Dear Editor,
In the Sunday Stabroek Editorial, “Public Servants’ 7% increase” (SN 11-21-21) it is stated: “The problem with Freedom House is that it stands with its back to the future and its face to the past. And in its eyes, not only do the bulk of the public servants have PNC proclivities, but the GPSU is unequivocally an opposition union and therefore has to be treated as an arm of the opposition.”
I was struck by the imagery invoked and the German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin’s description of the angel of history and the nature of progress. In the ninth thesis of his 1940 essay “Thesis on the Philosophy of History”, Benjamin, who purchased a print by Paul Klee, interprets it this way:
“A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
Is the editorial writer subliminally suggesting that the PPP’s action is impelled by progress as it surveys the wreckage of the catastrophe recently created by the PNC?
Sincerely,
Ravi Dev
