system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why Walter Benjamin concluded that the "aestheticization of politics" would lead/has led to war?
gpt
The problem with mass reproducible media is that it formally creates communal, utopian experience (e.g. via everybody adopting the perspective of the film lens) without necessarily creating the substantive conditions which can realize that communal, utopian experience in the real world (e.g. outside the theater). Thus, we have a tension in that people desire the communal, utopian experience given to them by mass media but cannot actually have this experience because they live in a fractured, alienated, exploitative world.

There are two solutions to this problem. The one Benjamin advocates is overthrowing the existing order of things which prevents the realization of communal, utopian experience - in other words, communist revolution. The contradiction is resolved when we politicize aesthetics to recognize that its fantasies cannot be fulfilled without genuine social-economic-political change, and then go on to enact such change. 

The one Benjamin warns against is the aestheticization of politics. Instead of attempting to change the material conditions of our existence to realize the communal, utopian dream of mass media, we aestheticize reality to extend unto it the utopian illusion. War, Benjamin argues, is a prime candidate for a mass, communal experience - nationalistic fervor of the sort mobilized by the Nazis made people feel like they were a part of something larger, after all. War for the glory of Germany (... or America, etc.) is an aesthetic remedy to a political problem. As such, we get a temporary, bloody, and futile "solution" to a structural problem.