Wherever
Christians have passed, conquering and discovering, it seems as though a fire
has gone, consuming everything.
Pedro de Cieza de Leon. Spaanse conquistador
en chroniqueur. Circa 1550
A doctrine
of life. A new great morality. A morality of actual living, not of salvation.
Europe has never got beyond the morality of salvation. America to this day is
deathly sick with saviourism.
D.H. Lawrence. Studies in Classic American
Literature. 1923
The white
man knows how to make everything, but he does not know how to distribute it…
The love of possession is a disease with them. They take tithes from the poor
and weak to support the rich whom rule. They claim this mother of ours, the
earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away.
Opperhoofd Sitting Bull. Hunkpapa Sioux. 1880
From capitalism’s point of
view, communal cultures that do not separate human beings from one another or
from nature are enemy cultures.
Eduardo Galeano. 1991.
The white
man does not understand America. He is too far removed from its formative
processes. The roots of the tree of his life have not yet grasped the rock and
the soil. The white man is still troubled by primitive fears; he still has in
his consciousness the perils of this frontier continent, some of it not yet
having yielded to his questing footsteps and inquiring eyes… The man from
Europe is still a foreigner and an alien. And he still hates the man who
questioned his path across the continent… Men must be born and reborn to
belong. Their bodies must be formed of the dust of their forefathers bones.
Luther Standing Bear. Lakota Sioux. Land of
the Spotted Eagle. 1933
The new nations of America will never
take root in its soil until they confront what is hidden by their myths and
make reparation to the survivors of the holocaust that began five centuries
ago… The invaders can stop ‘conquering and discovering.’ And if they begin to treat America as a
home for the first nations as well as for themselves – they may, unlike
Christopher Columbus, discover where they are.
Ronald Wright. Stolen Continents.
Conquest and Resistance in the America’s. 1992
History,
history! We fools, what do we know or care? History begins for us with murder
and enslavement, not with discovery… Fierce and implacable we kill them but
their souls dominate us.
William
Carlos Williams. In the American Grain. 1925
De
Amerikaanse cultuurcriticus, professor Henry A. Giroux, auteur van meer dan 50
boeken over Amerikaanse cultuur:
Violence
is Deeply Rooted in American Culture
After
every national tragedy involving guns, the American public is being inundated
with figures about gun violence, ranging from the fact that more than 84 people
are killed daily with guns, to the shocking statistic that there are more than
31,000 gun-related deaths annually. In 2010, for example, there were 8,775
murders by firearms in the U.S., while in Britain there were only 638.
Moreover, there are 300 million firearms in a country of just over 311 million
and just over 47 percent of Americans own guns. Most disturbingly, as pointed
out by the Children’s Defense fund, is the fact that in 2010, ‘2694 children and teens were killed
by gunfire [and] since 1979 …a shocking 119,079 children and teens have been
killed by gun violence. That is more child and youth deaths in America than
American battle deaths in World War I (53,402) or in Vietnam (47,434) or in the
Korean War (33,739) or in the Iraq War (3,517).’ These are startling figures, but they do not tell us enough about the
cult and spectacle of violence in American society. Nor do they make visible
the myriad of forces that has produced a country drenched in bloodshed and
violence.
There is
little doubt that the role of the National Rifle Association is instrumental in
the violence haunting American culture, or that gun control is important, but
it is only one factor in the culture of symbolic and institutional violence that
has such a powerful grip on the everyday cultural apparatuses and workings of
American society. The issue of violence in America goes far beyond the issue of
gun control. When gun control is the focus — instead of a broader consideration
of violence — it can actually serve to deflect the most important questions
that need to be raised. The grave reality is that violence saturates almost
every aspect of North American culture. Domestically, violence weaves through
the cultural and social landscape like a highly charged forest fire burning
everything in its path. Popular culture, extending from Hollywood films and
sports thuggery, to video games, embraces the spectacle of violence as the
primary medium of entertainment. The real issue here is the existence of a
pedagogy of violence that actually makes the power of deadly violence
attractive. Representations of violence dominate the media and often
parade before viewers less as an object of critique than as a for-profit
spectacle, just as the language of violence and punishment now shapes the U.S.
culture — with various registers of violence now informing school
zero-tolerance policies, a bulging prison-industrial complex, and the growing
militarization of everyday life. There is also the fact that as neoliberalism
and its culture of cruelty weaves its way through the culture it makes the work
place, schools, and other public spheres sites of rage, anger, humiliation, and
misery, creating the foundation for blind rebellion against what might be
termed intolerable conditions. Accepting the logic of radical individual
responsibility, too many Americans blame themselves for being unemployed,
homeless, and isolated and end up perceiving their misery as an individual
failing and hence are vulnerable to forms of existential depression and
collective rage. We have seen such violence among students reacting to
bullying and among postal workers responding to intolerable work conditions.
There is no one cause of violence, but a series of a number of causes that
range from the war on drugs and the militarization of police departments to
mass incarcerations in prisons to the return from brutal wars of many trained
killers suffering with PTSD. All of these factors combine in an explosive mix
to create an dangerous culture of violence and cruelty and as Jeff Sparrow
points out a ‘willingness
of ordinary people to commit unthinkable atrocities.’
C. J. Polychroniou: Is this what you mean when you refer
in your writings to a break down between the realm of war and civil life?
Exactly. The
metaphysics of war and associated violence creep into everyday life in the
United States, a process which has intensified since 9/11. War and militarism
not only eat up resources and revenue, it also determines the more general
meanings that shape the values of social relations of everyday life and is
constitutive of both social power and culture itself. Under
neoliberalism, markets are now fused with the warlike logic of militarization
as ways of thinking, subject positions, and the ordering of social relations
are fused, as the philosopher David Theo Goldberg points out, with ‘military truth, structure, and
temporality.’
Of course, what I mean by
this is that is the United States is not only obsessed with military values
shaping foreign policy, but war and militarism have become a mediating force
that now seep into almost every aspect of daily life. War now makes men,
and becomes the most important logic mediating not simply contemporary views of
masculinity but social relations in general. We see war and its dynamics of
cruelty and punishment seeping into a whole range of institutions. For
instance, we see schools and social services modeled increasingly after
prisons. We see police forces being paramilitarized. We see popular culture endlessly
celebrating the spectacle of violence. What is startling is that the logic of
war and violence have become addictive, a socially constructed need that we
simply cannot get away from. Violence has become a defining organizing
principle of society that has become one of the few shared mediating forces
that now holds everyday life together. What is crucial to acknowledge here is
that ‘the fields of politics and
violence—a violence that seems to lack rational organization, not excepting
self-destruction—are no longer separated. They have progressively permeated one
another.’
State violence is now amplified in the rise of the punishing state which works to support corporate interests and suppress all forms of dissent aimed at making corporate power accountable. Violence as a mode of discipline is now enacted in spheres that have traditionally been created to counter the symbolic and institutional violence perpetuated by forms of state and corporate sovereignty. Airports, schools, public services, and a host of other public spheres are now defined through a militarized language of discipline, regulation, control, and order. Human behavior is now reduced to the instrumental logic of cost-benefit analyses, market shares, and profit ratings. Human relations and behaviors are not simply militarized, viewed as targets, but also reified and dehumanized making it easier to legitimate a culture of cruelty and politics of disposability that are central organizing principles of casino capitalism.
C. J. Polychroniou: Where does all this come from?
Part of it comes from the
fact that all of a sudden we live in a society marked by what some have called
“a failed sociality.” We have no language for democracy. We have no language
for compassion. Neoliberalism collapses public issues into private troubles and
in doing so not only destroys democratic values and forms of solidarity, but
also extends a continuity of cruelty, misery, and exploitation into every
sphere of everyday life–from schools and the work place to the workings of a
state that now thrives on punishing rather than nourishing the welfare state.
We view any form of dependency, any form of regard for the other as humiliating
and worthy of scorn. We live in a neoliberal market-driven culture that
basically celebrates an unchecked notion of self-interest and narcissism. This
is a culture that has gone over the top in its worship of celebrity culture and
violence. It views the news as a video game, a source of entertainment where a
story gains prominence by virtue of the notion that if it bleeds it leads. So
it’s really not surprising in the lack of any substantive existence of a
formative culture that would value a sense of compassion and regard for the
other that we end up in a moral vacuum in which violence finds suitable
legitimation. And of course, formal education has been turned into a quest for
private satisfactions and is no longer viewed as a public good, thus cutting
itself off from teaching students about public values, the public good and
engaged notions of critical citizenship.
What has emerged in the
United States is a civil and political order structured around the
criminalization of social problems and everyday life. This
governing-through-crime model produces a highly authoritarian and mechanistic
approach to addressing social problems that often focuses on the poor and
minorities, promotes highly repressive policies, and places undue emphasis on
personal security, rather than considering the larger complex of social and
structural forces that fuels violence in the first place.
C. J. Polychroniou: In your writings, you also talk of
the “neoliberal terror” and the politics of disposability that has taken hold
over American society, suggesting that there is a new form of class warfare
directed against the poor and the working class. Would you elaborate a bit on
this?
In the US there is an
institutionalized regime of neoliberal violence directed against low income
people, poor minorities, immigrants, the disabled, and others now considered
disposable under a ruthless and savage fanatical capitalism that luxuriates in
the poisonous dream worlds of commodification, deregulation, consumption, and
privatization. Within this regime of neoliberal violence, the politics of
disposability is shored up by the assumption that some lives and social
relationships are not worthy of a meaningful social existence, empathy and
social protections. For instance, those considered ‘other’ because of their
lack of capital, consuming power, or alleged refusal to accept the unethical
grammar of an Atlas Shrugged winner-take-all ethos are now relegated to zones
of abandonment and terminal exclusion. Lacking social protections, such
populations increasingly are addressed within the growing reach of the
punishing state, as a source of entertainment, or are relegated to what the
French philosopher Etienne Balibar calls the ‘death zones of humanity.’
In a culture defined by
excessive inequality, suffering, and cruelty, the protective covering of the
state, along with the public values and the formative culture necessary for a
democracy is corrupted, increasingly dismantled, and held in contempt. And the
disposable are not merely those populations caught in extreme poverty.
Increasingly, they are individuals and groups now ravaged by bad mortgages,
poor credit and huge debt. They are the growing army of the unemployed forced
to abandon their houses, credit cards and ability to consume -- a liability
that pushes them to the margins of a market society. These are the groups whose
homes will not be covered by insurance, who have no place to live, no resources
to fall back on, no way to imagine that the problems they will be facing are
not just personal, but deeply structural, built into a system that views the
social contract and the welfare state as a lethal disease.
In this economic Darwinist
measure of value, those marginalized by race and class, who might detract from,
rather than enlarge another's wealth are not only demonized, but are also
viewed as problematic in that they become burdens to be disposed of, rather
than a valuable and treasured human resource in which to invest. The discourse
of disposability is not limited to right-wing politicians, but it is also built
into the vocabulary of neoliberal governmental policy. Market societies are
ruled by a predatory form of economic Darwinism in which greed and avarice are
legitimated through a war-against-all, survival-of-the-fittest mentality that
embraces a near sociopathic lack of interest in others and provides few social
protections against individual and collective misfortune while at the same time
dismissing the value of social provisions. As the sociologist Elliott
Currie has pointed out, neoliberal societies have become criminogenic in that
they destroy peoples’ livelihoods, withdraw public supports, create massive
extremes of economic inequality, erode social bonds while creating debilitating
forms of atomization, promote materialistic values that produce a culture
of callousness, corrupt the political process, and market a form of normalized
brutality evident in the massive rise of corporate crime and a culture of
corruption.Neoliberalism represents a full-fledged assault on democratic values, relations, and public spheres and does so by universalizing its own ideology, policies, and modes of governance. Its logic of disposability reduces citizenship to the logic of consumerism, reinforces the dominance of public life by giant corporations, and produces what the anthropologist Joao Biel calls a ‘machinery of social death.’ In fact, the ‘machinery of social death,’ is fed by corporate investments in the organized production of violence for profit and I am not just talking about industries that make big profits as part of the military-industrial complex. As New York Times journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin states, what has been overlooked in the recent debate about gun worship in the United States is that some of the biggest gun makers are ‘owned by private equity funds run by Wall Street titan.’ For instance, Cerberus Capital Management, Sciens Capital Management, and MidOcean Partners make big profits selling everything from Ak-47s to military-grade night-vision goggles. The technology of death is a big profit maker for Wall Street and makes clear that neoliberalism is actively engaged in the production of a dystopian society in which people, resources, and goods are now considered throwaways, just as moral responsibility is detached from actions, and politics is removed from the promise of a substantive democracy.
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