Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
C. Voting issue -
B. Violation –
1. Predictability – No way predict presence not tied to the agent in the resolution,
exploding the research burden and destroying any semblance of clash that the round
could offer, which is key to education in the round.
2. Extratopicality - the extraneous removal of non-US owned military presence is an
extratopical advocacy
a. kills topic-specific education: the resolution doesn’t deal with all supranational
organizations
b. destroys fairness: neg is placed at a disadvantage before the 1NC even begins
because we prepped out for US-owned military forces, not NATO-owned
3. The aff does not adhere to the res
2. Ground – disads depend on a possessive connection to the US, which are good for
debate because they allow us to test legitimate impacts.
We believe this debate should be about representations of American Hegemony.
America is crumbling. We have bombed too many wedding parties, maintained too
many aggressive wars, flouted too many international treaties, consumed and
borrowed our economy too far into oblivion to ever lead the free world again. The
so-called Pax Americana has been anything but stabilizing, fueling two endless wars
and inflaming anti-american sentiment, reproducing the violence it was supposed to
protect us from. The affirmative is a call to resurrect the dream. More infantry
recruits will do nothing to alleviate global violence, which runs structurally deep
within American foreign policy, other than satiate our desire to act, reifying faith in
imperial control and digging the trench that separates America from the rest of the
world even deeper.
Chris Hedges, journalist, author, and war correspondent, America’s Wars of Self-
Destruction. November 17th, 2008.
< http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/20081117_americas_wars_of_self_destructio
n/>.
War is a poison. It is a poison that nations and groups must at times ingest to
ensure their survival. But, like any poison, it can kill you just as surely as the disease
it is meant to eradicate. The poison of war courses unchecked through the body
politic of the United States. We believe that because we have the capacity to wage
war we have the right to wage war. We embrace the dangerous self-delusion that
we are on a providential mission to save the rest of the world from itself, to implant
our virtues—which we see as superior to all other virtues—on others, and that we
have a right to do this by force. This belief has corrupted Republicans and
Democrats alike. And if Barack Obama drinks, as it appears he will, the dark elixir of
war and imperial power offered to him by the national security state, he will
accelerate the downward spiral of the American empire.
Obama and those around him embrace the folly of the “war on terror.” They may
want to shift the emphasis of this war to Afghanistan rather than Iraq, but this is a
difference in strategy, not policy. By clinging to Iraq and expanding the war in
Afghanistan, the poison will continue in deadly doses. These wars of occupation are
doomed to failure. We cannot afford them. The rash of home foreclosures, the
mounting job losses, the collapse of banks and the financial services industry, the
poverty that is ripping apart the working class, our crumbling infrastructure and the
killing of hapless Afghans in wedding parties and Iraqis by our iron fragmentation
bombs are neatly interwoven. These events form a perfect circle. The costly forms
of death we dispense on one side of the globe are hollowing us out from the inside
at home.
The “war on terror” is an absurd war against a tactic. It posits the idea of perpetual,
or what is now called “generational,” war. It has no discernable end. There is no
way to define victory. It is, in metaphysical terms, a war against evil, and evil, as
any good seminarian can tell you, will always be with us. The most destructive evils,
however, are not those that are externalized. The most destructive are those that
are internal. These hidden evils, often defined as virtues, are unleashed by our
hubris, self-delusion and ignorance. Evil masquerading as good is evil in its
deadliest form.
The decline of American empire began long before the current economic meltdown
or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It began before the first Gulf War or Ronald
Reagan. It began when we shifted, in the words of the historian Charles Maier, from
an “empire of production” to an “empire of consumption.” By the end of the
Vietnam War, when the costs of the war ate away at Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society
and domestic oil production began its steady, inexorable decline, we saw our
country transformed from one that primarily produced to one that primarily
consumed. We started borrowing to maintain a lifestyle we could no longer afford.
We began to use force, especially in the Middle East, to feed our insatiable demand
for cheap oil. The years after World War II, when the United States accounted for
one-third of world exports and half of the world’s manufacturing, gave way to huge
trade imbalances, outsourced jobs, rusting hulks of abandoned factories, stagnant
wages and personal and public debts that most of us cannot repay.
The bill is now due. America’s most dangerous enemies are not Islamic radicals, but
those who promote the perverted ideology of national security that, as Andrew
Bacevich writes, is “our surrogate religion.” If we continue to believe that we can
expand our wars and go deeper into debt to maintain an unsustainable level of
consumption, we will dynamite the foundations of our society.
“The Big Lies are not the pledge of tax cuts, universal health care, family values
restored, or a world rendered peaceful through forceful demonstrations of American
leadership,” Bacevich writes in “The Limits of Power.” “The Big Lies are the truths
that remain unspoken: that freedom has an underside; that nations, like households,
must ultimately live within their means; that history’s purpose, the subject of so
many confident pronouncements, remains inscrutable. Above all, there is this:
Power is finite. Politicians pass over matters such as these in silence. As a
consequence, the absence of self-awareness that forms such an enduring element
of the American character persists.”
Those clustered around Barack Obama, from Madeline Albright to Hillary Clinton to
Dennis Ross to Colin Powell, have no interest in dismantling the structure of the
imperial presidency or the vast national security state. They will keep these
institutions intact and seek to increase their power. We have a childish belief that
Obama will magically save us from economic free fall, restore our profligate levels of
consumption and resurrect our imperial power. This naïve belief is part of our
disconnection with reality. The problems we face are structural. The old America is
not coming back.
The corporate forces that control the state will never permit real reform. This is the
Faustian bargain made between these corporate forces and the Republican and
Democratic parties. We will never, under the current system, achieve energy
independence. Energy independence would devastate the profits of the oil and gas
industry. It would wipe out tens of billions of dollars in weapons contracts, spoil the
financial health of a host of private contractors from Halliburton to Blackwater and
render obsolete the existence of U.S. Central Command.
There are groups and people who seek to do us harm. The attacks of Sept. 11 will
not be the last acts of terrorism on American soil. But the only way to defeat
terrorism is to isolate terrorists within their own societies, to mount cultural and
propaganda wars, to discredit their ideas, to seek concurrence even with those
defined as our enemies. Force, while a part of this battle, is rarely necessary. The
2001 attacks that roused our fury and unleashed the “war on terror” also unleashed
a worldwide revulsion against al-Qaida and Islamic terrorism, including throughout
the Muslim world, where I was working as a reporter at the time. If we had had the
courage to be vulnerable, to build on this empathy rather than drop explosive
ordinance all over the Middle East, we would be far safer and more secure today. If
we had reached out for allies and partners instead of arrogantly assuming that
American military power would restore our sense of invulnerability and mitigate our
collective humiliation, we would have done much to defeat al-Qaida. But we did not.
We demanded that all kneel before us. And in our ruthless and indiscriminate use of
violence and illegal wars of occupation, we resurrected the very forces that we
could, under astute leadership, have marginalized. We forgot that fighting terrorism
is a war of shadows, an intelligence war, not a conventional war. We forgot that, as
strong as we may be militarily, no nation, including us, can survive isolated and
alone.
The American empire, along with our wanton self-indulgence and gluttonous
consumption, has come to an end. We are undergoing a period of profound
economic, political and military decline. We can continue to dance to the tunes of
self-delusion, circling the fire as we chant ridiculous mantras about our greatness,
virtue and power, or we can face the painful reality that has engulfed us. We cannot
reverse this decline. It will happen no matter what we do. But we can, if we break
free from our self-delusion, dismantle our crumbling empire and the national
security state with a minimum of damage to ourselves and others. If we refuse to
accept our limitations, if do not face the changes forced upon us by a bankrupt elite
that has grossly mismanaged our economy, our military and our government, we
will barrel forward toward internal and external collapse. Our self-delusion
constitutes our greatest danger. We will either confront reality or plunge headlong
into the minefields that lie before us.
Hegemony Link
The aff attempts to radically disavow the United States’ vulnerability while framing
the rest of the world as beholden to US military power, creating a schism that marks
off whole populations as ungrievable, because they are only so many roadblocks on
the path to primacy.
With these insights in mind, let us return to the question Asad poses to us
about moral responsiveness. If just or justified violence is enacted by states,
and if unjustifiable violence is enacted by non-state actors or actors
opposed to existing states, then we have a way of explaining why we react
to certain forms of violence with horror and to other forms with a sense of
acceptance, possibly even with righteousness and triumphalism. The
affective responses seem to be primary, in need of no explanation, prior to
the work of understanding and interpretation. We are, as it were, against
interpretation in those moments in which we react with moral horror in the
face of violence. But as long as we remain against interpretation in such
moments, we will not be able to give an account of why the affect of horror is
differentially experienced_ We will then not only proceed on the basis of this
unreason, but will take it as the sign of our commendable native moral
sentiment, perhaps even of our "fundamental humanity."
Paradoxically, the unreasoned schism in our responsiveness makes it impossible to react
with the same horror to violence committed against all sorts of populations, In this way,
when we take our moral horror to be a sign of our humanity, we fail to note that the humanity in question is in fact, implicitly divided
between those for whom we feel urgent and unreasoned concern and those whose lives and deaths simply do not touch us, or do not appear as
lives at all. How are we to understand the regulatory power that creates this differential at the level of affective and moral responsiveness? Perhaps it
is important to remember that responsibility requires responsiveness, and that responsiveness is not a merely subjective state, but a
way of responding to what is before us with the resources that are available to us. We are already social beings, working within elaborate
social interpretations both when we feel horror and when we fail to feel it at all. Our affect is never merely our own: affect is from the start,
communicated from elsewhere. It disposes us to perceive the world in a certain way, to let certain dimensions of the world in and to resist
others. But if a response is always a response to a perceived state of the world, what is it that allows some aspect of the world to become
perceivable and another not? How do we re-approach this question of affective response and moral evaluation by considering those
already operative frameworks within which certain lives are regarded worthy of protection while others are not, precisely because they
are nor quite "lives" according to prevailing norms of recognizability? Affect depends upon social supports for feeling: we come to feel only in
relation to a perceivable loss, one that depends on social structures of perception; and we can only feeI and claim affect as our own on the
condition that we have already been inscribed in a circuit of social affect.
It's time for Americans to grow up, get their heads out of the sand, and put Realpolitik to bed. Our policy
of bombing wedding parties, torturing prisoners, ignoring international law and international treaties,
and treating every nation's territory as our personal property is not 'realistic', it's just short-sighted.
Realpolitik has always been contrasted with internationalism, which was seen as idealistic.
That was true a century ago. Today, internationalism is the only reality. The problems we
face all require international solutions. The world has shrunk, and the nation-state is
obsolete as an ultimate authority. Corporations are international, terrorism is international,
the economy is international, nature is international, pollution is international, labor is
international, poverty is international, disease is international.
The credit crisis should have been a wake-up call. Banks and other corporations have for a long time taken
rich advantage of the fact that politicians cling to meaningless national boundaries. Nations compete with
one another, allowing multinationals to play them off against each other. But when trouble came, the
banks were forced to reveal the truth to their nationalistic suckers: unite or we all go down.
The world we live in today is one of networks. The largest network will succeed, the others will fail. When
Citibank tried to maintain a closed network of ATM machines, for example, several smaller banks banded
together to form an open ATM network, which Citibank was ultimately forced to join because it was
larger. Isolationism today is a losing strategy.
And networks are not empires--they're composed of equals. The United States can no longer
dictate to the rest of the world--by attempting to, under the Bush administration, it has seen
its influence around the world sink to its lowest depth in history.
It's time to conduct our foreign policy like grownups, living in a grownup world, not like hyperactive
ten-year-old boys living in comic-book dreams of superheroes.
Terrorist rhetoric shuts off solutions to terrorism, necessitates eradication of those who its applied to,
and incites racist violence
Kapitan and Schulte 2 (Tomis and Erich, Thomas – Prof of Philosophy @ N Illionois U, and Erich – , Journal of Political and Military
Sociology Vol. 30 Iss. 1, 2002, pp. 172+, Questia) JPG
Given that a population has deeply rooted grievances it is determined to rectify, and given that, continually, its members have been willing to
resort to terrorist actions in pursuing its goals, then what is the intelligent response? One might try to beat them into submission, but
short of outright genocide, retaliation against a population from whose
ranks terrorists emerge will not solve anything so long as that population feels it has a legitimate
grievance worth dying for and decides that terrorism is the only viable response. Such "counter-terrorist" retaliation,
combined with a failure to address their grievances, only intensifies their hatred and resolve, their willingness to
engage in more terrorism, and soon the parties will find themselves wrapped in an ever-
increasing spiral of violence. Whether individual terrorists are driven by strategy, psychology, or a combination of
both, the rational approach to persistent terrorism stemming from a given group requires examining the situation wherein terrorism is seen as
the only route of resistance or outlet for outrage. Only then can intelligent moral responses be crafted. This brings us closer to our main
contentions. The prevalent rhetoric of 'terrorism' has not provided an intelligent
response to the problem of terrorism. To the contrary, it has shut off any
meaningful examination of causes or debate on policies and has left only the path of violence to solve differences.
Rather than promoting a free and open examination of the grievances of the group from which terrorists emerge, the 'terrorist'
label nips all questioning and debate in the bud. Terrorists are "evil"-as the U.S.
Administration has repeated on numerous occasions since September 11, 2001-and are therefore to be
eradicated. This sort of response to terrorist violence is nothing new; the 'terrorist' rhetoric has been steadily escalating since the
early 1970s, and under the Reagan Administration it became a principal foil for foreign policy. None of this has been
lost upon those who employ the rhetoric of 'terrorism' as a propaganda
device, to obfuscate and to deflect attention away from controversial
policies. A prime example in the 1980s was a book edited by Benjamin Netanyahu entitled, Terrorism: How the West Can
Win. While it offers a standard definition of 'terrorism,' both the editor and the contributors applied it selectively and argued
that
the only way to combat terrorism is to respond with force, "to weaken and
destroy the terrorist's ability to consistently launch attacks," even though
it might involve the "risk of civilian casualties" (pp. 202-205). Throughout this book, very little is
said about the possible causes of terrorist violence beyond vague assertions about Islam's confrontation with modernity (p. 82), or passages
of this calibre: The
root cause of terrorism lies not in grievances but in a disposition toward
unbridled violence. This can be traced to a worldview that asserts that certain ideological and religious goals justify, indeed
demand, the shedding of all moral inhibitions. In this context, the observation that the root cause of terrorism is terrorists is more than a
tautology. (p. 204) One is tempted to pass off comments like this as pure rant, save for the fact that this book reached a large audience,
especially since its contributors included not only academics and journalists but also important policy makers. Netanyahu himself went on to
become the Israeli Prime Minister, and among the American contributors were U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz, U.N. Ambassador
Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and Senators Daniel Moynihan and Alan Cranston, all of who voiced sentiments similar to those of Netanyahu. This
upshot of the book is that a
terrorist is portrayed as a carrier of "oppression and
enslavement," lacking moral sense, and "a perfect nihilist" (pp. 29-30). Given that the
overwhelming number of examples of terrorism are identified as coming from
the Arab and Islamic worlds, and that "retaliation" against terrorists is
repeatedly urged even at the expense of civilian casualties, then one
begins to see the point of Edward Said's assessment of the book as nothing short of "an incitement to anti-
Arab and anti-Moslem violence" (Said 1988:157).17
The metaphors that collectively construct the enemy in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars
require attention because of their potential consequences. The saturation of these
metaphors in media reporting has resulted in the dominance of the complementary
enemy-as-animal, enemy-as-prey and enemy-as-disease patterns, a dominance that works to obscure public awareness that, first,
representational strategies are in play and, second, that these strategies are more than merely rhetorical in their effects. The
link
between the widespread dissemination of dehumanizing images of the
enemy and racism, oppression and even genocide has been well
established. Gregory Stanton (1996) observed that the first three stages leading to genocide
are classification, symbolization and dehumanization. Animal, prey and disease-related
metaphors accomplish in a single rhetorical gesture all three of these steps, powerfully conflating them into a process that
simultaneously identifies, marks, symbolizes and profoundly devalues the Other. For Stanton, genocide
is not a product, but a process. It may appear sudden, but it is actually linked to a series of distinct but progressive stages, each
integral to the “genocidal process” (1996). Classification, symbolization, and dehumanization are followed by organization, polarization,
identification, extermination and finally denial of the genocidal act. The
language and imagery through
which the enemy-Other is represented in the news media play a key role
in these stages; once the enemy is consistently represented as less than human, it becomes
psychologically acceptable to engage in genocide or other atrocities (Frank &
Melville, 1988: 15). Historical precedents include Nazi propaganda films that interspersed scenes of Jewish immigration with shots of
teeming rats. Jews were also compared to cross-bred mongrel dogs, insects and parasites requiring elimination; Nazi propaganda insisted that
“in the case of Jews and lice, only a radical cure helps” (Mieder, 1982). The more recent Rwandan genocide was also fueled by widely-
disseminated media voices in print and radio repeatedly calling the Tutsi ethnic community serpents and cockroaches (Kagwi-Ndungu,
2007).
We control the internal link to war and extinction- Warfare happens when states
believe their vulnerability can be assuaged, and their military deployments are
predictably effective. This happens through ideological mystification- military
intervention is never stabilizing because it cannot map out nor control the socio-
political realities of its object- every US war of occupation proves our argument.
Burke 7 (Anthony Burke, Int'l Studies @ U of New South Wales, “Ontologies of War,” in Theory &
Event, Vol. 10, Iss. 2)
This essay develops a theory about the causes of war -- and thus aims to generate lines of action and critique for peace -- that cuts beneath
analyses based either on a given sequence of events, threats, insecurities and political manipulation, or the play of
institutional, economic or political interests (the 'military-industrial complex'). Such factors are important to be sure, and
should not be discounted, but they flow over a deeper bedrock of modern reason that has not only come to form a
powerful structure of common sense but the apparently solid ground of the real itself. In this light, the two 'existential'
and 'rationalist' discourses of war-making and justification mobilised in the Lebanon war are more than merely arguments,
rhetorics or even discourses. Certainly they mobilise forms of knowledge and power together; providing political
leaderships, media, citizens, bureaucracies and military forces with organising systems of belief, action, analysis and
rationale. But they run deeper than that. They are truth-systems of the most powerful and fundamental kind that we
have in modernity: ontologies, statements about truth and being which claim a rarefied privilege to state what is and
how it must be maintained as it is. I am thinking of ontology in both its senses: ontology as both a statement about
the nature and ideality of being (in this case political being, that of the nation-state), and as a statement of
epistemological truth and certainty, of methods and processes of arriving at certainty (in this case, the development
and application of strategic knowledge for the use of armed force, and the creation and maintenance of geopolitical
order, security and national survival). These derive from the classical idea of ontology as a speculative or positivistic
inquiry into the fundamental nature of truth, of being, or of some phenomenon ; the desire for a solid metaphysical account of
things inaugurated by Aristotle, an account of 'being qua being and its essential attributes'.17 In contrast, drawing on Foucauldian theorising
about truth and power, I see ontology as a particularly powerful claim to truth itself: a claim to the status of an
underlying systemic foundation for truth, identity, existence and action; one that is not essential or timeless, but is
thoroughly historical and contingent, that is deployed and mobilised in a fraught and conflictual socio-political
context of some kind. In short, ontology is the 'politics of truth'18 in its most sweeping and powerful form. I see
such a drive for ontological certainty and completion as particularly problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly,
when it takes the form of the existential and rationalist ontologies of war, it amounts to a hard and exclusivist claim:
a drive for ideational hegemony and closure that limits debate and questioning, that confines it within the boundaries
of a particular, closed system of logic, one that is grounded in the truth of being, in the truth of truth as such. The
second is its intimate relation with violence: the dual ontologies represent a simultaneously social and conceptual
structure that generates violence. Here we are witness to an epistemology of violence (strategy) joined to an ontology
of violence (the national security state). When we consider their relation to war, the two ontologies are especially dangerous
because each alone (and doubly in combination) tends both to quicken the resort to war and to lead to its escalation
either in scale and duration, or in unintended effects. In such a context violence is not so much a tool that can be
picked up and used on occasion, at limited cost and with limited impact -- it permeates being. This essay describes firstly
the ontology of the national security state (by way of the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt and G. W. F. Hegel)
and secondly the rationalist ontology of strategy (by way of the geopolitical thought of Henry Kissinger), showing how they
crystallise into a mutually reinforcing system of support and justification, especially in the thought of Clausewitz. This
creates both a profound ethical and pragmatic problem. The ethical problem arises because of their militaristic force -- they
embody and reinforce a norm of war -- and because they enact what Martin Heidegger calls an 'enframing' image of
technology and being in which humans are merely utilitarian instruments for use, control and destruction, and force
-- in the words of one famous Cold War strategist -- can be thought of as a 'power to hurt'.19 The pragmatic problem arises
because force so often produces neither the linear system of effects imagined in strategic theory nor anything we
could meaningfully call security, but rather turns in upon itself in a nihilistic spiral of pain and destruction. In the era
of a 'war on terror' dominantly conceived in Schmittian and Clausewitzian terms,20 the arguments of Hannah Arendt (that violence
collapses ends into means) and Emmanuel Levinas (that 'every war employs arms that turn against those that wield them' )
take on added significance. Neither, however, explored what occurs when war and being are made to coincide, other than Levinas' intriguing
comment that in war persons 'play roles in which they no longer recognises themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own
substance'. 21 What I am trying to describe in this essay is a complex relation between, and interweaving of, epistemology and ontology. But it is
not my view that these are distinct modes of knowledge or levels of truth, because in the social field named by security, statecraft and
violence they are made to blur together, continually referring back on each other, like charges darting between
electrodes. Rather they are related systems of knowledge with particular systemic roles and intensities of claim about truth, political being and
political necessity. Positivistic or scientific claims to epistemological truth supply an air of predictability and reliability
to policy and political action, which in turn support larger ontological claims to national being and purpose, drawing
them into a common horizon of certainty that is one of the central features of past-Cartesian modernity. Here it may be
useful to see ontology as a more totalising and metaphysical set of claims about truth, and epistemology as more pragmatic and instrumental; but
while a distinction between epistemology (knowledge as technique) and ontology (knowledge as being) has analytical value, it tends to break
down in action. The epistemology of violence I describe here (strategic science and foreign policy doctrine) claims positivistic
clarity about techniques of military and geopolitical action which use force and coercion to achieve a desired end, an
end that is supplied by the ontological claim to national existence, security, or order. However in practice, technique
quickly passes into ontology. This it does in two ways. First, instrumental violence is married to an ontology of insecure
national existence which itself admits no questioning. The nation and its identity are known and essential, prior to
any conflict, and the resort to violence becomes an equally essential predicate of its perpetuation. In this way
knowledge-as-strategy claims, in a positivistic fashion, to achieve a calculability of effects (power) for an ultimate
purpose (securing being) that it must always assume. Second, strategy as a technique not merely becomes an
instrument of state power but ontologises itself in a technological image of 'man' as a maker and user of things,
including other humans, which have no essence or integrity outside their value as objects. In Heidegger's terms,
technology becomes being; epistemology immediately becomes technique, immediately being . This combination could be
seen in the aftermath of the 2006 Lebanon war, whose obvious strategic failure for Israelis generated fierce attacks on the army and political
leadership and forced the resignation of the IDF chief of staff. Yet in its wake neither ontology was rethought. Consider how a reserve soldier,
while on brigade-sized manoeuvres in the Golan Heights in early 2007, was quoted as saying: 'we are ready for the next war'. Uri Avnery quoted
Israeli commentators explaining the rationale for such a war as being to 'eradicate the shame and restore to the army the "deterrent power" that
was lost on the battlefields of that unfortunate war'. In 'Israeli public discourse', he remarked, 'the next war is seen as a natural
phenomenon, like tomorrow's sunrise.' 22 The danger obviously raised here is that these dual ontologies of war link being,
means, events and decisions into a single, unbroken chain whose very process of construction cannot be examined .
As is clear in the work of Carl Schmitt, being implies action, the action that is war. This chain is also obviously at work in
the U.S. neoconservative doctrine that argues, as Bush did in his 2002 West Point speech, that 'the only path to safety is the
path of action', which begs the question of whether strategic practice and theory can be detached from strong
ontologies of the insecure nation-state.23 This is the direction taken by much realist analysis critical of Israel and the
Bush administration's 'war on terror'. Reframing such concerns in Foucauldian terms, we could argue that obsessive ontological
24
commitments have led to especially disturbing 'problematizations' of truth. 25 However such rationalist critiques rely
on a one-sided interpretation of Clausewitz that seeks to disentangle strategic from existential reason, and to open up
choice in that way. However without interrogating more deeply how they form a conceptual harmony in Clausewitz's
thought -- and thus in our dominant understandings of politics and war -- tragically violent 'choices' will continue to
be made.
Their motivation for withdrawal – that current presence is not effective at reproducing the
global order – maintains the logic of legitimation that justified BMD’s in the first place
Hardt and Negri 04 (*Michael, Professor of Literature and Italian, Duke University, Ph.D in Comparative
Literature, University of Washington, and *Antonio, Former professor in State Theory, Padua University, Multitude,
30, jbh)
Violence is legitimated most effectively today, it seems to us, not on any a priori framework, moral or legal,
but only a posteriori, based on its results. It might seem that the violence of the
strong is automatically legitimated and the violence of the weak
immediately labeled terrorism, but the logic of legitimation has
more to do with the effects of the violence. The reinforcement
or reestablishment of the current global order is what
retroactively legitimates the use of violence. In the span of just over a
decade we have seen the complete shift among these forms of
legitimation. The first Gulf War was legitimated on the basis of
international law, since it was aimed officially at restoring the sovereignty of Kuwait. The NATO
intervention in Kosovo, by contrast, sought legitimation on moral
humanitarian grounds. The second Gulf War, a preemptive war, calls for
legitimation primarily on the basis of its results. 46 A military
and/or police power will be granted legitimacy as long and only
as long as it is effective in rectifying global disorders—not
necessarily bringing peace but maintaining order. By this logic a
power such as the U.S. military can exercise violence that may
or may not be legal or moral and as long as that violence results
in the reproduction of imperial order it will be legitimated. As
soon as the violence ceases to bring order, however, or as soon
as it fails to preserve the security of the present global order,
the legitimation will be removed. This is a most precarious and
unstable form of legitimation.
KATO, DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI’I, 1993 [MASAHIDE, “NUCLEAR
GLOBALISM: TRAVERSING ROCKETS, SATELLITES, AND NUCLEAR WAR VIA THE STRATEGIC GAZE,”
ALTERNATIVES 18 (1993), 339-360]
Nuclear War Imagined and Nuclear War as Real
The vigorous invasion of the logic of capitalist accumulation into the last
vestige of relatively autonomous space in the periphery under late capitalism
is propelled not only by the desire for incorporating every fabric of the
society into the division of labor but also by the desire for "pure"
destruction/extermination of the periphery." The penetration of capital into the social fabric
and the destruction of nature and preexisting social organizations by capital are not separable. However, what
we have " witnessed in the phase of late capitalism is a rapid intensification
of the destruction and extermination of the periphery. In this context, capital is no longer
interested in incorporating some parts of the periphery into the international division of labor. The emergence of
such "pure" destruction/extermination of the periphery can be explained, at least partially, by another
problematic of late capitalism formulated by Ernest Mandel: the mass production of the means of destruction.'
the latest phase of capitalism distinguishes itself from the earlier
Particularly,
phases in its production of the "ultimate means of destruction/extermination,
i.e., nuclear weapons
Let us recall our earlier discussion about the critical historical conjuncture where the notion of "strategy" changed
its nature and became deregulated/dispersed beyond the boundaries set by the interimperial rivalry. Herein, the
The only instances of
perception of the ultimate means of destruction can be historically contextualized.
real nuclear catastrophe perceived and thus given due recognition by the
First World community are the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which
occurred at this conjuncture. Beyond this historical threshold, whose
meaning is relevant .only to the interimperial rivalry, the nuclear catastrophe
is confined to the realm of fantasy, for instance, apocalyptic imagery. And yet
how can one deny the crude fact that nuclear war has been taking place on this earth in
the name of "nuclear testing" since the first nuclear explosion at Alamogordo in
1945? As of 1991, 1,924 nuclear explosions have occurred on earth. The major
perpetrators of nuclear warfare are the United States (936 times), the former
Soviet Union (715 times), France (192 times), the United Kingdom (44 times),
and China (36 times). The primary targets of warfare ("test site" to use Nuke Speak
terminology) have been invariably the sovereign nations of Fourth World and
Indigenous Peoples. Thus history has already witnessed the nuclear wars
against the Marshall Islands (66. times), French Polynesia (175 times),
Australian Aborigines (9 times), Newe Sogobia (the Western Shoshone
Nation) (814 times), the Christmas Islands (24 times), Hawaii (Kalama Island,
also known as Johnston Island) (12 times), the Republic of Kazakhstan (467
times), and Uighur (Xinjian Province, China) (36 times). Moreover although I focus
primarily on "nuclear tests" in this article, if we are to expand the notion of nuclear warfare
to include any kind of violence accrued from the nuclear fuel cycle
(particularly uranium mining and disposition of nuclear wastes), we must
enlist Japan and the European nations as perpetrators and add the Navaho,
Havasupai and other Indigenous Nations to the list of targets. Viewed as a
whole, nuclear war, albeit undeclared, has been waged against the Fourth
World, and 'Indigenous Nations. The dismal consequences of "intensive exploitation," "low intensity
intervention,." or the "nullification of the sovereignty" in the Third World produced by the First World have taken a
form of nuclear extermination in the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations. Thus, from the perspectives- of the
the nuclear catastrophe has never been the
Fourth World and Indigenous Nations,
"unthinkable" single catastrophe but the real catastrophe of repetitive and
ongoing nuclear explosions and exposure to radioactivity. Nevertheless, ongoing
nuclear wars have been, subordinated to the imaginary grand catastrophe.by
rendering them as mere preludes to the apocalypse. As a consequence, the history
and ongoing processes of nuclear explosions as war have been totally wiped
out from the history and consciousness of the First World community. Such a
discursive strategy that aims to mask the "real" of nuclear warfare in the
domain of imagery of nuclear catastrophe can be observed even in Stewart
Firth's Nuclear Playground, which extensively covers the history of "nuclear
testing" in the Pacific:
Nuclear explosions in the atmosphere ... were global in effect The winds and seas carried radioactive contamination
over vast areas of the fragile ecosphere on which we all depend for our survival and which we call the earth. In
preparing for war, we were poisoning our planet and going into battle against nature itself.
the
Although Firth's book is definitely a remarkable study of the history of "nuclear testing" in the Pacific,
problematic division/distinction between the "nuclear explosions" and the
nuclear war is kept intact. The imagery of final nuclear war narrated with the
problematic use of the subject ("we") is located higher than the "real" of
nuclear warfare in terms of discursive value. This ideological
division/hierarchization is the very vehicle through which the history and the
ongoing processes of the destruction of the Fourth World and Indigenous
Nations by means of nuclear violence are obliterated and hence
legitimatized. The discursive containment/obliteration of the "real" of nuclear
warfare has been accomplished, ironic as it may sound, by nuclear criticism.
Nuclear criticism, with its firm commitment to global discourse, has
established the unshakable authority of the imagery of nuclear catastrophe
over the real nuclear catastrophe happening in the Fourth World and
Indigenous Nations almost on a daily basis.
The affirmative eschews techno-fix solutions, they're not going to manipulate international
relations to secure ourselves against terrorism or foreign states. Instead they would wipe the
slate clean, opening a space for new life. What this really means is that they refuse to take the
work of averting nuclear war, instead they invite it, as apocalypse. After all, apocalypse means
salvation, unveiling. Nuclear war will wipe away the sinful, the cities, the modernist dregs,
leaving only the purified survivors, purified by the deaths of most of the world population.
Martha A Bartter (Northeast Missouri State University). “Nuclear Holocaust as urban Renewal.” Science Fiction Studies, 13:2. July 1986.
Mrs. O'Leary's cow did Chicago a big favor. The earthquake of 1906 did the same for San Francisco.
Once such a disaster is distanced by time, we can see how these major cities benefited by having to rebuild. Similarly, we may marvel at
the modernity, functionality, and beauty of some European cities-those most devastated by World
War II. Cities get old, worn-out, dirty, dysfunctional. No technological" fix" seems to satisfy us
as we struggle with deteriorating neighborhoods, narrow streets, and ineffective sewers. We long
for the opportunity to clean house from top to bottom, to "make it new." Typically, we alternate
between the kind of urban renewal that blasts all old structures to make room for high-rise low-
income housing and the kind that salvages the shell of old buildings while "modernizing" the
interior. While we would deny actually wanting our major cities destroyed, and with them our landmarks and our
history, we note the popularity of movies like Godzilla, which show the fragility of our urban
culture.
Since Sodom and Gomorrah, cities have been identified with sin. Now we spend much of
our time and energy trying to make our cities "habitable," while seeing them as a prime target for
atomic bombs; they sin by their very existence. For us, the underground "shelters" that simultaneously protect and confine
the fictional survivors of nuclear "war" metaphorically represent he most-feared features of the city: crowded, dark, technologically dependent,
complicated prisons, they are necessary only because the city itself exists. The city is both womb and tomb.
Our attitude towards nuclear holocaust appears similarly ambivalent. Early, serious fictional descriptions of atomic
weapons used in war predicted their horrifying destructive properties, mostly aimed at civilian populations
in urban centers; yet these fictions usually found ways to explain the survival of a select group. This
group, purified through the sacrifice of a large percentage of its members (and perhaps by a return to
primitive conditions), might eventually be able to build a new, infinitely better world. Thus, atomic war has
traditionally been presented both as obvious disaster and as secret salvation. This covert message is
usually overlooked in fiction, even by authors, but it powerfully influences our cultural subconscious.
In fiction we explore who we "are" (or "were"). Through the medium of a story, we expose our
assumptions about ourselves and our world, although very often we don't see what we have said. "Culture hides
much more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own
participants. … [T]he real job is not to understand foreign culture but to understand our
own"( Hall:3 8). Comparing our culture to another is invaluable; we can "see" ourselves, perhaps for the first time. We obtain much the same
result by observing our fiction, which is produced from our own cultural matrix, responds to it, and subtly
but definitively influences it, while being "made new" by passing through the eye of an artist. Looking back at our fictions,
we can see some of our own cultural "blind spots," some of which seem not to have changed very much over the years, even
though SF is a "literature of change" (Gunn:1). In fiction, we still expect to "renew" society by surviving the
"inevitable" atomic war, rather than by changing the conditions that lead to it. While we give lip
service to the concept of "renewal," what we truly believe, as Mircea Eliade notes (see G. Wolfe: 3-4), is that
any remnant of the old structure will get in the way of the new: "life cannot be repaired, it can
only be re-created by a return to sources."
In fact, the US has been preparing for a nuclear war. Not with Star Wars or treaties or stockpiled
food, but by ensuring that the right population will be attacked – by concentrating the poor and
racial minorities in cities and eliminating social programs. The disadvantaged members of
society are being prepped for nuclear annihilation, and the aff plan is just another step towards
this economic, religious, and ethnic cleansing.
Dean MacCannell (Professor of sociology at UC Davis). “Baltimore in the Morning … After: On the Forms of Post-Nuclear Leadership.”
Diacritics, 14:2. Summer, 1984.
This line of reasoning had already received technical reinforcement from Yale political scientist Bernard Brodie and other early post-war civilian
strategists who made models of nuclear exchanges and determined that "cities of over 100,000
population" are the only targets of sufficient economic value to justify the use of atomic
weapons. They reasoned that atomic bombs are just too expensive to use on military targets which
typically would be worth no more than the bomb and the cost of its delivery [F. Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 30].
Thirty-five years later a military analyst reflected on the origin of the idea of deterrence by threat of massive retaliation in the
following way:
[B]efore the ashes of Japan were cold, the earliest thinkers about nuclear war hit on the idea that, if there was not effective defense
against nuclear attack ... you had only to rely on the threat of retaliation in kind; they all thought in terms of what came to be called
'city busting.' [L. Martin, The Two-Edged Sword: Armed Force in the Modern World (London: Weidendeld and Nicolsen, 1982), 18]
Basic Assumptions of the Doctrine of Deterrence and Their Effect on Domestic Structure
1. Survivability: Nuclear strategists must assume limited "survivability." (I cannot concern myself here with the evidence for and
against the validity of this assumption. I am personally among those who do not believe that an all out nuclear attack can be survived. But this
does not change the fact that our nuclear strategists must believe in survivability, or fundamentally alter the total design of our current nuclear
posture.) According to this idea, the cities will be blown away, but sufficient numbers of people will survive to rebuild American society.
According to one official United States Government Civil Defense Manual I read, this will take approximately four days. An assumption that is
never stated but is always implicit in survivability scenarios is that the survivors will be people who are closely in touch with the unique spirit of
America, and the values of the system of "free enterprise." No government planner has envisaged a post-attack rebuilding by people who never
much benefited from American society, or quite understood what America was all about, that is, by people who lived at a disadvantage on the
margins of society.
cities are not merely targets, but
2. The City as a Nuclear "Defense Weapon"' A second assumption of deterrence is that
American cities can be transformed into effective defense weapons to the degree that they are
vulnerable to atomic attack. In other words, the defense role of the city is not just to receive the hit, it is to
absorb the hit so that damage minimally spills over to surrounding "survival areas." After 1960,
defense planners were univocal on this one point: any effort to defend the American city by
protecting its residents from attack is extremely dangerous to the national security. All analysts agree
that such efforts ("hardening" the city) will be interpreted by the Soviet Union as an offensive move on our part, that is, as a sign that we are
preparing for a "firsts trike." Even more important, we are told by our own planners, any
preparedness for attack on our part will
only cause an intensification of the attack [Eyring iv, 19, 27, 28], needlessly endangering the small
communities and rural areas that might otherwise survive. For example, Wolfgang Panofsky stated: "a large civil
defense program would only raise the level of armament on both sides of the iron curtain to a higher level without an increase, and possibly a
decrease in our security" [Civil Defense 19]. Owen Chamberlain of the University of California agrees: "Meaningful
attempts by
the United States to protect its population from nuclear attack will be met by Soviet attempts to
increase the effectiveness of their armaments" [Civil Defense 291]. Barry Commoner, whose thoughts on the probable
effects of nuclear war are more detailed and sophisticated than other analysts, also agrees. He argues that any United States effort to duplicate the
Soviet policy of putting people and equipment in hardened facilities underground would cause our adversaries to reprogram their weapons to
detonate at ground level instead of in the lower atmosphere. In a 1966 statement, Commoner sums up this position: "the very existence of such
defenses would impel an enemy to massive attacks with ground bursts. This would create a huge global dust pall that might trigger a new ice age"
[AAAS 101]. What is especially noteworthy about these and similar statements is that they are made by scientists and other leaders who know
that Soviet domestic policy involves developing "hardened" facilities, and the United States has not chosen to read that fact as an extraordinary
provocation. This particular excuse for official opposition to the defense of our own cities is another slip of the nuclear unconscious.
3. The Strategic Role of the Rural Areas: The official plan of the United States is to move people, or suggest
that they move themselves, away from the target cities just before a nuclear attack. Interestingly, this
policy "figures in little" a large-scale shift in the macrostructural arrangement that Robert Redfield dubbed the "folk-urban continuum." The
first perturbation was the creation in the 1950's of middle class suburbs, entirely new communities, on the
edge of the cities. Next, in near perfect synchronization with accelerating nuclear arms build-up
and delivery capacity, came withdrawal of the upper-middle class and intelligentsia still further from
the city, into small towns beyond the suburban fringe. Beginning in the 1970's and continuing to the present, rural areas
of the United States, for the first time in history, are growing at a more rapid rate than urban areas. All of this is done in the framework of a
hastily assembled rhetoric of rediscovery of positive rural values. Independent of any actual cause, its strategic import cannot be discounted
because it now figures in our nuclear planning.
[Continues]
The Desire: The will to sacrifice our cities and urban peoples is a matter of national foreign policy, but the bomb itself and the will to use it is
only a bit of the ankle showing. The hidden demographic-psychoanalytic desire can be discovered only by bringing a consideration for some of
the most basic problems of the "system of Free Enterprise" into the post-nuclear structural arrangement. What is to be done with the
mass of disadvantaged people which is such a common feature and embarrassment to the system
of "Free Enterprise?" Are we to follow the course of Eurosocialism and agree upon certain
minimal standards of income, health care, and housing below which no one should fall? Or do we renew an
earlier United States program of quality democratic institutions, courts, schools, the free press, all of which hold
out the prospect of great economic reward for anyone tough enough to go for it? In the last decades, the
United States has turned away from either of these approaches and begun to warehouse its ethnic,
impoverished, stigmatized, and mentally marginal populations in large cities characterized by
measurably inferior education, health standards and facilities, and housing. During this same
period on the rural side, there has been a movement of white wealth out of the large cities and a
sudden and very large drop in the numbers of rural black farm owners. After the 1963 Community Mental
Health Centers Act, thousands of addicts and the certified insane were released into the streets of our cities.