by Eric J. Weiner
In 1940, at the height of Hitler’s invasion of Western Europe, Walter Benjamin, from Vichy France wrote, “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘emergency situation’ in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight.”[1] In our current historical context, his words are instructive for two reasons. First, they were written in the context of Nazi occupation with death breathing down his neck. In spite of these extreme conditions, Benjamin refused to see the emergency situation he was in as historically exceptional; his refusal to turn his back on the dialectic under these circumstances was extraordinary and, as we know now, at least in terms of ideology, prescient. Second, his theses about the concept of history, 80 years after he first conceived them, still resonate today. From the mismanaged pandemic and Trump’s fascistic incitement of a white supremacist insurrection at the Capitol to the continuing systemic assault and murder of African Americans by police, the failure of capitalism to eradicate poverty, growing economic inequality, deepening home and food insecurity, and the broken promise of public education to become the “great equalizer” of opportunity, the United States is struggling through what many people have mischaracterized as an unprecedented national crisis of existential proportions. It appears we have not learned what Benjamin suggested the tradition of the oppressed ought to have taught us: We have still not arrived at a conception of history that allows us to see the web of current crises as the rule, not the exception. Read more »