Henry Giroux Quotes About Violence

Quotes about: Violence

Abuse Accountability Age Army Assumption Authority Capitalism

Remember what Hannah Arendt said when she was talking about fascism and totalitarianism. She said thoughtlessness is the essence of totalitarianism. So all of a sudden emotion becomes more important than reason. Ignorance becomes more important than justice. Injustice is looked over as simply something that happens on television. The spectacle of violence takes over everything.

Henry Giroux

Ignorance, Justice, Important

Source: www.truth-out.org
In the United States the state monopoly on the use of violence has intensified since the 1980s, and in the process, has been increasingly directed against young people, low-income whites, poor minorities, immigrants, and women.

Henry Giroux

People, Low Income, United States

Source: www.truth-out.org
State violence operating under the guise of personal safety and security, while parading as a bulwark of democracy, actually does the opposite and cancels out democracy as the incommensurable sharing of existence that makes the political possible.

Henry Giroux

Opposites, Safety, Political

Source: www.truth-out.org
At the start of the second decade of the 21st century, young people all over the world are demonstrating against a variety of issues ranging from economic injustice and massive inequality to drastic cuts in education and public services. These demonstrations have and currently are being met with state-sanctioned violence and an almost pathological refusal to hear their demands.

Henry Giroux

Cutting, Issues, People

Source: www.truth-out.org
There is the emergence of a militarized society that now organizes itself for the production of violence. A society in which the range of acceptable opinion inevitably shrinks.

Henry Giroux

Violence, Opinion, Range

Source: www.truth-out.org
A symptomatic example of the way in which violence has saturated everyday life can be seen in the increased acceptance of criminalizing the behavior of young people in public schools. Behaviors that were normally handled by teachers, guidance counselors and school administrators are now dealt with by the police and the criminal justice system.

Henry Giroux

Teacher, School, Acceptance

Source: www.truth-out.org
There is a need for educators, young people, artists and other cultural workers to develop an educative politics in which people can address the historical, structural and ideological conditions at the core of the violence being waged by the corporate and repressive state and to make clear that government under the dictatorship of market sovereignty and power is no longer responsive to the most basic needs of young people - or most people for that matter.

Henry Giroux

Artist, Government, People

Source: www.truth-out.org
Violence now becomes the only tool by which we can actually mediate social problems that should be dealt with in very different ways.

Henry Giroux

Different, Violence, Problem

Source: www.truth-out.org
The propensity to avoid moral considerations was producing not simply a politically illiterate and authoritarian society, but one that was increasingly saturated in violence and a culture of cruelty. Needless to say, all of these forces intensified the increasing militarization and corporatization of higher education, along with the privatizing of everyday life.

Henry Giroux

Everyday, Violence, Culture

"Higher Education Under Attack: An Interview With Henry A. Giroux". Interview with C. Cryn Johannsen, www.truth-out.org. April 22, 2011.
The prevailing move in American society to a permanent war status does more than promote a set of unifying symbols that embrace a survival of the fittest ethic, promoting conformity over dissent, the strong over the weak, and fear over responsibility, it also gives rise to what David Graeber has called a "language of command" in which violence becomes the most important element of power and mediating force in shaping social relationships.

Henry Giroux

Strong, War, Moving

Source: www.truth-out.org
Students being miseducated, criminalized and arrested through a form of penal pedagogy in prison-type schools provide a grim reminder of the degree to which the ethos of containment and punishment now creeps into spheres of everyday life that were largely immune in the past from this type of state violence. This is not merely barbarism parading as reform - it is also a blatant indicator of the degree to which sadism and the infatuation with violence have become normalized in a society that seems to take delight in dehumanizing itself.

Henry Giroux

School, Past, Ethos

Source: www.truth-out.org
Unfortunately, we live at a moment in which ignorance appears to be one of the defining features of American political and cultural life. Ignorance has become a form of weaponized refusal to acknowledge the violence of the past, and revels in a culture of media spectacles in which public concerns are translated into private obsessions, consumerism and fatuous entertainment.

Henry Giroux

Ignorance, Past, Political

Source: www.counterpunch.org
Certainly I think the state is more than willing to not only attempt to change the consciousness of people, but to employ violence in ways that make people quite fearful.

Henry Giroux

Thinking, People, Way

Source: www.truth-out.org
As the welfare state is hollowed out, a culture of compassion is replaced by a culture of violence, cruelty and disposability.

Henry Giroux

Compassion, Culture, Violence

Source: www.truth-out.org
As a mode of public pedagogy, a state of permanent war needs willing subjects to abide by its values, ideology, and narratives of fear and violence. Such legitimation is largely provided through a market-driven culture addicted to the production of consumerism, militarism and organized violence, largely circulated through various registers of popular culture that extend from high fashion and Hollywood movies to the creation of violent video games and music concerts sponsored by the Pentagon.

Henry Giroux

Fashion, War, Games

Source: www.truth-out.org
Widespread violence now functions as part of an anti-immune system that turns the economy of genuine pleasure into a mode of sadism that creates the foundation for sapping democracy of any political substance and moral vitality. The predominance of the disimagination machine in American society, along with its machinery of social death and historical amnesia, seeps into in all aspects of life, suggesting that young people and others marginalized by class, race and ethnicity have been abandoned.

Henry Giroux

Race, Ethnicity, Class

Source: www.truth-out.org
Once ignorance is weaponized, violence seems to be a tragic inevitability.

Henry Giroux

Ignorance, Violence, Tragic

Source: www.counterpunch.org
I think, at some level, we see young people all over the country mobilizing around different issues, in which they're doing something that I haven't seen for a long time. And that is, they're linking issues together. You can't talk about police violence without talking about the militarization of society in general. You can't talk about the assault on public education unless you talk about the way in which capitalism defunds all public goods. You can't talk about the prison system without talking about widespread racism. You can't do that. They're making those connections.

Henry Giroux

Country, Thinking, Long

Source: www.truth-out.org
I also think that one of the things we often fail to realize is that that kind of violence is now legitimated in multiple public spheres.

Henry Giroux

Thinking, Violence, Spheres

Source: www.truth-out.org
Within the existing neoliberal historical conjuncture, there is a merging of violence and governance and the systemic disinvestment in and breakdown of institutions and public spheres that have provided the minimal conditions for democracy.

Henry Giroux

Historical, Democracy, Violence

Source: www.truth-out.org
There is a need for subjects who find intense pleasure in commodification of violence and a culture of cruelty.

Henry Giroux

Needs, Culture, Violence

Source: www.truth-out.org
Against the tyranny of forgetting, educators, young people, social activists, public intellectuals, workers and others can work to make visible and oppose the long legacy and current reality of state violence and the rise of the punishing state. Such a struggle suggests not only reclaiming, for instance, education as a public good but also reforming the criminal justice system and removing the police from schools.

Henry Giroux

Struggle, School, Reality

Source: www.truth-out.org
We need to remember that education can be both a basis for critical thought and a site for repression, which destroys thinking and leads to violence.

Henry Giroux

Thinking, Violence, Remember

Source: www.counterpunch.org
Under the interlocking regimes of neoliberal power, violence appears so arbitrary and thoughtless that it lacks the need for any justification, let alone claims to justice and accountability. It is truly as limitless as it appears banal.

Henry Giroux

Justice, Accountability, Violence

Source: www.counterpunch.org
We no longer have the public spheres available to be able to contest that violence. We don't see it in the mainstream media, we no longer see it in the schools. I mean, this endless criminalization, militarization, of every form of behavior, I mean, strikes me as one of the most dangerous and one of the most ever-growing threats to the United States, of which that speech exemplifies perfectly, and which [Donald] Trump exemplifies with the endless call for law and order.

Henry Giroux

School, Mean, Media

Source: www.truth-out.org

You May Also Like:

Antonio Gramsci

Henry Giroux

Follow

Born: September 18, 1943
Cite this Page: Citation

Popular Topics