Quotes About State

Europe's enduring localism, which had been the weak link in Christendom, became in turn the Achilles heel of the dynastic state.

The decision for the I-40 route had been made quietly in 1957 at a nonpublic meeting of white business leaders and state highway officials.

BPR and state highway engineers had enormous confidence in their own expertise, but they were unprepared for the upsurge of citizen opposition to the urban interstates.

The power of "the state" emanates both from the U.S. nation and also through the relations by which it is embedded in global, transnational networks of power.

Poor and immigrant communities feel most directly the spectacle and its terror. Other groups of U.S. residents, especially our threatened middle-class and white communities who (often wrongly) think they are safe from such official terror, are induced by the spectacle of paramilitary sweeps and SWAT operations to support and rationalize the powerful displays of state power.

The power to execute invests a near absolute power in the state. As Robert Meeropol has suggested, the granting of such absolute power most surely tends to corrupt, and especially to corrupt democracy. Meeropol's own parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were executed in 1953 when he was six years old.

In the U.S. of the last several decades, this consolidation of economic wealth and power constitutes the important political backdrop of the rise of the carceral state. It benefits, too, from the historical backdrop—the legacies of genocide, slavery, racialized caste systems, and other forms of structural violence of the U.S. past.

When the state is given absolute power, in this case to calculate and terminate the end of a human life, the state assumes a power that is "absolute," extending its domination to the borders of life and death. According to Meeropol, when people give that power to the state, they sacrifice their popular sovereignty. Executions function not to serve the people but as another mode of rule in today's theatrics of state terror. I

Let me emphasize, as well, that given a society pervaded by white racism, as discussed in the previous chapter, it will be the mentally ill of color who are generally taken to be a "criminal element" (instead of having a mental impairment), and so simply swept into the prisons by the states' carceral dragnet operations.

State terror thereby creates obedience in the bodies of citizens and residents by enlisting the tense stomach and the threatened sphincter as visceral reminders of the external threats. There, terror often abides, in hidden but lethal ways.

A counter-theatric to state terror is an effective militant practice toward this end. This is "radical love" in the sense foregrounded by Cornel West, which bases its challenging love of the enemy not just upon the enemy's needs, but upon an advocacy and fight for "the unloved,"[4] for the oppressed who need effective techniques and institutions of justice into which they can be liberated.

Such a liberating transformation in and against Lockdown America is "spectral," to use a term from my previous writings.[5] By that I mean that the counter-theatric to state terror makes demands. It is a spectral haunting of the suffering present. It makes demands and cultivates expectations that often make repressive powers tremble. For the repressed, though, this specter is laden with promise and hope. What does this spectral liberation look like?

Nullifying or "neutralizing" the work and effects of such dissidents and organizers of alternative social structures is a third way that carceral state terror protects a system of economic disparity.

More recently, the efforts against police violence that rippled through U.S. communities in 2014 as in the #blacklivesmatter movements are one manifestation of popular resistance against a U.S. state terror's long history.

We face today an especially sinister emergence, not just more police violence, mass incarceration, and a death penalty, but the rise of the U.S. "carceral" or "penal state." Here

Many church groups have their "prison ministries" and Christians participate in numerous education and assistance programs to the incarcerated. But do they challenge the carceral state? This is the broader and deeper problematic the churches must confront. Numerous

Lockdown America, as that triadic structure of police violence, mass incarceration and the death penalty, is one key assemblage of governing forces, of the state's "jaws." Theorists

Christians who confess that the presence or reign of God was uniquely given, in some mode, with Jesus' presence, are confronted with the need to do a political theology of state terror at the very heart of their Christology and at the heart of their discourse. By

Christians who are able to subvert their own public hegemony of Christianity are able to aid in the dismantling of Lockdown America because that hegemony unleashes many ideological reflexes that often sustain today's capitalist-carceral state.

Its meaning is that a God of life endures and somehow surprisingly continues to mobilize an effective and comprehensive resistance to executing state powers and its structural violence. What

The state, she writes, "is not a thing, system, or subject, but a significantly unbounded terrain of powers and techniques, an ensemble of discourses, rules and practices, cohabiting in limited, tension-ridden, often contradictory relation with one another.

In modern states, the citizen is politically impotent. A citizen, it is true, may complain, make suggestions, or cause disruptions, but in the ancient world these were privileges that belonged to any slave.

Consciousness is a computational goal state

if our rights are not unalienable, if they don't come from a source higher than ourselves, then they're malleable at the will of the state. This is a prescription for tyranny.