Assassins of Memory: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Erasure

In this book, Henry A. Giroux addresses the attacks on student protesters speaking up against the war on Gaza, and connects this with wider attacks on critical education and democracy. He details the ongoing scholasticide taking place in Palestine, the systematic attacks by the Israeli military on schools, teachers and museums, and argues that they represent the extreme endpoint of a broader, insidious campaign aimed at crushing dissent across universities in the United States, Europe, and beyond. Books are banned, student protesters face police brutality, faculty are purged, history is whitewashed, and faculty are restricted from teaching certain content in the classroom. Throughout the book he draws links between authoritarianism and education, the war on youth, the politics of higher education, the politics of mass media, as well as what he has termed “organized forgetting”. He closes the book by arguing that we live in an era where historical amnesia has been weaponized, where many young people are denied the histories that allow them to narrate their own experiences and assert modes of self-reflection they can claim as their own.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. Scholasticide: Erasing Memory, Silencing Dissent, and Waging War on Education from Gaza to the West 2. Childcide and Authoritarianism 3. Education, History, and the Scourge of Organized Forgetting 4. Hedge-Fund Driven Universities In A Time Of Crisis 5. Authoritarianism in the Age of Disimagination Machines 6. Firewalls of Ignorance and Disappearance: Corporate Media and Fascist Politics 7. Youth and Stolen Futures: Rethinking the Politics of Memory References Index

About the Author :
Henry A. Giroux holds the Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Canada. His recent books include The Burden of Conscience (2025), Insurrections (2023), Pedagogy of Resistance (2022), Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy (2021) and On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd Edition (2020), all published by Bloomsbury.

Review :
The reading of Assassins of Memory is indispensable for all who yearn to salvage our democracy and contribute to the construction of a more humane world. By coupling a language of critique that denounces with a language of possibility that announces, Assassins of Memory is yet another testament of Paulo Freire's truism who, decades ago, wrote: “For Giroux, there is no hope without a future to be made, to be built, to be shaped.” We have entered the time of disappearances, where the ideas, concepts, and intellectual frameworks for understanding how the world works and the networks of power that profit from the system that dominates us are being elided, erased from our collective memory. It is, of course, only a small step from the disappearance of ideas to the disappearance of people who hold them. There is no better guide to this premeditated numbing of the mind than Henry Giroux, who navigates through our darkening political landscape with an unflinching moral clarity, illuminating a path toward both reclaiming the truth of our past and salvaging a more just future. Assassins of Memory is an urgently needed antidote to our perilous moment. Henry Giroux's writing is always lucid and fearless but now it is also urgent. As his new book Assassins of Memory, makes clear, we are hovering on a precipice. The ground that supports us––our own history and its analysis––is being deliberately and rapidly eroded. Without knowledge of the past, we are immobilized and cannot envision a concept for the future. Giroux insists there is still hope, but only if we move quickly and “fight to remember” through education and “moral accountability.” These essays can lead the way to solid ground. They could not be more timely. Henry Giroux has been lighting the way toward democracy and solidarity by identifying the storm winds aimed against it for a long time. He is an articulate and passionate champion of kids and education. And he does not give up and he does not stop offering us his critical and political insights. Assassins of Memory is his latest contribution to what we need the most: a complicated analysis of the rapidly changing contemporary conjuncture and its political possibilities. It adds yet another layer to our understanding of the place of culture in the current struggles by elucidating how time and memory themselves have become fungible and weaponized. It is vital reading for anyway trying to figure out what's going on. With every page of Assassins of Memory, one encounters the brilliance and passion of Henry Giroux. In his hands, memory, storytelling, and history empower young people and others to fight the racialized fascist turn in the United States. Reading this book left me inspire and ready to fight. A must read for these dark times. At this moment of real peril for democracy as economic and political power becomes concentrated within an increasingly unaccountable billionaire class, Assassins of Memory delivers moral clarity and an urgent invocation to act in a post-truth world.