Yet I often return to the Zapatistas’ assertion that “Our word is our weapon.”
Or the fact that fascism, in whatever guise it takes, seeks the total annihilation not *just* of a people but also their entire culture. It burns books, prohibits “degenerate” art, smashes sacred artifacts to bits, and on and on, in an effort to erase the land of even any memory of a culture. Even any memory of possibility. Of alternatives. Of whole lifeways and millennia-old wisdoms.
When we don’t see a landscape—from words to images—around us that speaks in the language of dreams and aspirations, that cries out our sorrow and rage, that mourns our dead and fights for the living, we bury the roots and seeds and branches of all we could and should be. We forget that “It didn’t have to be this way.”
And “It doesn’t have to be this way.”
And “It isn’t their way, not completely. Not yet. We will outlive them” and their monstrous world.
It’s why people write their names on their bodies, as kids and/or their parents on their behalf are doing in Gaza, or why one of the Jews who helped sabotage the crematoria in Auschwitz used to bury slips of paper with names of his family, friends, and community in the ground of the death camp.
I know that paper and other aesthetic forms seem impossibly ineffectual to stop what’s happening in Gaza. Paper thin, or worse, like our hearts right now.
Yet every scrap of ephemera we put out into the world is a monument to life, a testament to life, a resistance to death, a rebellion against fascism and genocide, occupations and colonialism, and a love letter on wings that we hope might reach those in Gaza, as if all the millions of Palestinian flags being raised into the air around the globe right now at demos could form a murmuration of solidarity on our behalf to disrupt and destroy the war machine.
May it be so.
So here’s one little offering: an interview by @161.crew with an Israeli anarchist, beautifully turned into a zine by my friend @chava_lah (available soon as a downloadable PDF; for now, DM me for it).
Original interview: https://161crew.bzzz.net/interview-with-an-israeli-anarchist
