PARTISAN!

Anonymous, Online

In his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Walter Benjamin wrote: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.”

He wrote this as a German Jew fleeing Nazism. He escaped to Spain from Vichy France but he arrived to find the Spanish police deporting Jewish refugees. Believing that he would be imminently deported and returned to Nazi hands he committed suicide in September, 1940.

For 595 days, the Israeli massacre inflicted on the people of Gaza defies description. It is a crime which we have witnessed through the glowing rectangles of our phones, and yet still cannot understand. It is incomprehensible. It is barbarism.

Israel drops bombs on refugee camps, canteens, schools, hospitals, and yet many act like nothing is happening. While the protests around Gaza continue, and people attempt to build some kind of political momentum in Australia, the situation worsens, with no conceivable end in sight. They assassinate children.

Where are the Arab nations? Where are the western countries who meekly called for a ceasefire, or a humanitarian pause? They glower silently at a world historic atrocity. Total famine is being perpetuated by this terror state. Australia grumbled recently that Israel should allow humanitarian aid into Gaza.

But now that a man, unable to metabolise the international gaslighting any longer, has taken it upon himself to shoot two Israeli embassy officials in Washington DC, we must listen to ludicrous condolences and revived condemnations of anti-semitism.

Communists condemn political adventurism, especially of the type that Elias Rodriguez felt necessary. But we must try to understand the impulse that led this spontaneous shooter to act.

The mass movement around Palestine is not sustaining itself. The repression is working. Some people are beginning to feel as if violence is their only “moral” option.

Yet, the only people that this violence affects, other than the two Israeli embassy workers gunned down in the street, is the entire American pro-Palestine movement.

Condemnation is a sordid position. Communists struggle to properly condemn capitalist power and the socio-political currents that directly led to these killings. We have no immediate power to change society. What is happening in Gaza is a holocaust.

Our condemnation of Elias can only be understood as a condemnation of ourselves, of the world, of capitalism, and of a humanity that finds itself continuously tied up in contradiction.

So I will not condemn him. I will rather return to Walter Benjamin, who describes the angel of history in his theses:

“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. … This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past.

Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.

The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them.

The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

Progress and regress are two sides of capitalism’s revolutionary contradiction. Communists will never succeed if we cannot elucidate this contradiction. No amount of violence, no amount of chants, or condemnations will slingshot us towards victory. There is still so much work to do.