Marina Vishmidt <████████████████ >
To: Josh Schwebel <privatejosh@gmail.com>
Hi Josh,
This is just to apologise for my silence, as I painfully and
dizzyingly share every single one of the sentiments you articulate
here, and the bottomless exhaustion and disgust they inspire, even
as I'm trying to get work done as am now, the conversations and
the whole atmosphere is so present and so intrusive (am in Berlin
right now, hindered from going to the demo by a scheduling
meltdown in my Vienna teaching). It's also extra distressing to
have to educate your partner, but it sounds hopeful that there's
some movement there, if these discussions are happening in many
households and friendship networks, maybe something can move,
however incrementally, but I still don't have faith that an entire
left which has decided that palestinians either don't exist or
should be destroyed if they do because they are all nazis is an
interlocutor worth engaging, however many allowances can suposedly
be made for their immersion in the kinds of idelogy and habitus
you describe with regard to your partner. Interesting that there's
a demand for consideration from'internationals' in German-speaking
countries for that 'context' but that raising the context of the
occupation and the unremitting military and structural violence
against Palestinians performed by the colonizer, an avowedly
millenarian ethno-state, is decried as antisemitism. It is so
sickening, but of course what really are we suffering (and what
really can we do about it) compared obv with what's going on in
Gaza andthe West Bank but also in Berlinwith the arrests and
police raids in migrant background communities in e.g. Neukolln,
Sonnenallee, etc. The enemy within is everywhere, and solidarity
in Germany, Austria but also increasingly U.S and other places is
very very thin on the ground.
'If Germany put half as much energy into policing its own right wing as its immigrant and non-white populations, this would have a modicum of credibility, but as it is, this is just a clear expression of cultural racism.' is so absolutely right and already of course grotesquely in evidence in the documenta phoney war last year.
all my best,
Marina