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Resist and Speak out Loudly

Biggest Land Grab After Columbus

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By Devinder Sharma

I think the eulogisation of Tata's has gone too far. Behind all the glamour, sobriety and humanitariasm that we read and hear about Tata's, there is a dark hidden side which is kept under wraps. It is time we look at the destructive role Tata's have played over the years in uprooting thousands of poor families, and the resulting destruction of livelihoods and the environment.

To overcome their guilt, and that too aimed at pacifying the liberal voices in the urban centres, I am sure Ratan Tata would be thinking of setting up schools and funding some NGO activities in the tribal lands as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).

What a sophisticated way to cover your dark underbelly !

I was quite taken aback today to see a frontpage headline in The Hindustan Times: The biggest land grab after Columbus. As the blurb says: Government report criticises corporate exploitation of tribal lands; tribals turn to new friends: Maoist. And if you remember only a few days back, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had publicly accepted, and made a promise: "The systemic exploitation of our tribal communities can no longer be tolerated."

Do you think Manmohan Singh will do anything to stop this? You bet, he will simply push for more such projects that will eventually destroy the social fabric of these tribal lands. If you think I am wrong, let us take the land-grab in Bedanji, a remote rural expanse in Bastar in Chhatisgarh, as a test case. The Tata's plan to set up a Rs 19,500 crore steel plant for which ten villages have to be emtied.

Interestingly, a report of the PM-appointed Ministry of Rural Development committee on Land Reforms has succintly said: "This open declared war will go down as the biggest land grab ever, if it plays out as per the script." The Hindustan Times report quotes the just-released government report warning against the corporate takeover in the Bastar hinterland: "The biggest grab of tribal lands after Columbus."

You can read the full news report here:
http://www.hindustantimes.com/The-biggest-land-grab-
after-Columbus/H1-Article3-476125.aspx

I was reading another detailed field report from Pravin Patel, a human rights activist. It tells you how the State government is helping facilitate the process of the massive takeover of tribal lands. It tells you how the official machinery has actually been hand in glove with the industrial houses to ruthlessly exploit the tribals.

This is what he writes: In Chattisgarh the tribal district Batar, District administration has played in the hands of house of Tatas by way of stage managed public hearing bluntly violating the norms and set procedures as laid down in the Notification to grant Environmental Clearances.

By making mockey of the conditions of the Notification where Public Hearing is a mandatory requirement where consultation with the likely affected villagers are held. But to fulfill this mandatory requirements, public hearing was held at the campus of the district collector, which is at a distance of about 30 Kms from the project area. This was done with mischivious motives as it is known to all that the villagers are strongly opposing the setting up of any steel plant in their area.

The entire drama was enacted to show off that the mandatory public hearing is held. This has proved to be nothing less than a puppet show of the district administration where except the most of the tribals who are residents of the villages to be affected, all others were present whom the project proponent hired or managed with the help of District Administration to dance to the tunes of the project proponent house of Tatas.

You may like to read his full report. Please click on:
http://mail.google.com/mail/?hl=en&shva=
1#inbox/124f0af3377e6531

And finally, what does all this translate into. Well, you guessed it right. The tribals have no one else to seek solace and help from, except Maoists. What to talk of help, no one is willing to even listen to them except the Maoist. No wonder, Naxalism is growing.

As Gandhian Himanshu Kumar said the other day in an interview with the Times of India, (Nov 13, 2009) : Salwa Judum saw a 22-fold increase in Maoist numbers. Green Hunt will result in genocide of Adivasis. Those who survive will become Naxalites.
(Read the interview: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/opinion/edit-page/
Green-Hunt-will-result-in-genocide-of-Adivasis/articleshow/5223813.cms)

How true? But do you think anyone cares, least of all Manmohan Singh? Ha, he is more hinged to the GDP than the welfare of the human beings that he represents. With Tata's investing Rs 19,500-crore, which will add to the GDP, and that will be his government's report card.

Nobel for Promises and Promises?

by Howard Zinn

I was dismayed when I heard Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize. A shock, really, to think that a president carrying on wars in two countries and launching military action in a third country (Pakistan), would be given a peace prize. But then I recalled that Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Kissinger had all received Nobel Peace Prizes. The Nobel Committee is famous for its superficial estimates and for its susceptibility to rhetoric and empty gestures, while ignoring blatant violations of world peace.

Yes, Wilson gets credit for the League of Nations - that ineffectual body which did nothing to prevent war. But he also bombarded the Mexican coast, sent troops to occupy Haiti and the Dominican Republic and brought the US into the slaughterhouse of Europe in the first World War - surely, among stupid and deadly wars, at the top of the list.

Sure, Theodore Roosevelt brokered a peace between Japan and Russia. But he was a lover of war, who participated in the US conquest of Cuba, pretending to liberate it from Spain while fastening US chains around that tiny island. And as president he presided over the bloody war to subjugate the Filipinos, even congratulating a US general who had just massacred 600 helpless villagers in the Phillipines. The Committee did not give the Nobel Prize to Mark Twain, who denounced Roosevelt and criticized the war, nor to William James, leader of the anti-imperialist league.

Oh yes, the Committee saw fit to give a peace prize to Henry Kissinger, because he signed the final agreement ending the war in Vietnam, of which he had been one of the architects. Kissinger, who obsequiously went along with Nixon's expansion of the war with the bombing of peasant villages in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Kissinger, who matches the definition of a war criminal very accurately, was given a peace prize!

People should not be given a peace prize on the basis of promises they have made (as with Obama, an eloquent maker of promises) but on the basis of actual accomplishments towards ending war. Obama has continued deadly, inhuman military action in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Nobel Peace Committee should retire, and turn over its huge funds to some international peace organization which is not awed by stardom and rhetoric, and which has some understanding of history.

--------

Howard Zinn is a historian, playwright and social activist, and has received the Thomas Merton Award, the Eugene V. Debs Award, the Upton Sinclair Award and the Lannan Literary Award. He is perhaps best known for "A People's History of the United States."

Gandhi Today

Oct 03, 2009

By Ted Glick

"Somewhere there's a sweet spot, that produces enough without tipping over into the hyper-individualism that drives our careening, unsatisfying economy. The mix of regulation and values that might make such self-restraint more common is, of course, as hard to create in China as in the United States; far simpler just to bless an every-man-for-himself economy and step aside. But creating those values, and the laws and customs that will slowly evolve from them, may be the key task of our time here and around the world."
- Bill McKibben, Deep Economy

140 years today Mohandus Gandhi was born in Gujarat province in India. I didn't learn this from the New York Times, CNN, or any other mainstream media source. I didn't learn about it from progressive media outlets, although it is very possible that one or more of them publicized it and I missed it.

I learned about this as a result of being invited to speak yesterday at William Patterson University in northern New Jersey by a professor who organized a program about Gandhi's relevance for today. Thanks to Balmurli Natrajan, Director of the Gandhian Forum for Peace and Justice, I've spent the last few days reflecting on this question.

When I was asked this question directly at yesterday's forum, what came to mind is this: Gandhi is important, is of continuing relevance, because he wasn't just a great, if imperfect, leader of India's successful struggle for independence from colonial Britain. He is important because he understood that it was necessary for him personally, and for his people, to be about the process of personal and cultural change if they were to have a chance of truly lasting, truly revolutionary change, in the best sense of the term.

Gandhi did his best to live a life which reflected the values of justice and love which he understood were central to the teachings of all great spiritual leaders. He went on fasts that were directed not just against the British but for his own people, calling upon them to refuse to mimic English violence and repression in their struggle for independence.

The words of Gandhi that I have used most often over the years are these: "Fasting is the sincerest form of prayer." I've used them as I've learned their truth, as I've learned about prayer, during long fasts that I've undertaken in connection with the campaign to free Leonard Peltier, against the Iraq war and for strong government action to address the climate crisis.

There's another fast very much in the Gandhian spiritual and political tradition that will be taking place about a month from now, a Climate Justice Fast (http://www.climatejusticefast.org). This is a fast initiated by young people in Australia, Europe and elsewhere specifically directed at the leaders of the world's governments as they move toward the Dec. 7-18 international meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark to try to come up with a stronger climate treaty than the Kyoto Protocol. As I write, things are not looking good at all that they will do what is needed.

Anna Keenan, youth climate activist and one of the initiators of this fast, wrote yesterday about Gandhi. She began with a quote of his, that "the world has enough for everyone's needs but not for everyone's greed." She went on to "share another great Gandhi quote: 'Under certain circumstances, fasting is the one weapon God has given us for use in times of utter helplessness.' In just over a month, on the last day of the Barcelona[climate] talks [November 6], I and other activists around the world will be beginning the Climate Justice Fast and continuing until Copenhagen [over 40 days, on water only].

"While the concept of the fast may shock some, it will be a non-violent, morally forceful and peaceful action, and is perhaps one of the few types of action that we have available to us that is capable of deeply communicating the gravity of the situation that we now find ourselves in, both in terms of the profound disaster of unchecked climate change and the profound opportunity provided by the Copenhagen summit."

I know that there are many climate and progressive activists who have problems with the idea of fasting. It's too bad this is the case, because I have learned that fasting isn't just one of a number of tactics that we need to keep in our quiver to use as we struggle for a world based on love and compassion. Fasting is a form of action that is very valuable in building the internal discipline and the deeply-felt understanding of what's really important in this world that we individually need to stay true to our best ideals.

When you fast for more than a few days, especially on a water-only fast, you are forced to think about the reasons for your fasting, why you are putting yourself through this. You spend time thinking about all of the people all over the world who "fast" involuntarily because of an unjust world order which is dominated by a relative handful of billionaires and multi-billionaires. When on a fast related to the issue of climate, you think about the almost-certain catastrophic droughts, famines and other disasters affecting not millions but billions later in this century if we don't rapidly make a shift away from the burning of fossil fuels and earth-destroying practices.

It is difficult not to feel helpless in the face of the timidity and resistance of far too many of the world's government leaders to doing what clearly must be done. It's maddening knowing that a serious commitment to the enactment of a clean energy revolution can be the decisive shift that opens up all kinds of possibilities for a very different future as the nations of the world work together to clean up the environmental mess capitalism has created.

In the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, killed because of his leadership in the anti-Nazi German resistance movement, "Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present." Yes. Yes. Now and always.


Ted Glick is the Policy Director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and a long-time progressive activist.

The Politics of Lying and Culture of Deceit

Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear.

Hannah Arendt

By Henry A. Giroux

In the current American political landscape, truth is not merely misrepresented or falsified; it is overtly mocked. As is well known, the Bush administration repeatedly lied to the American public, furthering a legacy of government mistrust while carrying the practice of distortion to new and almost unimaginable heights. Even now, almost a year after Bush left office, it is difficult to forget the lies and government-sponsored deceits in which it was claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, Iraq was making deals with al-Qaeda and, perhaps the most infamous of all, the United States did not engage in torture. Unlike many former administrations, the Bush administration was engaged in pure political theater,[2] giving new meaning to Hannah Arendt's claim that "Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings."[3] For instance, when the government wasn't lying to promote dangerous policies, it willfully produced and circulated fake news reports in order to provide the illusion that the lies and the policies that flowed from them were supported by selective members of the media and the larger public. The Bush deceits and lies were almost never challenged by right-wing media "patriots," who were too busy denouncing as un-American anyone who questioned Bush's official stream of deception and deceit. Ironically, some of these pundits were actually on the government payroll for spreading the intellectual equivalent of junk food. And some of them were actually being paid by the Bush government to make such claims.

In such circumstances, language loses any viable sense of referentiality, while lying, misrepresentation and the deliberate denial of truth become acceptable practices firmly entrenched in the wild West of talk radio, cable television and the dominant media. Fact finding, arguments bolstered by evidence and informed analysis have always been fragile entities, but they risk annihilation in a culture in which it becomes difficult to distinguish between an opinion and an argument. Knowledge is increasingly controlled by a handful of corporations and public relations firms and is systemically cleansed of any complexity. Lying and deceitfulness are all too often viewed as just another acceptable tactic in what has become most visibly the pathology of politics and a theater of cruelty dominated by a growing chorus of media hatemongers inflaming an authoritarian populist rage laced with a not too subtle bigotry.[4] Truth increasingly becomes the enemy of democracy because it does not support the spectacle and the reduction of citizens either to mere dupes of power or commodities. Ignorance is no longer a liability in a culture in which lying, deceit and misinformation blur the boundaries between informed judgments and the histrionics of a shouting individual or mob. Talk radio and television talk show screamers, in particular, seem to delight in repeating claims that have been discredited in the public arena, demonstrating a barely disguised contempt for both the truth and any viable vestige of journalism. These lies and deceits go beyond the classic political gambit, beyond the Watergate-style cover up, beyond the comic "I did not have sex with that woman." The lies and deceptions that are spewed out everyday from the right-wing teaching machines - from newspapers and radio shows to broadcast media and the Internet - capitalize on both the mobilizing power of the spectacle, the increasing impatience with reason and an obsession with what Susan J. Douglas describes as the use of the "provocative sound bites over investigative reporting, misinformation over fact."[5] Lying and deception have become so commonplace in the dominant press that such practices appear to have no moral significance and provoke few misgivings, even when they have important political consequences. In the age of public relations managers and talk show experts, we are witnessing the demise of public life. At a time when education is reduced to training workers and is stripped of any civic ideals and critical practices, it becomes unfashionable for the public to think critically. Rather than intelligence uniting us, a collective ignorance of politics, culture, the arts, history and important social issues, as Mark Slouka points out, "gives us a sense of community, it confers citizenship."[6] Our political passivity is underscored by a paucity of intellectual engagement, just as the need for discrete judgment and informed analysis fall prey to a culture of watching, a culture of illusion and circus tricks. Shame over the lying and ignorance that now shape our cultural politics has become a source of national pride - witness the pathetic response to Joe Wilson's outburst against President Obama. Or, for that matter, the celebrated and populist response to Sarah Palin's lies about death panels, which are seized upon not because they distort the truth and reveal the dishonesty and vileness of political opportunism - while also undermining a viable health care bill - but because they tap into a sea of growing anger and hyped-up ignorance and ratchet up poll ratings. Lying and deceit have become the stuff of spectacle and are on full display in a society where gossip and celebrity culture rule. In this instance, the consequences of lying are reduced to a matter of prurience rather than public concern, becoming a source of private injury on the part of a Hollywood star or producing the individual humiliation of public figure such as John Edwards.

The widespread acceptance of lying and deceit is not merely suggestive of a commodified and ubiquitous corporate-driven electronic culture that displays an utter contempt for morality and social needs: It is also registers the existence of a troubling form of infantilization and depoliticization. Lying as common sense and deceit as politics-as-usual joins the embrace of provocation in a coupling that empties politics and agency of any substance and feeds into a corporate state and militarized culture in which matters of judgment, thoughtfulness, morality and compassion seem to disappear from public view. What is the social cost of such flight from reality, if not the death of democratic politics, critical thought and civic agency? When a society loses sight of the distinction between fact and fiction, truth-telling and lying, what happens is that truth, critical thought and fact finding as conditions of democracy are rendered trivial and reduced to a collection of mere platitudes, which in turn reinforces moral indifference and political impotence. Under such circumstances, language actually becomes the mechanism for promoting political powerlessness. Lying and deceit are no longer limited to merely substituting falsehoods for the truth; they now performatively constitute their own truth, promoting celebrity culture, right-wing paranoia and modes of government and corporate power freed from any sense of accountability.

While all governments resort to misrepresentations and lies, we appear to have entered a brave new world in which lies, distortions and exaggerations have become so commonplace that when something is said by a politician, it is often meant to suggest its opposite, and without either irony or apology. As lies and deceit become a matter of policy, language loses its grip on reality, and the resulting indeterminacy of meaning is often used by politicians and others to embrace positions that change from one moment to the next. Witness Dick Cheney, who once referred to torture as "enhanced interrogation" so as to sugarcoat its brutality, and then appeared on national television in 2009 only to defend torture by arguing that if such practices work, they are perfectly justified, even if they violate the law. This is the same Cheney who, appearing on the May 31, 2005, "Larry King Live" show, attempted to repudiate charges of government torture by claiming, without irony, that the detainees "have been well treated, treated humanely and decently." This type of discourse recalls George Orwell's dystopian world of "1984" in which the Ministry of Truth produces lies and the Ministry of Love tortures people. Remember when the Bush administration used the "Healthy Forest Initiative" to give loggers access to protected wilderness areas or the "Clear Skies Initiative" to enable greater industrial air pollution? President Obama also indulges in this kind of semantic dishonesty when he substitutes "prolonged detention" for the much maligned "preventive detention" policies he inherited from the Bush-Cheney regime. While Obama is not Bush, the use of this type of duplicitous language calls to mind the Orwellian nightmare in which "war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength."

When lying and deceit become normalized in a culture, they not only serve as an index of how low we have fallen as a literate society, but also demonstrate the degree to which language and education have become corrupted, tied to corporate and political power and sabotaged by rigid ideologies as part of a growing authoritarianism that uses the educational force of the culture, the means of communication and the sites in which information circulate to mobilize ignorance among a misinformed citizenry, all the while supporting reactionary policies. Especially since the horrible events of 9/11, Americans have been encouraged to identify with a militaristic way of life, to suspend their ability to read the word and world critically, to treat corporate and government power in almost religious terms and to view a culture of questioning as something alien and poisonous to American society. Shared fears rather than shared responsibilities now mobilize angry mobs and gun-toting imbeciles, who are praised as "real" Americans. Fear bolstered by lies and manufactured deceptions makes us immune to even the most obvious moral indecencies, such as the use of taser guns on kids in schools. Nobody notices or cares - and one cause and casualty of all of this moral indifference is that language has been emptied of its critical content just as the public spaces that make it possible are disappearing into the arms of corporations, advertisers and other powerful institutions that show nothing but contempt for either the public sphere or the kind of critical literacy that gives it meaning.

Obama's presence on the national political scene gave literacy, language and critical thought a newfound sense of dignity, interlaced as they were with a vision of hope, justice and possibility - and reasonable arguments about the varied crises America faced and civilized. Such practices as Obama compromised, if not surrendered, some of his principles to those individuals and groups that live in the vocabulary of duplicity, the idealism that shaped his language began to look like just another falsehood when measured against his continuation of a number of Bush-like policies. In this case, the politics of distortions and misrepresentations that Obama's lack of integrity has produced may prove to be even more dangerous than what we got under Bush because it wraps itself in a moralism that seems uplifting and hopeful while it supports policies that reward the rich, reduce schools to testing centers and continue to waste lives and money on wars that should have ended when Obama assumed his presidency. Obama claims he is for peace, and yet the United States is the largest arms dealer in the world. He claims he wants to reduce the deficit, but spends billions on the defense industry and wars abroad. He says he wants everyone to have access to decent health care, but makes backroom deals with powerful pharmaceutical companies. Orwell's ghost haunts this new president and the country at large. Reducing the critical power of language has been crucial to this effort. Under such circumstances, democracy as either a moral referent or a political ideal appears to have lost any vestige of credibility. The politics of lying and the culture of deceit are inextricably related to a theater of cruelty and modes of corrupt power in which politics is reduced to a ritualized incantation, just as matters of governance are removed from real struggles over meaning and power.

Beyond disinformation and disguise, the politics of lying and the culture of deceit trade in and abet the rhetoric of fear in order to manipulate the public into a state of servile political dependency and unquestioning ideological support. Fear and its attendant use of moral panic not only create a rhetorical umbrella to promote right-wing ideological agendas (increased military spending, tax relief for the financial and corporate elite, privatization, market-driven reforms and religious intolerance), but also contribute to a sense of helplessness and cynicism throughout the body politic. The collapse of any vestige of critical literacy, reason and sustained debate gives way to falsehoods and forms of ignorance that find expression in the often racist discourse of what Bob Herbert calls "the moronic maestros of right wing radio and TV,"[7] endlessly haranguing the public to resist any vestige of reason. How else to explain the actions of parents who refuse to let their children listen to a speech on education by - Should I say it? - an African-American President? How else to fathom the dominant media repeating uncritically the views of right-wing groups that portray Obama as Hitler or Lenin, or consistently making references that compare him to a gorilla or indulge in other crude racist references - in recent days, these groups have been given ample media attention, as if their opinions are not simply ventriloquizing the worst species of ignorance and racism.

The politics of lying and the culture of deceit are wrapped in the logic of absolute certainty, an ominous harbinger of a kind of illiteracy in which one no longer has to be accountable for justifying opinions, claims or alleged arguments. Stripped of accountability, language finds its final resting place in a culture of deceit in which lying either is accepted as a political strategy or is viewed as simply another normalized aspect of everyday life. The lack of criticism surrounding both government practices and corporations that now exercise unparalleled forms of power is more than shameful; it is an utter capitulation to an Orwellian rhetoric that only thinly veils an egregious form of authoritarianism and racism. In the face of such events, we must develop a critical discourse to address the gap between rhetoric and deeds of those who hold economic, political and social power. As Hannah Arendt has argued, debate is central to a democratic politics, along with the public space in which individuals can argue, exercise critical judgment and clarify their relationship to democratic values and public commitments. Critical consciousness and autonomy are, after all, not merely the stuff of political awareness, but what makes democratic accountability possible in the first place. They are also the foundation and precondition for individuals, parents, community groups and social movements to mobilize against such political and moral corruptions. Democracy is fragile, and its fate is always uncertain, but during the last decade we have witnessed those in commanding political and corporate positions exhibit an utter disregard for the truth, morality and critical debate. The Enron template of lying and deception has turned an ethos of dialogue and persuasion into its opposite: dogmatism and propaganda. In doing so, the American public has been bombarded by a discourse of fear, hate and racism, coupled with a politics of lying that undermines any viable vestige of a democratic ethos. We now find ourselves living in a society in which right-wing extremists not only wage a war against the truth, but also seek to render human beings less than fully human by taking away their desire for justice, spiritual meaning, freedom and individuality.

Politics must become more attentive to those everyday conditions that have allowed the American public to remain complicitous with such barbaric policies and practices. Exposing the underlying conditions and symptoms of a culture of lying and deceit is both a political and a pedagogical task that demands that people speak out and break through the haze of official discourse, media-induced amnesia and the fear-producing lies of corrupt politicians and the swelling ranks of hatemongers. The politics of lying and deceit at the current historical moment offers up the specter of not just government abuse, mob hysteria and potential violence, but also an incipient authoritarianism, one that avidly seeks to eliminate intelligent deliberation, informed public discussion, engaged criticism and the very possibility of freedom and a vital democratic politics. The spirit of critique is meaningless without literacy and an informed public. For such a public to flourish, it must be supported with public debate and informed agents capable of becoming both a witness to injustice and a force for transforming those political, economic and institutional conditions that impose silence and perpetuate human suffering. The distortions, misrepresentations and lies that have become an integral part of American culture present a serious threat to an aspiring democracy because they further what John Dewey called the "eclipse of the public," just as they empty politics of its democratic values, meanings and possibilities. The hate, extremism and pathology that have come to define our national political and popular landscapes - heard repeatedly in the prattle of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, to name only two of the most popular examples - are legitimated by an appeal to absolute certainty, which becomes the backdrop against which a politics of lying and a culture of deceit, fear, cruelty and repression flourish. We are witnessing in the politics of lying and the culture of deceit a disconnection between language and social responsibility, politics and critical education, market interests and democratic values, and privately felt pain and joys and larger public considerations. And this undermining of the value of human dignity, truth, dialogue and critical thought is the offspring of a debate over much more than simply meaning and language, or even the widespread legitimacy of individual and institutional ignorance and corruption. At its core, it is a debate about power and those corporate and political interests that create the conditions in which lying becomes acceptable and deceit commonplace - those forces that have the power to frame in increasingly narrow ways the conventions, norms, language and relations through which we relate to ourselves and others. How we define ourselves as a nation cannot be separated from the language we value, inhabit and use to shape our understanding of others and the world in which we want to live. As the language of critique, civic responsibility, political courage and democracy disappears along with sustained investments in schools, media, and other elements of a formative culture that keeps an aspiring democracy alive, we lose the spaces and capacities to imagine a future in which language, literacy and hope are on the side of justice, rather than on the side of hate, willful ignorance and widespread injustice.

NOTES

1. Hannah Arendt, "Lying in Politics," in "Crisis of the Republic" (New York: Harvest/HBJ Books, 1969), p. 6

2. Frank Rich, "The Greatest Story Ever Told" (New York: Penguin, 2007).

3. Ibid., Hannah Arendt, "Lying in Politics," p. 4.

4. See Bob Herbert's courageous article, "The Scourge Persists," New York Times (September 19, 2009), p. A17.

5. Susan J. Douglas, "Killing Granny with the Laziness Bias," In These Times (September 17, 2009). Online at: www.inthesetimes.com/main/article/4897.

6. Mark Slouka, "A Quibble," Harper's Magazine (February 2009), p. 9.

7. Ibid., Herbert, "The Scourge Persists," p. 17.

Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. Related work: Henry A. Giroux, "The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence" (Lanham: Rowman and Lilttlefield, 2001). His most recent books include "Take Back Higher Education" (co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux, 2006), "The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex" (2007) and "Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed" (2008). His newest book, "Youth in a Suspect Society: Beyond the Politics of Disposability," will be published by Palgrave Mcmillan in 2009. Henry A. Giroux's latest book, "Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?," has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Uday Prakash Comments:

Wed, 09/23/2009 - 06:11 — Uday Prakash (not verified)

Straight, honest, insightful, critical....and certainly not confined only to American state of reality. It's a global situation. Democracies have now turned in to huge power tombs of lies, violence and amorous monstrous anti-human machines... It's a most holly and provocative piece. It perturbs and motivates us all to think about all...

Freedom of Expression

Politics of ban

By Sudhanshu Ranjan

Now, in India, there is a tendency among some individuals or even communities to demand a ban on the drop of a hat.

Anthony Collins’s book ‘Discourse of Free-thinking’ published in 1713 popularised the term freethinking. In it, he wrote, that perfection of the sciences could be achieved only through freethinking. Deeply disturbed at the executions of witches, he wrote, “It is a glory to free-thinkers to wrest out of the priests’ hands the power of taking away so many innocent lives and reputations.”

Voltaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau and others made it popular in France while in America, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, among others, were its torchbearers. A society that does not provide space for dissent is a nothing but a barbaric society.
In 1702, Daniel Defoe wrote a pamphlet, ‘The Shortest Way with Dissenter’, in which he ridiculed the Anglican intolerance. He was arrested, jailed, fined and pilloried. But this is past. People fought hard for getting the right to freedom of expression and constitutions of most of the countries now guarantee it.

However, in India, of late, this right has become a victim of vote-bank politics. The Gujarat government’s ban on Jaswant Singh’s book on Jinnah, which was subsequently set aside by the high court, is the latest example of sacrificing the constitutionally-guaranteed right to score some brownie political points.

Thank God

Luckily, other BJP-ruled states did not follow suit. That the book was banned by a state government ruled by the BJP which also expelled Jaswant from the party even before reading the book and without giving him an opportunity to explain his position only proves that the party does not allow any freedom of thought.

Thus, a party man must write a book, not under the imprimatur of truth but in a way that appeases the leadership. Similarly, even textbooks must not be written objectively if some facts are not acceptable to some section.

Just a year ago, it was the BJP which opposed the ban on Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Satanic Verses’ and demanded to treat Taslima Nasreen like a political refugee to protect her freedom of speech and criticised the ban on her book ‘Dwikhandito’. Surprisingly then, the ban was imposed by the West Bengal government for which secularism is the creedal faith. However, the Calcutta high court set aside the ban. The state government also banned an issue of ‘Pathsanket’, a journal, which carried an article eulogising Taslima’s views as rational and scientific and raised some questions about the Prophet.

So, again it was a vote-bank politics — the Left front wanted to appease a particular community by banning the book, and the BJP opposed it to please another community. Protecting the freedom of expression was none of their concern.

Now, there is a tendency among some individuals or even communities to demand ban on the drop of a hat. Recently, Chhattisgarh government banned Habib Tanvir’s play ‘Charandas Chor’ because some self-styled representatives of the Satnami community complained that it denigrates Sant Ghasidas of their community. Habib wrote the play in 1974, which is based on a Rajasthani tale retold by Vijaydan Detha. That very year, Shyam Benegal made a film on it. Actors in both productions were almost same. This play was first of all enacted among members of the Satnami community who liked it very much. Habib wanted to christen it as ‘Amardas Chor’ because the protagonist is an honest thief who becomes immortal after getting the death sentence. But he was told that Amardas is the name of one of the gurus of the Satnamis. Another name suggested again turned out to be the name of another guru. Then, it was named ‘Chor chor’, which was later rechristened as ‘Charandas Chor’. Now, after 35 years, some people have taken offence, and the state government readily acceded to their demand.

Unofficial bans

Apart from official bans, there are unofficial bans imposed by vigilantes. Deepa Mehta was not allowed to film ‘Water’ in Varansi, and no action was taken against miscreants. ‘Parzania’ could not be screened in Gujarat. So was the fate of Mahesh Bhatt’s ‘Jakhm’ and Aamir Khan’s ‘Fanaa’. Babu Bajrangi thundered, “How can ‘Parzania’ ever be shown without our approval?” Bajrangi is the prime accused in the Naroda Patiya case in which over 100 people were massacred.

This trend of imposing unofficial ban is not new. A film on Shivaji could not be exhibited in the Kashmir valley in 1948. Hollywood film ‘Tango Charlie’ faced similar people’s ban in Assam by the ULFA as it showed the BSF engaged in anti-insurgency operations. Many a time the government does not show magnanimity either and bans films on tenuous grounds. French director Louise Malle’s film ‘My India’ was banned since it showed beggars, cows, dirt, etc on streets. The commentary was not offensive but the visuals were real which could not be changed.

The government has the power to impose restrictions but this power should be exercised in the rarest of rare cases. The US Supreme Court’s observation in Dennis vs US is apposite that to say that a thing is constitutional is not to say that it is desirable.
It is for the people to protect the hard-earned freedom. They must realise the dangerous game being played by politicians is inimical to the country’s interest.

Living in a Culture of Cruelty : Democracy as Spectacle

by : Henry A. Giroux


Under the Bush administration, a seeping, sometimes galloping, authoritarianism began to reach into every vestige of the culture, giving free rein to those anti-democratic forces in which religious, market, military and political fundamentalism thrived, casting an ominous shadow over the fate of United States democracy. During the Bush-Cheney regime, power became an instrument of retribution and punishment was connected to and fueled by a repressive state. A bullying rhetoric of war, a ruthless consolidation of economic forces, and an all-embracing free-market apparatus and media driven pedagogy of fear supported and sustained a distinct culture of cruelty and inequality in the United States. In pointing to a culture of cruelty, I am not employing a form of left moralism that collapses matters of power and politics into the discourse of character. On the contrary, I think the notion of a culture of cruelty is useful in thinking through the convergence of everyday life and politics, of considering material relations of power - the disciplining of the body as an object of control - on the one hand, and the production of cultural meaning, especially the co-optation of popular culture to sanction official violence, on the other. The culture of cruelty is important for thinking through how life and death now converge in ways that fundamentally transform how we understand and imagine politics in the current historical moment - a moment when the most vital of safety nets, health care reform, is being undermined by right-wing ideologues. What is it about a culture of cruelty that provides the conditions for many Americans to believe that government is the enemy of health care reform and health care reform should be turned over to corporate and market-driven interests, further depriving millions of an essential right?

Increasingly, many individuals and groups now find themselves living in a society that measures the worth of human life in terms of cost-benefit analyzes. The central issue of life and politics is no longer about working to get ahead, but struggling simply to survive. And many groups, who are considered marginal because they are poor, unemployed, people of color, elderly or young, have not just been excluded from "the American dream," but have become utterly redundant and disposable, waste products of a society that not longer considers them of any value. How else to explain the zealousness in which social safety nets have been dismantled, the transition from welfare to workfare (offering little job training programs and no child care), and recent acrimony over health care reform's public option? What accounts for the passage of laws that criminalize the behavior of the 1.2 million homeless in the United States, often defining sleeping, sitting, soliciting, lying down or loitering in public places as a criminal offence rather than a behavior in need of compassionate good will and public assistance? Or, for that matter, the expulsions, suspensions, segregation, class discrimination and racism in the public schools as well as the more severe beatings, broken bones and damaged lives endured by young people in the juvenile justice system? Within these politics, largely fueled by market fundamentalism - one that substitutes the power of the social state with the power of the corporate state and only values wealth, money and consumers - there is a ruthless and hidden dimension of cruelty, one in which the powers of life and death are increasingly determined by punishing apparatuses, such as the criminal justice system for poor people of color and/or market forces that increasingly decide who may live and who may die.

The growing dominance of a right-wing media forged in a pedagogy of hate has become a crucial element providing numerous platforms for a culture of cruelty and is fundamental to how we understand the role of education in a range of sites outside of traditional forms of schooling. This educational apparatus and mode of public pedagogy is central to analyzing not just how power is exercised, rewarded and contested in a growing culture of cruelty, but also how particular identities, desires and needs are mobilized in support of an overt racism, hostility towards immigrants and utter disdain, coupled with the threat of mob violence toward any political figure supportive of the social contract and the welfare state. Citizens are increasingly constructed through a language of contempt for all noncommercial public spheres and a chilling indifference to the plight of others that is increasingly expressed in vicious tirades against big government and health care reform. There is a growing element of scorn on the part of the American public for those human beings caught in the web of misfortune, human suffering, dependency and deprivation. As Barbara Ehrenreich observes, "The pattern is to curtail financing for services that might help the poor while ramping up law enforcement: starve school and public transportation budgets, then make truancy illegal. Shut down public housing, then make it a crime to be homeless. Be sure to harass street vendors when there are few other opportunities for employment. The experience of the poor, and especially poor minorities, comes to resemble that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administered electric shocks."

A right-wing spin machine, influenced by haters like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage and Ann Coulter, endlessly spews out a toxic rhetoric in which: all Muslims are defined as jihadists; the homeless are not victims of misfortune but lazy; blacks are not terrorized by a racist criminal justice system, but the main architects of a culture of criminality; the epidemic of obesity has nothing to do with corporations, big agriculture and advertisers selling junk food, but rather the result of "big" government giving people food stamps; the public sphere is largely for white people, which is being threatened by immigrants and people of color, and so it goes. Glenn Beck, the alleged voice of the common man, appearing on the "Fox & Friends" morning show, calls President Obama a "racist" and then accuses him of "having a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture." Nationally syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh unapologetically states that James Early Ray, the confessed killer of Martin Luther King Jr., should be given a posthumous Medal of Honor, while his counterpart in right-wing hate, talk radio host Michael Savage, states on his show, "You know, when I see a woman walking around with a burqa, I see a Nazi. That's what I see - how do you like that? - a hateful Nazi who would like to cut your throat and kill your children." He also claims that Obama is "surrounded by terrorists" and is "raping America." This is a variation of a crude theme established by Ann Coulter, who refers to Bill Clinton as a "very good rapist." Even worse, Obama is a "neo-Marxist fascist dictator in the making," who plans to "force children into a paramilitary domestic army." And this is just a small sampling of the kind of hate talk that permeates right-wing media. This could be dismissed as loony right-wing political theater if it were not for the low levels of civic literacy displayed by so many Americans who choose to believe and invest in this type of hate talk. On the contrary, while it may be idiocy, it reveals a powerful set of political, economic and educational forces at work in miseducating the American public while at the same time extending the culture of cruelty. One central task of any viable form of politics is to analyze the culture of cruelty and its overt and covert dimensions of violence, often parading as entertainment.

Underlying the culture of cruelty that reached its apogee during the Bush administration, was the legalization of state violence, such that human suffering was now sanctioned by the law, which no longer served as a summons to justice. But if a legal culture emerged that made violence and human suffering socially acceptable, popular culture rendered such violence pleasurable by commodifying, aestheticizing and spectacularizing it. Rather than being unspoken and unseen, violence in American life had become both visible in its pervasiveness and normalized as a central feature of dominant and popular culture. Americans had grown accustomed to luxuriating in a warm bath of cinematic blood, as young people and adults alike were seduced with commercial and military video games such as "Grand Theft Auto" and "America's Army," the television series "24" and its ongoing Bacchanalian fête of torture, the crude violence on display in World Wrestling Entertainment and Ultimate Fighting Championship, and an endless series of vigilante films such as "The Brave One" (2007) and "Death Sentence" (2007), in which the rule of law is suspended by the viscerally satisfying images of men and women seeking revenge as laudable killing machines - a nod to the permanent state of emergency and war in the United States. Symptomatically, there is the mindless glorification and aestheticization of brutal violence in the most celebrated Hollywood films, including many of Quentin Tarantino's films, especially the recent "Death Proof" (2007), "Kill Bill" 1 & 2 (2003, 2004), and "Inglorious Bastards" (2009). With the release of Tarantino's 2009 bloody war film, in fact, the press reported that Dianne Kruger, the co-star of "Inglorious Bastards," claimed that she "loved being tortured by Brad Pitt [though] she was frustrated she didn't get an opportunity to get frisky with her co-star, but admits being beaten by Pitt was a satisfying experience." This is more than the aestheticization of violence, it is the normalization and glorification of torture itself.

If Hollywood has made gratuitous violence the main staple of its endless parade of blockbuster films, television has tapped into the culture of cruelty in a way that was unimaginable before the attack on the US on September 11. Prime-time television before the attacks had "fewer than four acts of torture" per year, but "now there are more than a hundred." Moreover, the people who torture are no longer the villains, but the heroes of prime-time television. The most celebrated is, of course, Jack Bauer, the tragic-ethical hero of the wildly popular Fox TV thriller "24." Not only is torture the main thread of the plot, often presented "with gusto and no moral compunction," but Bauer is portrayed as a patriot, rather than a depraved monster, who tortures in order to protect American lives and national security. Torture, in this scenario, takes society's ultimate betrayal of human dignity and legitimates the pain and fear it produces as normal, all the while making a "moral sadist" a television celebrity. The show has over 15 million viewers, and its glamorization of torture has proven so successful that it appears to have not only numbed the public's reaction to the horrors of torture, but it is so overwhelmingly influential among the US military that the Pentagon sent Brig. Gen. Patrick Finnegan to California to meet with the producers of the show. "He told them that promoting illegal behavior in the series ... was having a damaging effect on young troops." The pornographic glorification of gratuitous, sadistic violence is also on full display in the popular HBO television series "Dexter," which portrays a serial killer as a sympathetic, even lovable, character. Visual spectacles steeped in degradation and violence permeate the culture and can be found in various reality TV shows, professional wrestling and the infamous Jerry Springer Show. These programs all trade in fantasy, glamorized violence and escapism. And they share similar values. As Chris Hedges points out in his analysis of professional wrestling, they all mirror the worse dimensions of an unchecked and unregulated market society in which "winning is all that matters. Morality is irrelevant.... It is all about personal pain, vendettas, hedonism and fantasies of revenge, while inflicting pain on others. It is the cult of victimhood."

The celebration of hyper-violence, moral sadism and torture travels easily from fiction to real life with the emergence in the past few years of a proliferation of "bum fight" videos on the Internet, "shot by young men and boys who are seen beating the homeless or who pay transients a few dollars to fight each other." The culture of cruelty mimics cinematic violence as the agents of abuse both indulge in actual forms of violence and then further celebrate the barbarity by posting it on the web, mimicking the desire for fame and recognition, while voyeuristically consuming their own violent cultural productions. The National Coalition for the Homeless claims that "On YouTube in July 2009, people have posted 85,900 videos with 'bum' in the title [and] 5,690 videos can be found with the title 'bum fight,' representing ... an increase of 1,460 videos since April 2008." Rather than problematize violence, popular culture increasingly normalizes it, often in ways that border on criminal intent. For instance, a recent issue of Maxim, a popular men's magazine, included "a blurb titled 'Hunt the Homeless' [focusing on] a coming 'hobo convention' in Iowa and says 'Kill one for fun. We're 87 percent sure it's legal.'" In this context, violence is not simply being transformed into an utterly distasteful form of adolescent entertainment or spectacularized to attract readers and boost profits, it becomes a powerful pedagogical force in the culture of cruelty by both aligning itself and becoming complicit with the very real surge of violence against the homeless, often committed by young men and teenage boys looking for a thrill. Spurred on by the ever reassuring presence of violence and dehumanization in the wider culture, these young "thrill offenders" now search out the homeless and "punch, kick, shoot or set afire people living on the streets, frequently killing them, simply for the sport of it, their victims all but invisible to society." All of these elements of popular culture speak stylishly and sadistically to new ways in which to maximize the pleasure of violence, giving it its hip (if fascist) edginess.

Needless to say, neither violent video games and television series nor Hollywood films and the Internet (or for that matter popular culture) cause in any direct sense real world violence and suffering, but they do not leave the real world behind either. That is too simplistic. What they do achieve is the execution of a well-funded and highly seductive public pedagogical enterprise that sexualizes and stylizes representations of violence, investing them with an intense pleasure quotient. I don't believe it is an exaggeration to claim that the violence of screen culture entertains and cleanses young people of the burden of ethical considerations when they, for instance, play video games that enabled them to "casually kill the simulated human beings whose world they control." Hollywood films such as the "Saw" series offer up a form of torture porn in which the spectacle of the violence enhances not merely its attraction, but offers young viewers a space where questions of ethics and responsibility are gleefully suspended, enabling them to evade their complicity in a culture of cruelty. No warnings appear on the labels of these violent videos and films, suggesting that the line between catharsis and desensitization may become blurred, making it more difficult for them to raise questions about what it means "to live in a society that produces, markets, and supports such products." But these hyper-violent cultural products also form part of a corrupt pedagogical assemblage that makes it all the more difficult to recognize the hard realities of power and material violence at work through militarism, a winner-take-all economy marked by punishing inequalities and a national security state that exhibits an utter disregard for human suffering. Even the suffering of children, we must note, as when government officials reduce the lives of babies and young children lost in Iraq and Afghanistan to collateral damage. Tragically, the crime here is much more than symbolic.

The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current, sapping the strength of social relations and individual character, moral compassion and collective action, offering up crimes against humanity that become fodder for video games and spectacularized media infotainment, and constructing a culture of cruelty that promotes a "symbiosis of suffering and spectacle."As Chris Hedges argues,

Sadism is as much a part of popular culture as it is of corporate culture. It dominates pornography, runs ... through reality television and trash-talk programs and is at the core of the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice. And it has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our lack of compassion for the homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed and the sick.
Bailouts are not going to address the ways in which individual desires, values and identities are endlessly produced in the service of a culture of cruelty and inequality. Power is not merely material, it is also symbolic and is distributed through a society in ways we have never seen before. No longer is education about schooling. It now functions through the educational force of the larger culture in the media, Internet, electronic media and through a wide range of technologies and sites endlessly working to undo democratic values, compassion and any viable notion of justice and its accompanying social relations. What this suggests is a redefinition of both literacy and education. We need, as a society, to educate students and others to be literate in multiple ways, to reclaim the high ground of civic courage, and to be able to name, engage and transform those forms of public pedagogy that produce hate and cruelty as part of the discourse of common sense. Otherwise, democracy will lose the supportive institutions, social relations and culture that make it not only possible but even thinkable.