From the Risk Society to Thana Capitalism: Dialogues About Genocide

From the Risk Society to Thana Capitalism: Dialogues About Genocide

Copyright: © 2021 |Pages: 11
DOI: 10.4018/IJRCM.2021070105
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Abstract

The current paper focused on the spectatularization of disasters as the main commodity thana capitalism exchanges. The discussion around the crimes against mankind perpetrated by Nazis in the clandestine concentration camps opened the doors towards new insights respecting the roots of thana capitalism. Nazis violated human rights secreting their crimes in a moment of the world where millions certainly died. Today´s philosophers are shocked to see how Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was the sanctuary of the horrors of the Second World War, sets the pace to a new allegory, intended to entertain thousands of tourists, many of them unfamiliar with these events. As a highly-demanded tourist destination, Auschwitz evinces the change of new postmodern ethics that commoditizes the other´s loss as a criterion of entertainment. The example of terrorism shows one of the paradoxes of thana capitalism simply because media covers and disseminates the cruelties of attacks to gain further subscribers and investors while terrorism finds a fertile ground to penetrate the homes of a wider audience.
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Introduction

In a recently published book, I used the term Thana-Capitalism to denote a new stage of capitalism, which abandoned the meaning of risk in the classic term by new morbid mode of consumption (Korstanje 2016). Whether the postmodern sociology envisaged the rise and expanse of risk as to the key factor towards a new cultural ethos (Giddens 1999; Beck, 1992; 2009; Luhmann 2017), the end of the millennium, adjoined to 9/11 and the globalization of terrorism, paved the pathways for the emergence of a new post-ethics, which makes from the others´ death a cultural form of entertainment. As David Altheide (2017) puts it, one of the most troubling aspects of terrorism seems not to be the violence used in the attacks against non-combatants but in the fact that the media packages the attacks as a form of entertainment. In the mid of this mayhem, this essay-review explores the problem of terrorism and the difficult symbiosis with media, which resulted in a thanaptopic culture, from the dark allegory of the Holocaust as it was discussed in the specialized literature. The figure of Genocide, which was introduced by Lemkin at the platform of a new legal discussion oriented to avoid the extermination of innocent civilian targets, opens the doors to an ethical paradox. In this respect, Michael Ignatieff (2003) argues convincingly that one of Lemkin´s worries was not only the gradual process of dehumanization millions of civilians suffered in WWII but also the ethical dichotomy of nation-states, which are originally oriented to protect the integrity of citizens finally vulnerated under other contexts. The rise of Nazis to power exhibited two important things future generations should retain. On one hand, Germans applauded the inhuman Nazi´s resolution under the auspices of so-called democracy. Not only they have thought mistakenly they were free, but also the lesson seems to be that the discourse of democracy is politically manipulated even by the cruelest dictatorships (Mayer 2013). On another, the banality of evil –paragraphing Arendt- suggests that capitalism adopted the crimes of war –perpetrated by Nazism- as bureaucratic and standardized forms of behaviour (Arendt, 1963). Nazism, far from the climate of destruction prompted, imposed an unethical instrumentalization of death which escaped to any type of ethics (Levinas, 1988; Korstanje 2017). The lessons of the holocaust, as Levinas adds, remind the importance of the instrumentalized “suffering”. After all, Nazis operated in the fields of creative destruction and the life they proffered was circumscribed to the race (Skoll, 2012). The phenomenology of evil corresponds with the needs of grasping the sense of pain. The useless pain exhibits not only the absurdity of suffering but it leads to nowhere. Starting from the premise that Levinas understands theodicy as a human modality, which supported by consciousness, helps to discuss the adversity within the terms of certainties, no less true is that Nazism inaugurated the ends of all theodicies in a way never imagined. Of course, Thana-Capitalism rests on the needs of expanding the other´s suffering as a sublime object of redemption for a global audience which made dark consumption a criterion of pleasure. Through the articulation of this ritual, the mobile elite affirms its status quo as a privileged class. If Nazism imagined a world reserved for only a few exclusive supermen while the rest of mankind were slaved or systematically exterminated, Thana-Capitalism fictionalizes the deaths of few to control ideologically the rest of mankind. With the benefits of hindsight, Hitler and Nazis lost the war but wined the ideological battle in the West –mutating towards social Darwinism.

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