America's addiction to terrorism PDF
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America’s Addiction to Terrorism America’s Addiction to Terrorism HENRY A. GIROUX Copyright © 2016 by Monthly Review Press All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from publisher— ISBN 978-1-58367-570-0 paper IBSN 978-1-58367-571-7 cloth Monthly Review Press 146 West 29th Street, Suite 6W New York, New York 10001 monthlyreview.org Typeset in Dante Monotype 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Acknowledgments Foreword by Michael D. Yates Introduction: The Neoliberal Reign of Terror 1. America’s Addiction to Torture 2. Terrorizing the Self: Selfie Culture in the Age of Corporate and State Surveillance 3. Death-Dealing Politics in the Age of Extreme Violence 4. Class Warfare and the Advance of Austerity Policies under the New Authoritarianism 5. Racism, Violence, and Militarized Terror in the Age of Disposability 6. The Fire This Time: Black Youth and the Spectacle of Post-Racial Violence 7. Higher Education Under Siege and the Promise of Insurgent Public Memory 8. Academic Terrorism, Exile, and the Possibility of Classroom Grace 9. Barbarians at the Gates: Authoritarianism and the Assault of Public Education 10. Hollywood Heroism in the Age of Empire: From Citizenfour and Selma to American Sniper 11. Hiroshima, Intellectuals, and the Crisis of Terrorism 12. Flipping the Script: Rethinking Working-Class Resistance in the Age of Terrorism Notes Index To Olivia Ward: A brilliant and courageous writer and a dear friend. Acknowledgments Susan Searls Giroux cannot be thanked enough for the many conversations we have had over many of the ideas presented in this book. She is my intellectual muse and treasured companion and partner. I am indebted to Brad Evans and David Clark for intellectual nourishment and their generous and informative comments. My assistant, Maya Sabados, has been her usual self in reading every word of this book and offering indispensable editorial advice. Victoria Harper, Leslie Thatcher, and Maya Schenwar, my editors at Truthout, are my literary anchors, always willing to provide support and editorial advice. I am enormously grateful to Michael Yates who urged me to write this book and offered invaluable advice along the way. Highly modified versions of some of these articles have been published in, Thesis 11, Third Text, Truthout, CounterPunch, Truthdig, and Arena Magazine. Foreword HENRY GIROUX IS A PHENOMENON. He has written more than sixty books, authored hundreds of essays, won numerous awards, and been an outstanding teacher for nearly forty years. His influence on the field of critical pedagogy is without parallel, and he has made significant contributions to many other areas as well, including both cultural and media studies. What distinguishes Giroux’s writing is a combination of lucid analysis and incisive and justifiably harsh criticism of the deterioration of the human condition under the onslaught of a savage modern-day capitalism. However, his examination of this savagery does not stop with a description of the vicious attacks on working people by corporations and their allies in government. Nor is it content to enumerate the economic, political, and social consequences of these assaults, such as the rise in poverty, stagnating wages, unconscionably high unemployment, deteriorating health, the astonishing increase in the prison population, and a general increase in material insecurity, to name a few. Instead, he goes beyond these to interrogate the more subtle but no less devastating effects of neoliberal capitalism, and by implication capitalism itself, on our psyches and on our capacity to resist our growing immiseration. In this book, he uses his consummate skills to examine what he terms “America’s addiction to terrorism.” As he makes clear in these essays, especially those on race (see chapters 5 and 6, “Racism, Violence, and Militarized Terror in the Age of Disposability” and “The Fire This Time: Black Youth and the Spectacle of Post-Racial Violence”), terrorism is as American as apple pie. This nation was founded upon terrorism, namely that of slavery, whose unspeakable degradations hardly ended with formal emancipation. Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, thousands of lynchings, mass imprisonment, and an orgy of police torture and murder have tormented the lives of black men and women right up to the present day. Black men, women, and children became the nation’s torture template, and what has happened to them set the stage for that directed at workers who dared defy their employers and to the peoples of the world as the United States rained misery down on its many enemies, reaching its apogee but by no means its end with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (see the chapter titled “Hiroshima, Intellectuals, and the Crisis of Terrorism”). Giroux excoriates all of this terror, as well its contemporary raw, naked, and ever-more
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