Safe Spaces of Violence
Violence is enhancing the power of those who can use it with total impunity.
By Paul Gottfried
March 23, 2021
Jörg Baberowski, an East German specialist on Stalin’s Russia, produced a book in 2018 titled Räume der Gewalt (The Spaces of Violence), which seems particularly relevant for understanding contemporary America.
According to Baberowski, modern civilization appears to have overcome the perennial problem of violence, but this may be more illusion than reality. Beneath the surface of civility and lawfulness lurks the danger that violence may lay waste to our modern societies. What Tocqueville characterized as “soft despotism†may turn suddenly brutal, and states that once prided themselves on legality may turn to savage force to impose their will. Baberowski observes that such totalitarian regimes as Nazi Germany and Stalin’s regime did not flow out of comparably evil pasts. They were qualitatively different from the governments that preceded them and crossed the line between traditional rule to something much more sinister. Like Hannah Arendt, Baberowski stresses terror as the distinguishing element of modern totalitarian tyrannies.
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/23/safe-spaces-of-violence/
