No country for children: The not-so-hidden horrors of child sexual abuse in Pakistan

Are religious institutions shielding predators? 

Delve into the harrowing truth of systemic child abuse in Pakistan, where clerical influence and misguided donor efforts perpetuate a cycle of silence and impunity.

Afiya S. Zia 

Published April 24, 2024

Recent reports of sexual molestation of children by clerics and incriminating videos of corporal punishment of madrassa students are neither new discoveries, nor particular to Pakistan.

Globally, totalitarian institutions — seminaries, the Vatican, and even lay establishments like boarding schools, military barracks, orphanages, and shelters — have long records of systemic abuse. However, the power of clerical lobbies in Pakistan often secures impunity for religious institutions and only the high risks taken by whistleblowers, fearless activists, and survivors result in any kind of justice.

Unfortunately, over the past 20 years, the more temporal approaches to social development in Pakistan have been displaced by a generation convinced that sacralising development is appropriate for Muslim sensibilities. This has complicated pre-existing challenges in Pakistan’s colonial and Islamic hybrid legal regime, deepened the shame and stigma associated with concepts of gender and sex, and privileged clerical authority over human rights advocacy.

Vocational sex abuse

According to data gathered by Sahil, an NGO working on cases of child sexual abuse, the overwhelming majority of abusers are acquaintances or neighbours in communities or family members. At the same time, the data also shows that institutionally, the highest number of complaints emerge against religious teachers or clerics — more so than police, school-teachers, or nuclear family members.

In 2020, the Associated Press documented several cases of sexual abuse in madrassas, including the case of 8-year-old Yaous in Mansehra, where despite the arrest of the offender, Qari Shamsuddin, fellow clerics and worshippers at the mosque disputed the charges, terming him innocent and a ‘victim of anti-Islamic elements in the country’. The cleric was later sentenced to 16.5 years imprisonment.

Primary data remains limited and organisations rely on media reports and police complaints but the trend over the past 20 years shows the gender divide of abused girls in madrassas is slightly higher than that of boys (‘Cruel Numbers’). The recent case of Qari Abubakar Muaviyah’s alleged rape of a 12-year-old boy in Shahdara initially looked like a lost cause due to the usual clerical pressure for the survivor to resile.

Under the amended anti-rape law, the police and prosecutors are duty bound to continue investigation and judicial hearing, even if the survivor resiles, yet they prefer compromises. The difficulty of obtaining DNA forensics is another escape route in many cases. In the end, it was only social media pressure over the Muaviyah case that resulted in a political and legal response against powerful religious lobbies.

Over the years, there have also been several reports of gang rapes in such seminaries. In very rare cases do children fight their rapists off and where parents are resilient in their pursuit for justice.

The madrassa reform debacle

Historically, Pakistani madrassas have been subject to cycles of reorganisation and reform but only over curricula or funding and not institutional accountability.

In 2003, at the peak of the ‘war on terror’, a new form of war anthropology and research methods emerged, relying on fixers, handlers, translators, NGO research and No Objection Certificates awarded by the military authorities at their discretion. This new paradigm produced a body of newly minted ‘experts’ on Islam, terrorism, jihad, security and conflict studies and now, Islam and development, as funded by British and American governments under the pretext of Muslim exceptionalism (especially, Muslim women and the poor).

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) implemented a five-year, $100 million bilateral agreement in 2002. Another multi-million pound religions and research project was spearheaded by DFID in 2008, paving the way for faith-based approaches to social change in Pakistan. With the help of overseas Pakistani consultants, they found that religion can be valuable in terms of providing organisational resources for social movements, with religious leaders and Muslim NGOs as ‘partners’.

Policy briefs from such projects stressed on the need to review and include religion into the mainstream of development research and policy itself, including support to madrassas and to encourage women’s religious leadership as alternatives to Western feminism.

At the time, Gen Musharraf’s US-compliant government was facing domestic resistance for registering madrassas as suspected support bases and havens for terrorists. The top-down consultant policy briefs insisted on the kind of reform that was acceptable to the undefined “Ulema” and ignored the experiences of civil society on the subject by dismissing any critique of faith-based development by feminists as ‘western and liberal-secular orientalism’.

The experts producing such research rode the crest of Gen Musharaff’s duplicitous project of enlightened moderation and recommended the inclusion of madrassas and clerical leaders into the social development sector. Even those claiming radical credentials, and who were critical of the binaries of western secular departure from religious-based education, invested hope in the role of madrassas as some decolonising, non-Western social safety nets for children from impoverished backgrounds and in women’s empowerment through mosque and madrassa piety.

These researchers and studies completely ignored — as some orientalist presumption — the history of corporal punishment and child sexual abuse at mosques and madrassas that human rights activists had been documenting for at least a decade. This was a revealing and damaging missed opportunity.

This ‘partnership’ between donors and clerics has empowered the latter as community gate-keepers (especially, in projects related to education, vaccination, child protection committees and labour). Recent cases have shown, however, that some of these clerics, who are now power brokers, may pressurise victims to resile charges of sex abuse in communities and madrassas, and who facilitate compromise and settling cases outside of courts, especially when it involves fellow clerics.

Law as protection, not a right

Research studies, academic theses and donor reports continue to recommend that Pakistan’s government should make genuine efforts to understand how the madrassa leadership perceives reform and modernisation, and for involvement in social development projects without any caution for regulation of widespread allegations of physical or sexual abuses.

Every other sector of reform is subjected to correction as a constitutional and moral imperative (especially, the ‘corrupt’ bureaucracy and judiciary) but the one sector where appeasement by government and donors remains consistent is religion and its institutional influence. This extends and sustains moral and legal impunity to the priestly classes and prevents rights-based progress.

In the first instance, legal reform has managed to chip at some religious exemption by way of releasing rape and honour crimes from the Qisas and Diyat loophole. It took 30 years of consistent advocacy from women’s rights activists and not the route of some decolonial thesis, nor due to reinterpretive exegesis. The amendments to many discriminatory laws have been rationalised by liberal appeal and universalising influences within the Constitution and while some opportunist clerics and politicians have been ‘encouraged’ to curb their opposition, this does not count as ‘success’ of ecclesiastical partnerships.

Secondly, many gender and religious biases are underwritten in family laws which prevent consensus or consistency on matters of sexual maturity and underage marriage. Over 18 per cent of girls and 4 pc of boys in Pakistan are married before the age of 18 and prevention is complicated by our dual legal regime and by societal trends of forced conversions of girls from religious minorities. If marriage remains an unequal legal arrangement for all women, and an economic safety net for the poor and a social status for the rich, girls will remain devalued for just their labour and reproductive worth and their virginities and sexual purity will serve as premiums.

Third, overwhelmingly, cases of any but especially child sexual abuse continue to be subject to attrition where survivors or victims’ families resile under counsel and social pressure from community, police or clerical leaders. As human rights lawyers point out, as long as the judicial process privileges ocular evidence over corroborative forms and courts are unwilling to try cases despite resiling, sex crimes will not be subject to justice.

Mythos over logos

Beyond legal recourse, social protection for Pakistani children remains precarious due to misguided beliefs and flawed remedies.

The first myth that family, marriage, and community are safe havens encourage private settlements in sex abuse cases and perpetuate lifelong generational trauma. The second damaging myth is that biology is the driver of sexual violence instead of unequal power relations, especially between genders.

Feminists have countered both these fallacies. They refute the notion that sex abuse is a private matter by insisting that the personal is political and risk their lives to speak out on the commonality of violence in families and marriages. The Aurat March movement has expanded this cause with many members narrating their own experiences of sexual offences and providing ventilation for other survivors. Stigmatising sex education, or underplaying abuse on the pretext of immorality or false respectability, disarms the potential victim from self-defence — silence and shame is the paedophile’s best alibi.

Glorifying the virtues of domesticated pious women and obedient children justifies discipline and decision-making as the male guardian’s natural right. Feminists contend that it is not biology but elite capture of social, economic, political resources that buys impunity for powerful abusive men. They also point out that while there is significant challenge in addressing attitudes within clerical, judicial, and political circles where some may justify male privilege, dismiss allegations of sex crimes, or blame victims, such figures often remain in positions of leadership and trust.

Age of innocence; beyond reliance and alliances

Despite these conceits of legal, social and sexual inequalities, the self-defeating solutions continue to fixate on laws, liberation theology, and male allies — but each needs reconsideration.

Pakistan has no standard legal definition of a child — ages for voting, marriage, sex crime, factory work, succession age, or as a juvenile liable to criminal proceedings — vary considerably across the country and provinces. Addressing sex crimes either involves deferring responsibility to communities and families, which may perpetuate abuse, or relying on technological solutions as a last resort.

There are at least 17 officially listed helplines for children-related complaints, yet members of Sahil say that hardly any child uses the helplines to complain (it is mostly parents or other adults who use the referral system). The high profile and politicised Zainab Alert App for missing children offers lopsided results nationwide and reports more abduction of boys than girls in every province, offering no analysis.

Most laws and policies on women’s and children’s rights are missing data or evaluation, yet random remedies continue to sink the country’s global ranking. The girl-child has been the poster figure for the UN and donor organisations that have sponsored efforts to change the fate of generations of stunted, anaemic, illiterate Pakistani girls from growing into disenfranchised, disinherited, dependent and vulnerable adult women.

But the hubris that has insisted on religious inclusivity in donor programming over the past 20 years, has escalated faith-based approaches to girls’ and women’s development and which essentially bribe male religious leaders to approve projects that deliver basic rights. This approach has reinforced the role of clerics as gatekeepers in community programmes —officials note a variety of specialised roles among clerics, including those focusing on polio, family planning, and gender issues.

Those who defended piety politics and appealed for faith appropriate alternatives to ‘Western’ rights have subdued radical resistance into reformative donor projects and culture festivals. This has also trapped the Aurat March movement, since pietist women oppose the demands for sexual equality in a not-so-docile manner.

Improving conviction rates for sex offences is important but castration or cajoling male allies to detox their masculinities is not going to end sex abuse. The only proven difference is when women and children refuse to remain silent; instead, they subvert and challenge all disparities, insist on equal educational, inheritance, marital, and professional rights, rather than constantly bargain with patriarchy or plead with its institutional representatives.

Rather than pouring resources into Sisyphean programmes for community behavioural change, perhaps, it is time to empower the child directly. This could involve implementing rights-based approaches and providing information and leadership to diminish the influence of community leaders, guardians, and traditional intermediaries. Such measures would help restore a sense of balance while ensuring the safety and self-reliance of children.

As long as academics sanitise religious institutions and activists promote faith-based laws and rights as decolonial tools; as long as newspapers refuse to carry ‘sensitive’ discussions on religion or sex, and feminists wait politely on the good will of male allies to introspect and lose their privileges; as long as governments continue to appease the political clerical classes while donors continue their paradoxical faith based social development, the country will fail to secure the godliness that is, a safe childhood.

Header image taken from Reuters.

DAWN

Cultural Politics And Public Intellectuals In The Age Of Emerging Fascism

By Henry A. Giroux

April 4, 2024
Source: Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies

The “En L’An 2000,” or “Life in Year 2000” by Jean-Marc Côté depicts the futuristic culturization of humanity. (Françoise Foliot , Wikimédia France, Paris, CC BY-SA 4.0)

LONG READ


Introduction

When I wrote “Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy, and the Responsibility of Intellectuals, in 2004,” I wanted to stress the contribution that cultural studies made for educators in broadening their understanding of how politics and power worked through language, diverse symbolic processes, and a range of cultural apparatuses and institutions. My concern then was directed at the need for a new language among educators that would address how matters of agency and pedagogy were both related to power and were increasingly constructed and legitimated within several institutions ranging from universities to the rise of the social media and other cultural apparatuses. My aim was to broaden an understanding of how the dynamics of power and domination include not only economic forces but also those pedagogical practices that shape beliefs, desires, identities, and social relations that are central to forces of oppression and empowerment.

At the time, I wanted to point to new locations of struggles, new sites of politics, new forms of cultural production, and new spaces of resistance. Put simply, I wanted to make clear that cultural studies were redefining and interrogating culture as a new space for politics, resistance, and hope. In addition, I wanted to make critical pedagogy central to both cultural studies and to politics itself. Moreover, I argued that cultural studies offered a new understanding for the role that academics might play as public intellectuals in addressing a variety of audiences in the multiple spheres in which culture, power, and politics are produced, distributed, and normalized.

Central here is the development of a politics and pedagogy, if not a revitalized role for academics as public intellectuals. Such a view stresses the challenge with renewed vigor of not only keeping alive the habits of democracy, but of stressing that education should be the place where students realize themselves as critically informed and engaged citizens. Equally important is the recognition that education must be defended as a democratic public sphere, especially at a time when it is under massive assault by far-right extremists. My emphasis was on defining education through its claims on democracy and having academics acknowledge that there is no democracy without informed citizens. Under such circumstances, I stressed that educators as public intellectuals had to become border crossers by not limiting themselves to their disciplines or only speaking to other academics. Put simply, there was a need for them to speak to a variety of audiences in and out of the academy. Of major concern in my position was emphasizing how the merging of cultural studies and critical education clarified that matters of agency and subjectivity are the grounds of politics itself.

Today, culture has been weaponized unlike anything we have seen since the 1930s in Europe. The mobilizing passions of fascism are now being produced, circulated, and legitimated though all aspects of the mass media, which are increasingly under the control of a billionaire class. Cultural politics in the face of the growing fascist threat is more important to address than ever before, and the responsibility of academics to function as public intellectuals as urgent today as it ever was in the past. Politics is no longer a matter of simply voting or reforming institutions, it is also about changing consciousness so that individuals, students, and others can adopt a critical stance to take control over the forces that shape their lives and change the structures of domination that bear down on them. What I build up and stress in this article is that we are facing a political crisis in the narrow sense of the term — changing politics and economic structures – but also a cultural crisis, a crisis of the civic imagination. Hence, my article argues for changing both habits and minds connected to the capacity to not only understand the problems we currently face as educators and citizens but also how to intervene in the world in order to change it.

Cultural politics needs to function as an act of resistance and hope against the threat of a paralyzing indifference to the current threat of fascism. The ghosts of the past do not reside simply in the forgotten archives of history; they have turned into a living nightmare that that now shapes the present. Matters of culture and pedagogy are crucial sites where the struggle for a radical democracy needs to take place. Without that understanding, democracy in the current moment has little chance of surviving.

The long shadow of domestic fascism, defined as a project of racial and cultural cleansing, is with us once again both in North America and abroad. Educators have seen the ghosts of fascism before in acts of savage colonialism and dispossession, in an era of slavery marked by the brutality of whippings and neck irons, and in a Jim Crow age most obvious in the spectacularized horror of murderous lynchings. More recently we have viewed fascist acts of terror in a politics of disappearances and genocidal erasures under the dictatorships of Adolf Hitler, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and others. Claims of genocide have also been made by an increasing number of international organizations and prominent public figures against the killing of civilians by both Israel and Hamas in the current war, but especially against Israel’s disproportionate killing of children in Gaza, now numbering over 5000 as of November 2023.Footnote1 And in each case, history has given us a glimpse of what the end of humanity would look like.Footnote2 Yet the lessons of history with its language of hate, machineries of torture, death camps and murderous violence as a political tool are too often ignored.

An upgraded form of fascism with its rabid nativism and hatred of racial mixing is currently at the center of politics in the United States. Traditional liberal values of equality, social justice, dissent, and freedom are now considered a threat to a Republican Party supportive of staggering levels of inequality, white Christian nationalism, and racial purity. Yet the lessons of history are too often ignored–though its mobilizing fascist passions are once again on the horizon.Footnote3 This politics of numbness and denial is not only true of the mainstream press but also applies to many liberal and left-oriented academics.Footnote4

America’s slide into a fascist politics demands a revitalized understanding of the historical moment in which we find ourselves, along with a systemic critical analysis of the new political formations that mark this period. This is especially true as neoliberalism can no longer defend itself. The destabilizing conditions of global capitalism with its mix of savage inequalities and expanding methods of control and repression point to both a legitimation crisis and a turn towards a revitalized and rebranded form of fascism. This neo-fascist resurgence is part of a counter-revolution waged against the student revolts of the sixties, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and a range of resistance insurgencies that have gained force over the last 60 years.Footnote5

The promise and ideals of democracy are receding as right-wing extremists breathe new life into a fascist past. This is particularly true, as education has increasingly become a tool of domination as right-wing pedagogical apparatuses controlled by the entrepreneurs of hate attack workers, the poor, people of color, trans people, immigrants from the south, and others considered disposable. Confronting this fascist counter-revolutionary movement necessitates creating a new language, rethinking education as a central element of politics, revitalizing the role of academics as public intellectuals. This impending threat also necessitates the building of a mass social movement to construct empowering terrains of education, politics, justice, culture, and power that challenge existing systems of white supremacy, white nationalism, manufactured ignorance, civic illiteracy, and economic oppression.

Neoliberalism’s death march

We now live in a world that resembles a dystopian novel. This is a world marked by new crises and the intensification of old antagonisms. Since the late 1970s, a form of predatory capitalism or what can be called neoliberalism has waged war on the welfare state, public goods, and the social contract. Neoliberalism insists that the market should govern not just the economy, but also all aspects of society. It concentrates wealth in the hands of a financial elite and elevates unchecked self-interest, self-help, deregulation, and privatization as the governing principles of society. Under neoliberalism, everything is for sale, consumerism is the only obligation of citizenship, and the only relations that matter are modeled after forms of commercial exchange. At the same time, neoliberalism ignores basic human needs such as universal healthcare, food security, decent wages, and quality education. Moreover, it disparages human rights and imposes a culture of cruelty upon young people, people of color, women, immigrants, and those considered disposable.

Neoliberalism views government as the enemy of the market – except when it benefits wealthy corporations, limits society to the realm of the family and individuals, embraces a fixed hedonism, and challenges the very idea of the public good. Under neoliberalism, the political collapses into the personal and therapeutic, rendering all problems a singular matter of individual responsibility, thus making it almost impossible for individuals to translate private troubles into wider systemic considerations. This over emphasis on personal responsibility depoliticizes people by offering no language for addressing wider structural issues such as the call for better jobs, schools, safer neighborhoods, free education, and a basic universal wage, among other issues. It also stresses the language of emotional self-management, further producing a kind of ethical tranquilization and indifference to wider democratic struggles for racial, gender, and economic reforms. Moreover, under neoliberalism economic activity is divorced from social costs further eviscerating any sense of social responsibility at a time when policies that produce systemic racism, environmental destruction, militarism, and staggering inequality have become defining features of everyday life and established modes of governance. As Bernie Sanders notes, “It is not moral that three people on top own more wealth than the bottom half of American society, 165 million Americans … that’s not moral. That’s not right. That’s not what should exist in a democratic society.”Footnote6

Clearly, there is a need to raise fundamental questions about the role of education in a time of impending tyranny. Or, to put it another way, what are the obligations of education to democracy itself? That is, how can education work to reclaim a notion of democracy in which matters of social justice, freedom and equality become fundamental features of learning to live in a society.

The scourge of fascist education in the US

In the current historical moment, the threat of authoritarianism has become more dangerous than ever – one in which education has taken on a new role in the age of upgraded fascism. This authoritarian project is evident particularly in the United States as a number of far-right wing governors have put a range of reactionary educational policies in place that range from disallowing teachers to mention critical race theory and issues dealing with sexual orientation in their classrooms to forcing educators to sign loyalty oaths, post their syllabi online, give up tenure, and allow students to film their classes. Regarding the banning of books, Judd Legum notes,

Across the country, right-wing activists are seeking to ban thousands of books from schools and other public libraries. Those promoting the bans often claim they are acting to protect children from pornography. But the bans frequently target books ‘by and about people of color and LGBTQ individuals.’ Many of the books labeled as pornographic are highly acclaimed novels.Footnote7

The latter include Animal Farm, Maus, and The Color Purple. Such policies echo a fascist past in which the banning of books eventually led to both the imprisonment of dissidents and the eventual disappearance of bodies.

Not only are these attacks on certain books and ideas aimed at educators and minorities of class and color, this far-right attack on education is also part of a larger war on the very ability to think, question, and engage in politics from the vantage point of being critical, informed, and willing to engage in a culture of questioning. More generally, it is part of a concerted effort to destroy public and higher education and the very foundations of civic literacy and political agency. Under the rule of this emerging authoritarianism, political extremists are attempting to turn education into a space for killing the imagination, a place where provocative ideas are banished, and where faculty and students are punished through the threat of force or harsh disciplinary measures for speaking out, engaging in dissent, and holding power accountable.

In this case, the attempt to undermine public schooling and higher education as public goods and democratic public spheres is accompanied by a systemic attempt to destroy the notion that they are vital democratic public goods. Schools that view themselves as democratic public spheres are now disparaged by far-right Republican politicians and their allies as socialism factories, government schools, and citadels of left-wing thought.

In fact, as Jonathan Chait observes, what is being said by a right-wing Republican Party about American schools echoes a period in history in which fascist regimes used a similar language rooted in the cold war rhetoric of McCarthyism. For instance, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida has called schools “a cesspool of Marxist indoctrination.” Former secretary of State Mike Pompeo claims that “teachers’ unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids,” will “take this republic down.” Donald Trump has stated that “pink-haired communists [are] teaching our kids” and “Marxist maniacs and lunatics” run higher education. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis stated on Fox News that if he won the presidency in 2024, he “will … destroy leftism in this country and leave woke ideology in the dustbin of history.”Footnote8

This is more than anti-democratic, authoritarian rhetoric. It shapes poisonous policies in which education is increasingly defined as an animating space of repression, violence and weaponized as a tool of censorship, state indoctrination, and terminal exclusion. The examples have become too numerous to address. A short list would include a Florida school district banning a graphic novel version of Anne Frank’s Dairy,Footnote9 the firing of a Florida principal for showing her class an image of Michelangelo’s ‘David,’Footnote10 and the publishing of a textbook that removed any hint of racism from Rosa Park’s refusal to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955.Footnote11 There appears to be no limits on the part of right-wing activists in Florida to ban books. For instance, on July 12, 2023, an effort by right-wing extremists was made to ban the book Arthur’s Birthday, from libraries in the Clay County School District. The book by Marc Brown is “part of a popular children’s series that was spun off into an Emmy-winning children’s cartoon.”Footnote12 It gets worse.

In a number of states controlled by Republican governors, academic freedom is under assault as bills are passed with ban topics such as “Critical Race Theory, Critical Ethnic Studies, Radical Feminist Theory, Radical Gender Theory, Queer Theory, Critical Social Justice, or Intersectionality.”Footnote13 At Idaho’s public universities, faculty cannot talk about, teach, or write about abortion “may now face up to fourteen years of imprisonment.”Footnote14 There is more at work here than an attack on academic freedom, there is also an attempt to turn public universities into indoctrination centers modeled after the repressive modes of censorship endemic to past and present authoritarian regimes. All these actions are warning signs of a history about to be repeated.

At the current moment, it would be wise for educators to heed the words of Holocaust survivor and brilliant writer Primo Levi who argued in his book, In The Black Hole of Auschwitz, that “Every age has its own fascism.” In his book, The Voice of Memory, Levi elaborates on what he considered the elemental features of fascism. He wrote:

There is only one Truth, proclaimed from above; the newspapers are all alike, they all repeat the same one Truth. … As for books, only those that please the state are published and translated. You must seek any others on the outside and introduce them into your country at your own risk because they are considered more dangerous than drugs and explosives … Books not in favour … are burned in public bonfires in town squares … .In an authoritarian state it is considered permissible to alter the truth; to rewrite history retrospectively; to distort the news, suppress, the true, add the false. Propaganda is substituted for information.Footnote15

Making education central to politics

It is hard to imagine a more urgent moment for taking seriously Paulo Freire’s ongoing attempts to make education central to politics. At stake for Freire was the notion that education was a social concept, rooted in the goal of emancipation for all people. Moreover, his view of education encouraged human agency, one that was not content to enable people to only be critical thinkers, but also engaged individuals and social agents. Like John Dewey, Freire’s political project recognized that there is no democracy without knowledgeable and informed citizens. Today this insight is fundamental to creating the conditions to forge collective international resistance among educators, youth, artists, and other cultural workers in defense of public goods, if not democracy itself. Such a movement is important to resist and overcome the tyrannical fascist nightmares that have descended upon the United States, Italy, Hungary, India, and a number of other countries plagued by the rise of right-wing populist movements, far right militias such as the Proud Boys, and neo-Nazi parties.

The signposts of America’s turn toward a fascist notion of education are everywhere. Trans students are under attack, their history is being erased from school curricula, and the support of their care-givers is increasingly criminalized. African American history is sanitized and rewritten, while teachers, faculty, and librarians who contest or refuse this authoritarian script are being fired, demonized, and in some cases also subject to criminal charges. Mirroring an attack on trans people and the Institute for Sexual Science similar to the one that took place in the early years of the Third Reich, far right-wing politicians and white supremacists are waging a vicious war against trans youth and their teachers who are now treated as social pariahs while their supporters are slandered as pedophiles and groomers.

The growing threat of authoritarianism is also visible in the emergence of an anti-intellectual culture that derides any notion of critical education. What was once unthinkable regarding attacks on education has become normalized. Ignorance is now praised as a virtue and white supremacy and white Christian nationalism are now the organizing principles of governance and education in many American states and several countries globally.

This right-wing assault on democracy is a crisis that cannot be allowed to turn into a catastrophe in which all hope is lost. This suggests viewing education as a political concept, rooted in the goal of empowerment and emancipation for all people, especially if we do not want to default on education’s role as a democratic public sphere. Moreover, as I mentioned in my 2004 article, “Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy, and the Responsibility of Intellectuals,” the issue of recognizing that culture is a site of active struggle and integrates institutionally and symbolic forms in making education central to politics is more important today than ever before. For too many theorists, culture has become merely a site of domination, used by the far right to weaponize language, images, and a range of information platforms. Not only does such a reading misread the emancipatory possibilities of culture, but it also denies the powerful role it can play as a radical educational force.

Culture as a site of struggle represents a pedagogical practice that calls students beyond themselves, embraces the ethical imperative for them to care for others, embrace historical memory, work to dismantle structures of domination, and to become subjects rather than objects of history, politics, and power. If educators as public intellectuals are going to develop a politics capable of awakening students’ critical, imaginative, and historical sensibilities, it is vital to engage education as a project of individual and collective empowerment – a project based on the search for truth, an enlarging of the civic imagination, and the practice of freedom.

It would be wise for educators to remember that the first casualty of authoritarianism are the minds that would oppose it. Fascism begins with the language of hate, and as Thom Hartmann observes

Before fascism can fully seize power in a nation, it must first be accepted by the people as a “patriotic” system of governance, representing the will of the majority of the nation. This is why fascists always scapegoat minorities first … before they acquire enough power to subjugate the entire nation itself.Footnote16

Against this warning, it is important for us as educators to note that the current era is one marked by the rise of disimagination machines that produce manufactured ignorance and concoct lies on an unprecedented level, giving authoritarianism a new life. As the historian Federico Finchelstein notes, it is crucial to recall that “one of the key lessons of the history of fascism is that racist lies led to extreme political violence.”Footnote17 We live at a time when the unthinkable has become normalized so that anything can be said and everything that matters unsaid. Moreover, this degrading of truth and the emptying of language makes it all the more difficult to distinguish good from evil, justice from injustice. Under such circumstances, the American public is rapidly losing a language and ethical grammar that challenges the political and racist machineries of cruelty, state violence and targeted exclusions.Footnote18

Education both in its symbolic and institutional forms has a vital role to play in fighting the resurgence of false renderings of history, white supremacy, religious fundamentalism, an accelerating militarism, and ultra-nationalism. As far-right movements across the globe disseminate toxic racist and ultra-nationalist images of the past, it is essential to reclaim education as a form of historical consciousness and moral witnessing. This is especially true at a time when historical and social amnesia have become a national pastime, further normalizing an authoritarian politics that thrives on ignorance, fear, the suppression of dissent, and hate. The merging of power, new digital technologies, and everyday life have not only altered time and space, but they have also expanded the reach of culture as an educational force. A culture of lies, cruelty, and hate, coupled with a fear of history and a 24/7 flow of information now wages a war on historical consciousness, attention spans, and the conditions necessary to think, contemplate, and arrive at sound judgments.Footnote19 This is evident in the use of the new social media by Trump and his allies to deny election results, saturate the culture with lies about everything from climate change to attacks on trans students and Black history.Footnote20

The cultural force of education in the twenty-first century

It is crucial for educators to learn that education and schooling are not the same and schooling must be viewed as a sphere distinctive from the educative forces at work in the larger culture.Footnote21 The point of course is that an array of cultural apparatuses extending from social media and streaming services to the rise of artificial intelligence and corporate controlled media platforms also constitutes vast educational machinery with enormous power and influence. What both schooling and the wider cultural sphere of education have in common is that they often work in tandem to shape and orchestrate dominant social relations, constitute prevailing notions of common sense, and open up conceptual horizons, modes of identification, and social relations through which consciousness and identities are shaped and legitimated.

In the current age of barbarism and the crushing of dissent, there is a need for educators to acknowledge how the wider culture and pedagogies of closure operate as educational and political forces in the service of fascist politics and other modes of tyranny. Under such circumstances, educators and others must question not only what individuals learn in society, but what they must unlearn, and what institutions provide the conditions for them to do so. Against those cultural apparatuses producing apartheid pedagogies of repression and conformity – rooted in censorship, racism, and the killing of the imagination – there is the need for critical institutions and pedagogical practices that value a culture of questioning, view critical agency as a fundamental condition of public life, and reject indoctrination in favor of the search for justice within educational spaces and institutions that function as democratic public spheres.

A critical consciousness matters

Any viable pedagogy of resistance needs to create the educational and pedagogical visions and tools to produce a radical shift in consciousness; it must be capable of recognizing both the scorched earth policies of neoliberalism and the twisted fascist ideologies that support it. This shift in consciousness cannot occur without pedagogical interventions that speak to people in ways in which they can recognize themselves, identify with the issues being addressed, and place the privatization of their troubles in a broader systemic context.

An education for empowerment that functions as the practice of freedom should provide a classroom environment that is intellectually rigorous and critical, while allowing students to give voice to their experiences, aspirations, and dreams. It should be a protective and courageous space where students are able to speak, write, and act from a position of agency and informed judgment. It should be a place where education does the bridging work of connecting schools to the wider society, connect the self to others, and address important social and political issues. It should also provide the conditions for students to learn how to make connections with an increased sense of social responsibility coupled with a sense of justice. Pedagogy for the practice of freedom is rooted in a broader project of a resurgent and insurrectional democracy– one that relentlessly questions the kinds of labor practices, and forms of knowledge that enacted in public and higher education.

If the evolving authoritarianism and rebranded fascism in the United States, Canada, Europe and elsewhere is to be defeated, there is a need to make critical education an organizing principle of politics and, in part, this can be done with a language that exposes and unravels falsehoods, systems of oppression, and corrupt relations of power while making clear that an alternative future is possible. Hannah Arendt was right in arguing that language is crucial in highlighting the often hidden “crystalized elements” that make authoritarianism likely.Footnote22 The language of critical pedagogy and literacy are powerful tools in the search for truth and the condemnation of falsehoods and injustices. Moreover, it is through language that the history of fascism can be remembered and be used to make clear that fascism does not reside solely in the past and that its traces are always dormant, even in the strongest democracies.

Against those politicians, pundits, and academics who falsely claim that fascism rests entirely in the past, it is crucial to recognize that fascism is always present in history and can crystallize in different forms. Or as the historian Jason Stanley observes, “Fascism [is] ‘a political method’ that can appear anytime, anywhere, if conditions are right.”Footnote23 The historical arc of fascism is not frozen in history; its attributes lurk in different forms in diverse societies, waiting to adapt to times favorable to its emergence. As Paul Gilroy has noted, the “horrors [of fascism] are always much closer to us than we like to imagine,” and our duty is not to look away but to make them visible.Footnote24 The refusal by an array of politicians, scholars, and the mainstream media to acknowledge the scale of the fascist threat bearing down on American society is more than an act of refusal, it is an act of complicity. What is noticeable is that the fascist threats emanating from Trump and his political allies have become so unabashedly overt that there has been a fury of articles in the mainstream press warning about the fascist threat Trump poses to American democracy.Footnote25 Unfortunately, almost none of them focus on the political, economic, and cultural conditions that support him or even made Trump possible as a threat to democracy.

Ignorance now rules America. Not the simple, if innocent ignorance that comes from an absence of knowledge, but a malicious manufactured ignorance forged in the arrogance of refusing to think hard and critically about an issue, and to engage language in the pursuit of justice. James Baldwin was certainly right in issuing the stern warning in No Name in the Street that “Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”Footnote26 For the ruling elite and modern Republican Party, thinking is viewed as an act of stupidity, and thoughtlessness is considered a virtue. Traces of critical thought increasingly appear at the margins of the culture, as ignorance becomes the primary organizing principle of American society and a number of other countries across the globe. A culture of lies and ignorance now serves as a tool of politics to prevent power from being held accountable.

Under such circumstances, there is a full-scale attack on thoughtful reasoning, empathy, collective resistance, and the compassionate imagination. In some ways, the dictatorship of ignorance resembles what John Berger once called “ethicide,” defined by Joshua Sperling as “The blunting of the senses; the hollowing out of language; the erasure of connection with the past, the dead, place, the land, the soil; possibly, too, the erasure even of certain emotions, whether pity, compassion, consoling, mourning or hoping.”Footnote27 Words such as love, trust, freedom, responsibility, and choice have been deformed by a market and authoritarian logic that narrows their meaning to either a commodity, a reductive notion of self-interest, or generates a language of bigotry and hatred.

Freedom in this context means removing oneself from any sense of social responsibility, making it easier to retreat into privatized orbits of self-indulgence and communities of hate. Such actions are legitimated through an appeal to what Elizabeth Anker has called ugly freedoms. That is, freedoms emptied of any substantive meaning and used by far-right politicians and corporate controlled media to legitimate a discourse of hate and bigotry while actively depoliticizing people by making them complicit with the forces that impose misery and suffering upon their lives.

Given the current crisis of politics, agency, history, and memory, educators need a new political and pedagogical language for addressing the changing contexts and issues facing a world where anti-democratic forces draw upon an unprecedented convergence of resources – financial, cultural, political, economic, scientific, military, and technological–to exercise powerful and diverse forms of control.

As a political and moral practice, critical pedagogy combines a language of critique and a vision of possibility in the fight to revive civic literacy, civic activism, and a notion of shared and engaged citizenship. Politics loses its emancipatory possibilities if it cannot present the educational conditions for enabling students and others to think against the grain, and realize themselves as informed, critical, and engaged individuals. There is no emancipatory politics without a pedagogy capable of awakening consciousness, challenging common sense, and creating modes of analysis in which people discover a moment of recognition that enables them to rethink the conditions that shape their lives.
Academics as public intellectuals

Against the emerging fascist politics, educators should assume the role of public intellectuals and border crossers within broader social contexts. For example, this might include finding ways, when possible, to share their ideas with the wider public by making use of new media technologies and a range of other cultural apparatuses, especially those outlets that are willing to address a range of social problems critically. Embracing their role as public intellectuals, educators can speak to more general audiences in a language that is clear, accessible, and rigorous. As educators organize to assert their role as citizen-educators in a democracy, they can forge new alliances and connections to develop social movements that include and expand beyond working simply with unions. For example, we see evidence of such actions among teachers and students organizing against gun violence and systemic racism and doing so by aligning with parents, unions, and others to fight the gun lobbies and politicians bought and sold by the violence industries. Moreover, we see faculty joining with students, social justice activists, and youth movements in fighting back against white supremacists, some liberals, and far right politicians such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis who are restricting academic freedom, attacking critical race theory, erasing African American history, undermining tenure, and banning books in public colleges and universities. Moreover, a number of critical scholars of race and gender such as Robin D. G. Kelley, Cornel West, Angela Y. Davis, and others speak to multiple and diverse audiences in a variety of sites, amplifying their role as engaged public intellectuals.

Education operates as a crucial site of power in the modern world and critical pedagogy has a key role to play in both understanding and challenging how power, knowledge, and values are deployed, affirmed, and resisted within and outside of traditional discourses and cultural spheres. This suggests that one of the most serious challenges facing teachers, artists, journalists, writers, parents, and other cultural workers is the task of developing discourses and pedagogical practices that connect, as Freire once suggested, a critical reading of the word and the world.

There is no agency without hope

In taking up this project, educators as public intellectuals should create the conditions that enable young people to view cynicism as unconvincing and hope practical. We live in an era in which hope is wounded, but far from lost. The anti-public intellectuals and anti-democratic politicians now attacking public and higher education have betrayed Hope, but at the same time hope becomes central to a larger struggle for social justice and democracy itself. Hope in this instance is educational, removed from the fantasy of an idealism that is unaware of the constraints facing the struggle for a radical democratic society. Educated hope is not a call to overlook the difficult conditions that shape both schools and the larger social order, nor is it a blueprint removed from specific contexts and struggles. On the contrary, it is the precondition for imagining a future that does not replicate the nightmares of the present, for not making the present the future.

Educated hope provides the basis for dignifying the labor of teachers; it offers up critical knowledge linked to democratic social change, affirms shared responsibilities, and encourages teachers and students to recognize ambivalence and uncertainty as fundamental dimensions of learning. Without hope, even in the darkest times, there is no possibility for resistance, dissent, and struggle. Agency is the condition of struggle, and hope is the condition of agency. Hope expands the space of the possible and becomes a way of recognizing and naming the incomplete nature of the present. Such hope offers the possibility of thinking beyond the given. As the great writer and novelist Eduardo Galeano once argued, we live at a time when hope is wounded but not lost.

As Martin Luther King Jr, John Dewey, Paulo Freire, and Nelson Mandela argued there is no project of freedom and liberation without education and that changing attitudes and institutions are interrelated. Central to this insight is the notion advanced by Pierre Bourdieu that the most important forms of domination are not only economic but also intellectual and pedagogical and lie on the side of belief and persuasion. This suggests that academics bear a responsibility in acknowledging that the current fight against an emerging authoritarianism and white nationalism across the globe is not only a struggle over economic structures or the commanding heights of corporate power. It is also a struggle over visions, ideas, consciousness, and the power to shift the culture itself. It is also as Arendt points out a struggle against “a widespread fear of judging.”Footnote28 Without the ability to judge, it becomes impossible to recover words that have meaning, imagine a future that does not mimic the dark times in which we live, and create a language that changes how we think about ourselves and our relationship to others. Any struggle for a radical democratic order will not take place if lies cancel out reason, ignorance dismantles informed judgments, and truth succumbs to demagogic appeals to unchecked power. As Francisco Goya warned “the sleep of reason produces monsters.”Footnote29

Democracy begins to fail, and political life becomes impoverished in the absence of those vital public spheres such as public and higher education in which civic values, public scholarship, and social engagement allow for a more imaginative grasp of a future that takes seriously the demands of justice, equity, and civic courage. Without financially robust schools, critical forms of education, and knowledgeable and civically courageous teachers, young people are denied the habits of citizenship, critical modes of agency, and the grammar of ethical responsibility. Democracy should be a way of thinking about education, one that thrives on connecting pedagogy to the practice of freedom, social responsibility and the public good.Footnote30 I want to conclude by making some suggestions, however incomplete, regarding what we can do as educators to save public and higher education and connect them to the broader struggle over democracy itself.

Elements of reform

First, in the midst of the current assault on public and higher education, educators should reclaim and expand its democratic vocation and in doing so align itself with a vision that embraces its mission as a public good. Understanding education as fundamental to a democracy, raises a central question here is what the role of education is in a democracy and in what capacity as David Clark argues is “democracy … an education that nurtures our capacity for democracy, and for sharing power rather than enduring or deferring to authority.”Footnote31 Second, educators should also acknowledge and make good on the claim that there is no democracy without informed and knowledgeable citizens. At stake here is the need to create the institutional contexts for faculty to have control over the conditions of their labor, enjoy academic freedom, and provide students with an education that nurtures their capacity to be critical and engaged citizens. Moreover, in addition to gaining control over the conditions of their labor, educators have a responsibility to connect their work to both those issues that make a democracy possible –matters of justice, freedom, and equity – while working to educate a broader public about the work they do and how crucial it is to all individuals, not just their students.

Third, education should be free and funded through federal funds that guarantee a quality education for everyone. The larger issue here is that education cannot serve the public good in a society marked by staggering forms of inequality. Rather than build bombs, fund the defense industry, and inflate a death dealing military budget, we need massive investments in public and higher education–This is an investment in which youth are written into the future, rather than potentially eliminated from it.

Fourth, in a world driven by data, metrics, fragmented ways of thinking, and the replacement of knowledge by the overabundance of information, educators need to teach students to be border crossers, who can think dialectically, comparatively, and historically. With the rise of data sciences, neurosciences, AI technology, zoom, and other electronically produced platforms, technological rationality increasingly defines and undermines the humanities and liberal arts. Spaces where broad-based knowledge and a culture of questioning might flourish are under threat giving a new urgency to the struggle to protect and preserve the liberal arts and humanities as fundamental to what it means to be educate students as critical and engaged citizens. Educators should teach students to engage in multiple literacies extending from print and visual culture to digital culture. Students need to learn how to think intersectionally, comprehensively, and relationally while also being able to not only consume culture, but produce it; they should learn how to be both cultural critics and cultural producers. In a world marked by increasing forms of social atomization, it is important to provide comprehensive understandings of the self, others, and the larger world to create the conditions for merging differences, building formative communities, and expanding the boundaries of compassion and solidarity.

Fifth, educators must defend critical education as the search for truth, the practice of freedom, and pedagogy of disturbance. Such pedagogy should unsettle commonsense, inform, and expand the horizons of the imagination. Such a task suggests that critical pedagogy should shift not only the way people think but also encourage them to shape the world in which they find themselves for the better. As the practice of freedom, critical pedagogy arises from the conviction that educators and other cultural workers have a responsibility to unsettle power, trouble consensus, and challenge common sense. This is a view of pedagogy that should disturb, inspire, and energize a vast array of individuals and publics. Such pedagogical practices should enable students to interrogate common-sense understandings of the world, take risks in their thinking, however difficult, and be willing to take a stand for free inquiry in the pursuit of truth, multiple ways of knowing, mutual respect, and civic values in the pursuit of social justice. Students need to learn how to think dangerously, push at the frontiers of knowledge, and support the notion that the search for justice is never finished and that no society is ever just enough. These are not merely methodical considerations but also moral and political practices because they presuppose the creation of students who can imagine a future where justice, equality, freedom, and democracy matter and are attainable.

Sixth, educators need to argue for a notion of education that is viewed as inherently political – one that relentlessly questions the kinds of labor, practices, and forms of teaching, research, and modes of evaluation that are enacted in public and higher education. Education is political in that it is always related to relations of power, connected to the acquisition of agency, and is a place where students realize themselves as citizens. Moreover, there is no mode of education that stands outside of the relationship between power and knowledge, escapes defining what knowledge is of most worth, and is free from envisioning notions of the future. While such an education does not offer guarantees, it defines itself as a moral and political practice that is by necessity implicated in power relations because it produces versions and visions of civic life, how we construct representations of ourselves, others, our physical and social environment, and the future itself.

Seventh, in an age in which educators are being censored, fired, losing tenure, and in some cases subject to criminal penalties, it is crucial for them to fight to gain control over the conditions of their labor. Without power, faculty are reduced to casual labor, play no role in the governing process, and work under labor conditions comparable to how workers are treated at Amazon and Walmart. Educators need a new vision, language, and collective strategy to regain the power, rightful influence, control and security over their work conditions and their ability to make meaningful contributions to their students and larger society.

It is crucial to remember that there is no democracy without informed citizens and no justice without a language critical of injustice. The central question here is what the role of education in a democracy is and how we can teach students to govern rather than be governed. There is no hope without a democratically driven education system. The greatest threat to education in North America and around the globe is anti-democratic ideologies and market values that believe public schools and higher education are failing because they are public and should not operate in the interests of furthering the promise and possibility of democracy. If schools are failing it is because they are being defunded, privatized, and modeled after white nationalist indoctrination spheres, transformed into testing centers, and reduced to regressive training practices.

Finally, I want to suggest that in a society in which democracy is under siege, it is crucial for educators to assume the role of public intellectuals to connect their work to crucial social issues and to fight for education as a crucial public good, especially in the face of a rising fascism across the globe. Hope matters, suggesting that educators remember and assert that alternative futures are possible and that acting on these beliefs is a precondition for making social change possible. In closing I want to return to my 2004 article in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies and cite a paragraph, which is more important and relevant today than when I first wrote it in 2004.

At a time when our civil liberties are being destroyed and public institutions and goods all over the globe are under assault by the forces of a rapacious global capitalism, there is a sense of concrete urgency that demands not only the most militant forms of political opposition on the part of academics, but new modes of resistance and collective struggle buttressed by rigorous intellectual work, social responsibility, and political courage. The time has come for intellectuals to distinguish caution from cowardice and recognize the ever-fashionable display of rhetorical cleverness as a form of “disguised decadence.” As Derrida reminds us, democracy “demands the most concrete urgency … because as a concept it makes visible the promise of democracy, that which is to come.”

At issue here is the courage to take on the challenge of what kind of world we want – what kind of future we want to build for our children? The great philosopher, Ernst Bloch, insisted that hope taps into our deepest experiences and that without it reason and justice cannot blossom. In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin adds a call for compassion and social responsibility to this notion of hope, one that is indebted to those who will follow us. He writes: “Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them … . [T]he moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us, and the light goes out.” Now more than ever educators must live up to the challenge of keeping fires of resistance burning with a feverish intensity. Only then will we be able to keep the lights on and the future open. In addition to that eloquent appeal, I would say that history is open, and it is time to think differently in order to act differently, especially if, as educators, we want to imagine and fight for alternative democratic futures and build new horizons of possibility.
Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes

1 Radhika Sainath, “The Free Speech Exception.” Boston Review (October 30, 2023). Online: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-free-speech-exception/; Adam Tooze, Samuel Moyn, Amia Srinivasan, et al. “The principle of human dignity must apply to all people,” The Guardian (November 22, 2023). Online: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/22/the-principle-of-human-dignity-must-apply-to-all-people; Judith Butler, “The Compass of Mourning.” London Review of Books (October 19, 2023). Online: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n20/judith-butler/the-compass-of-mourning.

2 Alberto Toscano, “The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism,” Boston Review. (October 27, 2020). Online http://bostonreview.net/race-politics/alberto-toscano-long-shadow-racial-fascism.

3 Henry A. Giroux, Pedagogy of Resistance (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).

4 Anthony DiMaggio, “Fascism Denial American Style: Exceptionalism in the Ivory Tower,” Counterpunch (April 5, 2023). Online: https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/04/05/fascism-denial-american-style-exceptionalism-in-the-ivory-tower/.

5 Henry A. Giroux, Insurrections: Education in an Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (London: Bloomsbury, 2023).

6 Jon Queally, “When 3 Men Richer Than 165 Million People, Sanders Says Working Class Must ‘Come Together’,” CommonDreams (June 4, 2023). Online: https://www.commondreams.org/news/immoral-inequality-bernie-sanders.

7 Judd Legum, “Banning Book Bans,” Popular Information (May 31, 2023). Online: https://popular.info/p/banning-book-bans?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1664&post_id=124913640&isFreemail=false&utm_medium=email.

8 Martin Pengelly, “Ron DeSantis says he will ‘destroy leftism’ in US if elected president,” The Guardian (May 30, 2023). Online: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/30/ron-desantis-fox-news-interview-destroy-leftism.

9 Gloria Oladipo, “Texas teacher fired for showing Anne Frank graphic novel to eighth-graders,” The Guardian (September 20, 2023). Online: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/20/texas-teacher-fired-anne-frank-book-ban.

10 Richard Whiddington, “The Florida Principal Fired for Allowing a Lesson on Michelangelo’s ‘David’ Went to Italy to See the Sculpture Herself—and Was Rather Impressed,” ArtNews (April 28, 2023). Online: https://news.artnet.com/news/fired-florida-principal-visited-michelangelo-david-2292636#:~:text=Museums-,The%20Florida%20Principal%20Fired%20for%20Allowing%20a%20Lesson%20on%20Michelangelo’s,way%2C%22%20Hope%20Carrasquilla%20said.

11 Charisma Madarang, “Publisher Deletes Race From Rosa Parks Story for Florida,” Rolling Stone (March 16, 2023). Online: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/race-deleted-rosa-parks-history-florida-textbooks-1234698582/.

12 Jedd Legum, “Right-wing activists seek to ban “Arthur’s Birthday” from Florida school libraries,” Popular Information (July 20, 2023). Online: https://popular.info/p/right-wing-activists-seek-to-ban.

13 Tom Mockaitis, “Attacks on academic freedom undermine the quality of US education,” The Hill (April 21, 2023). Online: https://thehill.com/opinion/education/3962012-attacks-on-academic-freedom-undermine-the-quality-of-us-education/.

14 Elizabeth Gyori, “Idaho Wants to Jail Professors for Teaching About Abortion,” ACLU (August 9, 2023). Online: https://www.aclu.org/news/reproductive-freedom/idaho-wants-to-jail-professors-for-teaching-about-abortion.

15 Primo Levi, “Primo Levi’s Heartbreaking, Heroic Answers to the Most Common Questions He Was Asked About ‘Survival in Auschwitz’,” The New Republic (February 17, 1986). Online: https://newrepublic.com/article/119959/interview-primo-levi-survival-auschwitz.

16 Thom Hartmann, “Trump Town Hall: Is CNN Normalizing Fascism Next Week?” The Hartmann Report (May 3, 2023). Online: https://hartmannreport.com/p/trump-town-hall-is-cnn-normalizing.

17 Federico Finchelstein, A Brief History of Fascist Lies (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020), 1.

18 Frank B. Wilderson III, “Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics,” in Red, White, & Black, (London, UK: Duke University Press, 2012), 1–32.

19 See especially, Jonathan Crary, Scorched Earth: Beyond The Digital Age To A Post-capitalist World. (London: Verso Books, 2022).

20 Robin D. G. Kelley, “The Long War on Black Studies,” The New York Review of Books (June 17, 2023). Online: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/06/17/the-long-war-on-black-studies/.

21 See, for example, Jane Mayer, “The Making of the Fox News White House,” The New Yorker (March 4, 2019). Online: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/the-making-of-the-fox-news-white-house.

22 Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Trade Publishers, New Edition, 2001).

23 Cited in Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “What Is Fascism?” Lucid Substack (December 7, 2022). Online: https://lucid.substack.com/p/what-is-fascism.

24 Paul Gilroy, “The 2019 Holberg Lecture, by Laureate Paul Gilroy: Never Again: refusing race and salvaging the human,” Holbergprisen, (November 11, 2019). Online: https://holbergprisen.no/en/news/holberg-prize/2019-holberg-lecture-laureate-paul-gilroy.

25 See, Chauncey Devega, “Americans are sleepwalking into a Trump dictatorship,” Salon (December 5, 2023). Online: https://www.salon.com/2023/12/05/americans-are-sleepwalking-into-a-dictatorship/; even neo-conservatives are raising the alarm about Trump’s fascism, see, for instance, Robert Kagan, “ A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.,” The Washington Post (November 30, 2023). Online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/30/trump-dictator-2024-election-robert-kagan/.

26 Cited in Toni Morrison, ed. James Baldwin, Collected Essays: No Name in the Street (New York: Library of America, 1998), 437.

27 Joshua Sperling cited in Lisa Appignanesi, “Berger’s Ways of Being,” The New York Review of Books (May 9, 2019). Online: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/05/09/john-berger-ways-of-being/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20Tintoretto%20Berger%20Mueller&utm_content=NYR%20Tintoretto%20Berger%20Mueller+CID_22999ee4b377a478a5ed6d4ef5021162&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=John%20Bergers%20Ways%20of%20Being.

28 Hannah Arendt, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” in Jerome Kohn, ed., Responsibility and Judgement, (NY: Schocken Books, 2003). Online: https://grattoncourses.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/responsibility-under-a-dictatorship-arendt.pdf.

29 Mark Vallen, “Goya and the Sleep of Reason,” Art for Change (March 31, 2023). Online: Francisco Goya warned “the sleep of reason produces monsters”.

30 Henry A. Giroux, The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Review of Books, 2019).

31 David L. Clark, “What is Democracy?,” NFB Blog (March 27, 2023). Online: https://blog.nfb.ca/blog/2023/05/04/edu-higher-learning-what-is-democracy/.


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Henry A. Giroux (born 1943) is an internationally renowned writer and cultural critic, Professor Henry Giroux has authored, or co-authored over 65 books, written several hundred scholarly articles, delivered more than 250 public lectures, been a regular contributor to print, television, and radio news media outlets, and is one of the most cited Canadian academics working in any area of Humanities research. In 2002, he was named as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period in Fifty Modern Thinkers on

 

Who Must Go?

Permanent government vs. the People

by T.P. Wilkinson / March 26th, 2024

President Kennedy was furious at the CIA for having misled him. Waiting several months before he compelled CIA Director Allen Dulles to resign, Kennedy told him, “Under a parliamentary system of government it is I who would be leaving. But under our system it is you who must go.”

Thus John F. Kennedy defended the illusion that the Anglophile dominated US government had transcended its British aristocratic-monarchical roots. Allen Dulles resigned from his office as Director of Central Intelligence to preside over the committee that would disprove Kennedy‘s naive belief in an American system of responsible government in the hands of popularly elected representatives.

A Conservative friend of the Thatcher regime in Great Britain created a series called “Yes Minister” (with a sequel “Yes Prime Minister”) in which the power of the permanent civil service over elected parliamentary government was lampooned. Yet behind the sarcasm with which Sir Humphrey exhibits his scarcely concealed contempt for the “barbarians” – meaning His Majesty’s ordinary subjects- lies the admission of simplicity in what has been recently called the “Deep State”. Denied by most in the West, the existence of what Prouty called “the secret team” is so obvious to the scriptwriters of the aristocratic- monarchist British Broadcasting Corporation that it could be advertised in prime time. The history of the current regime in the Federal Republic of Germany, ignored by most of occupied Germany’s licensed “free media”, was so obvious that GDR prime time TV broadcast a series in the 1970s which dramatized the US-Nazi cooperation in the remilitarization of Germany (west) to fight the war now actually impending against Russia. Das Unsichtbare Visier told the story of secret rearmament using the core of the SS and reliable Wehrmacht officers and the use of CIA Gladio operations to create pseudo-Left terrorism in the strategy of tension against the nominally legal Left in the NATO-occupied countries.

The best the US could do was House of Cards, which follows the Dallas template with some cynical steroids. However while the British and the GDR series admit this is a system, the US version is unable to transcend celebrity and the superficiality of daytime soap operas. All three series were devised as entertainment. They therefore have aesthetic attributes, which permit the viewer to suspend belief. However the difference in context is remarkable. While the GDR version fictionalizes history and the British version reeks of the smugness in the senior common room, Americans at their most cynical cannot transcend the Disneyland/ Leave it to Beaver (even if Beaver now would be a trannie) exceptionalism by which only the individual is good or bad. Despite the candid asides and opportunism of the players, the story is always about corruption. The politicians are dishonest and greedy for wealth and power. But so is everyone else. House of Cards conceals the interests of power inherent in the system by making all the participants sinners with varying degrees of indulgence and grace. The clever are the elect (or elected). Calvinism is affirmed.

While I was searching for Kennedy’s words to Allen Dulles (not knowing who would have recorded the original exchange), I listened to some of Kennedy‘s press conferences. I can recommend them highly. They are remarkable for their studied candour, lacking that vacuous, manipulative staging by the handlers of subsequent POTUS. John F Kennedy campaigned among other things on alleged indicators of US weakness in comparison to the Soviet Union- the so-called missile gap. This persisted in his speeches about the space program. However as POTUS he also implied the Soviet Union or the communist countries were ahead of the US in social welfare. In his 21 April 1961 press conference he replied to a question by saying not that the US was better or more successful than the USSR but that he believed it was “more durable”.

At this point one could have asked what virtue lies in a durable yet inferior system? Needless to say this question was not asked. Sixty years after his assassination the US system has proven resilient and reactionary. Despite almost quadrennial changes in the executive branch the resilience of the Reaction continues to amaze while innumerable analysts draft obituaries for the expected demise of the great empire. Meanwhile long-term rises in living standards are only found among the enemies (Russia and China).

To put this in perspective the Soviet Union accomplished the equivalent of two industrialisation phases between 1917 and 1962 (45 years) despite a world war, civil war, foreign invasion and “cold war” that lasted from 1910 until 1989. All that was accomplished based on domestic resources. China accomplished similar development between 1949 and 1989. The US required a century with African and Chinese slave labour, the extermination of a whole continent of indigenous people and some 182 wars fought to dominate the Western hemisphere. Russia and China out produce the US quantitatively and qualitatively despite latter having the highest armaments expenditure in the world. Clearly durability does not translate into human welfare. Kennedy was oblique but somehow aware that the US system would be durably unattractive if something essential did not change in the country whose chief executive he had become.

The press conferences reveal a man who knew how the formal machinery of Congress worked but seemed oblivious to the operation of government itself. His hesitancy and caution betrayed that novitiate status. One need only compare him to Lyndon Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower or Richard Nixon. His seniors in the business all clearly understood how precarious elected office was. Eisenhower’s farewell may not have been cynical but it suggested that there was actually a choice between elected government and the permanent state. As a career Army officer and high functionary in the permanent bureaucracy he must have known that no later than the machinations that made Truman the new tenant in the White House the POTUS had become a cupid doll for the cultic rituals of entrenched power. The patriotic (loyal) opposition chronically overvalue this speech.

If one believes the government is only corrupt – although that is bad enough – then it is very tempting to believe that if only the right, honest people get elected then change or even salvation is in sight. However if one begins with the questions what do ordinary people need to live decent lives? And how are those needs satisfied? Then the constant threat that those needs will not be met can be openly addressed. Instead of abstract, negative freedom (Isaiah Berlin) where one is more or less free to sleep under bridges in default of eternal debts, one might judge a government by its willingness to spend maybe half of what it appropriates for killing people to keeping people alive. Then with such a modest proposal one might assess the willingness and ability of one’s government to facilitate well-being for all instead of deliberately preventing it. That could lead to questions about who makes decisions if not the elected representatives (sometimes pretending to be leaders)?

Until the mid-19th century the US had no permanent civil service like the British had developed. In history books one can read deprecatory discussions of the “spoils system”. Whenever there was a change in elected office, the new officer or his party exercised patronage privilege to hire and fire the civil servants to fit the taste or priorities of the incoming officeholders. Even letter carriers and secretaries owed their posts to the officeholder’s pleasure. In the Reform Era leading into the 20th century the US adopted a competitive civil service system with permanent appointment regardless of party. The only posts that remained discretionary were cabinet-level and those subject to Senate confirmation. This rational improvement and professionalization was intended to give daily government and administration quality and efficiency. However it also created a class of officials whose primary interest was career promotion and not professional implementation of government policy. The very security which was to keep them out of politics created a political subculture insulated from expressions of the popular will. This clerical caste operated like its cultural predecessors in the Latin clergy. The prelates, i.e. cabinet officials and agency directors relied on the senior and ambitious junior civil servants to implement policy but also to defend ministerial/ cabinet secretary turf. While the British filled these ranks from the aristocratic families, new and old, the Americans filled these preferments from the plutocracy. Thus the civil service was socially reproduced like the British service with the US equivalent of titled privilege. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was not the first to call attention to industry “capture” of the regulatory agencies. As serious and justified as that critique is it misses the class component of capture entirely. The “revolving door” which amplifies “capture” is not merely corruption. It is a direct reflection of how the American class system works. There is no better head of NIH or Dr Anthony Fauci’s fief just waiting for an honest selection to confirm his appointment. The DIE dogma is not a solution but a further obfuscation of the problem. There is no “better CIA” or “cleaner FBI” any more than there was a better Inquisition or Gestapo to be had. Philip Agee was clear about that point, as was David Atlee Phillips. Moshe Lewin in his discussion of the eternally maligned Soviet government under Joseph Stalin (The Making of the Soviet System, 1994) pointed out that from the start of the October Revolution the Soviet Union was dependent on the vast majority of Tsarist civil and military servants simply because there were never enough educated Communist cadre to fill all the administrative positions for the vast Russian territory. This Tsarist civil service was even more rigid than those of the “modern” Western states. The only way to change policy was to change personnel. Hence throughout the Stalin era the so-called purges were mainly the punishing or serial replacement of recalcitrant and entrenched bureaucrats with those schooled and tested to enforce the new policies. The bulk of those purged according to Lewin were CPSU cadre and functionaries. Aggravated by war, the Politburo had few direct ways to communicate policy and assure its implementation—using one bureaucracy against the rest. Such periodic “draining of the swamp” is an allusive task, especially in countries like the US, Great Britain and France where the senior civil service is entirely dominated by the ruling class and its aristocratic-corporate cadre.

The term “deep state”, an expression Peter Dale Scott used to describe the “continuity of government” apparatus that expanded massively under Ronald Reagan, is a meaningful cliché. In increasingly common parlance it directs us to the failure of electoral politics as a means of democratic social management. Electoral politics is in fact a strategy applied by the ruling oligarchy through the permanent state apparatus to manage the population. However it is not something mysterious, secret or transcendental. The term has arisen to poorly substitute for a term and concept still prohibited in serious political action, namely class power. Perhaps the last American to seriously describe this phenomenon both empirically and theoretically was the renegade sociologist C Wright Mills. Mills called it the “power elite”. Today that insight has been distorted beyond recognition by obsession first with the “rich and famous“ and then celebrity. In fact the genre “reality TV” is the paramount vulgarization of the concept. That a former and aspirant POTUS enjoys such celebrity also shows the impact of fantasy on the political unconscious. The term “deep state” is a weak if concerted attempt to reformulate the question: if the people as electors have no power, then who does? Call it a class or the “power elite“ or as George Carlin said the big club – and you ain‘t in it. And it’s also the club they beat you with… till your own deep state is six feet underground.

Dr T.P. Wilkinson writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket between the cradles of Heine and Saramago. He is also the author of Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa. Read other articles by T.P..