The modern state makes killing-without-penalty a routine potential status

Evidence

From a legal point of view, even more interesting than the change from the suspect to the objective enemy is the totalitarian replacement of the suspected offense by the possible crime. The possible crime is no more subjective than the objective enemy. While the suspect is arrested because he is thought to be capable of committing a crime that more or less fits his personality (or his suspected personality), the totalitarian version of the possible crime is based on the logical anticipation of objective developments. The Moscow Trials of the old Bolshevik guard and the chiefs of the Red Army were classic examples of punishment for possible crimes. Behind the fantastic, fabricated charges one can easily detect the following logical calculation: developments in the Soviet Union might lead to a crisis, a crisis might lead to the overthrow of Stalin’s dictatorship, this might weaken the country’s military force and possibly bring about a situation in which the new government would have to sign a truce or even conclude an alliance with Hitler. Whereupon Stalin proceeded to declare that a plot for the overthrow of the government and a conspiracy with Hitler existed. Against these “objective,” though entirely improbable, possibilities stood only “subjective” factors, such as the trustworthiness of the accused, their fatigue, their inability to understand what was going on, their firm conviction that without Stalin everything would be lost, their sincere hatred of Fascism—that is, a number of factual details which naturally lacked the consistency of the fictitious, logical, possible crime. Totalitarianism’s central assumption that everything is possible thus leads through consistent elimination of all factual restraints to the absurd and terrible consequence that every crime the rulers can conceive of must be punished, regardless of whether or not it has been committed. The possible crime, like the objective enemy, is of course beyond the competence of the police, who can neither discover, invent, nor provoke it. Here again the secret services depend entirely upon the political authorities. Their independence as a state within the state is gone. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 956 (#complicates, via linked claim)

The extreme point of penal justice under the Ancien Régime was the infinite segmentation of the body of the regicide: a manifestation of the strongest power over the body of the greatest criminal, whose total destruction made the crime explode into its truth. The ideal point of penality today would be an indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation, a judgement that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed, the calculated leniency of a penalty that would be interlaced with the ruthless curiosity of an examination, a procedure that would be at the same time the permanent measure of a gap in relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptotic movement that strives to meet in infinity. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 353 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Policing increasingly justifies killing people for hypothetical future crimes — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1752; Capital punishment is reserved for murder and barred for non-homicide crimes. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 2008; Modern penality’s ideal is endless observation rather than spectacular punishment — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 353 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Totalitarianism punishes conceivable future crimes rather than committed offenses #complicates (0.78) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 956
• Modern penality’s ideal is endless observation rather than spectacular punishment #complicates (0.75) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 353