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shitholes and trump-speak
CHALLENGING THE LANGUAGE OF FASCISM
by
HENRY A. GIROUX
__________________________________________
Henry
A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair
Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural
Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship
at Ryerson University. He is the author of more than 50 books
including The Educational Deficit and the War on Youth
and Zombie
Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism.
Many of his essays, including The Spectacle of Illiteracy, appear
on his website at www.henryagiroux.com.
His interview with Bill
Moyers is must viewing. He was recently named one of
the century's 50 most significant contributors to the debate
on education.
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YOUR
COMMENTSGeorge Orwell warns us in his dystopian novel
1984 that authoritarianism begins with language. Words
now operate as "Newspeak," in which language is twisted
in order to deceive, seduce and undermine the ability of people
to think critically and freely. As authoritarianism gains in
strength, the formative cultures that give rise to dissent become
more embattled along with the public spaces and institutions
that make conscious critical thought possible.
Words
that speak to the truth, reveal injustices and provide informed
critical analysis begin to disappear, making it all the more
difficult, if not dangerous, to hold dominant power accountable.
Notions of virtue, honor, respect and compassion are policed,
and those who advocate them are punished.
I think
it is fair to argue that Orwell's nightmare vision of the future
is no longer fiction. Under the regime of Donald Trump, the
Ministry of Truth has become the Ministry of "Fake News,"
and the language of "Newspeak" has multiple platforms
and has morphed into a giant disimagination machinery of propaganda,
violence, bigotry, hatred and war.
With
the advent of the Trump presidency, language is undergoing a
shift in the United States: It now treats dissent, critical
media and scientific evidence as a species of "fake news."
The administration also views the critical media as the "enemy
of the American people." In fact, Trump has repeated this
view of the press so often that almost a third of Americans
believe it and support government-imposed restrictions on the
media, according to a Poynter survey. Language has become unmoored
from critical reason, informed debate and the weight of scientific
evidence, and is now being reconfigured within new relations
of power tied to pageantry, political theater and a deep-seated
anti-intellectualism, increasingly shaped by the widespread
banality of celebrity culture, the celebration of ignorance
over intelligence, a culture of rancid consumerism, and a corporate-controlled
media that revels in commodification, spectacles of violence,
the spirit of unchecked self-interest and a "survival of
the fittest" ethos.
Under
such circumstances, language has been emptied of substantive
meaning and functions increasingly to lull large swaths of the
American public into acquiescence, if not a willingness to accommodate
and support a rancid "populism" and galloping authoritarianism.
The language of civic literacy and democracy has given way to
the language of saviors, decline, bigotry and hatred. One consequence
is that matters of moral and political responsibility disappear,
injustices proliferate and language functions as a tool of state
repression. The Ministry of "Fake News" works incessantly
to set limits on what is thinkable, claiming that reason, standards
of evidence, consistency and logic no longer serve the truth,
because the latter are crooked ideological devices used by enemies
of the state. "Thought crimes" are now labeled as
"fake news."
The
notion of truth is viewed by this president as a corrupt tool
used by the critical media to question his dismissal of legal
checks on his power -- particularly his attacks on judges, courts,
and any other governing institutions that will not promise him
complete and unchecked loyalty. For Trump, intimidation takes
the place of unquestioned loyalty when he does not get his way,
revealing a view of the presidency that is more about winning
than about governing. One consequence is myriad practices in
which Trump gleefully humiliates and punishes his critics, willfully
engages in shameful acts of self-promotion and unapologetically
enriches his financial coffers.
David
Axelrod, a former senior advisor to President Obama, is right
in stating:
And
while every president is irritated by the limitations of democracy
on them, they all grudgingly accept it. [Trump] has not. He
has waged a war on the institutions of democracy from the
beginning, and I think in a very corrosive way.
New
York Times writer Peter Baker adds to this charge by arguing
that Trump -- buoyed by an infatuation with absolute power and
an admiration for authoritarians -- uses language and the power
of the presidency as a potent weapon in his attacks on the First
Amendment, the courts and responsible governing. Trump's admiration
for a number of dictators is well known. What is often underplayed
is his inclination to mimic their language and polices. For
instance, Trump's call for "law and order," his encouraging
police officers to be more violent with "thugs," and
his adoration of all things militaristic echoes the ideology
and language of Philippine President and strongman Rodrigo Duterte,
who has called for mass murder and boasted about "killing
criminals with his own hand."
At
the same time, it would be irresponsible to suggest that the
current expression of authoritarianism in US politics began
with Trump, or that the context for his rise to power represents
a distinctive moment in American history. As Howard Zinn points
out in A People's History of the United States, the
US was born out of acts of genocide, nativism and the ongoing
violence of white supremacy. Moreover, the US has a long history
of demagogues, extending from Huey Long and Joe McCarthy to
George Wallace and Newt Gingrich. Authoritarianism runs deep
in American history, and Trump is simply the end point of these
anti-democratic practices.
With
the rise of casino capitalism, a "winner-take-all"
ethos has made the United States a mean-spirited and iniquitous
nation that has turned its back on the poor, underserved, and
those considered racially and ethnically disposable. It is worth
noting that in the last 40 years, we have witnessed an increasing
dictatorship of finance capital and an increasing concentration
of power and ownership regarding the rise and workings of the
new media and mainstream cultural apparatuses. These powerful
digital and traditional pedagogical apparatuses of the 21st
century have turned people into consumers, and citizenship into
a neoliberal obsession with self-interest and an empty notion
of freedom. The ecosystem of visual and print representations
has taken on an unprecedented influence, given the merging of
power and culture as a dominant political and pedagogical force.
This cultural apparatus has become so powerful, in fact, that
it is difficult to dispute the central role it played in the
election of Donald Trump to the presidency. Analyzing the forces
behind the election of Trump, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
provide a cogent commentary on the political and pedagogical
power of an old and updated media landscape. They write:
Undoubtedly,
Trump's celebrity status played a role. But equally important
was the changed media landscape . . . By one estimate, the
Twitter accounts of MSNBC, CNN, CBS, and NBC -- four outlets
that no one could accuse of pro-Trump leanings -- mentioned
Trump twice as often as Hillary Clinton. According to another
study, Trump enjoyed up to $2 billion in free media coverage
during the primary season. Trump didn't need traditional Republican
power brokers. The gatekeepers of the invisible primary weren't
merely invisible; by 2016, they were gone entirely.
What
is crucial to remember here, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes, is that
fascism starts with words. Trump's use of language and his manipulative
use of the media as political theater echo earlier periods of
propaganda, censorship and repression. Commenting on the Trump
administration's barring the Centers for Disease Control to
use certain words, Ben-Ghiat writes:
The
strongman knows that it starts with words . . . That's why
those who study authoritarian regimes or have had the misfortune
to live under one may find something deeply familiar about
the Trump administration's decision to bar officials at the
Centers for Disease Control (CDC) from using certain words
("vulnerable," "entitlement," "diversity,"
"transgender," "fetus," "evidence-based"
and "science-based"). The administration's refusal
to give any rationale for the order, and the pressure it places
on CDC employees, have a political meaning that transcends
its specific content and context . . . The decision as a whole
links to a larger history of how language is used as a tool
of state repression. Authoritarians have always used language
policies to bring state power and their cults of personality
to bear on everyday life. Such policies affect not merely
what we can say and write at work and in public, but also
[attempt] to change the way we think about ourselves and about
others. The weaker our sentiments of solidarity and humanity
become -- or the stronger our impulse to compromise them under
pressure -- the easier it is for authoritarians to find partners
to carry out their repressive policies.
Under
fascist regimes, the language of brutality and culture of cruelty
was normalized through the proliferation of the strident metaphors
of war, battle, expulsion, racial purity and demonization. As
German historians such as Richard J. Evans and Victor Klemperer
have made clear, dictators such as Hitler did more than corrupt
the language of a civilized society, they also banned words.
Soon afterwards, they banned books and the critical intellectuals
who wrote them. They then imprisoned those individuals who challenged
Nazi ideology and the state's systemic violations of civil rights.
The endpoint was an all-embracing discourse of disposability,
the emergence of concentration camps, and genocide fueled by
a politics of racial purity and social cleansing. Echoes of
the formative stages of such actions are with us once again.
They provide just one of the historical signposts of an American-style
neo-fascism that appears to be engulfing the United States,
after simmering in the dark for years.
Under
such circumstances, it is crucial to interrogate, as the first
line of resistance, how this level of systemic linguistic derangement
and corruption shapes everyday life. It is essential to start
with language, because it is the first place tyrants begin to
promote their ideologies, hatred, and systemic politics of disposability
and erasure. Trump is not unlike many of the dictators he admires.
What they all share as strongmen is the use of language in the
service of violence and repression, as well as a fear of language
as a symbol of identity, critique, solidarity and collective
struggle. None of them believe that the truth is essential to
a responsible mode of governance, and all of them support the
notion that lying on the side of power is fundamental to the
process of governing, however undemocratic such a political
dynamic may be.
Lying
has a long legacy in American politics and is a hallmark of
authoritarian regimes. Victor Klemperer in his classic book,
The Language of the Third Reich, reminds us that Hitler
had a "deep fear of the thinking man and [a] hatred of
the intellect." Trump is not only a serial liar, but he
also displays a deep contempt for critical thinking and has
boasted about how he loves the uneducated. Not only have mainstream
sources such as The Washington Post and The New
York Times published endless examples of Trump's lies,
they have noted that even in the aftermath of such exposure,
he continues to be completely indifferent to being exposed as
a serial liar.
In
a 30-minute interview with The New York Times on December
28, 2017, The Washington Post reported that Trump made
"false, misleading or dubious claims … at a rate
of one every 75 seconds." Trump's language attempts to
infantilize, seduce and depoliticize the public through a stream
of tweets, interviews and public pronouncements that disregard
facts and the truth. Trump's more serious aim is to derail the
architectural foundations of truth and evidence in order to
construct a false reality and alternative political universe
in which there are only competing fictions with the emotional
appeal of shock theater.
More
than any other president, he has normalized the notion that
the meaning of words no longer matters, nor do traditional sources
of facts and evidence. In doing so, he has undermined the relationship
between engaged citizenship and the truth, and has relegated
matters of debate and critical assessment to a spectacle of
bombast, threats, intimidation and sheer fakery. This is the
language of dictators, one that makes it difficult to name injustices,
define politics as something more than rule by the powerful,
and make and justify real equitable rules, shared relations
of power, and a strong democratic politics.
But
the language of fascism does more that normalize falsehoods
and ignorance. It also promotes a larger culture of short-term
attention spans, immediacy and sensationalism. At the same time,
it makes fear and anxiety the normalized currency of exchange
and communication. Masha Gessen is right in arguing that Trump's
lies are different than ordinary lies and are more like "power
lies." In this case, these are lies designed less "to
convince the audience of something than to demonstrate the power
of the speaker." In short, Trump's prodigious tweets are
not just about the pathology of endless fabrications, they also
function to reinforce a pedagogy of infantilism, designed to
animate his base in a glut of shock while reinforcing a culture
of war, fear, divisiveness and greed in ways that often disempower
his critics.
How
else to explain Trump's desire to attract scorn from his critics
and praise from his base through a never-ending production of
tweets and electronic shocks reminiscent of the tantrums of
a petulant 10-year-old? The examples just keep coming and appear
to get more bizarre as time goes on. Peter Baker and Michael
Tackett sum up a number of bizarre and reckless tweets that
Trump produced to inaugurate the New Year. They write:
President
Trump again raised the prospect of nuclear war with North
Korea, boasting in strikingly playground terms on Tuesday
night that he commands a "much bigger" and "more
powerful" arsenal of devastating weapons than the outlier
government in Asia. "Will someone from his depleted and
food starved regime please inform [North Korean Leader Kim
Jong Un] that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much
bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!"
It came on a day when Mr. Trump, back in Washington from his
Florida holiday break, effectively opened his new year with
a barrage of provocative tweets on a host of issues. He called
for an aide to Hillary Clinton to be thrown in jail, threatened
to cut off aid to Pakistan and the Palestinians, assailed
Democrats over immigration, claimed credit for the fact that
no one died in a jet plane crash last year and announced that
he would announce his own award next Monday for the most dishonest
and corrupt news media.
Trump
appropriates crassness as a weapon. In a throwback to the language
of fascism, he has repeatedly positioned himself as the only
one who can save the masses, reproducing the tired script of
the savior model endemic to authoritarianism. In 2016 at the
Republican National Convention, Trump stated without irony that
he alone would save a nation in crisis, captured in his insistence
that, "I am your voice, I alone can fix it. I will restore
law and order." Trump's latter emphasis on restoring the
authoritarian value of law and order has overtones of creating
a new racial regime of governance, one that mimics what the
historian Cedric J. Robinson once called the "rewhitening
of America." Such racially charged language points to the
growing presence of a police state in the US and its endpoint
in a fascist state where large segments of the population are
rendered disposable, incarcerated or left to fend on their own
in the midst of massive degrees of inequality. There is more
at work here than an oversized, if not delusional ego. Trump's
authoritarianism is also fueled by braggadocio and misdirected
rage. There is also a language that undermines the bonds of
solidarity, abolishes institutions meant to protect the vulnerable,
and a full-fledged assault on the environment.
In
addition, Trump's ceaseless use of superlatives models a language
that encloses itself in a circle of certainty while taking on
religious overtones. Not only do such words pollute the space
of credibility, they also wage war on historical memory, humility
and the belief that alternative worlds are possible. For Trump
and his followers, there is a recognizable threat to their power
in the political and moral imperative to learn from a dark version
of the past, so as to not repeat or update the dark authoritarianism
of the 1930s. Trump is the master of manufactured illiteracy,
and his public relations machine aggressively engages in a boundless
theater of self-promotion and distractions -- both of which
are designed to whitewash any version of the past that might
expose the close alignment between Trump's language and policies
and the dark elements of a fascist past.
Trump
revels in an unchecked mode of self-congratulation bolstered
by a limited vocabulary filled with words like "historic,"
"best," "the greatest," "tremendous"
and "beautiful." As Wesley Pruden observes:
Nothing
is ever merely "good," or "fortunate."
No appointment is merely "outstanding." Everything
is "fantastic," or "terrific," and every
man or woman he appoints to a government position, even if
just two shades above mediocre, is "tremendous."
The Donald never met a superlative he didn't like, himself
as the ultimate superlative most of all.
Trump's
relentless exaggerations suggest more than hyperbole or the
self-indulgent use of language. This is true even when he claims
he "knows more about ISIS than the generals," "knows
more about renewables than any human being on Earth," or
that nobody knows the US system of government better than he
does. There is also a resonance with the rhetoric of fascism.
As the historian Richard J. Evans writes in The Third Reich
in Power:
The
German language became a language of superlatives, so that
everything the regime did became the best and the greatest,
its achievements unprecedented, unique, historic, and incomparable….
The language used about Hitler, Klemperer noted was shot through
and through with religious metaphors; people 'believed in
him,' he was the redeemer, the savior, the instrument of Providence,
his spirit lived in and through the German nation . . . Nazi
institutions domesticated themselves [through the use of a
language] that became an unthinking part of everyday life.
Under
the Trump regime, memories inconvenient to authoritarian rule
are now demolished in the domesticated language of superlatives,
so the future can be shaped so as to become indifferent to the
crimes of the past. For instance, he has talked about the Civil
War as if historians have not asked why it took place, while
at the same time ignoring the role of slavery in its birth.
During a Black History Month event, he talked about the great
abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass as if he were
still alive. Trump's ignorance of the past finds its counterpart
in his celebration of a history that has enshrined racism, tweeted
neo-Nazi messages, and embraced the "blood and soil"
of white supremacy.
How
else to explain the legacy of white racism and fascism historically
inscribed in his signature slogan "Make America Great Again"
and his use of the anti-Semitic phrase "America First,"
long associated with Nazi sympathizers during World War II?
How else to explain his support for bringing white supremacists
such as Steve Bannon (now resigned) and Jeff Sessions, both
with a long history of racist comments and actions, into the
highest levels of governmental power? Or his retweeting of an
anti-Islamic video originally posted by Britain First, a far-right
extremist group -- an action that was condemned by British Prime
Minister Theresa May?
It
gets worse: Trump created a false equivalence between white
supremacist neo-Nazi demonstrators and those who opposed them
in Charlottesville, Virginia. In doing so, he argued that there
were "very fine people on both sides," as if fine
people march with protesters carrying Nazi flags shouting, "We
will not be replaced by Jews." Trump appears to be unable
to differentiate "between people who think like Nazis and
people who try to stop them from spewing their hate."
But
there is more than ignorance at work in Trump's lengthy history
of racist comments. Trump's sympathy for white nationalism and
white supremacy offers a clear explanation for his unbroken
use of racist language about Mexican immigrants, Muslims, Syrian
refugees and Haitians. It also points to Trump's use of language
as part of a larger political and pedagogical project to "mobilize
hatred," legitimate the discourse of intimidation and encourage
the American public "to unlearn feelings of care and empathy
that lead us to help and feel solidarity with others,"
as Ben-Ghiat writes.
Trump's
nativism and ignorance works in the United States because it
not only caters to what the historian Brian Klass refers to
as "the tens of millions of Americans who have authoritarian
or fascist leanings," it also enables what he calls Trump's
attempt at "mainstreaming fascism." He writes:
Like
other despots throughout history, Trump scapegoats minorities
and demonizes politically unpopular groups. Trump is racist.
He uses his own racism in the service of a divide-and-rule
strategy, which is one way that unpopular leaders and dictators
maintain power. If you aren't delivering for the people and
you're not doing what you said you were going to do, then
you need to blame somebody else. Trump has a lot of people
to blame.
Trump's
language, especially his endorsement of torture and contempt
for international norms, normalizes the unthinkable, and points
to a return to a past that evokes what Ariel Dorfman has called
"memories of terror … parades of hate and aggression
by the Ku Klux Klan in the United States and Adolf Hitler's
Freikorps in Germany . . . . executions, torture, imprisonment,
persecution, exile, and, yes, book burnings, too." Dorfman
sees in the Trump era echoes of policies carried out under the
dictator Pinochet in Chile. He writes:
Indeed,
many of the policies instituted and attitudes displayed in
post-coup Chile would prove models for the Trump era: extreme
nationalism, an absolute reverence for law and order, the
savage deregulation of business and industry, callousness
regarding worker safety, the opening of state lands to unfettered
resource extraction and exploitation, the proliferation of
charter schools, and the militarization of society. To all
this must be added one more crucial trait: a raging anti-intellectualism
and hatred of "elites" that, in the case of Chile
in 1973, led to the burning of books like ours.
The
language of fascism revels in forms of theater that mobilize
fear, hatred and violence. Sasha Abramsky is on target in claiming
that Trump's words amount to more than empty slogans. Instead,
his language comes "with consequences, and they legitimize
bigotries and hatreds long harbored by many but, for the most
part, kept under wraps by the broader society. They give the
imprimatur of a major political party to criminal violence."
Surely, the increase in hate crimes during Trump's first year
of his presidency testifies to the truth of Abramsky's argument.
The
history of fascism teaches us that language operates in the
service of violence, desperation, and troubling landscapes of
hatred, and carries the potential for inhabiting the darkest
moments of history. It erodes our humanity, and makes too many
people numb and silent in the face of ideologies and practices
that are hideous acts of ethical atrocity. By undermining the
concepts of truth and credibility, fascist-oriented language
disables the ideological and political vocabularies necessary
for a diverse society to embrace shared hopes, responsibilities
and democratic values.
Trump's
language -- like that of older fascist regimes -- mutilates
contemporary politics, empathy, and serious moral and political
criticism, and makes it more difficult to criticize dominant
relations of power. Trump's language does more than produce
a litany of falsehoods, fears and poisonous attacks on those
considered disposable; it works hard to prevent people from
having an internal dialogue with themselves and others, relegating
self-reflection, critical thinking, and the ability to question
and judge to a scorned practice.
Trump's
fascistic language also fuels the rhetoric of war, toxic masculinity,
white supremacy, anti-intellectualism and racism. What was once
an anxious discourse about what Harvey Kaye calls the "possible
triumph in America of a fascist-tinged authoritarian regime
over liberal democracy" is no longer a matter of speculation,
but a reality.
Any
resistance to the new stage of American authoritarianism has
to begin by analyzing its language, the stories it fabricates,
the policies it produces, and the cultural, economic and political
institutions that make it possible. Questions have to be raised
about how right-wing educational and cultural apparatuses function
both politically and pedagogically to shape notions of identity,
desire, values, and emotional investments in the discourses
of casino capitalism, white supremacy and a culture of cruelty.
Trump's language both shapes and embodies policies that have
powerful consequences on people's lives, and such effects must
be made visible, tallied up, and used to uncover oppressive
forms of power that often hide in the shadows. Rather than treat
Trump's lies and fear-mongering as merely an expression of the
thoughts of a petulant and dangerous demagogue, it is crucial
to analyze their historical roots, the institutions that reproduce
and legitimate them, the pundits who promote them, and the effects
they have on the texture of everyday life.
Trump's
language is not his alone. It is the language of a nascent fascism
that has been brewing in the US for some time. It is a language
that is comfortable viewing the world as a combat zone, a world
that exists to be plundered. It is a view of those deemed different
as a threat to be feared, if not eliminated. Frank Rich is correct
in insisting that Trump is the blunt instrument of a populist
authoritarian movement whose aim is "the systemic erosion
of political, ethical, and social norms" central to a substantive
democracy. And Trump's major weapon is a toxic language that
functions as a form of "cultural vandalism" that promotes
hate, embraces the machinery of the carceral state, makes white
supremacy a central tenant of governance, and produces unthinkable
degrees of inequality in wealth and power.
Trump's
language has a history that must be acknowledged, made known
for the suffering it produces, and challenged with an alternative
critical and hope-producing narrative. Such a language must
be willing to make power visible, uncover the truth, contest
falsehoods, and create a formative and critical culture that
can nurture and sustain collective resistance to the diverse
modes of oppression that characterize the times that have overtaken
the United States, and increasingly many other countries. Progressives
need a language that both embraces the political potential of
diverse forms racial, gender and sexual identity, and the forms
of "oppression, exclusion, and marginalization" they
make visible while simultaneously working to unify such movements
into a broader social formation and political party willing
to challenge the core values and institutional structures of
the American-style fascism. No form of oppression, however hideous,
can be overlooked. And with that critical gaze must emerge a
critical language, a new narrative and a different story about
what a socialist democracy will look like in the United States.
At
the same time, there is a need to strengthen and expand the
reach and power of established public spheres as sites of critical
learning. There is also a need to encourage artists, intellectuals,
academics and other cultural workers to talk, educate, make
oppression visible, and challenge the normalizing discourses
of casino capitalism, white supremacy and fascism. There is
no room here for a language shaped by political purity or a
limited to politics of outrage. A truly democratic vision has
a broader and more capacious overview and project of struggle
and transformation.
Language
is not simply an instrument of fear, violence and intimidation;
it is also a vehicle for critique, civic courage, resistance,
and engaged and informed agency. We live at a time when the
language of democracy has been pillaged, stripped of its promises
and hopes. If fascism is to be defeated, there is a need to
make education central to politics. In part this can be done
with a language that exposes and unravels falsehoods, systems
of oppression and corrupt relations of power while making clear
that an alternative future is possible. A critical language
can guide us in our thinking about the relationship between
older elements of fascism and how such practices are emerging
in new forms. The search and use of such a language can also
reinforce and accelerate the need for young people to continue
creating alternative public spaces in which critical dialogue,
exchange and a new understanding of politics in its totality
can emerge. Focusing on language as a strategic element of political
struggle is not only about meaning, critique and the search
for the truth, it is also about power, both in terms of understanding
how it works and using it as part of ongoing struggles that
merge the language of critique and possibility, theory and action.
Without
a faith in intelligence, critical education and the power to
resist, humanity will be powerless to challenge the threat that
fascism and right-wing populism pose to the world. All forms
of fascism aim at destroying standards of truth, empathy, informed
reason and the institutions that make them possible. The current
struggle against a nascent fascism in the United States is not
only a struggle over economic structures or the commanding heights
of corporate power. It is also a struggle over visions, ideas,
consciousness and the power to shift the culture itself.
Progressives
need to formulate a new language, alternative cultural spheres
and fresh narratives about freedom, the power of collective
struggle, empathy, solidarity and the promise of a real socialist
democracy. We need a new vision that refuses to equate capitalism
and democracy, normalize greed and excessive competition, and
accept self-interest as the highest form of motivation. We need
a language, vision and understanding of power to enable the
conditions in which education is linked to social change and
the capacity to promote human agency through the registers of
cooperation, compassion, care, love, equality and a respect
for difference.
Any
struggle for a radical democratic socialist order will not take
place if "the lessons from our dark past [cannot] be learned
and transformed into constructive resolutions" and solutions
for struggling for and creating a post-capitalist society. Ariel
Dorfman's ode to the struggle over language and its relationship
to the power of the imagination, collective resistance and hope
offers a fitting reminder of what needs to be done. He writes:
We
must trust that the intelligence that has allowed humanity
to stave off death, make medical and engineering breakthroughs,
reach the stars, build wondrous temples, and write complex
tales will save us again. We must nurse the conviction that
we can use the gentle graces of science and reason to prove
that the truth cannot be vanquished so easily. To those who
would repudiate intelligence, we must say: you will not conquer
and we will find a way to convince.
In
the end, there is no democracy without informed citizens and
no justice without a language critical of injustice.
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