Day 38: Jose Rosales responds to Jon Rich, “ISIS and the CIA Vie for the Claim to Divinity”
“. . . [f]rom Feuerbach to Rich, we see the utilization of the Spectacle as the means of ensuring a governable population (whose individuals are recruited to die on behalf of the State) and ensuring a specific vision of the future for global politics.[2] What marks this competition as one for ‘divinity’ is not simply the struggle between a ‘secular’ West and a caliphate vying for global dominance – both facts which are nothing but surface effects and require no analysis whatsoever. As Feuerbach notes, even if religion disappears there can remain various substitutes that fulfill its function . . . these spectacular forms of governance are essentially religious because they require populations to be held in states of fear or hope – fear of some divine retribution/damnation, or the hope of a ‘democracy to come’ once the true enemy of the West has been exterminated through a strategy of ‘infinite justice.’”
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