Musk's fascist salute or Milei's chainsaw are childish gestures like that of the teenager who enters Catalan class shouting "Long live Franco!"But history pulls the strings of these puppets with its usual sinister smile. Faced with spectacles like this, what should Jews, or Westerners with memory, think after eighty years of anti-Nazi reflection and propaganda?
I hear on the radio that they're celebrating the fifth anniversary of the declaration of COVID-19. During the pandemic, we learned how easily we accepted a state of emergency through fear. Trump's surprises, so difficult to understand, may seek that same state of emergency, with the danger of bringing down the house of cards of global equilibrium at any moment. Perhaps the most unexpected action was his blatant embrace of Putin.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939 left Walter Benjamin completely devastated. Persecuted and exiled from his country for being Jewish, he spent three months in a French internment camp and, at the end of the year, began writing his will, months before committing suicide.Thesis on the concept of history, as important today as when they were written: "At a time when the politicians in whom the opponents of fascism had placed their hope are lying on the ground and aggravating the defeat by betraying their own cause..."
Benjamin didn't need to know that the Nazis would start the gas chambers because he understood that the myth of progress was a very dangerous illusion, a storm that pushes us forward and prevents us from stopping to understand and redeem the misfortunes of history. With Covid, we have wanted to convince ourselves of this myth again. We ended up giving thanks for being able to exchange the streets for screens. Benjamin spoke of the "technocratic features" of fascism: we can imagine what he would think today, of AI and the cyberbros Trumpists. The most serious concession we've made to technology has been the dismantling of education and the replacement of the teacher by the computer program. Whatever you eliminate in the humanities, you'll gain in barbarism.
Benjamin used the concept of catastrophe. Starting with education, we don't need to strain to see it everywhere around us now: linguistic, institutional, migration; healthcare and housing; transportation and communication; justice and truth; economic, military, democratic. To the point that we can ask ourselves which comes first, collapse or catastrophe.
