Attacks on the Historical Knowledge of Struggle – Represent Our Resistance

Seventy-five percent of the American population opposes the kingdom of corporatization and militarization King George and Darth Vader have established here and around the world, yet they are frozen in the state of fear. As a result, even some of these seventy-five percent of the American public opposed to this current administration, still believe that, for the most part, the U.S. government is on the side of the people. What keeps Americans in a state of fear is its lack of knowledge. And it is not just any knowledge or the kind offered in American educational institutions today that urges young people of all classes and races to climb the mountain of corporate capitalism and, in the meantime, keep an eye on the interior and exterior monsters roaming the streets of America and deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan. Americans lack what French philosopher, Michel Foucault, called the historical knowledge of struggles (Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977). This kind of knowledge is and has been subjugated; in its place is the kind of knowledge that supports the maintenance of an American Empire. This kind of knowledge speaks of appropriate, indeed, natural domination of white male economic power to the exclusion of any alternative perspective. This kind of knowledge speaks of patriotism, military conflict for corporate profit, detention camps and torture, and signing decree after signing decree to maintain law and order. And from what? Why, a possible uprising on the part of those for whom the knowledge of historical struggles is more real than the imagined “enemy.”

Thought control works even without the presence of a police state. We can police ourselves into a state of fear if we assume that the myriad attacks on our children are too overwhelming, and we sit down and allow the media to torture us with words and images of our inferiority and powerlessness.