Inevitably, in the sublime rhizomatic wiring of the internet, one gets unexpectedly rerouted. I was researching a phrase from Paul Celan’s great poem ‘Shibboleth’. The phrase, ‘no pasaran [They Shall Not Pass]’ is itself a veritable knot of radical associations. It is most famously a rallying cry from the Spanish Civil war. The poem alludes to the destruction of Austrian socialism in 1934 and Spanish republicanism. It does so in a spirit of whispered political solidarity, yet it is a nakedly private poem; or rather, it draws this very distinction - between the public/ political and the private into its own singular questioning. John Felstiner, in his priceless gloss of Celan comments:
Less well know, the French said ‘ils ne passeront pas’ when slaughter began at Verdun in February 1916. Writing in Paris, a victim of the second Great War, Celan could not help facing back, like Walter Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’ who sees ‘one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls them infront of its feet.’
But turn away from these lofty and thoughtful matters if you will, for a moment, for the phrase ‘no pasaran’ has been stolen by an excited gang of two-a-penny right-wing proxies . Some of them at least seem to be Americans sequestered in France, still reeling from the factum brutum of cultural and political difference. It seems that in this article, the French had the temerity to exercise their democratic rights and protest against the Iraq war when they should have been smoking gauloise cigarettes in cafes and talking about existentialism and all those postcard-shaped things they’re supposed to do. Instead they were engaging in ‘anti-American’ outrages and persisting in their stubborn refusal to leave what Donald Rumsfeld named ‘old Europe’
We have already seen (below) that the appropriation of Left symbols - symbols of liberation and equality - is a (by now) standard ploy of the advertising industry. They want to buy into its subversive glamour, the aura of dissent and radical questioning, whilst of course emptying these of any real substance. This is at least, one supposes, predicated on the recognition that the Right’s symbolic resources are pretty nugatory. Such visual adverts seek to mobilise hopes which their very existence has helped extinguish. It is another monotonous instance of the Spectacle at work, of course. And in the case of web sites like No Pasaran (who also use the icon of Che Guevara) it is the almost equally monotonous exhibition of representatives of the status quo dramatising themselves as some righteous and heroic minority fighting against a repressive establishment. This trope, so threadbare as to be unworthy of thought, seems to have a remarkably enduring life - as forms of self deception often do. Anyway, having thrown out this soiled bath water, let us revert to the words of Paul Celan:
SHIBBOLETH
Together with my stones
grown big with weeping
behind the bars,
they dragged me out into
the middle of the market,
that place
where the flag unfurls to which
I swore no kind of allegiance.
Flute,
double flute of night:
remember the dark
twin redness
of Vienna and Madrid.
Set your flag at half-mast,
memory.
At half-mast
today and for ever.
Heart:
here too reveal what you are,
here, in the midst of the market.
Call the shibboleth, call it out
into your alien homeland:
February. No Pasaran..
Unicorn:
you know about the stones,
you know about the water,
come,
I shall lead you away
to the voices
of Estremadura.