The ideology of settler colonialism is founded on a similar sense that history is evil and deserves to be repealed.
by Adam Kirsch
Following excerpts adapted from the author’s book, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice, published by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc
“For many who are tuned in to what Walter Benjamin called ‘the tradition of the oppressed,’ ” writes John Collins of St. Lawrence University, “the centrality of Palestine is almost axiomatic.” But an axiom is not a truth; it is a statement that must be accepted as true in order for a system of thought to function. For the ideology of settler colonialism, Palestine is axiomatic in just this sense: it is a premise from which many conclusions are drawn, and not just about Israel. The fact that many of these conclusions are false and harmful should lead us to question whether the axiom is sound. Is there a better way to think about the tradition of the oppressed, and what can be done to redeem it?
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| A watercolor from 1837, possibly by Jean-Louis Gaspard of the 31st Regiment, shows French forces advancing on the fortified city of Constantine, Algeria. From the Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University Library/Library of Congress. |
Walter Benjamin, the German Jewish philosopher and critic, coined the phrase “the tradition of the oppressed” in his last major essay, “On the Concept of History,” written in early 1940. At the time, he was living in Paris as a refugee from Nazism. A few months later Germany conquered France, forcing Jewish exiles like Benjamin to flee for their lives. In September he was one of a group of refugees who attempted to cross the border into Spain, hoping eventually to make it to the United States. But the party was intercepted by border guards, and Benjamin, in despair, killed himself with an overdose of morphine.
Despair in the face of historical evil is the subject of “On the Concept of History.” In a series of short reflections, Benjamin argues that in the twentieth century it is no longer possible to believe in the idea of progress, which lay at the heart of nineteenth-century social thought. At a moment when Nazism appeared triumphant, Benjamin came to believe that the injustice and barbarity around him were humanity’s essential condition. “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule,” he writes. Rather than trying to accelerate the course of history, then, our duty is to resist it—“to brush history against the grain.”
In the twenty-first century, Benjamin’s heretical way of thinking about history and progress has become the common conviction of many people in the West. When we look at the past, we see it through the eyes of the figure Benjamin called, in the same essay, “the angel of history,” whose eyes are fixed on the past while a storm “irresistibly propels him into the future.” “Where we perceive a chain of events,” Benjamin writes, “he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”
Just so, when we look at historical episodes that our ancestors saw as glorious and righteous, our eyes are drawn to the wreckage they neglected. Where they saw Christopher Columbus as a champion of progress, we see the people he killed, enslaved, and infected. Where they saw the American Revolution as a new birth of freedom for humanity, we see how George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were sustained by slavery. And where many Americans, not only Jews, once understood the founding of the State of Israel as the miraculous rebirth of a destroyed people, today many Americans, including many Jews, see it as a crime against the Palestinians.
The ideology of settler colonialism is founded on this shift in moral perspective. For liberals who acknowledge the moral claim of the tradition of the oppressed, this makes it difficult to criticize, just as with earlier ideologies of the left like Jacobinism or Communism. For many Jews, in particular, it is intolerable to feel that they have moved from the status of victim to that of victor, since they feel like Benjamin that it is a duty to “call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers.”
Yet Benjamin’s essay is ambivalent about what, if anything, can be done to rectify the catastrophe of history. In some sections, he suggests that fascism can be stopped by a working-class revolution, and he blames the leaders of German socialism for misdirecting the movement. But in others, like the “angel of history” section, he seems to suggest that it would take a divine intervention to wrench history out of its evil course. In these moments Benjamin sounds less like a Marxist than a mystic awaiting the coming of the Messiah. For Judaism, he writes at the end of the essay, “every second of time was the strait gate through which Messiah might enter.”
In vacillating between extreme violence and extreme passivity—making the revolution or waiting for the Messiah—Benjamin testifies to the hopelessness of his historical moment. For him, as for tens of millions of others who were about to die in World War II, there was no possibility of being saved. The only way he could envision redemption was as the cancellation of history. The ideology of settler colonialism is founded on a similar sense that history is evil and deserves to be repealed.
Copyright © Adam Kirsch
Adam Kirsch is the author of several books of poetry and criticism. A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, Kirsch is an editor at the Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Review section and has written for publications including The New Yorker and Tablet. He lives in New York.
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