Signs of Life: A May Day Missive
"You can cut down the flowers, but you cannot stop the spring" - Popular slogan, commonly attributed to the poet Pablo Neruda
These have been trying times for the people of Turtle Island. Millions are struggling just to survive. Millions more have been condemned to die in other corners of the colonized world.
In the south, we have concentration camps for the displaced. In the east: Kill zones for the dispossessed. From the west: Billions of dollars flowing to bombs and drones. And from the Global North: Billions in cuts to life-saving services.
And yet, in the face of the barbarity and the brutality, the disappearances and the deportations, the abductions and the arrests -- in spite of the state of exception and the climate of fear -- there are signs of life all over occupied America this May Day.
One by one, acts of defiance and non-compliance are springing up amidst an otherwise barren political landscape. Here, we see ICE ops being daily disrupted, or even derailed. There, we see ethnic cleansing fiercely contested by the collective action of ordinary people. Here and there, a political prisoner is freed, a visa reinstated, a refugee released from detention.
Together, these small victories remind us that resistance is not futile, but fertile.
At the same time, the present moment demands more than the usual displays of dissent, more than the conventional acts of protest. It demands a response that is proportional to the magnitude of the crisis, and to the harm it is set to inflict on the peoples of the world -- whether in the form of homegrown fascism or global capitalism, genocide or ecocide or some combination thereof.
The age of the Alt Reich, along with and its all-out assault on civil society — also calls for a novel approach to the institutions of everyday life: from the media of mass communication to the methods of public education.
These times require that we rethink the way we live, the way we use our language, the way we produce our knowledge. It is to this task that I and other scholars, writers, artists, and activists are now turning our attention.
We need not look far for living examples of how fascism can be fought, and ultimately felled, on the cultural front and beyond. From Argentina to Serbia, the Korean Peninsula to Palestine, oppositional movements are everywhere in motion, dealing one death blow after another to authoritarian regimes the world over. Let us learn from their example.
And let us take a page, this May Day, from the lyrics of the old rebel song, which reminds us:
In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold / Greater than the might of armies, multiplied a thousand-fold / We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old / For the union makes us strong.
Solidarity forever,
MGW
