We have many monsters to destroy. –George Seferis
But how can anyone tell the truth about fascism, unless
he is willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it forth? –Bertolt Brecht
More than four decades ago, the Greek composer and public
intellectual Manos
Hadjidakis issued a warning that now reads less like a reflection on
fascism than a prophecy of our own time. The greatest danger, he suggested,
comes when we grow accustomed to the monster, when its presence no longer
shocks the conscience and its violence begins to merge with the routines of
everyday life. Tolerance does not diminish the monster; it multiplies the
conditions that allow it to flourish, strengthening its presence in public life
until monstrosity itself acquires the authority to govern. In this instance,
the collapse of conscience is inseparable from the uncoupling of “belief
from judgment, conviction from action.”
We have reached such a moment.
The monsters are no longer hiding in the shadows. They
occupy presidential offices and ministries, command armies and police forces,
control digital platforms, dominate television screens, administer borders,
build detention centers, and transform the suffering of others into political
theater. Their
language of racial purification, mass deportation, extermination, vengeance,
and disposability no longer produces the outrage it once might have summoned.
Cruelty is displayed as strength. Humiliation becomes entertainment. The
spectacle of suffering becomes a source of political pleasure. What should be
unbearable becomes familiar; what should provoke resistance is absorbed into
the rhythms of everyday life.
The monster triumphs not simply when it commits
atrocities, but when its language becomes ordinary, its violence becomes
acceptable, its weaponization of racial and class divisions goes unnoticed, and
its presence no longer disturbs the moral imagination.
Toni
Morrison gave us another language for understanding how monsters become
ordinary. She called it “dead language,” a language emptied of ethical
responsibility and enlisted in the service of domination. Morrison’s dead
language is itself monstrous. As she writes, oppressive language “does more
than represent violence; it is violence.” It is a language that “drinks blood,
laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of
respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line
and the bottomed-out mind.”
Morrison’s insight reaches beyond rhetoric. Monsters
require a language that prepares the ground for their violence, strips their
victims of humanity, and teaches people to accommodate the unthinkable. Dead
language is one of the conditions that allows monstrosity to pass into everyday
life disguised as common sense.
Primo
Levi once observed that “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to
be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready
to believe and to act without asking questions.” Levi remains right about the
role of unthinking functionaries, but today the monsters themselves have
acquired institutional power and public legitimacy. Emboldened by staggering
economic inequality, empowered by the machinery of high-tech authoritarianism,
and legitimated by an expanding culture of state violence, they have moved from
the political margins to the commanding heights of American society.
Here Hannah
Arendt’s warning about the failure of thinking takes on a renewed urgency.
Monstrosity thrives when judgment is surrendered, when the obligation to think
becomes a burden, and when ignorance is transformed from an absence of
knowledge into a cultivated refusal to know. We might call this the banality of
ignorance: the willful suspension of judgment that allows people to see
suffering without confronting it and to hear lies without rejecting them. The
monster does not merely demand obedience. It needs subjects who have learned
not to think about what their obedience makes possible.
Yet
Hadjidakis’s warning poses a question more disturbing than whether monsters
now govern us. What does it mean for a society to begin to resemble its
monsters? And what pedagogical forces are at work in creating and normalizing
that resemblance? Resemblance does not mean that everyone becomes a killer or a
fascist. It means that the habits of thought, structures of feeling, and forms
of indifference on which monstrosity depends begin to penetrate everyday life.
The banality of ignorance becomes a social condition, a cultivated form of
moral blindness in which not knowing offers a refuge from responsibility and
refusing to think becomes a condition of belonging. But such ignorance
does not exist outside the realm of desire. It has an emotional register, a
psychology of authoritarianism and a pedagogy of terror through which people
learn not simply to live with cruelty but to bathe in its emotional charge,
finding pleasure and belonging in “patterns
of domination and submission [that harden] into a syndrome of attitudes
regarding hierarchy, power, sexuality and tradition.”
The monster has a long history, born in the darkest
regions of the social imagination where fear, difference, and power converge.
As Manvir
Singh has observed, monsters have long haunted the boundaries between the
human and the inhuman, the familiar and the terrifying, the civilized and what
it casts outside its gates. But monsters are never simply creatures of fantasy.
They are warnings, projections, embodiments of collective fears, and often
weapons for deciding who belongs within the circle of humanity and who can be
expelled from it. What matters politically is what happens when the monster
steps out of myth and fantasy, takes possession of the institutions of power,
and acquires the authority to decide who may live, who must suffer, and who can
be made disposable.
There is, however, another problem with the metaphor of
the monster itself. To imagine Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth,
Itamar Ben-Gvir, Benjamin Netanyahu, or other architects of contemporary
authoritarian violence simply as monsters risks placing them outside history,
as if their cruelty originated in some private pathology detached from the
society that produced them. The monster can then become an alibi for the
society that created him.
Moral outrage becomes individualized, while the institutions,
economic interests, racial hierarchies, cultural apparatuses, and political
forces that make organized cruelty possible disappear. This is the crucial
insight in Jorge
Gonzalez Arocha’s argument that turning perpetrators into monsters can
itself become a way of looking away. Arocha argues that
“reducing the perpetrator to nothing more than a monster protects us from
recognizing ourselves as potential perpetrators. It distances us from the event
and its reality, while placing us in a position of moral superiority…. [It] is a
way of denying that the ability to destroy also belongs to us, that it forms
part of the human condition.”
The problem is not that monsters do not exist. The
problem begins when monstrosity becomes an explanation rather than a question.
Monsters do not descend upon society from somewhere outside history. They are
produced within history, cultivated through institutions, protected by
bureaucracies, legitimized by law, financed by powerful economic interests,
amplified by media, and normalized through culture. The political significance
of monsters lies not simply in the horrors they commit, but in the social order
that makes those horrors possible, useful, legitimate, and eventually ordinary.
A singular focus on monsters can obscure the deeper structure of gangster
capitalism, a system that “prioritizes certain
forms of power over the common good and enables the gradual dehumanization of
our societies.”
The question must therefore change. We must move from
monster to machinery, from the pathology of the individual to the political
economy of organized cruelty, and from there to the cultural and educational
forces that teach people how to live with the suffering such machinery
produces. Monsters do not act alone. Their power becomes visible in the
institutions that protect them, the wealth that sustains them, the laws that
authorize them, and the violence that follows in their wake. We see their
handiwork in streets stained with blood, in
migrants brutalized and left to die in detention centers, in
the torture documented in Israeli prisons, and in the bodies of
children and families torn apart by Israeli and American bombs in Gaza.
Behind these abstractions are torn limbs, dismembered bodies, children pulled
from rubble, families burned and buried beneath the ruins of their homes, and
human beings reduced to flesh and bone by systems in which cruelty has been
organized, authorized, and repeated until even the most horrific violence
threatens to lose its capacity to shock.
The horror lies in a society’s growing accommodation to
monsters, in the silence surrounding their crimes and the erosion of moral and
political boundaries that once made their actions intolerable. Such silence is
never innocent. It is the rigor mortis of ethical and political decay, the
point at which a politics organized around death begins to pass as ordinary
life.
The nightmare no longer lurks in the shadows; it claws its way into
daylight and is met with indifference, resignation, or applause. The question
is how people learn to live amid mass suffering and eventually look away. What
forms of power require such silence? What institutions cultivate it? What
culture teaches people to turn away from the bodies left behind? And most
important, what pedagogical machinery teaches millions not merely to tolerate
cruelty but to identify with those who inflict it, desire the power they
embody, and experience the suffering of others as the price of their own
imagined liberation?
Political economy, culture, and pedagogy converge here.
The monster becomes inseparable from gangster capitalism, pedagogical
terrorism, and the culture of cruelty. Gangster capitalism does not
accidentally produce monsters. It increasingly requires them, along with
publics capable of loving them.
Arendt’s concept of radical evil takes this argument
further, moving us from the failure of judgment to the political machinery that
renders human beings superfluous. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, radical
evil emerges from a political order capable of stripping human beings of
rights, history, individuality, and finally their claim to membership in the
human community. The concentration camp represented the most extreme
realization of this logic, but its political significance extended beyond the
camp. Totalitarianism required institutions capable of transforming human
beings into disposable matter.
Arendt’s later account of Adolf Eichmann complicated the
picture further. Eichmann did not appear before her as a demonic figure
possessing some unfathomable depth of evil. He appeared frighteningly ordinary:
bureaucratic, careerist, obedient, incapable of thinking seriously about the
consequences of his actions. The banality of evil did not mean that his crimes
were banal. It meant that extraordinary crimes could be administered through
ordinary routines, bureaucratic language, professional ambition, obedience, and
the suspension of judgment.
Reinhard Heydrich, one of the principal architects of the
Nazi machinery of terror and mass murder, represents another configuration of
the political monster. Here ideological fanaticism, administrative
intelligence, and extraordinary institutional power converged. Eichmann and
Heydrich should not be collapsed into the same psychological type, but both
expose the inadequacy of treating atrocity simply as the work of monsters.
Modern systems of terror require administrators, lawyers, technicians, police officers,
propagandists, intellectuals, journalists, and functionaries. Evil becomes most
politically dangerous when it acquires an office, a budget, a bureaucracy, a
vocabulary of necessity, and a public willing to accept its premises… .
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University
Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural
Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical
Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los
Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury,
2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis
(Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury
2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics
(Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial:
Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a
member of Truthout’s board of directors.
from When
Monsters Walk Among Us - CounterPunch.org
