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| A Palestinian boy reacts at the damages at a UN-run school sheltering displaced people, following an Israeli attack, in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip, November 2, 2023. [Fadi Whadi/Reuters] |
TEARS OF BLOOD
The idea, the promise, the practice of democracy is being torn apart across the globe. In the shadow of state terrorism’s rise, the machinery of violence grinds against freedoms and bodies alike. Against this tsunami of terror and suffering, there emerges a silence--an oppressive, suffocating silence--blanketing the suffering of the young. It is a silence that echoes across borders, in the hollow cries of youth left to starve in Gaza, their lives stolen by the bloodlust of a war criminal. It is the silence that surrounds the broken bodies of immigrant youth in the U.S., torn from their families and cast into a void of trauma--while the demagogue in chief exults shamelessly in receiving a 400 million flying palace given to him by a ruthless dictator. The MAGA death machine marches on, dismantling food programs and health services for the most vulnerable children, while the silence deepens. If the measure of a democracy is about how it treats its youth, democracy is dead in the US and increasingly in a number of countries across the globe.
The emerging fascism, cloaked in the bad faith war culture of gangster capitalism, unfolds alongside spectacles that not only echo but legitimize what is to come-- Musk and Bannon exhibiting Nazi salutes in a frenzy of emotion, white nationalist, Stephen Miller embracing Hitler’s vision of racial cleansing with his claim that “America is for Americans and Americans only” and Trump resurrecting the spirit of the Confederacy—embracing and celebrating its history, symbols, statues, and rhetoric. This is all accompanied by an unimaginable language of cruelty: immigrants called vermin, due process abolished under the guise of an invasion, judges and critics branded as communists or leftist thugs. The horrors of the past are revived, now cloaked in dehumanizing language that fuels the death machine, speaking directly to the present and future.
This silence is not just about the death of democracy—it is the murder of moral conscience itself. It is the voice of the walking dead reveling in their unfathomable hatred-spewing out language that makes visible the blood in their mouths. There is more than demagogic darkness, authoritarianism on steroids, there is something more sinister—the sound of a world that has stopped listening, a world complicit in the erasure of future generations. It is the sound of Fascism unapologetically expanding a politics of racial cleansing, greed, power, corruption, and disposability—it is a politics filled with the screams of children who are being bombed, starved, and erased from the future.
— Henry Giroux
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