For Benjamin, the horror of our historical trajectory lies in the Angel’s inability to close his wings. What prevents that closure is the insistent storm of “progress,” the stubborn belief of liberals, fascists, and communists alike that technology and rational control are positive forces that merely have to be harnessed to their respective utopian projects. The political ideology of the modern world—the storm pushing to reach the “Paradise” of modernity’s impossible utopias—is in fact violent, Benjamin thinks, precisely because it cannot or will not make that which is truly valuable in the past whole and tangible to the present. The powerful may monumentalize historical icons in order to glorify the state in the present, but this is merely in order to further cement the belief that they are legitimately carrying us all forward into a better future. What they will not permit is any chance for the wretched, for those suffering at the base of the social pyramid, to come to know the past that is really relevant to them.