Quote

The alternative position to whether torture is acceptable - that's not an alternative position, that's barbarism. The question here is not whether torture is acceptable or whether it works. It should be simply seen as a war crime. There's no other position on torture.

Henry Giroux

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Henry Giroux
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 18
Journalist
Teacher
Providence
Rhode Island
Question
Simply
Barbarism
Seen
Alternative
Whether
Acceptable
War
Torture
Crime
Works
Position

More quotes by Henry Giroux

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You had workers' movements. You had left organizations, the Communist Party, that were mobilizing in profoundly powerful ways to basically address the great injustices of capitalism.
Henry Giroux
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State violence, particularly the use of torture, abductions, and targeted assassinations are now justified as part of a state of exception in which a political culture of hyper-punitiveness has become normalized. Revealing itself in a blatant display of unbridled arrogance and power, it is unchecked by any sense of either conscience or morality.
Henry Giroux
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Very little appears to escape the infantilizing and moral vacuity of the market.
Henry Giroux
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We need to get rid of the growing army of temporary workers now filling the ranks of academy. This is scandalous it weakens both the power of the faculty and exploits these workers.
Henry Giroux
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The pedagogy of authoritarianism is alive and well in the United States, and its repression of public memory takes place not only through the screen culture and institutional apparatuses of conformity, but is also reproduced through a culture of fear and a carceral state that imprisons more people than any other country in the world.
Henry Giroux
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Any dominant ideology operates off the assumption that what it has to say is unaccountable and unquestionable.
Henry Giroux
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Any collective struggle that matters has to embrace education as the center of politics and the source of an embryonic vision of the good life outside of the imperatives of predatory capitalism.
Henry Giroux
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In the United States the state monopoly on the use of violence has intensified since the 1980s, and in the process, has been increasingly directed against young people, low-income whites, poor minorities, immigrants, and women.
Henry Giroux
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Young black men are not only being arrested and channeled into the criminal justice system in record numbers, they are also being targeted by the police, harassed by security forces, and in some instances killed because they are black and assumed to be dangerous.
Henry Giroux
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Trump erases the ability to recognize suffering and to try to understand the conditions that produce it, the ability to become a moral witness in the face of injustices. Trump erases that. Trump appeals to a population in which that becomes irrelevant. And that is so dangerous, at this particular time.
Henry Giroux
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If the ongoing struggles waged by young people are to matter, demonstrations and protests must give way to more sustainable organizations that develop alternative communities, autonomous forms of worker control, collective forms of health care, models of direct democracy and emancipatory modes of education.
Henry Giroux
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The rise of the punishing state and the governing-through-crime youth complex throughout American society suggests the need for a politics that not only negates the established order but imagines a new one, one informed by a radical vision in which the future does not imitate the present.
Henry Giroux
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Poor minorities live in a new age of Jim Crow, one in which the ravages of segregation, racism, poverty and dashed hopes are amplified by the forces of privatization, financialization, militarization and criminalization, fashioning a new architecture of punishment, massive human suffering and authoritarianism.
Henry Giroux
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Schools resemble the culture of prisons.
Henry Giroux
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Pedagogy is not about training, it is about critically educating people to be self reflective, capable of critically address their relationship with others and with the larger world. Pedagogy in this sense provides not only important critical and intellectual competencies it also enables people to intervene critically in the world.
Henry Giroux
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Within the United States especially, the often violent response to nonviolent forms of youth protests must be analyzed within the framework of a mammoth military-industrial state and its commitment to war and the militarization of the entire society.
Henry Giroux
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I mean, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, the Black Lives Movement, it's very difficult to, in a sense, especially since the 1980s, to talk about what the social contract is and what it means, and what it means to celebrate public goods, what it means to make, create social investments.
Henry Giroux
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The value of making young people stupid, subject to an educational deficit has enormous currency in a society in which existing relations of power are normalized. Under such conditions, those who hold power accountable are reviewed as treasonous while critically engaged young people are denounced as un-American.
Henry Giroux
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I think we're in a very distinctively different historical moment. I mean, I think that you had two things that were operating in the 1930s that seem to be, in many ways, to have been weakened or disappeared. And of course the beginning of the 21st century, I mean, you have - at one level you had massive social movements.
Henry Giroux
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Once ignorance is weaponized, violence seems to be a tragic inevitability.
Henry Giroux