The
greatest emergency is the absence of emergency.
Santiago Zabala
Memory currently
occupies a large media presence, less as a tool of historical
remembrance than as a source of political repression and
regressive ignorance and thoughtlessness. In an act of elimination
and erasure, far right GOP legislators such as Florida Gov.
Ron DeSantis are attempting to whitewash, censor and ban
Black history. Memory is now administered, cleansed of its
democratic revelations, relieved of the practice of moral
witnessing and devoid of lessons learned from the past.
The history of Indigenous genocide, slavery, Jim Crow, and
a wave of resistance movements extending from the fight
for civil rights to struggles for labor rights — which
reside in the domain of the unpleasant and repressed —
are being systemically removed from schools, libraries,
books, curricula and classroom pedagogy. This attack on
historical memory brings to mind Marxist philosopher Ernst
Bloch’s trenchant reflection: “The most tragic
form of loss isn’t the loss of security; it’s
the loss of the capacity to imagine that things could be
different.”
Remembrance
is under siege as far right politicians work to disintegrate,
misrepresent and eliminate its emancipatory possibilities.
The absence of critical memory work poses both a crisis
of witnessing, the cancelling of moral vision, the destruction
of public education and the depoliticization of agency itself.
What is particularly disturbing is that this notion of historical
erasure is barely acknowledged in the mainstream media as
a serious threat to democracy. This is in spite of the fact
that when history is erased as a repository of dangerous
memories, it becomes complicit with the emerging threat
of fascism. Amid this widespread and underreported attack
on public memory, the mainstream media has instead chosen
to focus relentlessly on another story of memory: President
Joe Biden’s alleged loss of memory and his assumed
decline in cognitive abilities.
When Republican
Special Prosecutor Robert Hur released his lengthy report
following a year-long investigation into Biden’s handling
of classified materials, he concluded that “no charges
were warranted because the evidence wasn’t sufficient
to support a conviction.” Hur then argued that another
reason he did not convict Biden of mishandling classified
materials was because a jury would not convict a “well-meaning,
elderly man with a poor memory … of a serious felony”
because such a charge “requires a mental state of
willfulness.” The mainstream and conservative media
seized upon Hur’s claim that Biden was an elderly
man with “poor memory,” and by implication,
diminished critical capacities.
Ignored here
is that both Hur’s and the media’s politically
lethal commentary has little to do with the subject of the
investigation and served largely to legitimate a partisan
right-wing attack that provided red meat for the MAGA crowd.
In addition, as Fintan O’ Toole argues, Hur’s
report brought into public view a highly dramatized issue
of memory. What O’Toole fails to mention is that the
report and subsequent coverage in the mainstream media had
nothing to say about the much more important crisis of forgetting.
Notwithstanding
the fact that Hur is a lawyer who lacks any qualifications
to provide a medical opinion, Biden received toxic coverage
from major media outlets. Many of them seized upon the claim
that Biden was “sliding into dementia” and should
not run for reelection in 2024. Judd Legum, echoing the
commentary of a host of medical experts, wrote in Popular
Information that Biden’s alleged fitness “crisis”
lacked any scientific evidence and was nothing less than
a partisan hit job by Hur that the media defined as a “major
political crisis for Biden and an existential threat to
his re-election campaign.” He writes:
A Popular Information
analysis found that just three major papers — The
New York Times, the Washington Post, and
the Wall Street Journal — collectively published
81 articles about Hur’s assessment of Biden’s
memory in the four days following the release of Hur’s
report. Incidents that raised questions about former President
Trump’s mental state received far less coverage by
the same outlets. Overall, The New York Times published
30 stories about Biden’s alleged memory issues between
February 7 and February 10. Over those four days, the story
was covered by 24 reporters (some of whom filed multiple
stories), four opinion columnists, and The New York
Times' Editorial Board.
There is nothing
surprising about the mainstream media fabricating an issue
in order to increase its revenue. In fact, many believe
the media’s one-sided attention to Trump in 2016 contributed
to his election. What is interesting regarding media coverage
of the Hur report is how the media function as assassins
of memory. There is also a much larger issue at work here
— neoliberal capitalism is waging a full-scale war
on historical consciousness, the power of remembrance and
historical knowledge itself.
The administering
of memory, whether by the far right or the mainstream media,
involves more than ideologically driven and lopsided reporting.
Such reporting privatizes memory, reducing it to a tool
for judging individual competence and moral character. This
is both an act of historical displacement and a form of
depoliticization. For instance, the mainstream media’s
focus on memory and Biden’s occasional slips and forgetfulness
erases his current support for Israel’s war of revenge
and genocide against the Palestinian people. What is lost
in this one-sided and repressive coverage of Biden is a
version of memory-work that serves to reveal injustices,
a politics of disposability, and the relentless elimination
of the Palestinian people by Israel with U.S. support. Memory
in the Biden narrative becomes a mask for all that is missing.
Arwa Mahdawi writing in The Guardian sums up what
is missing regarding the crimes being committed in Gaza
when memory is depoliticized. She writes that what is willfully
overlooked in the mainstream media is Biden’s “clear
disdain for Palestinians, his dehumanization of Arabs, and
his complicity in what many experts have termed a “plausible
genocide.” She notes: “There is not a single
university left. The health system has basically collapsed.
1.9 million people have been forcibly displaced. The UN
has said 100,000 people in Gaza have been killed, injured,
or are missing.” For instance, Megan K. Stack writes
in The New York Times that “Israeli officials
have said there was no shortage of food in Gaza and denied
that they were responsible for people going hungry, accusing
Hamas of pilfering aid bound for civilians and saying the
United Nations failed to distribute food.” These statements
come from officials who are deeply implicated in the morally
and politically reprehensible assault on Palestinians. They
have blood in their mouths as they perpetuate a form of
totalitarian terror that is both unthinkable and unimaginable
while issuing statements that shield frenzied attempts of
violent imperial repression.
Under neoliberal
capitalism’s embrace of fascist politics, authoritarian
countries such as the United States, India, Turkey, Hungary
and Russia share in their perpetuation of a crisis of witnessing,
the gutting of memory, and a frontal attack on moral vision,
dissent and the connection between past and present injustices.
Truth-tellers such as Julian Assange and the late Alexei
Navalny have been imprisoned and even murdered because they
embraced a pedagogy of the uncanny — a pedagogy which
turns something that has been normalized into something
that needs to be interrogated and held accountable. Moreover,
they committed an act that all authoritarians fear: They
made visible the unwritten history of forgetting and collective
memories. As Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi observes, what is at
stake under such circumstances is more than the decay of
collective memory. He writes in Zakhor: Jewish History
and Jewish Memory that “in the world in which
we live it is no longer merely a question of the decay of
collective memory and the declining consciousness of the
past, but of the aggressive rape of whatever memory remains,
the deliberate distortion of the historical record, the
invention of mythological pasts in the service of the powers
of darkness.”
When memory
is relegated to the language of the ahistorical, it evolves
into a form of complicity, relieved of its burden of witnessing
as an act of translation. For instance, when systemic racism
is removed from books, curricula and classroom teaching,
crucial lessons to be learned from the history of slavery
and the longstanding assault on movements for racial justice
disappear. Under such circumstances, students are denied
any possibility of understanding the present as an extension
of the past, and their own agency in the fight for social
justice and moral witnessing is undermined, if not cancelled
altogether.
As John Gray
notes, in the current context, unpleasant history, its horrors
and its resistances, are either demolished or consigned
to the memory hole. Neoliberalism breeds what he calls an
“obsession with mobility, fluidity and ceaseless innovation
[which] are the ruling imperatives in the turbo¬charged
economy that shapes our lives.” In a society trapped
in a culture of immediacy, overrun by the commodification
of everything, and subject to a fascist politics at war
with memory, it is even more crucial for educators and other
cultural workers to address how history is being mediated,
distorted and erased. That is, how do dominant cultural
apparatuses such as digital media and other elements of
screen culture mediate memory, in the words of James E.
Young, “less as a reflection of [fascist politics]
than as an extension of it”?
Trump and the
MAGA Party have emerged from the shadows of the U.S.’s
real history that is both ugly and terrifying. At the same
time, memory is produced within a historical void filled
with anguish, lies, and bigotry while mobilizing and appealing
to white fears about race. In this instance, the ongoing
attack on history, memory, and historical consciousness
aligns with fascist politics by producing in large segments
of the public a moral ignorance and a crisis of thinking
and agency. Gray is right in stating that “willed
collective amnesia leaves [us] with no identity at all.”
A crucial lesson
to be learned from the mainstream media’s obsession
with Biden’s memory and its erasure of a broader understanding
of remembrance and collective memory is not only how ignorance
gets normalized but also about how the absence of critical
thought allows us to forget that we are moral subjects capable
of changing the world around us. The suppression of historical
memory constitutes a crisis that must be confronted both
historically and through a comprehensive politics that allows
us to learn from the alarming signs of a growing fascist
movement in the U.S. and around the globe.
Americans today,
to quote Gray, are “threatened by an ideology that
wages war on their past. Societies that repudiate their
historic inheritance in this way leave themselves defenseless
against the dark forces that are now re-emerging.”
Memory in the service of historical amnesia represents what
Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell label as a “kind
of psychic numbing” that diminishes our capacity to
recognize the underlying conditions that produce human suffering,
while perpetuating the false fascist claim that interrogating
the past is a burden that must be shed because it holds
no insights into the present or the unfolding future.
The attack on
historical memory in the U.S. coincides with a war on truth
and the collapse of the habits of citizenship. As truth
becomes malleable, education increasingly is mobilized as
a force of censorship, repression and indoctrination. As
language becomes thinner and detached from history, and
as education is reduced to a site of repression, those public
spaces that offer possibilities for critical thought, informed
dialogue and historical inquiry begin to disappear. Consequently,
dangerous memories are removed from public view and the
scourge of historical amnesia furthers the domestication
of the unimaginable. Deflated values and endless sensations
accelerate under the production of relentless spectacles
in which painful truths are consigned to a memory hole that
furthers the U.S.’s slide into mass forgetting. As
the Spanish painter Francisco Goya reminds us in “The
Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,” an inattentiveness
to the never-ending task of history — witnessing and
critique — generates horrors such as failures of conscience,
wars against thought and flirtations with irrationality
that lie at the heart of the triumph of everyday aggression,
the withering of political life, and the withdrawal into
private and hateful obsessions.
Public memory
is under siege by both the far right and the apostles of
neoliberalism. In the age of white supremacy and its embrace
by the Republican Party, the denial of truth, the suppression
of history, and the support of a culture of lies transforms
memory and history into a politics of subjugation and denial.
What cannot be missed here is that this politics of erasure
is what Ayana Mathis calls a way of “codifying whiteness”
as a tool of domination.
Matters of history,
remembrance and memory are crucial to the survival of a
radical democracy. When people cease to remember, politics
loses its emancipatory possibilities, and individual and
collective actions that can resurrect the unkept promises
of the past disappear. Moreover, under such circumstances,
knowledge is criminalized, as is evident in the war on history
taking place in several GOP-led states. Yet the struggle
over history is more than an educational issue. It is central
to the struggle over consciousness, critical agency, collective
resistance and democracy itself.
Americans need
to shake off the threat of historical amnesia as one step
in the struggle against fascism, white supremacy, ultra-nationalism,
and a culture of cruelty and elimination. Fighting the assassins
of memory and history should be central to the struggle
against fascism both in the U.S. and abroad. How we remember
the past will help us understand the current fascist threats
and how we might imagine a possible and just future. As
Roger Simon has brilliantly argued, when informed by the
search for justice, freedom, and equality, historical memory
and the process of remembering offer the possibility of
reappraising the connections among civic life and the educative
practices that “establish the conditions necessary
for democratic life.” Paraphrasing Ernst Bloch, memory
may be wounded, but it is not lost. Historical memory can
help us anticipate a future that is not only conceivable
but necessary.
By
Henry Giroux:
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
