You
should not honour men more than truth.
Plato
In the aftermath
of over five hundred shootings during the July 4th weekend,
reports indicate that "a Texas-based company has
developed vending machines that sell bullets and installed
them at a handful of grocery stores in Texas, Oklahoma,
and Alabama, with plans for expansion into other states."
Violence has become an organizing and governing principle
in America, revealing a form of social and political
psychosis driven by greedy manufacturers of death, the
military-industrial-academic complex, fascist politics,
and the emergence of a society that uses violence as
a source of identity, pleasure, and collective hatred.
When morality collapses, the social contract dies, and
liberal ideology exhausts itself. With the growing concentration
of power and massive inequality in wealth, historical
amnesia and willful ignorance, poisonous conditions
proliferate for a society marked by both bare life and
a form of institutionalized domestic terrorism.
The mainstream
media reports nightly on bloodletting violence in the
United States that takes place in schools, supermarkets,
on the streets, and almost everywhere else. In addition,
there is an additional focus on the storms, tornadoes,
fires, displacements, and deaths due to climate change-this
is a form of slow violence that has about the same status
as a traffic report. Celebrity news stenographers endlessly
repeat such violence, lacking a hint of serious analysis
or commentary. As such, violence in different forms
is both normalized and used to fill the empty space
of the news spectacle. Needless to say, it is reported
but rarely analyzed in relation to the deeper systemic
forces creating it. The mainstream media’s indifference
to the horror of such violence and the conditions producing
it, along with its consequences, are not limited to
the United States. The conditions producing systemic
violence in the U.S. extend beyond national boundaries
and result in horrendous consequences abroad, yet they
are rarely mentioned or critically analyzed in relation
to the violence at home.
For instance,
as reported by Democracy Now, a “250-pound GBU-39
guided bomb, manufactured by Boeing and supplied by
the United States,” exploded outside a school
in Gaza this week while some boys were playing soccer,
killing three of them. Al Jazeera broadcasted a video
showing dead bodies, body parts, blood flooding the
area, and legs and arms flying in the air. This violence
originates from weapons of death made in the United
States and supplied to a right-wing regime that embraces
violence as the only mode of communication with those
it considers enemies. Barbarism is now covered up with
the distorting veil of complicity and moral irresponsibility.
Ignorance is now manufactured, corrupting politics and
legitimating violence at home and abroad.
Mass violence
at home merges with brutal violence abroad in a union
defined by settler colonialism, neoliberal barbarism,
white nationalism, and the erosion of social responsibility
as a cornerstone of governance. These forms of violence
are linked through the values of various theocratic
fascist ideologies, where racial purity and militarized
nationalism sustain the brutalism of settler colonialism,
maintained by death-machines produced and legitimized
by the military-industrial-academic complex. This violence
also manifests as a form of childcide—the destruction
of both the spirit and bodies of children and young
people.
Currently,
the slow violence of childcide is evident in the censorship
and repression of free speech being waged by right-wing
politicians, neoliberal educators, and a reactionary
donor class of billionaires, aimed at stifling the imagination
of young people. Another form of childcide is occurring
in Gaza, involving the overt violence that kills and
maims young people, denies them lifesaving medical treatment,
and forces them to lose limbs. With the potential upcoming
election of Trump, these forms of childcide in both
the U.S. and Gaza are likely to intensify.
Under Trumpism,
plans for a full-scale fascist mode of governance have
emerged and are treated as simply a political doctrine
of a legitimate political party. This is evident in
Project 2025 (a blueprint for a fascist theocracy),
a Vichy-like mainstream press, the growth of civic illiteracy,
and the paralyzing scourge of a culture of immediacy,
all of which bury any room for informed judgment and
resistance to the rise of the punishing state and the
blood flowing at home and abroad.
We live
in an age when violence has become normalized, the spirit
of the Confederacy informs the Republican Party, and
the terrifying language of the Third Reich emerges in
Trump's call for a “unified Reich” and the
promise of a dictatorship. With the blessing of a corrupt
and authoritarian Supreme Court, a President Trump would
have absolute immunity to assassinate his "enemies."
With the breakdown of the relationship between law and
justice, he could conduct mass deportations and build
massive detention camps for immigrants and others considered
disposable. As "Marxists" and “communists”
are purged from their jobs, arrested, tortured, and
jailed, schoolchildren would begin each morning reading
from the Bible and memorizing the Ten Commandments.
Banned books would be burned in public squares and broadcast
on all government media. Meanwhile, institutions of
higher education would eliminate the scourge of critical
thinking, history would be whitewashed, and education
would be defined by the sordid principles of white Christian
nationalist ideology. This is more than a dystopian
fantasy.
The current
attacks on journalists, student protesters, higher education,
public education, and oppositional media are not merely
echoes of a horrifying past; they represent an emerging
tsunami of state and organized violence. This violence
is occurring not only in the U.S. but also in Hungary,
Turkey, Russia, Israel, India, and other far-right societies.
What the U.S. and Israel, in particular, model for other
authoritarian regimes is a worldview that has become
increasingly dominant. As the Israeli journalist Chaim
Levinson points out in Haaretz, it is a worldview where
“violence as a solution [melds] racial supremacy,
thuggery, and ignorance."
The rise
of global fascism merges violence and ultra-nationalism,
waging war against any vestige of democracy. Its goal
is to aggressively destroy those institutions, groups,
and individuals who make thinking dangerous and action
necessary and courageous. The barbarians are gleefully
waiting in the shadows while a culture of mass ignorance,
endless spectacles, and commodification continues to
blind the public to the horrors that are about to emerge
in 2025. Historical and social amnesia are at the heart
of the machinery of death both at home and abroad. Memories
of the horrors of genocide against Native Americans,
Indigenous people, Blacks, no longer define moral responsibility
and a mass politics of resistance. The consequences
are truly frightening. At home, students find themselves
on campuses that have been turned into police precincts.
Abroad, the horror of colonial dispossession and death
goes unchallenged by many of the alleged democracies
of the world. These two registers of domination and
the threat of genocidal terror inform each other. Nowhere
is this criminogenic behavior more obvious today than
in the failed response, indifference, and outright complicity
regarding the slaughter taking place in Gaza. The horrors
of fascism are most evident in the ways authoritarian
societies turn on their children, and nowhere is this
more obvious than in Gaza.
The respected
journal, The Lancet, has reported that the current death
toll may be closer to 200,000, considering both "indirect"
and direct killings. Many of the dead and maimed are
children, resulting in an entire generation being wiped
out. Every university in Gaza has been destroyed, along
with 80 percent of the schools. Museums have been destroyed
and, in some cases, looted by the IDF. Hospitals have
been destroyed by the 2000-pound bombs provided by the
Biden administration.
The killing
of innocent Palestinians is made possible by the Biden
administration, which supplies Israel with the weapons
it uses in its genocidal war. This complicity and murderous
assistance occur in a moral void, regardless of how
many innocent children and women are killed by such
weapons. Under the Biden administration, organized violence
cancels out any notion of justice, compassion, and desire
for peace. This is evident given that, as of July 10,
2024, the Biden administration has decided to “resume
shipping 500lb bombs to Israel.” The Biden administration
has blood on its hands.
The elimination
of the Palestinian people is accompanied by the destruction
of Palestinian heritage, history, memories, and an entire
generation. James Baldwin once said, "The children
are always ours, every single one of them, all over
the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever
is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of
morality." Baldwin was only partly right. Immorality
has become a badge of global power. The idea and promise
of a strong democracy that has lost itself in the militarized
machineries of death and the resurgence of a dangerous
authoritarianism and poisonous colonialism. What is
happening in Gaza is a preview of the fascist virus
that is spreading across the globe.
Any viable
resistance must begin by making this fascist threat
visible. Trump and his followers signal a deep political
crisis both at home and abroad. The first strategy for
resistance in the current moment must prioritize preventing
the potential victory of a fascist white Christian nationalist
state in 2025. This is about more than defending the
rule of law, it is about mobilizing those passions necessary
to fight repression and breathe civic courage into a
sense of collective agency. The fight for justice can
only begin by recognizing the state of injustice that
now rules America. The stakes for democracy, the lives
of those considered other, and the planet itself are
too high to ignore. A multi-racial, multi-class movement
must set aside its differences, dampen its tendency
to political purity, and unite to mobilize a public
capable of stopping Trump and eliminating the conditions
of neoliberal fascism that created him. As I have said
before, under the present circumstances and at this
time in history, resistance is no longer an option;
it is a necessity.
By
Henry Giroux:
The
Corporate Firewall Against Truth
Assassins
of Memory
Not Joe's But Our Collective Memory Issues
The
Politics of Emergency Time
Hijacking
Freedoms
America
at the Crossroads
Gangster
Capitalism
Historical
Amnesia in Age of Capitalist Apocalypse
The
Inequality of Freedom
The
Nazification of Education
Killing
Fields in Age of Mass Shootings
The
Pedagogy of Resistance
The
Death of Ethics
Banning
Books
Homage
to Paulo Freire
Plague
of Manufactured Ignorance
Racial
Cleansing and Erasing History
Plague
of Historical Amnesia
Recovering
from Trumpism
Tribute
to Noam Chomsky
The
Ouster of Trump
White
Supremacy in the Offal Office
The
Plague of Inequity
Covid
and our Embattled Society
Trump
and the Corona Death Waltz
Neoliberal
Fascism
The
Terror Unforseen
Interview
of H.A.Giroux
The
Normalization of Fascism
The
Public Intellectual II
Bertrand
Russell: Public Intellectual
Thinking
Dangerously in Dark Times
Democracy
in Exile
Authoritarianism
in America
Violence:
US Favourite Pastime
Losing
in Trump's America
In
Dark Times Teachers Matter
The
Age of Civic Illiteracy
Exile
and Disruption in the Academy
What
Society Produces a Donald Trump
From
School to the Prison Pipeline
Orwell
& Huxely
American
Sniper and Hollywood Heroism
Selfie Culture
The
Age of Disposability
In
the Shadow of the Atomic Bomb
Killing
Machines and the Madness of the Military
The
Age of Neoliberal Cruelty
The
Politics of the Deep State
Challenging
Casino Capitalism
Crisis
in Democracy
America's
Descent into Madness
