The censorship industrial complex combines psychological manipulation with highly sophisticated tools from computer science, including artificial intelligence. Continue reading A Journal of the Plague Year 2023: The censorship industrial complex
The great exhibition: in our time (a documentary) Continue reading The great exhibition: in our time
Fredric Jameson is a literary critic and Marxist political theorist. Stanley Aronowitz is a sociologist, activist, cultural critic, and an advocate for organized labor. Continue reading An American utopia: Fredric Jameson in conversation with Stanley Aronowitz
by Henry A. Giroux Seventy years after the horror of Hiroshima, intellectuals negotiate a vastly changed cultural, political and moral geography. Pondering what Hiroshima means for American history and consciousness proves as fraught an intellectual exercise as taking up this … Continue reading Remembering Hiroshima in an Age of Neoliberal Barbarism
by Henry A. Giroux In the aftermath of the reign of Nazi terror in the 1940s, the philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote: National Socialism lives on, and even today we still do not know whether it is merely the ghost of what was so monstrous that it lingers on after its own death, or whether it has not yet died at all, whether the willingness to commit the unspeakable survives in people as well as in the conditions that enclose them.[1] Adorno’s words are as relevant today as they were when he first wrote them. The threat of authoritarianism to citizen-based … Continue reading The ghost of Authoritarianism in the Age of the Shutdown
by Henry A. Giroux A tragedy of errors: nobody knows any more who is who. The smoke of the explosions forms part of the much larger curtain of smoke that prevents all of us from seeing clearly. From revenge to revenge, terrorism obliges us to walk to our graves. I saw a photo, recently published, of graffiti on a wall in NYC: ‘An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind’. — Eduardo Galeano[1] The American public rightfully expressed a collective sigh of relief and a demonstration of prodigious gratitude towards law enforcement authorities when the unprecedented manhunt for … Continue reading Lockdown, USA: The Boston marathon manhunt
by Diana Johnstone Opposing genocide has become a sort of cottage industry in the United States. Everywhere, “genocide studies” are cropping up in universities. Five years ago, an unlikely “Genocide Prevention Task Force” was set up headed by former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and former defense secretary William Cohen, both veterans of the Clinton administration. The Bible of the campaign is Samantha Power’s book, “A Problem from Hell”. Ms. Power’s thesis is that the U.S. Government, while well-intentioned, like all of us, is too slow to intervene to “stop genocide”. It is a suggestion that the U.S. government embraces, even to taking … Continue reading Taking notes 17: The good intentions that pave the road to war
by Henry A. Giroux You write in order to change the world knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that [writing] is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter even by a millimeter the way people look at reality, then you can change it. – James Baldwin The Violence of Neoliberalism We live in a time of deep foreboding, one that haunts any discourse about justice, democracy, and the future. Not only have the points of reference that provided a sense of certainty and collective hope … Continue reading The politics of disimagination and the pathologies of power
Philosophers for Change 