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 recognising 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 “prioritises 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.
Primo Levi understood this danger in another register. He rejected the consoling temptation to divide the world neatly between innocent humanity and incomprehensible monsters. As he once put it, “It is a stupid mistake to see all the demons on one side and all the saints on the other…. To divide into black and white means not to know human nature.” His concept of the gray zone gave this insight its most disturbing political force. The gray zone did not abolish distinctions between victim and perpetrator; it exposed the ways systems of domination corrupt moral life itself. The political lesson is disturbing precisely because it denies us the comfort of believing that atrocity belongs to another species of human being. Modern barbarism does not emerge outside civilization. It is organized through civilization’s institutions, technologies, forms of expertise, and structures of obedience.
Umberto Eco made a related point about fascism. Fascism does not possess a single immutable costume. It changes its language, symbols, technologies, and institutional forms. Eco warned that “Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises.” To search only for Mussolini’s blackshirts or Hitler’s brownshirts is therefore to risk missing fascism when it returns wearing a business suit, carrying a Bible, appearing on podcasts, commanding an algorithm, or invoking the language of freedom, national rebirth, border security, and popular sovereignty. Fascism survives precisely because it learns how to inhabit the historical conditions of its own time.
If fascism changes with the historical conditions it inhabits, then those conditions become central to understanding how its monsters are produced and sustained. The problem of the monster must therefore be situated within political economy, culture, pedagogy, and history. The conditions that make monstrosity possible are neither accidental nor timeless. They emerge from societies in which extreme inequality is treated as natural, cruelty becomes entertainment, racial hierarchy is defended as common sense, militarism becomes a national virtue, and entire populations are designated as disposable.
The monstrosity of the present did not suddenly appear with Trump. Its genealogy runs through the long history of American empire and, with particular force, through the War on Terror. In the name of fighting terrorism, the United States unleashed wars whose direct death toll exceeded 600,000 people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen, while estimates of deaths produced indirectly through destroyed infrastructure, disease, displacement, and malnutrition run into the millions. Such devastation cannot be reduced to the language of catastrophic policy failure. It constituted a vast machinery of racialized disposability in which entire populations could be bombed, tortured, displaced, imprisoned, and abandoned while their suffering barely registered within the moral vocabulary of American political life.
Aimé Césaire understood long ago that imperial violence never remains safely confined to the people against whom it is first directed. Colonial brutality, he warned, produces a “terrific boomerang effect”: the habits of dehumanization, racial hierarchy, lawlessness, and organized violence cultivated abroad eventually return home. The War on Terror offers a terrifying contemporary illustration of that warning. The torture chambers of Abu Ghraib, indefinite detention at Guantánamo, extraordinary rendition, drone assassination, mass surveillance, and the normalization of permanent war did more than devastate other societies. They helped educate the American public into accepting torture, surveillance, militarized policing, lawless executive power, and the designation of whole populations as threats. Trumpism did not invent this political culture. It inherited it, intensified it, and turned its imperial habits inward. In this sense, the monster came home because the machinery that produced it had been operating for decades.
Under gangster capitalism, the imperial machinery of disposability turns inward, assuming an especially lethal domestic form. Wealth concentrates, public goods are stripped for private profit, democratic institutions are subordinated to billionaire power, and the punishing state expands as the social state contracts. Abandonment and repression become two sides of the same political order.
Pedagogy becomes central because fascism is never merely imposed from above. It must be learned. People must be taught whom to fear, whom to hate, whose suffering matters, whose suffering can be ignored, and whose disappearance can be celebrated. They must learn to experience cruelty as strength, domination as freedom, racial hierarchy as natural, and violence as national purification.
Pedagogical terrorism names this process. It operates through schools and churches, television and social media, podcasts, political rallies, digital platforms, advertising, and the spectacular theater of state violence. These cultural apparatuses do more than communicate ideas. They organize attention, shape consciousness, mobilize desire, and teach habits of feeling. They create the emotional and ideological conditions under which disposability becomes common sense.
Private anxieties are given public enemies. Loneliness is transformed into the counterfeit solidarity of the tribe, powerlessness redirected into aggression, and resentment elevated into a moral virtue.
Fear is converted into hatred and humiliation into the desire to humiliate others.
Fascism thrives on this emotional economy because it gives private suffering a public target. The wounds inflicted by an increasingly brutal social order are redirected away from the structures that produce them and toward immigrants, Black people, Palestinians, feminists, intellectuals, queer people, dissidents, and anyone else designated as an enemy.
A culture of barbarism takes hold when cruelty is no longer confined to the state or its most fanatical leaders but enters everyday life, shaping public consciousness, political desire, and the boundaries of who is considered human.
Barbarism becomes cultural when large numbers of people support forced removal, collective punishment, starvation, exterminatory violence, and the destruction of civilian life without experiencing such policies as a moral catastrophe.
Israel offers a chilling example. In May 2025, a survey conducted by Pennsylvania State University professor Tamir Sorek found that 82 percent of Israeli Jews surveyed supported the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, with 54 percent saying they were “very” supportive. More disturbing still, 47 percent agreed that when the Israeli military conquers an enemy city it should act as the Israelites did in the biblical conquest of Jericho, by “killing all the residents.” These figures register something more terrifying than support for a particular military policy. They reveal how the language of expulsion and extermination can migrate from the margins of political life into the moral vocabulary of everyday society. This is what a culture of barbarism looks like when disposability becomes common sense and the destruction of another people can be imagined as legitimate, necessary, or even righteous.
Omer Bartov has gone further, arguing that Israeli society has become complicit through both action and silence, and is increasingly marked by violence, vulgarity, and indifference. What is at stake here exceeds the crimes of Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, or the Israeli military. It points to the pedagogical production of a social order in which the language of elimination becomes thinkable, mass suffering becomes tolerable, and exterminatory violence can be absorbed into the ordinary rhythms of national life. This is the endpoint of pedagogical terrorism: the manufacture of subjects for whom barbarism no longer appears barbaric.
The culture of fascism does not merely tolerate monsters; it turns them into celebrities, strongmen, saviors, and objects of identification, reproducing a cult of leadership. Their violations of moral and political norms become signs of authenticity, their cruelty proof of strength. Their contempt for democratic restraints becomes a source of pleasure for followers who experience each transgression as their own imaginary liberation from the obligations of equality, compassion, and mutual responsibility.
Trump offered a chilling display of these mobilizing passions of fascism when he called upon his followers to cheat in the November elections. At the Republican convention in Dallas, he instructed thousands of supporters to raise their right hands and repeat an oath of personal loyalty that included the declaration, “I don’t care if I’m registered or not. I’m going to try and cheat like hell like they do.” This was more than another assault on democratic norms. It was a fascist political ritual in which loyalty to the leader, contempt for law, and the thrill of collective transgression were fused into a mass spectacle. Yet the incident was absorbed into the churn of the news cycle as another bizarre Trump performance. This is how fascism becomes ordinary: the outrageous is reported, consumed, and forgotten before its meaning can become a matter of sustained public judgment. What should have registered as a political emergency dissolved into the culture of immediacy, stripped of its historical meaning and reduced to another spectacle without consequence.
The political task cannot be reduced to removing individual monsters from power. The language of monstrosity becomes politically disabling when it individualizes what is systemic, directing attention toward pathological leaders while leaving intact the institutions, economic interests, media ecosystems, racial hierarchies, and educational forces that produce authoritarian consciousness.
The defining political question of our time is not whether monsters have returned. It is what kind of society produces them, what forms of power need them, and what pedagogical machinery teaches people to follow them. The monster is not the end of the analysis but its beginning. Fascism cannot be defeated by removing its most visible leaders while leaving intact the economic, political, and cultural machinery that produced them. The struggle against fascism must also confront gangster capitalism, white supremacy, militarism, the carceral state, and the institutions that turn human beings into disposable populations.
But resistance cannot live on outrage alone. It needs a language of possibility and a politics capable of making hope concrete. Hope is neither optimism nor faith that history bends automatically toward justice. It is a practice born when people refuse the manufactured loneliness of neoliberal life, discover one another in struggle, and recognize that what they experience as private misery is often a public wound produced by structures of power. It takes form in unions, classrooms, demonstrations, mutual-aid networks, abolitionist movements, struggles for Palestinian freedom, immigrant justice campaigns, and organizations capable of turning anger into collective power.
There are already signs that such a politics is struggling to be born in the United States. The resurgence of democratic socialism, the extraordinary growth of the Democratic Socialists of America, the electoral victories of socialist candidates, and renewed labor militancy suggest that increasing numbers of people are no longer willing to accept the tyranny of the market as the horizon of political possibility. DSA reported more than 120,000 members by the summer of 2026, alongside a widening field of socialist electoral victories and organizing campaigns. These developments should neither be romanticized nor mistaken for a mass socialist transformation. But they matter because they register something the ruling order desperately wants declared impossible: capitalism is once again being named as a political problem, socialism has returned to public life as a language of possibility, and collective struggle is breaking through the suffocating claim that there is no alternative.
Hope is dangerous to fascism because authoritarian power feeds on isolation, historical amnesia, political exhaustion, and the conviction that nothing can be changed.
Militant hope shatters that conviction.
It turns private suffering into public anger, spectators into political agents, and the loneliness on which fascism feeds into collective power. Against the pedagogy of fear, it creates a pedagogy of resistance and civic courage. Against the culture of cruelty, it makes solidarity a weapon and justice a collective demand. Against a society organized around disposability, it insists that human beings are worth more than markets, borders, property, and profit, and that the institutions producing misery, abandonment, and organized violence must be transformed.
The struggle is larger than defeating the monsters who occupy the commanding heights of power. We must destroy the conditions that make them possible by building a mass democratic politics capable of confronting concentrated wealth, dismantling racial and economic hierarchies, defending public goods, breaking the grip of militarism, and returning economic and political power to ordinary people. Democracy cannot survive as the political shell of capitalism, emptied of its substance while concentrated economic power governs from within. It must become a way of organizing social life itself, grounded in equality, collective power, and the struggle for a just future.
More than four decades ago, Manos Hadjidakis warned: “When the face of the monster ceases to frighten us, then we must be afraid… because that means we have begun to resemble it.” His warning has never been more urgent. But resemblance is not destiny. The monster depends upon our resignation, our silence, our isolation, and finally our belief that resistance is futile.
The most radical form of hope begins with the refusal of that lie.
Monsters are made by history, and they can be unmade by collective struggle. That struggle must confront capitalism itself and build a democratic socialist politics capable of wresting power from the ruling elites, returning it to ordinary people, and transforming hope into a force for remaking the world.
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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. Second half should read: His latest books are The Burden of Conscience: Educating Beyond the Veil of Silence (Bloomsbury in 2025); Assassins of Memory: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Erasure (Bloomsbury, 2026). He is LA Progressive's Associat
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