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Fascism looks “to war for artistic satisfaction of the different kind of sensory perception brought about by technology. This is clearly the culmination of ‘l'art pour l'art (art for art’s sake). Humanity, which in Homer’s day provided a spectacle for the gods of Olympus, has now become one for itself. Its alienation from itself has reached a point where it now allows its own destruction to be savoured as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”
With or without the reference to “fascism” as a root cause, the words of Walter Benjamin, written in 1936, were true before they were prophetic.
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