Very discussion worth, imo. The entire article can be read here.
...within the last decade under President George W. Bush and President Obama, we have witnessed an undeniable attack on civil liberties through legislation - extending from the passage of the Patriot Act of 2001 to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2012 - which gives the government the right to conduct warrantless surveillance, detain American citizens indefinitely and use the power of the military to detain suspected terrorists in the United States.[3]
This is not all. The United States government now has the legal power to assassinate "any citizen considered a terrorist or an abettor of terrorism,"[4] kidnap citizens and non-citizens and transfer them to other countries to be tortured, suspend due process, expand the prison system, and do all of this covertly under the protection of state secrecy laws. It can remain silent with impunity while government officials, including a former president and vice president, sanction state-administered torture.
As politics became an extension of war in the United States, particularly in the aftermath of the tragic events of September 2001, national security and the ever-widening net of militarism have trumped any appeal to democratic rights. With the looming edifice of the national security state casting its shadow over the United States, Jim Garrison offers a critique of the NDAA that goes to the heart of the dark clouds of authoritarianism that are gathering over the nation. He writes:
The question screaming at us through this bill is whether the war on terror is a better model around which to shape our destiny than our constitutional liberties. It compels the question of whether we remain an ongoing experiment in democracy, pioneering new frontiers in the name of liberty and justice for all, or have we become a national security state, having financially corrupted and militarized our democracy to such an extent that we define ourselves, as Sparta did, only through the exigencies of war?[5]
Indeed, it increasingly appears that the United States has given up on its claim to democracy, however tainted its democratic ideals may have been before 9/11.
Authoritarian societies mark their presence in more ways than the suspension of civil liberties and the ongoing militarization of everyday life. They are generally preceded by a formative culture - notable for its hatred of critical thinking, disdain for the truth, and devaluation of compassion, civic courage, and social responsibility. This is a formative culture whose pedagogical task is to create subjects who are mobilized by fear, self-interest, political affiliation or ignorance to invest emotionally and politically in regimes that cripple the public's sense of agency. Such regimes immerse people in "a language that erases everything that matters"[6] and offer them a space in which they can assume the role of detached bystanders, indifferent to the demands of ethical responsibility and justice for all. In a society that elevates a survival-of-the-fittest ethic to a national ideal, there is no room to appeal to human solidarity or call for a moral response to instances of suffering and widespread racial targeting.
In fact, at the present moment in American society, human solidarity and democratic values are scorned just as a moral response to the plight of the other is viewed with disdain and seen as a sign of weakness. Witness the culture of cruelty touted by the current run of Republican presidential candidates, who barely blink when asked about how capital punishment embodies the legacy of slavery, who unapologetically suggest that child-labor laws be suspended so poor youth of color can work as janitors in their schools, or who endlessly complain that the poor lack a work ethic and are undeserving of social protections.[7] Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich believe that the social safety net, rather than being inadequate, is overextended and promotes a nation of dependents, an army of unrepentant moochers, creating what right-wing politicians and anti-public intellectuals call an "entitlement society."
The supposed cure in this case is simply to abolish the safety net and let the free market work its delusional magic, so that the poor, elderly, sick, unemployed and homeless can rely upon their own resources to take care of themselves. In the meantime, the contemporary neoliberal mantra to downsize, privatize, outsource and deregulate continues to promote economic policies characterized by moral and political lawlessness. At the same time, high priests of casino capitalism remain undeterred in their drive to accumulate capital for the few while promoting planetary immiseration for everyone else.
What's missing in the right-wing analysis of the issues facing Americans is not merely any sense of compassion or social responsibility, but any understanding of the social and economic costs of such policies. While the political rhetoric marshaled by politicians such as Gingrich and Romney is as delusional as it is cruel and unjust, the real issue at work here is the price to be paid in any society for these types of political and economic measures. Not only do such norms and policies create massive inequalities in wealth, income and power, they also produce practices that are responsible for massive amounts of human suffering.
The fact of the matter is that under the regime of neoliberal capitalism in the United States, social spending is vastly inadequate, given that 39 percent of all adults and 55 percent of all children live on or below the poverty line. Approximately 146 million Americans - that is, 1 in 2 Americans - are low-income or poor.
Under such circumstances, politics works to create heartless and savage zones of abandonment, or what Achille Mbembe calls "death worlds" - a form of "death in life."[10] Hollowed out and stripped of its civic functions, politics takes as its first priority creating the conditions for corporations and financial institutions to act without restraint, while modalities of hypermasculinity, unchecked individualism and armed power become the measure of national greatness. The formative culture that supports such a politics is one in which the celebration of market fundamentalism and war are destined to become the most enduring symbols of the American way of life.
...
It is worth remembering the period in the late 19th century when giant corporations and robber barons controlled state and national politics and subjected blacks, women, immigrants and the poor to the savage rule of free market capitalism, leaving the disadvantaged on their own, and, often, defenseless, to confront the effects of the structural violence and ideologically powered social Darwinism that shaped the forces governing their lives.[15]
]
....
Two recent events in Arizona provide flagrant examples of what might be called the emergence of a virulent racism in the service of repressive educational policies and cultural practices fueled by anti-democratic and authoritarian interests. The first event involves the banning of ethnic studies as a result of the passage of Arizona House Bill 2281, which forbids public schools, as well as charter schools, in the state from offering courses that "promote the overthrow of the U.S. government," "promote resentment toward a race or class of people," "are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group" or "advocate for ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals."[17] Crafted at a time when Arizona is at the forefront of a number of states in enacting a right-wing offensive that produces anti-immigrant and anti-Latino opinions, sentiments, and policies, the law was designed not only to provide political caché for Arizona conservatives seeking political office, but also to impose regulations "which [would] dismantle the state's popular Mexican-American/Raza Studies programs."[18]
In one highly popularized incident, the current Tea Party conservative Superintendent of Public Instruction, John Huppenthal - making good on an earlier claim that he would "stop la raza" - notified the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) that, as a result of the new law banning ethnic studies, the popular Mexican-American studies program was in violation of the ban and TUSD would lose $15 million in annual state aid unless it was terminated. The program was eventually eliminated in spite of the fact that it was credited "with reducing dropout rates, discipline problems, poor attendance and failure rates among Latino Students."[19]
The attack on ethnic studies was soon followed with a decision by the TUSD board to ban a number of books associated with this field of study. The list of removed books, in some cases literally taken out of the hands of crying students, includes classic texts such as "Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years," published by Rethinking Schools; "Occupied America: A History of Chicanos," by Rodolfo Acuna, and the internationally acclaimed "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," by Paulo Freire. In an attempt to eliminate any texts or class units where "race, ethnicity and oppression are central themes," the TUSD board also banned Shakespeare's play, "The Tempest."
The fear is that ethnic studies can be taught in ways that provide a critical reading of history, power, ideas and institutional mappings. This is viewed as dangerous by conservatives and white supremacists because classroom learning can be used to expose specific modes of racial exclusion, class inequalities, and the ongoing punishing and silencing of the voices of young people. What many of the newly elected Tea Party ideologues recognize is that critical pedagogy has the power to challenge persistent racial injustice in the United States. More importantly, they fear the role that such a pedagogy can play in empowering minority students to become informed citizens who might exercise their rights by changing the fundamental institutions and power structures that affect their lives.
There is more at work in the attack on ethnic studies and the banning of books considered dangerous to children in the Arizona schools than the rise of Tea Party politics and specific acts of censorship (this would be a typical liberal interpretation of these events). There is also the emergence of deeper structures of a systemic racism and the increasing mobilization of neoliberal ideology to justify the ongoing attacks on people of color, immigrants and those considered other by virtue of their class and ethnicity.
In the first instance, race is not ignored. On the contrary, it is either coded as a style, a commodity, or devalued as a criminal culture and defined as a threat to a supposedly under-siege white, Christian nation. What follows, then, is that race is more and more erased as a political category and reduced to the narrow parameters of individual preference, psychology or prejudice. Privatizing race preserves the dominant power structures that produce modes of structural racism that extend from racial discrimination to racial exclusion practiced by schools, governments, banks, mortgage companies and state policies, among others.
To read more by Henry A. Giroux or other authors in the Public Intellectual Project, click here.
Within this type of privatized discourse, racism survives through the guise of neoliberalism as a kind of repartee that imagines human agency as simply a matter of individualized choices - the only obstacle to effective citizenship and agency being the lack of principled self-help and moral responsibility. Privatizing racism functions as a racial mythology that both encourages individual solutions to socially produced problems and reveals a false sense of conceit used by those who claim that racism is nothing more than "a psychological space free of racial tension."[21
I am curious as to why nobody has commented on this.
The article is really long and I will return and read it all carefully later. But the main thing that frightnes me is Book Burning...that is a sign of wanting to control, as in a Dictatorship, and this is typical of the way some influential people in Arizona think. There is a wish to control in too many ways such as deciding who has permission to marry, Government interference in reproduction, disapproval of birth control and increasing financial benefits afforded the already wealthy right wing segment of our population. The right is beginning to resemble Europe of the past....Fascism.
Fahrenheit451 by Ray Bradbury would be a good research asset if anyone has any questions about book burning:
http://www.cliffsnotes.com/study_guide/literature/Fahrenheit-451-Book-Summary.id-106.html
that's how I feel about ANY book burning!
What is going on in Arizona really scares me. I am afraid it will spread like wildfire to surrounding states. The banning of the books mentioned really does remind me of Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. Not to mention the recent laws allowing police to ask for people's identification if they think they are "illegal." We cannot move backward like this, or we learned nothing from fascist and totalitarian regimes.
I edited the article. Hitler and Himmler are both quoted in the beginning and it's really scary stuff. It's a great article, lots of information, a great bibliography.
This really hit home for me because the school I received my bachelor's and master's taught critical pedagogy as the foundation of its education program. We read a lot of Frere. It frightens me that it would be considered subversive.
No doubt about it: critical pedagogy threatens the status quo. It teaches ways of educating that aren't "multicultural" or "politically correct." It finds the pattern of power structures and exposes them. It's revolutionary. It's a way of teaching that brings about those "lightbulb" moments and critical thinkers are born.
It turns my stomach that a whole shelf of my books could be fuel for the fire.
Quoting matreshka:
What is going on in Arizona really scares me. I am afraid it will spread like wildfire to surrounding states. The banning of the books mentioned really does remind me of Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. Not to mention the recent laws allowing police to ask for people's identification if they think they are "illegal." We cannot move backward like this, or we learned nothing from fascist and totalitarian regimes.
This actually makes me physically sick.What next?Library burnings????????????
This is a really important article. I'm always telling my boys to read more about history, because I know that the curriculum is very watered down, and why that is has everything to do with controlling who is valued as American and who is not. At least in our experience- and I think it's really sad.
This made me wonder about the political compass for this year, because I think we all often put on the party-blinders and forget that this thing is mostly just a sham at this point in time-
The US Presidential Election 2012
Literacy and education have always been a threat to the ruling class.
I don't have it in me right now to read this looooooooooooooong article. I am sure it is to my detriment that I am missing something important. But anytime there is a book burning, someone is hiding something and seeking to control someone. Never a good thing.
Quoting lga1965:
I am curious as to why nobody has commented on this.
The article is really long and I will return and read it all carefully later. But the main thing that frightnes me is Book Burning...that is a sign of wanting to control, as in a Dictatorship, and this is typical of the way some influential people in Arizona think. There is a wish to control in too many ways such as deciding who has permission to marry, Government interference in reproduction, disapproval of birth control and increasing financial benefits afforded the already wealthy right wing segment of our population. The right is beginning to resemble Europe of the past....Fascism.
Fahrenheit451 by Ray Bradbury would be a good research asset if anyone has any questions about book burning:
http://www.cliffsnotes.com/study_guide/literature/Fahrenheit-451-Book-Summary.id-106.html
VP Picks. Who's Your Fave?
- Kate_Momof3
on Feb. 11, 2012 at 11:49 AM