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HISTORICAL AMNESIA IN THE AGE OF CAPITALIST
APOCALYPE
![Henry A. Giroux](volume_images/henrygiroux-self.jpg)
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.
No
history is mute. No matter how much they own it,
break it, and lie about it, human history refuses to shut
its mouth.
Despite deafness and ignorance,
the time that was continues to tick inside the time that
is.
Eduardo Galeano
We live at a
time in which apocalyptic visions have become normalized.
Slow-motion catastrophes unfold as the planet experiences
massive floods, storms, droughts, toxic air, poisonous water,
wildfires, dust storms and other tragic disasters. The railroad
disaster and massive toxic explosion in eastern Ohio is
just the latest example. In the political realm, fast-moving
crises portend nuclear war, ecological devastation and the
rise of fascism across the globe.
Creeping calamities
have become routine. They are matched only by a civic culture
that is under siege by the apostles of neoliberalism promoting
privatization, consumerism, anti-intellectualism and a brutal
market ideology purposefully bereft of any sense of social
responsibility. Americans now live in an age when historical
consciousness no longer functions to inform the present
and has become the target of white supremacists and a far-right
Republican Party that is silent about the dark past that
informs its authoritarian politics. As the violent terrors
of the past tear into the present, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis
and his political allies enact school policies that freeze
history in an ideological straitjacket, claiming they are
liberating history when in fact they are denying it.
America is
becoming a country that can no longer question itself, invest
in the public good or imagine a future beyond the dreamscapes
of the rich and ruling elite. Apocalyptic fears, uncertainties
and anxieties feed a rising tsunami of violence that has
become the organizing principle of governance, everyday
life and society itself. American society is caught in the
daily routines of lies, corruption and manufactured ignorance;
one consequence is the withering of individual and social
agency along with civic culture and the public imagination.
American optimism has turned bleak. In the age of gangster
capitalism, people lose their interconnections, community
and sense of security. Isolation and anxiety gives way to
mass depression and is ripe for expressions of rage and
hatred. The guard rails of justice, compassion, the welfare
state, politics, democratic values and the institutions
that nourish them are under threat of disappearing. Apocalyptic
terrors have moved from the realm of fiction into the social
fabric of everyday life.
Violence is
the essence of authoritarianism; it is the symbolic, material
and visceral breeding ground and expression of militarism,
lies, hatred, fear and cruelty. It flourishes in societies
marked by scandalous inequality, despair, unchecked precarity,
lies, hate and cynicism. This is especially true in a society
that is armed and militarized, and that embraces a war culture.
One index is the epidemic of gun violence in the U.S. As
Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children's Defense
Fund, observes, it represents America as a death machine
immersed in a culture and language of senseless brutality;
it also represents the emergence of a fascist politics which
provides the discourse of hate, bigotry and fear that feed
an apocalyptic embrace of violence. The bodies of Black
and brown people are no longer viewed as spaces of agency,
but as the location of violence, crime and social pathology.
There are no safe spaces in America. Edelman provides an
example of the range and scope of such violence early into
2023:
Just
a few days into the New Year America's gun violence epidemic
is back under a harsh spotlight. The Gun Violence Archive,
which documents the number of mass shootings in the U.S.
in which four or more people are shot or killed in a single
incident, counted 40 mass shootings in the first 25 days
of 2023. This was 21 percent higher than in the previous
two years and more than any January on record. Seventy-three
people were killed and 165 more were injured in those mass
shootings alone. Every day on average more than 100 people
are killed and more than 200 others are injured by guns
in our nation in assaults, suicides and suicide attempts,
unintentional shootings, and police intervention. Gun violence
is the leading cause of death for children in our nation.
This is American exceptionalism at its worst.
Violence, especially
regarding the killing of children — such as the mass
killing at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, that
left at least 19 students dead, the child shot dead at Ingraham
High School in Seattle or the "more than 338,000 students"
who have experienced gun violence in their schools since
the Columbine mass shooting in 1999 — can't be understood
in the immediacy of shock and despair, however deplorable
and understandable. Nor can it be reduced to personal narratives
about the victims and shooters. The ideological and structural
conditions that both nourish and legitimate it must be revealed
both in terms of their connections to power and in the systemic
unmasking of those who benefit from such death-dealing conditions.
The culture of violence and the murdering of children as
a national pastime cannot be abstracted from the business
of violence.
Among Democrats,
the general response to mass violence in the U.S. is to
call for more gun regulations and to criticize the NRA,
gun lobbies and the weapons industry. This is understandable
given that the arms industry floods the United States with
all manner of lethal weapons, pays out millions to mostly
Republican politicians and, in the case of the NRA, has
sponsored an amendment banning "any federal dollars
from being used to research gun injuries or deaths in the
U.S." Republicans, on the other hand, thrive in the
culture of guns, white supremacy, the spirit of the Confederacy
and an unchecked defense of the Second Amendment —
a culture whose roots are in the long history of racial
fascism.
Of course the
search for profits at any costs drives the U.S. arms industry,
the largest in the world. The cultural politics of violence
is a powerful pedagogical force in America and cannot be
ignored. Inundating the country with dangerous weapons is
not simply a matter of convincing every adult that they
should own a gun in order to protect themselves from migrants
and people of color, or from Democrats who have been charged
by QAnon conspiracy theorists of grooming children to be
gay or kidnapping them in order to drink their blood as
part of a Satanic ritual. There is also the vast general
appeal to personal safety, security and the celebration
and pleasure of gun ownership as a matter of identity formation.
Consider Wee1Tactical Firearm Company, which markets the
JR-15 rifle designed specifically for children. The gun
is modeled after the infamous assault-style AR-15, with
semiautomatic action firing, but is 20 percent smaller —
in other words, a toy-scale replica of the weapon used in
many mass shootings. The company's press release says it
all:
Our goal was to develop a shooting platform that was not
only sized correctly, and safe, but also looks, feels, and
operates just like Mom and Dad's gun. . . . The WEE-1 and
Schmid Tool Team brought their collective experience in
the firearms business . . . to launch the JR-15. We are
so excited to start capturing the imagination of the next
generation.
This is more
than gallows humor covering pedagogical appeals to violence
as a governing principle of security and daily life. In
fact, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, in the aftermath of the
mass murder of 19 children and two teachers on May 24, 2022,
in Uvalde, Texas, tweeted: "The kids at Uvalde needed
JR-15s to defend themselves . . . At least they could have
defended themselves since no one else did, while their parents
were held back by police." The call to arm children
with semiautomatic rifles modeled on the AR-15 is beyond
irrational; it is barbaric. Those opposed to a gun culture
and mass violence should indeed criticize gun fanatics such
as Greene, the gun lobby and the arms industry, but this
critique does not go far enough.
In addition
to high-profile mass shootings such as the one in Uvalde,
there were two other hate-filled mass shootings in line
with the racial and antisemitic hatred now blooming in the
United States. The 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue
in Pittsburgh by an antisemite, and the racist slaughter
carried out by a youth nourished on white supremacist social
media against Black shoppers in a Buffalo supermarket points
to more than a culture awash in guns, hate and violence;
it also points to a culture in which the drive for profits
overrides any threat such greed may promote, even to children.
The pedagogical
force of culture is a crucial political element of power
in the U.S., an important site where struggles over power
and ideas now merge. It has become a sphere where the formerly
tacit assumption about the public sphere belonging to white
people has now become normalized as a badge of patriotism.
Neoliberal capitalism has become apocalyptic and utterly
dystopian, and in its fascist phase expands the landscape
of violence by trading in hatred, bigotry and violence both
as spectacle and as a killing mechanism.
Neoliberal
capitalism has become apocalyptic and dystopian; formerly
tacit assumptions about the public sphere belonging to white
people have become normalized as "patriotism."
Racist violence,
in particular, has become visceral, unhinged and ingrained
in the institutions that are designed to serve and protect
the public. This was evident in the savage beating and death
of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old FedEx worker, at the hands
of five Memphis police officers. His deadly beating is indicative
of how deeply embedded the culture of violence is in American
police departments. Nichols was stopped for an alleged traffic
violation, dragged from his car, punched and tasered. While
he was handcuffed, lying helpless on the ground, "one
officer kicked him in the head and then did so again."
Another officer pulled him up from the ground while another
struck him repeatedly with a baton. Videos from the cop's
body camera and a street-mounted camera show Nichols asking
why he was pulled over, stating that he just wanted to go
home and then, in the midst of the attack, calling out for
his mother. It was heartbreaking and terrifying, and offers
a signpost of the systemic violence being waged against
Black people by police forces in the United States.
The racist
nature of Nichols' killing is bolstered by numerous reports
that make clear that Black people are disproportionately
stopped, searched and arrested by police when routinely
pulled over for traffic stops. The disparity in how the
police treat Black and white people under similar circumstances
was highlighted vividly by Washington Post columnist Eugene
Robinson in his comparison of how the police treated Nichols
versus their arrest of Dylann Roof, the white racist who
killed 19 Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina,
in 2015:
Roof
fled all the way to North Carolina and was known to be armed
and dangerous. Yet police officers, acting on a tip, apprehended
him at a traffic stop without incident and without a scratch.
And when Roof complained about being hungry, police in Shelby,
N.C., bought him food from a nearby Burger King. Those officers
in Memphis — who have been charged with second-degree
murder — didn't have to treat Nichols to a Whopper.
But they could have listened when he explained that he was
going to his mother's house, just a few hundred feet away.
The numerous
deaths of Black people at the hands of the police are part
of the historical DNA of an apocalyptically violent culture
of policing in the United States. As Simon Balto observes,
the problem of policing needs to focus on the institution
and the culture, not the individuals who commit violence.
Balto adds that the beating of Nichols was not the work
of rogue cops. It has to be understood as part of the "institution"
and culture "that trained [them] to be violent, paid
[them] to be violent and paid [them} to train others to
be violent.… Police are trained . . . to use coercive
force, are trained to use deadly weapons . . . Violence,
coercive force, the carry and use of deadly weapons —
all of these are central to 'proper policing' as the institution
of policing in this country currently exists."
Violence is
not random in the U.S. It is systemic, pervasive, racist
and deeply embedded in a fascist politics. It takes place
in schools, supermarkets, gyms, dance studios and parades.
Although everyone is a potential target, people of color
suffer disproportionately from state violence. This apocalypse
of violence is amplified by a modern Republican Party that
is utterly wedded to destroying the welfare state, accelerating
the range of groups considered disposable and imposing a
white Christian nationalist state on America while expanding
a bloated military and arms industry. Capitalism is now
fully mobilized as a death machine and the Republican Party
is committed to turning the United States into a fascist
state.
In an age in
which indoctrination and propaganda are waging an assault
on all forms of education including schools and larger social
and media apparatuses, the far right and corporate erasure
of knowledge has become a form of intensifying violence.
For instance, the notion of systemic racism, violence, oppression
and inequality is anathema to the far right. This is clear
in Donald Trump's 1776 Commission, which touted "patriotic
education," a view of education that rejected any indication
of systemic oppression in U.S. history.
The notion that
the U.S. has never practiced systemic discrimination is
also evident in policies passed by right-wing legislators
"prohibiting teachers from talking about patterns of
racism" and devoted to removing "from classrooms
and school libraries books whose subjects must overcome
systemic discrimination." However false and blatantly
propagandistic this whitewashing of history is, the power
of the far right in cleansing the history of racism and
other forms of oppression has a long reach. One example
that stands out is the final version of the AP African-American
Studies course in which the word "systemic" was
eliminated from previous versions of the course. According
to Nick Anderson, writing in the Washington Post:
The February 2022 version declared that students should
learn how African American communities combat effects of
"systemic marginalization." An April update paired
"systemic" with discrimination, oppression, inequality,
disempowerment and racism. A December version said it was
essential to know links between Black Panther activism and
"systemic inequality that disproportionately affected
African Americans." Then the word vanished. "Systemic,"
a crucial term for many scholars and civil rights advocates,
appears nowhere in the official version released Feb. 1.
The College
Board has denied being influenced by right-wing critics
of the AP course such as DeSantis, who claimed the course
lacked educational value and contributed to a "political
agenda." However one wants to parse this issue, it
is difficult to believe that the barrage of right-wing complaints
about not just the AP course, but the inclusion of any knowledge
about race in American history, had no effect on the final
version of the AP course.
Violence is
not random in America. It is amplified by a Republican Party
devoted to destroying the welfare state and imposing a Christian
nationalist autocracy.
As Keeanga-Yamahtta
Taylor has noted, while it is certainly conceivable that
the preliminary version of the class would have been revised,
it is "unbelievable that right-wing complaints did
not influence the final outcome." Of course, the real
issue here is not whether the College Board has engaged
in a politics of historical erasure, but that it is symptomatic
of an "anti-woke" attack on knowledge, critical
pedagogy and radical ideas regarding racism that has a lengthy
history in the U.S. but has been aggressively pursued in
the age of Trumpism. The larger issue here is a right-wing
assault on critical thought and the production of an age
of stupefaction in which young people are being groomed
to embrace conformity and forms of historical and civic
illiteracy. The forces that created fascism are with us
once again.
Under neoliberalism,
democratic life has no vision and no meaningful ideological
civic anchors. Neoliberalism strips society of both its
collective conscience and democratic communal relations.
Violence proliferates in a society when justice is corrupted
and when power works to produce mass forms of historical
and social amnesia largely aimed at degrading society's
critical and moral capacities. Civic culture is under attack
by a gangster capitalism that, as Jonathan Crary notes,
promotes "the massive erasure and disabling of historical
memory, and the parallel corruption and falsification of
language and public forms of communication, [both of which]
are complicit in the perpetuation of violence on a mass
scale."
Neoliberalism
can no longer deliver on its promises of social mobility,
economic prosperity and a meaningful life for people. Its
barbaric celebration of profit over human needs and culture
of cruelty has reached its endpoint, which is a fascist
politics that blames the breakdown of the social and economic
order on Blacks, Muslims, Jews and migrants. It is essential
to acknowledge that the turn to fascist politics provides
ideological cover and support for a Republican Party that
has morphed into an upgraded form of fascism aimed at creating
a white Christian nationalist state. The GOP's war on Black
people, young people, migrants, women and transgender people
now creates a diversion and spectacle that enables the corporate
elite and economically powerful to hide in the shadows of
mass hatred, dehumanization and bigotry. All that is left
is a discourse of dehumanization and the increasingly normalized
view that violence is the only tool left to solve social
problems while the punishing state becomes the default institution
for addressing social problems.
Apocalyptic
imaginings no longer address crises that could be avoided.
On the contrary, they have morphed into the sphere of the
hysterical and unimaginable. As the social sphere is shredded,
politics experiences its own destruction, accompanied by
the rise of extremist groups and a public drawn to racist
and xenophobic rhetoric and actions. In this instance, violence
is increasingly aligned with a politics of cultural and
racial purification. As violence is disconnected from critical
thought and historical contexts, ethical sensibilities are
neutralized, making it easier for right-wing extremists
to appeal to the alleged exhilaration, experience of pleasure
and gratification provided by the abyss of moral nihilism,
lawlessness and the operation of power in the service of
mass aggression.
Violence thrives
on historical and social amnesia. Hence, the current right-wing
attacks on public education, dissident journalism, books,
African American history and critical ideas represent a
fundamental attack on the public imagination and those institutions
in which critical thought nourishes critical and actively
involved workers, writers, educators, Black power movements
and others fighting for a radical democracy.
The GOP's war
on Black people, young people, migrants, women and LGBTQ
people is a spectacular diversion, allowing the corporate
elite to remain in the shadows.
In moments like
these, it is crucial to remember that justice is partly
dependent upon the merging of civic courage, historical
understanding, a critical education and robust mass action.
There is a recurring history of resistance in America that
is under siege and is being erased from schools, books and
libraries by right-wing Republican politicians and their
followers. This is not only an assault on historical consciousness;
it's also an assault on thinking itself, along with the
very ability to recognize injustice and the tools needed
to oppose it. One consequence is that neoliberal authoritarianism
now thrives in an ecosystem of historical amnesia and has
become an accelerating agent of violence.
In an age of
apocalyptic violence, memory is erased, historical consciousness
is banished from schools and critical ideas are labeled
as unpatriotic. Fear, manufactured ignorance, engineered
panics and a paranoid racist politics draped in the language
of white nationalism and bigotry are now imposed on schools
in the name of "patriotic education." This is
the violence of a formative culture that embraces racial
cleansing, a white nationalist notion of citizenship and
the undermining of the public and civic imagination. Its
endpoint is a rebranded fascism.
As the United
States tips over into the abyss of fascism, state violence
must be interrogated within the historical conditions that
have both legitimated and normalized it over time. It must
be viewed with a long durée of neoliberalism and
racist violence that has become normalized in almost every
aspect of daily life. The militarization of American society
is now readily embraced and revealed in its turn toward
a fascist politics. As long as we allow neoliberal capitalism
to disconnect the fascist past from the present, the violence
will continue as a matter of common sense.
The histories
of repressed others must be made visible, along with the
struggles and resistance they have waged against such repression.
In this instance, the apocalypse of violence must be addressed
not through limited reforms but through a call for . . .
eliminating a capitalist society whose history only leads
to mass suffering, staggering inequality, endless injustice
and fascism itself. Labor historian Michael Yates is right
in stating that "The long rule of capital has created
profoundly alienated conditions for nearly all of humanity
[and we] cannot afford to settle for incremental changes
. . . .The radical upending of the social order is now hard
headed realism, the only path forward." The struggle
for revolutionary socialism is no longer a utopian longing.
It is an urgent necessity.
By
Henry Giroux:
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
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