A lot of my life is spent arguing with people in an exercise of vanity. Occasionally, it yields some fruitful advancement of my intellect which I hope to share with you. 

Greta Thunberg has been making waves, literally, by her participation in the naval expedition to symbolically break the siege of Gaza. A German friend, erstwhile supporter of the Green party, and I have been arguing about the Middle East and Greta’s advocacy of Palestinian humanity clashing with the German Green movement. My friend feels alienated from Greta, having started out very much as a fan while I have gone the opposite way, gradually having become a Greta stan. One point of the discussion has been stuck in my mind: my friend believes that Greta’s activism has devolved into sinnlose Symbolpolitik. 

I think this is a point worth dissecting. It gets to the heart of the disagreement between people of the more radical flank like myself and those who, despite being, in principle, in favour of the same outcomes, disagree tactically and on certain fine points of principle. I think, unlike the Trotskyist approach of denouncing people as not real *insert example of No True Scotsman Fallacy*, we have to try to get through to people who profess a sincere belief in the desirability of the same objectives. 

Fundamentally, the question is not of whether sinnlose Symbolpolitik exists–it clearly does–but rather who gets to declare something as such and on what basis. ALL politics is symbolism. Why is it Bündnis90/Die Grünen and not just Die Grünen? Why does the SPD use red rosettes and the colour red, while the CDU goes with Black and the CSU with light blue? What does it mean when Markus Söder and Friedrich Merz go to Oktoberfest and tell people in the beer tent that the people in the tent represent the “real” Germany as opposed to the people in, for example, Neukölln? Is this not a fine epitome of sinnlose Symbolpolitik? 

I don’t think my friend would disagree, but–and it’s a big but–why is it that Greta Thunberg’s participation in a life-endangering voyage to provide literal physical aid to a starving population, in clear defiance of the most militarised society on Earth’s genocidal assault on Gaza, referred to as Symbolpolitik? On the surface it is the opposite of symbolic, especially if she manages to throw even one sack of flour to a starving Gazan. It is very much a physical, material act.

Let me get blunt. Greta Thunberg is on that boat because she is an effective human shield. The simple calculation is that the Israeli state will have to murder or molest the most prominent young activist, who also happens to look like the eurocentric ideal. Her presence on that boat manages to concentrate the attention of the world on that boat so as to prevent the disastrous murder of a previous group of activists who tried to do something similar in 2010 leading to the murder of 10 activists. Here, the symbolism becomes a rich seam for us to mine. Greta Thunberg is continuing and honouring the legacy of activists who gave their lives for the cause of Palestinian liberation from Zionist barbarity. 

Her tactical role is to garner attention–a literal commodity in today’s information saturated world. She is acting as a human shield in much the same way Israel uses Palestinians but accuses Hamas of always doing. The universalist ideals of the Enlightenment have today been so thoroughly eroded that we need a 22 year-old woman, who started her climate activism before turning 15, to symbolically help break the siege of a population experiencing the worst man-made hunger crisis in modern history; a siege enacted by a state that reflexively instrumentalises the memory of the Holocaust to rationalise its perpetration of another holocaust. 

There is indeed a lot of Symbolpolitik at play, none of it sinnlos. What is sinnlos is the hollow acknowledgement of wrongs that a series of German politicians are always expressing concern about, but never doing anything materially to prevent, never actually pulling the levers which they guard but never actuate. Herein, lies the true explanation of the deployment of the term.

All the acts of peaceful political resistance, all the appeals to morality and international law, which political leaders and economic elites fail to adequately respond to, fail to properly engage with, and wish to disparage as illegitimate–these are all acts of sinnlose Symbolpolitik. What is truly senseless is their apathy, their vulgar denials of wrongdoing, their reactionary accusations of bigotry levelled at people of conscience, their unwavering MATERIAL support of a regime that will sacrifice millions of innocent lives and Jewish morality itself in order to preserve the rabid fantasy of an ethno-state. 

One must question who files the charge of senseless symbolic politics, from which position, and to what effect. Is it some journalist in a cushy job at Süddeutsche Zeitung writing from the comfort of their holiday home in Sylt or a politician from their podium in the Bundestag. If these charges are being advanced by people in positions of authority, people with credentials and platforms as well as the power to affect people’s lives, then it is merely a pithy insult lobbed by people with a guilty conscience. 
It is the Neubauers of the world who have chosen to take a vow of silence or disingenuous complicity – they will die in the dustbin of history – but Greta will live forever. She will live in the hearts of people like myself, in the global majority that resolutely supports Palestinians and recognises the evil of the Zionist regime. Greta chose to take a walk on part in the war while the Neubauers took the lead role in their gilded cages. In difficult moments of my life, moments that all of us will face when the environmental catastrophe unleashed by militarism finally comes home to roost, my spirit will be nourished by Greta’s bravery. Nobody will remember the cowards and the traitors who were elevated to prominence for their good deeds at one point in their lives and were then hypnotised by the allure of this very prominence into the impotence of sinnlose Symbolpolitik. Greta Thunberg has shown that though we mortals are indeed fallible and prone to the allures of glamour and adulation, there is nothing inevitable about it. Our crushing ordinariness is no impediment to the manifestation of the heroism that all human beings possess within them.