Occupy Wall Street's Battle Against American-Style Authoritarianism Wednesday 26 October 2011
by: Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | News Analysis Occupy Wall Street, Liberty Park, New York, October 10, 2011. (Photo: DoctorTongs) Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people. -Theodor Adorno The Occupy Wall Street movement is raising new questions about an emerging form of authoritarianism in the United States, one that threatens the collective survival of vast numbers of people, not through overt physical injury or worse, but through an aggressive assault on social provisions that millions of Americans depend on. For those pondering the meaning of the pedagogical and political challenges being addressed by the protesters, it might be wise to revisit a classic essay by German sociologist and philosopher Theodor Adorno titled "Education After Auschwitz," in which he tries to grapple with the relationship between education and morality in light of the horrors perpetrated in the name of authoritarianism and its industrialization of death.[1] Adorno's essay, first published in 1967, asserted that the demands and questions raised by Auschwitz had barely penetrated the consciousness of peoples' minds such that the conditions that made it possible continued, as he put it, "largely unchanged." full: http://www.truth-out.org/occupy-wall-streets-battle-against-american-style-authoritarianism/1319570241
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