For in the world in which we live it is no longer merely a question of the decay of collective memory and declining consciousness of the past, but of the aggressive [assault on] whatever memory remains, the deliberate distortion of the historical record, the invention of mythological pasts in the service of the powers of darkness. - Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi It is only a rebirth of historical memory that will enable the merging of dangerous thinking, critical knowledge and subversive action into a movement capable of reviving the dream of a future in which the practice of radical democratization prevails. Memory work is dangerous, particularly to those defenders of tyranny such as Cheney, Kristol, Rice and other warmongers for whom the politics of forgetting is crucial to their own legitimation. When such anti-public intellectuals have returned to the national spotlight in order to revel in historys erasure, it is time to make trouble and to hope, as Herbert Marcuse once stated, that “the horizon of history is still open.” Henry Giroux
Posted on: Sat, 28 Jun 2014 08:46:24 +0000
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