One year ago I stood in front of a painting by Otto Mueller of a pair of lovers.
I looked at the 1918 painting of the young couple. The label told me that they were young Roma. It read that Otto Mueller’s mother may have been Roma herself. Even if she wasn’t, I learned, Mueller himself felt a kinship with the Roma and spent time travelling with them. He was known as Gypsy Mueller.
My shoulders began to shake, my lips trembled. The other people in the gallery avoided looking as I began to sob.
That painting. That moment of intimacy and love so beautifully captured. It just floored me. I imagined the young couple, in their 40s or 50s when Nazi extermination was at its height. I thought of their survivors facing continued violence well into the present.
It was at that moment that I realized that no one in Europe misses the Jews or the Roma. People here may miss their own innocence. They may miss a couple of scientists or musicians. They may miss a painter or two. Even a writer. But they most certainly do not miss the rest of us, the mess of us. Conformity makes peace.
Hitler and the Nazis succeeded beyond what people are willing to admit.
The far right has defeated us. The villages my grandparents were born in no longer exist. The Jews who remained were murdered. The Romas who survive remain ostracized with no reparations.
The ideas that fueled the devouring of those of us who deviated from accepted norms either because of our very beings or because of our politics may have been discredited, but they have not been extinguished.
Immigration is severely curbed in most of Europe, the UK, and the US. Children and their families are dying trying to escape tyranny, war, violence, and environmental and economic collapse. The idea of “racial purity” is so successful that it has spread to every corner of the globe. It is in the travel bans, the deportations, security checkpoints, and border patrols. It is in the smallest things and the biggest. It is the hum in our daily lives.
The center leans to the right even as it congratulates itself for supporting gay marriage and the rights of (some) trans folks. The center has expanded the net of those who can be like us and calls it diversity. Those with messy lives and desires, nonconforming bodies, minds, and ways of being are Too Much Trouble. Now that we have expanded the net, we can tell ourselves that it is their own fault that they remain outside.
The center echoes the far right’s framing of anti-fascism as violent, censorious, and a threat to free speech. It speaks of “both sides” as if they were equivalent. The center speaks of nonviolence, without acknowledging the ways in which police forces have come to see those at the margins as people they need to control, to colonize. It demands nonviolence from those who experience the threat of violence daily.
In Saint Louis, police taunt protesters, turning their own chant against them: “Whose streets? Our streets.”
In Rotterdam, they harass people of color marching under the banner of Pride.
In Manilla, the police shoot people addicted to drugs.
All over the world, security forces are occupying their own localities. They are investing in riot gear and training in methods colonial powers have used to control local populations.
The center consents. The center calls it non-violence. It calls it protection.
Protest speech on social media is punished by potential employers.
Free speech is punished. Demanding space is punished. In a particularly vile form of doublespeak, the extreme right has occupied the very notion of free speech, claiming victimhood as they drive their hated victims into hiding with threats of violence.
Nonconforming is punished.
The center measures its commitment to the freedoms of assembly and speech by how tolerant it is of Nazi speech. It often mimics the right in complaining about university students, trigger warnings, and political correctness. It maintains that young people, who grew up more exposed to the horrors of the world than any other generation previous, are too sensitive and too coddled.
In an interview with On the Media, historian Angus Johnston stated that many young activists do not see free speech as supportive of their activities:
“I see a lot of my peers in academia and in the media who are lot more willing to stand up the free speech rights of a Nazi than the free speech rights of a student activist. That, I think, is not unrelated to the fact that many student activists don’t see the first amendment as a weapon in their arsenal, but rather as a cudgel to bludgeon them with.”[1]
Whose streets, again?
REFERENCES
Roma Slavery: The Case for Reparations, By Margareta Matache and Jacqueline Bhabha: http://fpif.org/roma-slavery-case-reparations/
Militarization of police, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militarization_of_police
On the Media: “Free Speech Week” Puts Berkeley Back in the Crosshairs: http://www.wnyc.org/story/berkeley-back-cross-hairs/
Philly Police Union President Calls Black Lives Matter Activists ‘A Pack Of Rabid Animals’, by Sebastian Murdock: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/philly-police-union-president-calls-black-lives-matter-activists-a-pack-of-rabid-animals_us_59aacc02e4b0dfaafcf0bc55?
St. Louis Police Have Declared an All-Out War on Protesters, Media and Even Themselves, by Michael Harriot: http://www.theroot.com/st-louis-police-have-declared-an-all-out-war-on-protes-1818735388?utm_source=theroot_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow
Eyewitness account of Rotterdam Pride March by Amandla Awetu: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1707604982879441&id=100008898665511
Lecture on anti-fascism by Shon Meckfessel:
[1] On the Media: “Free Speech Week” Puts Berkeley Back in the Crosshairs: http://www.wnyc.org/story/berkeley-back-cross-hairs/
