Quotes Henry Giroux - page 3

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[Hillary Clinton] sort of very cautious kind of uncomfortable, clumsy interaction with the black lives movement, who are very smart in recognizing that historical memory matters, that those legacies live on when you don\'t identify them, when you\'re not willing to be in dialog with them, when you\'re not willing to be self-reflective about the very part that you played as part of that apparatus of power.

[Hillary Clinton] sort of very cautious kind of uncomfortable, clumsy interaction with the black lives movement, who are very smart in recognizing that historical memory matters, that those legacies live on when you don't identify them, when you're not willing to be in dialog with them, when you're not willing to be self-reflective about the very part that you played as part of that apparatus of power.

At the same time, you see in those studies, you see the emergence of various movements among black youth that are really challenging the ideology of neoliberalism since the 1980s.

Today, there is a new focus on public values, the need for broad-based movements for solidarity, and alternative conceptions of politics, democracy and justice.

Only a well-organized movement of young people, educators, workers, parents, religious groups and other concerned citizens will be capable of changing the power relations and vast economic inequalities that have generated what has become a country in which it is almost impossible to recognize the ideals of a real democracy.

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Individual struggles merge into larger social movements.

Until educators, individuals, artists, intellectuals and various social movements address how the metaphysics of casino capitalism, war and violence have taken hold on American society (and in other parts of the world) along with the savage social costs they have enacted, the forms of social, political, and economic violence that young people are protesting against, as well as the violence waged in response to their protests, will become impossible to recognize and act on.

The government now requisitions the publics' telephone records and sifts through its emails. It labels whistle-blowers such as Edward Snowden as traitors, even though they have exposed the corruption, lawlessness and host of antidemocratic practices engaged in by established governments. Police can take DNA samples of all people arrested of a crime, whether they are proven guilty or not. The United States is incarcerating people in record numbers, imprisoning over 2.3 million inmates while 6 million people at any one time [are] under carceral supervision - more than were in Stalin's Gulag.

Within the United States especially, the often violent response to nonviolent forms of youth protests must be analyzed within the framework of a mammoth military-industrial state and its commitment to war and the militarization of the entire society.

Unfortunately, we live at a moment in which ignorance appears to be one of the defining features of American political and cultural life. Ignorance has become a form of weaponized refusal to acknowledge the violence of the past, and revels in a culture of media spectacles in which public concerns are translated into private obsessions, consumerism and fatuous entertainment.

Violence maims not only the body but also the mind and spirit. As Pierre Bourdieu has argued, it lies \

Violence maims not only the body but also the mind and spirit. As Pierre Bourdieu has argued, it lies "on the side of belief and persuasion." If we are to counter violence by offering young people ways to think differently about their world and the choices before them, they must be empowered to recognize themselves in any analysis of violence, and in doing so to acknowledge that it speaks to their lives meaningfully.

I think the other side of this is in this balance between the social state and the punishing state, remember, the social state has been decimated. And the question becomes, how is finance capital, how does the 1 percent now resort to governing? And they govern basically through a form of lawlessness and what I call the punishing state, in which we've had a punishment creep, and now it moves from the prison to almost every institution in society, from airports to schools to social services.

The prevailing move in American society to a permanent war status does more than promote a set of unifying symbols that embrace a survival of the fittest ethic, promoting conformity over dissent, the strong over the weak, and fear over responsibility, it also gives rise to what David Graeber has called a "language of command" in which violence becomes the most important element of power and mediating force in shaping social relationships.

Power is global and politics is local. That must change. We need a new language for understanding new global power formations as well as new international modes of politics to fight them. Social movements must move outside of national boundaries and join with others across the globe to fight the savagery of neoliberal global politics and central to such a task is the work of intellectuals, artists, cultural workers, and others who can fashion new tools and social movements in the fight against the current anti-democratic threats being imposed all over the globe.

I think that contradictions, unless they're understood, unless they're analyzed, unless they're thoughtfully probed, unless people have a sense of what those contradictions mean - there's just as much of a chance that they'll move into embracing fascism as there is that they'll move into a more radical conception of democracy itself.

Of course, the new domestic paramilitary forces will also undermine free speech and dissent with the threat of force while simultaneously threatening core civil liberties, rights and civic responsibilities.

The propensity to avoid moral considerations was producing not simply a politically illiterate and authoritarian society, but one that was increasingly saturated in violence and a culture of cruelty. Needless to say, all of these forces intensified the increasing militarization and corporatization of higher education, along with the privatizing of everyday life.

Today, in the age of standardized testing, thinking and acting, reason and judgment have been thrown out the window just as teachers are increasingly being deskilled and forced to act as semi-robotic technicians good for little more than teaching for the test.

The promises of modernity regarding progress, freedom and hope have not been eliminated; they have been reconfigured, stripped of their emancipatory potential and relegated to the logic of a savage market instrumentality.

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What has changed about an entire generation of young people includes not only neoliberal society\'s disinvestment in youth and the lasting fate of downward mobility, but also the fact that youth live in a commercially carpet-bombed and commodified environment that is unlike anything experienced by those of previous generations. Nothing has prepared this generation for the inhospitable and savage new world of commodification, privatization, joblessness, frustrated hopes and stillborn projects.

What has changed about an entire generation of young people includes not only neoliberal society's disinvestment in youth and the lasting fate of downward mobility, but also the fact that youth live in a commercially carpet-bombed and commodified environment that is unlike anything experienced by those of previous generations. Nothing has prepared this generation for the inhospitable and savage new world of commodification, privatization, joblessness, frustrated hopes and stillborn projects.

I also think that one of the things we often fail to realize is that that kind of violence is now legitimated in multiple public spheres.