Blessed is the Flame
I was talking to my friend hexmage about Blessed is the Flame last Saturday, which I had just finished my second read of.
It’s a text about concentration camp resistance during the Holocaust. From a nihilist perspective (with a lot of focus on the notion of jouissance and positive consequences of that sacrificial sabotage), the grimness and horror come from the actual existence of the camps rather than the punishment that came for the resisting inmates. It’s a devastating, powerful account of the price resistance paid within the Nazi camp complexes and the German war machine during the early 40s.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the very real, very sickening risk of carrying out successful sabotage, one that means something; to mess with the production and distribution of weapons. To teach things that might make people aware and willing to join this sabotage. To blow yourself up if you take a few key oppressors in the process.
In the climate of suffocating capitalist realism that we live in, liberalism will never be an effective political tactic. The interests of capital will continue to permeate every action and stop it at just the right spot before it meaningfully changes anything. I’m guilty of believing some of my actions are more structurally meaningful than they actually are, and it hits me sometimes how this praise of violence, this acceptance of death as a price worth paying, is so discouraged even by most self-described leftists.
And I understand; I get that the cognitive dissonance of saying that death and/or permanent injury and/or disabling trauma (physical or mental) is necessary for it to not happen again. I think to myself, I can do more things if I’m alive; the dead can’t really do much for the living. And then I think about the fact that there’s no way to effectively resist the capitalist boot at your neck that isn’t life-risking.
You will lose your job. They will break your union’s resistance box, and you will go hungry. They will cut you off from all your friends. They will try to make you regret your actions and your thoughts. They will try to make an example out of you. If you can’t be subsumed into a capitalist agenda, you need to be snuffed out.
Blessed is the flame, because it keeps on burning, even if it has to destroy the match to keep going. Blessed is the flame that takes oxygen and gives light.