The history lessons and fascism checklists could prepare us to spot today’s attacks on the courts, press and opposition forces, as well the normalisation of sadism. But they didn’t prepare us for this. Nothing prepared us for a nation perpetrating a genocide, while claiming to be protecting themselves from genocide, all in the name of learning from a previous century’s genocide.
As I have tried to make sense of these derangements, I have often taken refuge in the work of the Jewish-German writer Walter Benjamin, particularly his On the Concept of History, also referred to as Theses on the Philosophy of History. One of its key insights is his description of history not as “a chain of events” but rather as “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage”. Benjamin wrote the essay in 1940, shortly before trying to escape from Vichy France, where he was at risk of being handed over to the Gestapo. According to Benjamin, the wreckage of history forms a “pile of debris” that “grows skyward”. Later that year, the fascists caught up with him and he took his own life in a small town in Catalonia.
The idea of history as “wreckage upon wreckage” (rather than that ever-repeating loop) goes a long way towards explaining how we could have arrived at what Palestinian historian Sherene Seikaly has termed “the age of catastrophe”, with one genocide used to justify another, and the intersections of climate breakdown and surging neo-fascist movements promising much more in store.
As Benjamin knew, wreckage is not an inert substance. It has a life force, it changes, its elements interacting with each other to create volatile new compounds and toxic chain reactions. No one is protected from the weight of history’s accumulation – not even the political forces we might expect to be rousing people to fight fascism. Today’s left, radicalised by genocide and ecocide, has no difficulty articulating disillusionment with Western humanism and the liberal international order, but we have not coalesced around a shared political alternative, another way of living with one another that is genuinely non-fascist.
How could we be otherwise? The revolutionary movements that came before us made great strides, and yet they were defeated before overthrowing the death-dealing systems they opposed. Our world is shaped by those defeats, including the shape of our isolated and monetized selves, and of our fragmented social groupings.
We’re beginning to glimpse what fascism looks like amid the wreckage of history, with all its ironies and absurdities. But an urgent question remains unanswered: what, in that same wreckage, might antifascism look like? We cannot look to the past for easy answers, since the past has changed us in such fundamental ways. But we can look for clues – including to an antifascist movement of artists and philosophers in which Benjamin himself reserved a special kind of hope.
