After Nagasaki: Against the Politics of Psychic Numbing

 

 

"We have not simply become accustomed to living amid unprecedented violence, we have been educated to accommodate it. Cruelty no longer confronts us as an ethical rupture demanding judgment and action. It has been absorbed into the rhythms of everyday life, stripped of its capacity to shock, and transformed into yet another spectacle competing for our distracted attention.

Under such conditions, the dehumanization of others is inseparable from the transformation of the machinery of death into a spectacle consumed with fascination rather than horror. The deepest victory of authoritarian politics in the twenty-first century lies not only in its capacity to produce immense suffering, pain, and death, but in its ability to cultivate moral indifference while making violence appear seductive, entertaining, or inevitable. When people cease to feel the pain of others, violence no longer requires widespread consent; it needs only widespread indifference."

 read article by HENRY GIROUX 

After Nagasaki: Against the Politics of Psychic Numbing - CounterPunch.org