Discourse that allows us to express a wide range of ideas, opinions, and analysis that can be used as an opportunity to critically examine and observe what our experience means to us beyond the given social/cultural contexts and norms that are provided us.
This talk by Chris Hedges was recorded by Skalli Events at The Islamic Society of Central New Jersey on January 18, 2024.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
He was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for The New York Times coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. Hedges, who holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, is the author of the bestsellers American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist for his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He writes an online column for the website ScheerPost. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto.
Scholar and activist Angela Davis joins Frank Barat to discuss the importance of solidarity with Palestinians as they face a genocide in Gaza by Israel.
Prof. Angela Davis is the Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies Departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
The project "Viva Palestina Libre-Subtitles against the Occupation" collaborates by preparing the Spanish subtitles of several of the interviews. These are usually added 2 to 3 days after the original interview is uploaded. Every time the subtitles of an interview are available, they are announced on their Instagram account (@viva_palestina_libre). On their blog, you can find all the subtitled interviews: https://memoriapresente.net/subtitulo...
"Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline...a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
PHOTO: Former president Donald Trump speaks to the media outside a polling location at Londonderry High School in Londonderry, New Hampshire, on January 23, 2024. Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post via Getty Images
This week’s revelation that Donald Trump is already plotting new ways to try to put himself permanently above the law
is just the latest reminder of the looming threat of lawless and
emboldened right-wing forces in the United States. Trump’s new scheme to
expand a Nixon-era policy memo to prohibit the Justice Department from
prosecuting presidents, even after they leave office, is just a tiny hint of the greater threat. In recent months, several scholars have sounded the alarm
that the United States is “sleepwalking towards authoritarianism.” The
concern is not unfounded given that in his run for the presidency in
2024, Trump has boldly telegraphed his aspirations to impose an
authoritarian future on the United States. He has repeatedly injected
authoritarian language, extremist ideas and threats of violence into the
mainstream. Moreover, he has done so to “create a climate of
trepidation and powerlessness that discourages mobilization by the
opposition,” in the words
of scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Forecasting his authoritarian intentions,
Trump has openly stated that he intends to terminate portions of the
U.S. Constitution, calls his political enemies “vermin” and boldly proclaims he will make himself a dictator “on day one.” On Truth Social, he claimed without irony that a president should have blanket authority and total immunity “even for events that ‘cross the line.’” He has repeatedly stated that if he regains the White House, “it will be a time for retribution” and revenge.
Taking pages from Hitler’s speeches, Trump has also said that the biggest threat to the United States “is from within.” In this instance, he reproduces a version of McCarthyite slander with his claim
that the country is being overrun by “communists, Marxists, fascists
and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of
our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections, and need to be
rooted out.” His constant attacks on what he labels as the “enemy
within” are meant to incite his MAGA followers to wage violence against
people of color, critics, progressives, LGBTQ+ Americans, news networks,
immigrants, feminists, and any other group that does not buy into
Christian nationalist, white supremacist views.
Trump’s discourse overflows with the genocidal language used in the Third Reich. The historian Heather Cox Richardson rightly notes
that Trump’s “use of language referring to enemies as bugs or rodents
has a long history in genocide because it dehumanizes opponents, making
it easier to kill them. In the U.S., this concept is most associated
with Hitler and the Nazis, who often spoke of Jews as ‘vermin’ and vowed
to exterminate them.”
Trump has claimed that immigrants “are poisoning the blood of our
country” and polluting his notion of white Christian culture, and he’s
indicated that, if reelected, he plans to make them undergo “ideological
screening” in order to enter the country legally (assuming here that he
wants to make sure they would not vote for the Democratic Party). If
his vision were carried out, millions of undocumented immigrants would
be barred from the country while others would be rounded up, put into
what amount to Gulag camps, and subjected to unimaginably harsh
policies. Given Trump’s calls to shoot shoplifters, impose death
penalties on drug dealers, and his suggestion that his former chair of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, “deserves to be executed,” there
is no reason to doubt Trump’s authoritarian designs.
On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly echoes the language of
autocrats such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who embraces
the concept of “illiberal democracy,” and claims, as The Guardian
points out, that the biggest threat to Hungary and other nations is
“the ‘mixing’ of European and non-European races.” Trump and the GOP,
like many of the authoritarian politicians they admire, believe that
equality is a weakness endemic to democracy and destroys society.
Trump’s contempt for the law and desire for absolute power is not only
evident in his remarks about wanting to be a dictator; it was also on
full display when his legal team argued
before a D.C. Circuit Court that unless Trump is impeached, he could
not be held responsible for “selling pardons, military secrets, or
simply having people assassinated.” As Thom Hartmann put it,
“Trump’s lawyer argued before the DC Appeals Court that if Trump became
president again, he could order SEAL Team Six to assassinate Joe Biden
or Liz Cheney and nobody could do anything about it.” While
Trump’s lawlessness is central to his grab for unchecked power, there
are also displays of the delusions and aspirations of a Nazi-infested
politics.
What is especially disturbing about the emerging fascism in the
United States is the lack of general public outrage that accompanies it.
Such silence extends from almost the entirety of the Republican Party,
the mainstream media, 84 percent of white Evangelicals,
and a number of the wealthiest American billionaires and corporate
tycoons. While the Democratic Party, including President Joe Biden, have
called out Trump as a fascist, they have been silent about their
support for decades of neoliberal economic policies, the ravages of
deindustrialization, a staggering rise in economic inequality
and cuts to social programs. Such policies have produced the conditions
that have accelerated the rise of authoritarianism in the United
States. Wedded to the interests of the banks, corporate ideology and the
financial elite, their silence should come as no surprise. At
the same time, such policies have produced enormous economic hardships
and a diminished sense of agency that creates an enforced silence among
the most impoverished populations and often results in their inevitable
retreat from politics, especially in relation to voting in national elections.
In the current historical moment, language has increasingly forfeited
its obligation to a politics of truth, justice, equality and freedom,
and in doing so has turned cannibalistic and cruel. As political
horizons and public life wither under the assault of an emerging fascism
and a mainstream media that refuse to confront it, language appears to
fail in the presence of what Zygmunt Bauman called “the
emergence of modern barbarity.” A continuing series of crises —
political, cultural, economic and ecological — are translated into
emotional plagues of fear, lies and violence produced by right-wing
spectacles that have undermined the ability of the U.S. public to
address critically the endless attacks by tyrannical forces on
democratic ideas, values and institutions. Matters of historical
context, interconnections, informed judgment and critical analysis that
refuse to divorce themselves, in the words of Winifred Woodhull, “from social institutions and material relations of power and domination”
are either ignored or disappear from public view. Language in the age
of gangster capitalism and fascist politics is under siege, functioning
less as a vehicle of audacious truth and moral witnessing than as a tool
to purge democracy of its ideals. In the face of a politics of enforced
silence, the United States is experiencing an era marked by what Brad Evans calls “a closing of the political,” grounded in the assumption that “nothing can be done.”
The poisonous shadow of authoritarianism has entered the public
imagination in spectacular fashion as a normalized political discourse. A
boisterous creed of “annihilating nihilism” marked by a politics of
vacuousness, resentment, historical amnesia, self-interest and freedom
from responsibility has become a dominating force in U.S. politics. A
right-wing vocabulary of hatred, bigotry, lies and conspiracy theories
has produced a brutalizing politics whose rhetoric and polices echo a
dark and horrifying period of history 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. How
else to explain not only Trump’s public courting of white supremacists
and antisemites, such as Nick Fuentes and Kanye West, but also Nikki
Haley’s claim
that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War? Such comments reveal
the GOP’s fascist tendency not only to whitewash and seek to erase the
relevance of the history of racism, but also to endorse the poisonous
ideologies of white nationalism and white supremacy. As Czech dissident
Václav Havel once remarked, “the disorder of real history is replaced by
the orderliness of pseudo-history.… Instead of events, we are offered
non-events.”
Diverse social movements … produced a language that allows us to recognize ourselves as agents, not victims.
Extremist language that was once considered unimaginable and
relegated to fringe groups has been elevated to the center of power,
politics and everyday life. For instance, billionaire Elon Musk’s recent racist comments
echo the racial eugenicist movements in the U.S. in the 19th and 20th
centuries, from which Hitler took inspiration. Yet, little is said in
the mainstream press connecting Musk’s comments to a shameful past that
gave us the Tuskegee experiments and provided a rationale for Jim Crow
and racial segregation laws. Enforced silence is a tool for the
repression of history and the wiping out of historical consciousness and
memory, especially those moments in history we associate with
segregation, exploitation, disposability and genocide. Fascist discourse
is currently abetted and affirmed by ongoing public displays of the
detritus of fascist politics, which makes visible that which the United
States has forgotten and of which it should be ashamed — that is, a
society in which collective morality and the ethical imagination appear
to no longer matter.
Beyond bold and unapologetic public displays of fascist rhetoric,
beliefs and policies, there are relentless right-wing assaults against
democracy that are barely recognized in the media and in public
discourse for the danger they pose to democracy. A short list includes
book censorship, turning libraries into student detention centers,
voter suppression laws, threatening election workers, assaulting
reproductive rights, enacting cruel policies against queer and trans
people and harassing critical educators. In addition, schools are turned
into indoctrination centers, torrents of propaganda replace facts,
history is whitewashed, dissent is suppressed and those who provide
medical care to trans people and people in need of abortions are
criminalized.
These authoritarian aggressions have become embedded in United States
culture to the degree that they fail to garner any alarm or concern
from the wider public. As fascist beliefs, values and language multiply,
so do attacks by far right politicians, reactionary pundits and white
supremacists against diversity, equality and inclusion, all the while
promoting a white nationalist notion of who counts as a citizen. As Toni
Morrison once noted, this is a language constrained by the “weary and wearying vocabulary of racial domination.” It is “a dead language” trapped in sordid silence regarding the racist ideology that drives its claims to “exclusivity and dominance.”
A dangerous silence now often accompanies a language at war with
democratic ideals and the public imagination. This is an enforced
silence among the larger public that purposely mutes matters of critical
agency, moral responsibility, reason, justice and the demands of
keeping alive a substantive democracy. It is a language where moral
outrage disappears, is silenced or both, while concealing the danger
that this fascist language portends. This is a depoliticizing silence
that clouds lies and untruths in mindless theater, spectacles and a
flood of evasions. Under such circumstances, community is emptied of any
substance, reduced to notions of the social organized around the
merging of lies and violence. The loneliness and social atomization
produced under neoliberalism provide fodder for the dictatorial energies
that offer forms of the false promise of community rooted in hate,
bigotry and lies, often resulting in habitual ignorance to justice.
Mainstream institutions such as schools, the media and online platforms
that should trade in imaginative ideas and provide a critical culture
are under siege. One consequence is the breakdown of civic culture,
egalitarian values and politics itself. What many Americans fail to
realize is that this reactionary mode of silence is a form of complicity
that creates a political climate marked by cruelty, violence and
lawlessness. How else to explain the lack of public outrage against an
extremist Republican Party that rejects free summer lunch programs for
food-insecure youth, weakens child labor laws and restricts voting
rights?
Liberal and conservative Americans are immersed in a crisis of
silence that ignores the fact that politicians such as Trump embrace
totalitarian values — the language of dictators — and advocate for
violence as a tool of political opportunism. This is not to suggest that
all forms of silence function to erase the scourge of racism, white
supremacy and the misery imposed by neoliberal capitalism.
Silence can be contemplative, offer consolation, and provide the
space for close analysis, thinking critically and mobilizing modes of
critical agency. However, in an era marked by a massive flight from
ethical and political responsibility, a particular kind of administered
silence emerges, one that subverts any sense of critical agency and
abandons a more noble message regarding a warning of the dangers to come
and the lessons to be addressed. Under such conditions, silence
operates increasingly within oppressive relations of power. Tyrannical
relations of power are now at the center of U.S. politics and radiate a
contempt for dissent, integrity, compassion and liberty which, as Bauman
notes in his book Babel, ejects “any sense of critical agency and [refuses] to recognize the bonds we have with others.”
In the face of injustice, silence has become ethically mute, and exhibits a
dehumanizing indifference to human suffering in the midst of dangerous
politics. Enforced silence, both as a subjective stance and as a
political space of organized moral irresponsibility and self-deception,
increasingly legitimates and helps to produce a society that has lost
its moral bearings and wallows in a repudiation of civic courage and
human rights. This current politics of enforced silence is happening at a
time when many Americans seem oblivious to the threat posed to
democracy by Trump, the GOP, far right foundations, reactionary cultural
apparatuses and neoliberal educational institutions.
Silence today has become part
of a politics of disappearance where critical ideas are buried along
with dangerous memories, and the bodies of journalists, poets and those
who lead the fight against oppression in its diverse modes. As Spanish
painter Francisco Goya once warned
of the degree to which truth and informed judgments are overcome by
ignorance, superstition and falsehoods, “the sleep of reason produces
monsters.” Martin Luther King Jr. gave a contemporary valence to Goya’s
warning in his famous 1967 speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the
Silence.” His words alerted Americans to the dangers of refusing to
speak out in the face of militarism, racism and massive poverty. Stating
that “a time comes when silence is betrayal,” King was clear regarding
how the refusal to speak out eviscerates both the idea of democracy and
the promise of resisting the mobilizing passions of fascism, especially
militarism, poverty and racism. The challenge posed by King’s call to
resist a complicitous silence in the face of injustice is exceptionally
relevant today. At the heart of this challenge is the need to not only
make detectable the current threats to democracy but also to understand
how silence in the face of tyranny legitimates authoritarianism along
with the risks it poses to any viable notion of justice, equality and
freedom.
It is important to note that fascism not only arrives through the
language of hate, bigotry, dehumanization and military dictatorships as
it did in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s; it also arrives through the
everyday acceptance of an ethically debilitating silence. In the current
moment, such silence accompanies authoritarian threats to democracy. A
politics of silence facilitates a tsunami of manufactured ignorance
advanced by the repression of dissent, the cowardice of the mainstream
media, the unaccountability of social media platforms steeped in the
astonishing toxicity of hatred, and a disdain for equality, freedom and
truth in a society, notes Jonathan Crary, governed by the corrupting force of the billionaire elite.
Given the current threat posed
to U.S. democracy, enforced silence should be analyzed within the
uniquely current threats to liberty, basic human rights and equality
that sabotage any viable notion of democracy. Such a challenge is
especially crucial at a time when the habits of democracy are being
replaced by what David Graeber called
the “habits of oligarchy, as though no other politics are possible.”
The politics of silence increasingly works through multiple sites and
seemingly contrasting impulses, often aligning itself with a reactionary
disdain for the public good. In part, it does so by refusing to address
the growing (yet to some, seemingly unrelated) issues of Trump’s full
embrace of fascist politics, the growing attacks on freedom of
expression and the struggle for social justice.
This is all the more reason to reclaim the language of the common
good; to protect public and higher education from a fascist takeover; to
reject the privatization of public goods; expand the power of unions
and the rights of workers, people of color, women, immigrants, queer and
trans people, and all those others considered excess and disposable.
The plague of silence has to be broken so as to inject the struggle for
human rights back into the language of politics, and to fight for a
socialist democracy built on the anti-capitalist values of equality,
social justice, liberty and human dignity. The words of Frederick
Douglass are prescient here and worth remembering. He writes:
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to
favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without
plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They
want the ocean without the roar of its mighty waters.
If the plague of silence is to be overcome, Americans need to tap
into a language that makes clear that they will not look away or refuse
to stand up in the face of fascist aggression. The brilliant writer
Maaza Mengiste argues
for such a language with his call for a vocabulary that “will take us
from shock and stunned silence toward a coherent, visceral speech, one
as strong as the force that is charging at us.”
Fortunately, especially since the Occupy movement in 2011, a number
of social movements have emerged to provide a language that both exposes
and makes the ruthless power of the financial elite and other
anti-democratic forces accountable through a discourse of critique and
hope. The Occupy movement made the discourse of inequality and class
differences a more central part of a national political narrative. In
the last decade, workers have used the language of economic justice,
solidarity and fair play to reenergize the labor movement. The
resurgence of the labor movement provided a discourse that exposes how
neoliberalism benefits the wealthy and privileged.
Silence has
become the language through which people are either depoliticized or are
willingly complicit with the economic and racial forces of
totalitarianism.
Meanwhile movements such as the movement for Black lives have
highlighted the language of structural racism along with making visible a
history of slavery, racial abuse and police violence, and crafting a
nuanced and multidimensional discourse of liberation.
The #MeToo movement created new discourses to make visible the
pervasive extent of sexual assault, violence and harassment across a
wide variety of sites and greatly advanced gender justice.
The abolitionist movement has provided a contextual and relational
language highlighting the punitive nature of highly racialized criminal
legal system and the carceral state while instituting a national
movement to defund the police.
Trans and queer people have invigorated a movement and language that
critiques the right-wing weaponization of marginalized and ostracized
identities.
Climate activists have exposed the danger fossil fuels pose to the
planet, and how the most vulnerable populations, especially Black and
Brown communities, pay a heavy price for the abuses of the oil and gas
industries. In doing so, they have inserted the language of climate
justice into the public sphere and made clear how capitalism is creating
a murderous future for human beings by destroying the environment.
Black and Brown theorists working with the idea of intersectionality have provided a new language highlighting
how every social movement is “shaped by multiple intersecting
inequalities and power dynamics,” which draw “attention to unmarked
categories” of both oppression and resistance. All of these movements
have imaginatively offered a new language of politics and continue to
further expand and sharpen such discourses.
Equally promising is the increased political activism of young
people, who are voicing a language and pedagogy of disruption, critique
and possibility. As I stated more than a decade ago in Truthout,
theirs is a language “that recognizes that there is no viable politics
without will and awareness and that critical education motivates and
provides a crucial foundation for understanding and intervening in the
world.” Young people recognize that they have been written out of the
script of democracy for too long and are now creating spaces and
enacting a language in which to expand individual and social agency
through collective forms of resistance as starting points to build a new
democratic social order.
Fortified with the energy and language of these dynamic movements, it
is incumbent upon the broader left and its various social movements to
continue to develop a language that not only highlights social
injustices but also includes a vocabulary that moves people, allows them
to feel compassion for “the other” and gives them the courage to talk
back. Beyond highlighting the wide range of social injustices, all of us
on the left must continue to develop a vocabulary that speaks to
people’s needs in a way that is moving, affirming, recognizable and
enables them to confront the burden of conscience in the face of the
unspeakable, and to do so with a sense of dignity, self-reflection and
the courage to act individually and collectively in the service of a
radical democracy.
One important contribution of these diverse social movements is that
they all produced a language that allows us to recognize ourselves as
agents, not victims. In doing so, they have expanded the discourse of
radical democratic politics. Of course, there is more at stake here than
a struggle over meaning; there is also the struggle over power, over
the need to create a formative culture that will produce new modes of
critical agency and contribute to a broad social movement that will
translate meaning into a fierce struggle for economic, political and
racial equality. While there is a new energy among youth and a number of
powerful social movements, there is the ongoing challenge of
confronting with renewed vigor a culture of silence and indifference
that has become the most powerful educational force of the emerging
fascism.
Writing about the civil rights struggles of the ‘60s, Martin Luther
King Jr. was prescient in acknowledging that the tyranny and violence of
authoritarianism feeds on silence, moral apathy and the collapse of
conscience. Given the fierce urgency of the times, the struggle against
an enforced silence is especially crucial when people refuse to speak up
in the face of injustice. Silence
has become the language through which people are either depoliticized
or are willingly complicit with the economic and racial forces of
totalitarianism. As King notes, it is the language of those “who accept evil without protesting against it.”
The new social movements in the face of an emerging fascism have done
us a great theoretical and political favor in making clear that any
viable mode of resistance must embrace a language that translates into
power — a critical language that expands the power of education, agency
and resistance. This is a language that imaginatively rethinks the
forces of militarism, capitalism, racism and sexism in light of the
dramatic changes taking place technologically, culturally and
politically. There will be no justice or democracy in the United States
unless a mass multiclass social movement emerges that combines political
and individual rights with economic rights — that joins a movement for
gender and racial equality with a movement for economic justice.
At the same time, many new social movements need to further a
language that is not only theoretical and critical but also passionate.
In many ways, they do this, but a politics of passion needs a greater
place in their politics. Central to such a language is a politics of
emotion that addresses what Ruth Ben-Ghiat refers to as communities of
belonging. This is a language that invites joy while mobilizing emotions
that embrace compassion, justice and hope. What might be called a
politics of identification and emotion is particularly important at a
time when many people living in a neoliberal society are atomized,
feeling alienated, lonely, invisible, and subject to far right emotional
appeals to forms of allegiance rooted in hatred, bigotry and a
poisonous nationalism.
Anand Giridharads claims
that today’s left is often too cerebral and too suspicious of what he
calls empowering emotional appeals. He writes that much of the left
today is “suspicious of the politics of passion” and “doesn’t do
emotional appeals,” adding:
Can those who defend the rule of law and pluralism and economic
justice and human rights not only articulate those ideas but also appeal
to the more basic human needs to belong, to have anxieties soothed, to
have fears answered, to feel hope, or just to feel something at
the end of bleak and tedious days?… In an era [of anxiety and future
dread] such as this, leaving the politics of emotion, of passion, to
aspiring autocrats is a dangerous abdication.
It is worth emphasizing that the struggle against fascism and for a
socialist democracy will not take place if education is not made central
to politics. Any attempt to further the language of social, economic
and racial justice will not be effective if it does not construct a
language of critique, possibility and desire. We need a language that
pedagogically moves people, makes power visible and creates communities
of belonging, justice and compassion. We need to continue to fight
aggressively the plague of silence with what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues
is “the power to think the absent.” It is only then that a critical
public consciousness can be awakened, and a multiracial working-class
movement can begin to bring into fruition a democratically socialist
society.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Henry A. Giroux currently
holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public
Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo
Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent
books include: American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism (City Lights, 2018); The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); and Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s Board of Directors.
Trump Is A Pied Piper by Liza Donnelly January 23, 2024
Substack: Seeing Things
Waiting on the results of the New Hampshire primary, I thought,
what’s really bothering me about this election? Lots of things, but one
is the blind following of Trump; it really perplexes me. So I tried to
think of a visual to express my utter confoundment. Those who now
support him think, he’ll fix the broken economy, he knows what he’s
doing, he’s strong, he will keep us safe (i.e. keep immigrants out), or
“he cares for us/me.” “He understands me.” GOP politicians who fall in
line are simply doing so because the want power, lacking any sense of
moral compass. Trump is such a master at manipulating people, it’s
frightening. Is this really our country?
Trump is a malicious
pied piper. We all vaguely know the tale of the pied piper, but I
looked it up to be sure. The Meriam-Webster dictionary defines the pied
piper as “one that offers strong but delusive enticement.” And then of
course I added to the imagery by making the MAGA followers sheep. I
could have added a lot more sheep, of course. I even considered having
dollar signs coming out of the flute, but that’s not quite
right…although I think many follow him because they think he’s
successful when in fact he has simply lied and manipulated to make it
appear he’s rich. Anyway, since when do we care if a leader is rich?!
That money rules in this country, over democracy, is beyond worrisome
I really wish Trump does very poorly tonight. Right now, it’s difficult to know...
[Seeing Things is a reader-supported publication on Substack]
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Liza Donnelly is an American cartoonist and writer, best known for her work in The New Yorker since 1982, the author of fifteen books and an accomplished public speaker.
Guest: Adam Shatz is the author of the new biography The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon.
He is also the US editor of the London Review of Books and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and other
publications. His podcast is called Myself & Others.
The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon by Adam Shatz Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024
[Publication date: January 23, 2024]
Named a most anticipated book of 2024 by Foreign Policy | Lit Hub | The Millions
"Nimble and engrossing. . . [An] exemplary work of public intellectualism." ―Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post
A revelatory biography of the writer-activist who inspired today’s movements for social and racial justice
In
the era of Black Lives Matter, Frantz Fanon’s shadow looms larger than
ever. He was the intellectual activist of the postcolonial era, and his
writings about race, revolution, and the psychology of power continue to
shape radical movements across the world. In this searching biography,
Adam Shatz tells the story of Fanon’s stunning journey, which has all
the twists of a Cold War-era thriller. Fanon left his modest home in
Martinique to fight in the French Army during World War II; when the war
was over, he fell under the influence of Existentialism while studying
medicine in Lyon and trying to make sense of his experiences as a Black
man in a white city. Fanon went on to practice a novel psychiatry of
“dis-alienation” in rural France and Algeria, and then join the Algerian
independence struggle, where he became a spokesman, diplomat, and
clandestine strategist. He died in 1961, while under the care of the CIA
in a Maryland hospital. Today, Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and The
Wretched of the Earth have become canonical texts of the Black and
global radical imagination, comparable to James Baldwin’s essays in
their influence. And yet they are little understood. In The Rebel’s
Clinic, Shatz offers a dramatic reconstruction of Fanon’s extraordinary
life―and a guide to the books that underlie today’s most vital efforts
to challenge white supremacy and racial capitalism.
Includes 8 pages of black-and-white photographs
REVIEWS:
"[A]
nimble and engrossing new book . . . As Shatz shows in this exemplary
work of public intellectualism, in which he does not sugarcoat or
simplify, [Fanon] was every bit as much a victim of empire as the
patients he worked to heal." ―Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post
"Absorbing
. . . Shatz [. . .] is a mostly steady hand in turbulent waters. His
chosen title highlights a side of Fanon that often gets eclipsed by the
larger-than-life image of the zealous partisan ― that of the caring
doctor . . . What gives “The Rebel’s Clinic” its intellectual heft is
Shatz’s willingness to write into such tensions." ―Jennifer Szalai, The
New York Times Book Review
“Excellent
and thought-provoking . . . All too timely . . . The Rebel’s Clinic
should be read by anyone who wants a deeper understanding of the
intellectual origins of today’s ‘decolonial left,’ whether they
sympathize with it or not.” ―Adam Kirsch, Air Mail
"[An]
insightful biography . . . Shatz is a sober and informed guide [to
Fanon]. He is an erudite writer, [and] his frequent detours into the
intellectual currents that surrounded Fanon―from existentialism and the
francophone black consciousness movement Négritude to Algerians’ varying
attitudes to FLN tactics―are useful." ―Daniel Trilling, Financial Times
"[A]
perceptive biography . . . Elucidating the ideas and figures that
animated Fanon’s thinking, [. . .] the nuanced narrative skillfully
illuminates how the disparate threads of Fanon’s life fit together . . .
Shatz also provides discerning commentary on Fanon’s two masterworks . .
. A striking appraisal of a towering thinker." ―Publishers Weekly
"[A]
thoroughly researched biography . . . The Rebel’s Clinic is a deep
meditation on the transformative power and influence of one radical
philosophical writer on the continuing fight for justice on many
fronts." ―Booklist (starred review) "The
Rebel's Clinic is a diligent, scrupulous, serious book. Adam Shatz
keeps Fanon alive as one of us―a human being―not simply the
larger-than-life subject of an academic study. This book offers a
careful reconstruction of Fanon's times, especially the war in Algeria,
and resonates at a moment when we are tragically no closer to solving
the problems Fanon dedicated his life and writing to understanding."
―John Edgar Wideman, author of Fanon and Look for Me and I'll Be Gone
"Frantz
Fanon has found his Isaac Deutscher in Adam Shatz. Politically and
psychologically suave, The Rebel’s Clinic is as illuminating on the
tragic pattern of Fanon’s private life as on the tumultuous continents
through which he moved. It is also continuously insightful about Fanon's
tormentingly complicated intellectual bequest on the crucial subjects
of race and empire." ―Pankaj Mishra, author of Run and Hide and From the
Ruins of Empire
"Adam Shatz offers a richly detailed account of
the life and thought of Frantz Fanon. It is at once an intimate and
unsparing portrait of the complexities of Fanon’s life as psychiatrist
and militant political activist, and a vivid depiction of the
anti-colonial struggles in which he engaged. We get a close look at
internal conflicts among revolutionaries, as Fanon makes his way from
Martinique to Algeria to sub-Saharan Africa. Shatz’s masterful command
of the history of that moment of promise in the early 1960s is
compelling, indeed gripping reading. This is a book that gives deep
insight not only into the life and times of Fanon, but also into the
ways in which the history he lived was made." ―Joan W. Scott, professor
emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study
"The Rebel's Clinic
is a triumph, a sweeping work of intellectual history that is also an
intimate biography of a remarkable thinker and historical figure. It is
beautifully written, deftly constructed, rigorous and illuminating. This
is a book that will last and be read for many years." ―Eyal Press,
author of Dirty Work
"The Rebel’s Clinic is a fabulous book.
Frantz Fanon’s life as portrayed by Adam Shatz is a breathtaking love
and jealousy ridden encounter with philosophy, politics, and literature,
taking place in the last days of European empires." ―Ivan Krastev,
author of Is It Tomorrow Yet? and co-author of The Light that Failed
"Adam
Shatz has captured Fanon's evolution as a thinker by linking this
proud, fastidious man's interiority to a complex network of contexts:
family, war, art, psychiatry, existentialism, black America, left-wing
Catholicism and, most of all, African poetics. The result is the most
subtle, comprehensive and lucid study yet to appear in English.Shatz has
the gift of explanation without simplification." ―Declan Kiberd, author
of Inventing Ireland
"More than a biography, Adam Shatz’s The
Rebel’s Clinic is a rich and textured portrait of the intellectual and
political worlds that shaped Frantz Fanon’s life, ideas, and legacies.
Readers who know Fanon’s work intimately as well as those just
discovering this iconic figure of Third World revolution will learn from
this book." ―Adom Getachew, author of Worldmaking after Empire: The
Rise and Fall of Self-Determination
"Adam Shatz sweeps us up in
Frantz Fanon's life-as-road movie, with a cast of characters and an
array of settings that come alive on the page, from Sartre and Beauvoir
in Copacabana to Patrice Lumumba in the suburbs of Léopoldville. At the
same time, with his unequaled mastery of geopolitics and world-spanning
ideas, he has given us an intellectual history of a century of
revolutionary aspirations. The Rebel's Clinic is a what is to be done
for our times." ―Alice Kaplan, author of The Collaborator and Looking
for The Stranger
"The Rebel's Clinic is a fascinating and
enlightening read, one that will speak to many and that will help
correct misconceptions about Fanon. This book not only provides a full
picture of its subject; it also inspires the reader to apply Fanon's
insights to situations that transcend his life and times. Adam Shatz has
written an important book that speaks to our troubled and confusing
moment." ―Raja Shehadeh, Orwell Prize–winning author of We Could Have
Been Friends, My Father and I
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Adam Shatz is the US editor of the London Review of Books and a
contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of
Books, The New Yorker, and other publications. He is the author of
Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination and the host
of the podcast Myself with Others. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
The International Court of Justice has just issued preliminary measures against Israel for the crime of genocide in Gaza. The ruling follows weeks of anticipation and months of international outcry for Israel to face accountability from the UN. While much remains undetermined, this is a critical development in a time when the integrity of international institutions has been thrown into crisis by their ineffectiveness in the face of Israel's slaughter.
Former director of the New York Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights Craig Mokhiber, who resigned from his position last fall in protest of what he called the UN's "failure" to protect Palestinians, joins The Chris Hedges Report for a discussion on the weaknesses of the UN in the face of US and Israeli impunity.
Editor's note: This interview was recorded prior to the Jan. 26 ICJ ruling.
Studio Production: Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Watch The Chris Hedges Report live YouTube premiere on The Real News Network every Friday at 12PM ET: https://therealnews.com/chris-hedges-...
Listen to episode podcasts and find bonus content at The Chris Hedges Report
A
Palestinian woman cries as she sits next to her girl wounded in the
Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip while receiving treatment at the
Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, Southern Gaza Strip, Jan. 22, 2024.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said Friday that the territory’s death toll
has climbed to more than 26,000 people with more than 64,400 wounded in
more than three months of war.
The ministry said early Friday that in the last 24 hours, 183
Palestinians have been killed in Israeli strikes and 377 have been
injured.
The Israeli military said it is investigating an attack on Thursday
that killed at least 20 people and wounded another 150 at a traffic
circle in Gaza City as Palestinians waited for humanitarian aid, Hamas
health officials said.
Also in central Gaza, Palestinian health officials said a nighttime
Israeli airstrike on a house in Al-Nusseirat refugee camp killed six
people.
The death toll from a Wednesday strike on a United Nations training
center in Khan Younis in southern Gaza has risen to 12, with more than
75 wounded, according to Thomas White, a senior official with the United
Nations agency for Palestinian refugees.
The U.N. relief agency did not directly blame Israel, although
earlier it had said the facility was hit by tank fire and Israel is the
only force with tanks in Gaza’s second-largest city. The Israeli
military said it had "currently ruled out" that the strike was carried
out by its aircraft or artillery but that it was still investigating the
attack.
It said the building might have been hit by a Hamas rocket.
The fighting is part of Israel’s efforts to end Hamas’ control of the
Gaza Strip since the October 7 attack, when Hamas militants invaded
southern Israel, killed about 1,200 people and took about 250 people
hostage.
The fighting has severely disrupted the flow of humanitarian aid into
Gaza, and the international charity ActionAid said on Thursday that
hunger there has reached catastrophic levels, prompting people to grind
animal feed to use as flour.
A Palestinian woman bakes bread as children sit
next to her, while Gaza residents face crisis levels of hunger and
soaring malnutrition, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, Jan.
24, 2024.
“Famine is looming across the territory,” ActionAid said in a
statement, “while pockets of famine are strongly suspected in the north,
where it is extremely challenging for aid to reach.”
ActionAid also reports water is so scarce that people in Gaza have
access to only 1.5 to 2 liters of water per day for all their needs,
including sanitation.
Adding to the misery, the United Nations said the weather has turned rainy and chilly, raising fears of illness.
"It was entirely predictable at this time of the year, and risks
making an already unsanitary situation completely uninhabitable for the
people. Most have no more clothes or blankets," said Ajith Sunghay, head
of the U.N. Human Rights Office for the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government has created a channel with Israel to
discuss concerns about incidents in Gaza in which civilians have been
killed or wounded by Israeli attacks, and civilian infrastructure has
been targeted, according to a Thursday report by Reuters.
The channel was established after a meeting earlier this month
between U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Israel’s war Cabinet.
A senior U.N. official called Thursday for "every measure" to be
taken to protect civilians, following the Wednesday attack at the Khan
Younis training center, where thousands of displaced Palestinians have
been staying.
The U.N.’s White said the situation in Khan Younis shows a
"consistent failure to uphold the fundamental principles of humanitarian
law."
Holding up Israeli flags people take part in a
protest against humanitarian aid entering Gaza and against the hostages
exchange deal with Hamas, in Jerusalem, Jan. 25, 2024.
"Persistent attacks on civilian sites in Khan Younis are utterly
unacceptable and must stop immediately," White said. "People are being
killed and injured. As fighting intensifies around hospitals and
shelters hosting the displaced, people are trapped inside, and
lifesaving operations are impeded."
The United States, which has been a key Israeli ally in its war against Hamas, condemned the training center attack.
State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said, "You've heard me say it
before, you've heard [Secretary of State Antony Blinken] say it before,
but civilians must be protected, and the protected nature of U.N.
facilities must be respected. And humanitarian workers must be protected
so that they can continue providing civilians with the life-saving
humanitarian assistance that they need."
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the U.N.’s Palestinian relief agency,
said the Khan Younis compound had been clearly marked as a U.N.
facility, and its coordinates had been shared with Israeli authorities.
The head of the World Health Organization called for a cease-fire to
the conflict in an address to the organization’s governing body
Thursday, during which he described the conditions in Gaza as “hellish.”
Palestinians mourn a relative killed in the
Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip outside a morgue in Khan Younis,
Jan. 22, 2024.
“War doesn't bring solution, except more war, more hatred, more
agony, more destruction. So, let's choose peace and resolve this issue
politically," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the
WHO Executive Board in Geneva.
The U.S. and some Middle East countries are trying to negotiate a new
cease-fire to halt the fighting, perhaps for 30 days, to allow the
release of more hostages and the release of jailed Palestinians held by
Israel. About 100 hostages held by Hamas and 240 Palestinians jailed by
Israel were freed in a late November week-long cease-fire.
But no new cease-fire agreement has been reached.
Some information for this report was provided by The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against."
W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963)
"There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent. "
James Baldwin (1924-1987)
"Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society."
Aimé Césaire (1913-2008)
"A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization."
Nina Simone (1933-2003)
"There's no other purpose, so far as I'm concerned, for us except to reflect the times, the situations around us and the things we're able to say through our art, the things that millions of people can't say. I think that's the function of an artist and, of course, those of us who are lucky leave a legacy so that when we're dead, we also live on. That's people like Billie Holiday and I hope that I will be that lucky, but meanwhile, the function, so far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times, whatever that might be."
Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973)
"Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone's head. They are fighting to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children ....Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories..." .
Angela Davis (b. 1944)
"The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?”
Duke Ellington (1899-1974)
“Jazz is the freest musical expression we have yet seen. To me, then, jazz means simply freedom of musical speech! And it is precisely because of this freedom that so many varied forms of jazz exist. The important thing to remember, however, is that not one of these forms represents jazz by itself. Jazz simply means the freedom to have many forms.”
Amiri Baraka (1934-2014)
"Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is."
Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” --August 3, 1857
Cecil Taylor (1929-2018)
“Musical categories don’t mean anything unless we talk about the actual specific acts that people go through to make music, how one speaks, dances, dresses, moves, thinks, makes love...all these things. We begin with a sound and then say, what is the function of that sound, what is determining the procedures of that sound? Then we can talk about how it motivates or regenerates itself, and that’s where we have tradition.”
Ella Baker (1903-1986)
"Strong people don't need strong leaders"
Paul Robeson (1898-1976)
"The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative."
John Coltrane (1926-1967)
"I want to be a force for real good. In other words, I know there are bad forces. I know that there are forces out here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good."
Miles Davis (1926-1991)
"Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around."
C.L.R. James (1901-1989)
"All development takes place by means of self-movement, not organization by external forces. It is within the organism itself (i.e. within the society) that there must be realized new motives, new possibilities."
Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)
"Now, political education means opening minds, awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence as [Aime] Cesaire said, it is 'to invent souls.' To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them."
Edward Said (1935-2003)
“I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for."
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)
“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. There must be pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.”
Susan Sontag (1933-2004)
"Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager."
Kofi Natambu, editor of The Panopticon Review, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He is the author of a biography MALCOLM X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: THE MELODY NEVER STOPS (Past Tents Press) and INTERVALS (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of SOLID GROUND: A NEW WORLD JOURNAL, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology NOSTALGIA FOR THE PRESENT (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
