Noam Chomsky is an activist and an emeritus professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Continue reading Noam Chomsky: The history and hypocrisy of the war on terror
by Henry A. Giroux With the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture, it becomes clear that in the aftermath of the loathsome terrorist attack of 9/11, the United States entered into a new and barbarous stage in … Continue reading Moral paralysis: torture and the violence of organized forgetting
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 The spectacle of violence and terrorism looms large in the post 9/11 world. As the recent beheading of James Foley by Islamic extremists makes clear, mass-mediated terrorism is now joined with the spectacle of violence, torture, … Continue reading Taking notes 39: Beyond the Spectacle of Neoliberal Misery and Violence in the Age of Terrorism
by Henry A. Giroux The recent killing and then demonization of an unarmed 18-year-old African-American youth, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri by a white police officer has made visible how a kind of military metaphysics now dominates American life. The … Continue reading Taking notes 38: The Militarization of Racism and Neoliberal Violence
by Henry A. Giroux Under the regime of neoliberalism, especially in the United States, war has become an extension of politics as almost all aspects of society have been transformed into a combat zone. Americans now live in a society in which almost everyone is spied on, considered a potential terrorist, and subject to a mode of state and corporate lawlessness in which the arrogance of power knows no limits. The state of exception has become normalized. Moreover, as society becomes increasingly militarized and political concessions become relics of a long-abandoned welfare state hollowed out to serve the interest of … Continue reading Neoliberalism and the machinery of disposability
by Henry A. Giroux Edward Snowden, Russ Tice, Thomas Drake, Jeremy Scahill, and Julian Assange, among others, have recently made clear what it means to embody respect for a public intellectual debate, moral witnessing and intellectual culture. They are not just whistle-blowers or disgruntled ex-employers but individuals who value ideas, think otherwise in order to act otherwise, and use the resources available to them to address important social issues with what might be called a fearsome sense of social responsibility and civic courage. Their anger is not treasonous or self-serving as some critics argue, it is the indispensable sensibility and … Continue reading Intellectuals as subjects and objects of violence
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 Henry A. Giroux The winners in the disposable society circulate close to the top of the power pyramid… Those who can’t afford to be on the move stand little chance…Market freedom means few people have a hold on the present and that everyone is expendable. — Zygmunt Bauman In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, shocking images of dead bodies floating in the flood waters of New Orleans appeared on national TV against a sound track of desperate cries for help by thousands of poor, black, brown, elderly and sick people. These disturbing pictures revealed a vulnerable and destitute segment … Continue reading Neoliberal terror and the age of disposability
Philosophers for Change 