Henry Giroux on a Politics of Cruelty Without Euphemisms
Thursday, July 27, 2017 By Mickey Huff, Truthout | Interview- font size
Henry A. Giroux. (Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)In this wide-ranging interview with Mickey Huff, head of Project Censored, Henry Giroux addresses a number of issues that constitute various elements of US authoritarianism. He brings together a number of issues affected by the concentration of power and wealth, including the emergence of a culture of cruelty, hardness, corruption, militarism, racism and violence that has reached down into everyday life while compromising a number of public institutions, including higher education, the criminal legal system and health care.
Giroux is particularly interested in rethinking the end of the ideology debate by arguing that neoliberal politics is no longer interested in camouflaging its market-driven, death-dealing policies and is quite unapologetic about the misery and suffering it is imposing on the American people under the project of making the wealthy elite even richer.
The financial elites and big corporations in the United States have so much power and wealth, coupled with an unbridled degree of arrogance, that they no longer rely heavily on ideology to justify capitalism's multiple forms of lawlessness and oppression. As neoliberalism morphs into a US version of authoritarianism, civil society is turned into a site of economic nationalism and a spectacle of disparagement and humiliation. The state violence and acts of domestic terrorism that are legitimated and sanctioned in the Trump administration are obscured through a politics of diversion, but their effects are producing widespread suffering and will increasingly make visible the violence of an authoritarian regime.
The United States has entered a period of politics without euphemisms, a no-holds-barred frontal assault on democratic values, institutions and social relations, wrapped up in the discourse of greed and practices characteristic of an authoritarian mode of governance.
Giroux ends by talking about the need for a comprehensive politics that rejects the two-party system and relies upon young people and others in order to rewrite the script of democracy through sustainable social movement dedicated to democratic socialism.
MICKEY HUFF
Mickey Huff is the current director of Project Censored, founded in 1976, and president of the Media Freedom Foundation. To date, he has edited or coedited nine volumes of Censored (published by Seven Stories Press in New York) and contributed numerous chapters to these works dating back to 2008. He is currently professor of social science and history at Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he is cochair of the history department; and a lecturer in the communications department at California State University, East Bay. Huff is cohost with former Project Censored director Peter Phillips of The Project Censored Show, the weekly syndicated public affairs program that began in 2010, which originates from the historic studios of KPFA Pacifica Radio in Berkeley CA, and airs on 40 stations around the country from Maui to New York.
RELATED STORIES
Henry A. Giroux on Trump's Cabinet, the Church of Neoliberal Evangelicals
By Kim Brown, Henry A. Giroux, The Real News Network and Truthout | Video Interview
Henry A. Giroux on Militant Hope and Radical Action in a Time of Democratic Collapse
By Chuck Mertz, This Is Hell | Audio Segment
Henry A. Giroux | Thinking Dangerously: The Role of Higher Education in Authoritarian Times
By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten