Читать книгу Livin' la Vida Barroca. American Culture in an Age of Imperial Orthodoxies онлайн
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Conjoined to this hope of changing, in some small way, the tone and content of our dominant social pedagogies, is a more deeply personal, and some might even say, vain motive.
During the last 90 years or so, the so-called Western world has been afflicted with intermittent and inevitably murderous bouts of authoritarianism. At the end of each of these feverish episodes of mendacity and human destruction, attempts are inevitably made to explain how such gruesome things were allowed to take place within what people liked to think of as civilized societies. And at the end of each such inquest we are told, in effect, “no one truly understood what was happening” and that as a result, “no one could have foreseen or prevented” the catastrophe that eventually took place.
Within the last ten years alone we have seen our government and press establishment tell us, again and again, that “no one could have foreseen” the coming of September 11th, the fact that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, that human privacy would be abolished or that Obama would turn out to be a corporate and military puppet.