Henry Giroux Quotes
I think that contradictions, unless they're understood, unless they're analyzed, unless they're thoughtfully probed, unless people have a sense of what those contradictions mean - there's just as much of a chance that they'll move into embracing fascism as there is that they'll move into a more radical conception of democracy itself.
Giroux, Henry A. "Henry Giroux on Zombie Politics." Interview by Bill Moyers. Moyers & Company, 22 Nov. 2013.
The Priest was the right wing demagogic radio host of his day. Virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Black, he was threatened with excommunication by the Catholic Church, which finally ordered him to cease us weekly radio show and stop the political hate.
From the latter part of the 20th century onward, religious nationalism was no longer a force for most religions and nations except Muslim countries. It was the only religion left where a large proportion of the adherents saw no distinction between the religion and the government. Nations that had separation of church and state were not conducive to the extreme fundamentalist form of Islam where the Secular Leader and the Religious leader was to be embodied as a single person. As a result Islamic religious nationalists argued for a Theocracy and at times fought for it with violent means. The secular government typically, to curtail the violence and prevent a religious takeover, often outlawed the extreme religious Islamic parties. While Aslan cites the Muslim Brotherhood failure in Egypt as a desirable outcome, the only way the other forces of Egyptian society could prevent the Islamists from taking over turning the country into a theocracy was to forcefully repress the extremists. The Turkish outcome was much better, but there was the threat of repression of the Justice and Development Party when it won a majority control of the government. There were explicit threats that if it tried to weaken the secular nature of the government as Ataturk had formulated it, the military would come “out of the barracks” and oust the government as they had done before. There were nations like China which persecuted religions such as certain forms of Christianity, but those religions were not fighting for religious nationalism. They only wished the freedom to practice their religion and had no program or theology that argued for Christianizing the government. The Tamil Hindus of Sri Lanka did not want a Hindu government and were perfectly free to practice their religion. The problem was that they felt that there was systemic social and economic discrimination against the Tamils and they fought for independence—not of a Hindu state, but of a secular, nondiscriminatory state of equal opportunity.
Henry Armand Giroux is an American and Canadian scholar and cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, cultural studies, youth studies, higher education, media studies, and critical theory. In 2002 Routledge named Giroux as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period.
