Henry Giroux Quotes
When we talk about total war, and we talk about war zones, and we talk about the breakdown of the cities, when you exclude questions of race from that discourse, something disappears that's really central to the forms of repression that we're talking about.
Giroux, Henry A. America at War with Itself. City Lights Books, 2016, p. 115.
60,000 English men, women, and children had been killed by German terror bombing of London and other English cities. The policy had been to retaliate and bomb German population centers. Over 4 million British homes had been destroyed by the blitz and Churchill was becoming concerned that when the Allies would occupy Germany shortly, there would be no German housing left for the civilian population much less for the Allied occupying forces. Churchill’s Air Attaché persuaded him NOT to send the memorandum with it’s references to the terror bombing in retaliation. The memorandum was rewritten with the references to “terror” removed. The bombing of cities did stop as a result.
The soldiers obeyed their orders and killed every man, woman and child they could find outside the city. They beheaded captured prisoners, bayoneted pregnant women and children. All civilian houses were burned, often with the people trapped inside.
Wherever there has been a true free press, there have been anti-war activists who are particularly critical of the affect on civilians—collateral damage or otherwise.
In 1936, Fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia in an effort to obtain an African colony like other European Countries had. Over 50 nations had promised aid to Ethiopia if attacked but then the Italian attacks came, it was not just soldiers with some small artillery and vehicles. Instead it was a full modern army with not only heavy artillery and tanks, but extensive use of air power against villages and towns which generally hardly had rifles. The airplane carnage of civilian populations was a shock to the world. However, the tactics were studied by the Italian German Fascist allies who further developed air power use against unarmed towns and cities in the Spanish Civil war. The aid promised to Christian Ethiopia never materialized because there was a worldwide depression and the great powers would have had to commit to major war—not just send some arms and ammunition. The Ethiopians mostly fought with spears and knives. The Fascists were thus emboldened for the invasion of Europe a few years later.
There had been a Ukrainian coup where the pro-Russian President of Ukraine was ousted and a new Parliament elected that was more inclined to Europe and the West. Unfortunately, several of the key members of the new regime were neo-Nazis. Ukraine had a nasty past where during WWII over 200.000 Ukrainians joined Hitler’s Nazis and fought against the 800,000 Ukrainians fighting with Russia and the Russians. The Ukrainians even ran the only death concentration camp no operated by Germans. Russia used the presence of some Nazis and the passage of the first Ukranian law of the new Parliament that prohibited the use of Russian in Ukrainian schools to come to the “aid” of the ethnic Russians living near the Russian border at the Eastern end of Ukraine who had seized the governments of several areas and forced the Ukrainian officials out and with the help of Russian “volunteers” with Russian weapons, prevented Ukrainian troops from reasserting control. In the struggle there were deaths on both sides of the conflict and these were the “peaceful civilians” who were “annihilated”.
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.
