1902, Historia de España en el siglo XIX, vol 5 – Public Domain

On October 8, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, announced that the Pentagon will livestream the Fort Hood shooter’s military execution by firing squad. “Because people need to understand that there are serious consequences for these types of things,” he said.

This is what happens when a country is run by veterans of reality TV and morning talk shows. Hegseth’s unspoken message: Spectacle brought us to power. Spectacle will keep us here.

An impoverished political imagination is reduced to simple formulas: Spectacle equals power. State violence equals spectacle. Therefore, state violence equals power.

If “Make America Great Again” invokes nostalgia for a glorious past, public hangings and racial lynchings belong to that past, too. Then there is the war in Iran, which did not deliver the promised swift triumph. It has dragged on for months, bleeding billions, exposing the limits of military might and diplomatic........

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