Biopower and racism are the means by which the state exercises death and extermination.

The impact is nothing short of total extinction. achille mbembe, 03 ( "necropolitics," public culture 15.1, 2003, 1140 Achille Mbembe senior researcher at the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of the Witwatersrand.) Operating on the basis of a split between the living and the dead, such a power defines itself in relation to a biological field which it takes control of and vests itself in. This control presupposes the distribution of human species into groups, the subdivision of the population into subgroups, and the establishment of a biological caesura between the ones and the others. This is what Foucault labels with the (at first sight familiar) term racism.17 That race (or for that matter racism) figures so prominently in the calculus of biopower is entirely justifiable. After all, more so than classthinking (the ideology that defines history as an economic struggle of classes), race has been the ever present shadow in Western political thought and practice, especially when it comes to imagining the inhumanity of, or rule over, foreign peoples. Referring to both this ever-presence and the phantomlike world of race in general, Arendt locates their roots in the shattering experience of otherness and suggests that the politics of race is ultimately linked to the politics of death.18 Indeed, in Foucault s terms, racism is above all a technology aimed at permitting the exercise of biopower, that old sovereign right of death. 19 In the economy of biopower, the function of racism is to regulate the distribution of death and to make possible the murderous functions of the state. It is, he says, the condition for the acceptability of putting to death. 20 Foucault states clearly that the sovereign right to kill (droit de glaive) and the mechanisms of biopower are inscribed in the way all modern states function;21 indeed, they can be seen as constitutive elements of state power in modernity. According to Foucault, the Nazi state was the most complete example of a state exercising the right to kill. This state, he claims, made the management, protection, and cultivation of life coextensive with the sovereign right to kill. By biological extrapolation on the theme of the political enemy, in organizing the war against its adversaries and, at the same time, exposing its own citizens to war, the Nazi state is seen as having opened the way for a formidable consolidation of the right to kill, which culminated in the project of the final solution. In doing so, it became the archetype of a power formation that combined the characteristics of the racist state, the murderous state, and the suicidal state. This racism from within justifies the wholesale extension of slaughter in the name of sovereignty. Mendieta, 02. (Eduardo Mendieta, 2002, To Make Live and to Let Die Foucault and Racism.) This is where racism intervenes, not from without, exogenously, but from within, constitutively. For the emergence of biopower as the form of a new form of political rationality, entails the inscription within the very logic of the modern state the logic of racism. For racism grants, and here I am quoting: the conditions for the acceptability of putting to death in a society of normalization. Where there is a society of normalization, where there is a power that is, in all of its surface and in first instance, and first line, a bio-power, racism is indispensable as a condition to be able to put to death someone, in order to be able to put to death others. The homicidal [meurtrire] function of the state, to the degree that the state functions on the modality of bio-power, can only be assured by racism (Foucault 1997, 227) To use the formulations from his 1982 lecture The Political Technology of Individuals which incidentally, echo his 1979 Tanner Lectures the power of the state after the 18th century, a power which is enacted through the police, and is enacted over the population, is a power over living beings, and as such it is a biopolitics.

And, to quote more directly, since the population is nothing more than what the state takes care of for its own sake, of course, the state is entitled to slaughter it, if necessary. So the reverse of biopolitics is thanatopolitics. (Foucault 2000, 416). Racism, is the thanatopolitics of the biopolitics of the total state. They are two sides of one same political technology, one same political rationality: the management of life, the life of a population, the tending to the continuum of life of a people. And with the inscription of racism within the state of biopower, the long history of war that Foucault has been telling in these dazzling lectures has made a new turn: the war of peoples, a war against invaders, imperials colonizers, which turned into a war of races, to then turn into a war of classes, has now turned into the war of a race, a biological unit, against its polluters and threats. Racism is the means by which bourgeois political power, biopower, re-kindles the fires of war within civil society. Racism normalizes and medicalizes war. Racism makes war the permanent condition of society, while at the same time masking its weapons of death and torture. As I wrote somewhere else, racism banalizes genocide by making quotidian the lynching of suspect threats to the health of the social body. Racism makes the killing of the other, of others, an everyday occurrence by internalizing and normalizing the war of society against its enemies. To protect society entails we be ready to kill its threats, its foes, and if we understand society as a unity of life, as a continuum of the living, then these threat and foes are biological in nature. ( ). The consequences of our racist discourse are all-encompassing. All of their scenarios are included in the global genocide we are talking about. The impact of destroying an entity in order to save it stretches into the root cause of all violence and all of the conflict they access. The biggest and most important impact in the debate is sacrificial genocide it is about MAGNITUDE and METHOD. Santos, Dir. Center for Socl Studies U. of Coimbra, Portugal, 03 (issue 63, April, Boaventura de Sousa http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2003/63/santos.html/view?searchterm=santos)According to Franz Hinkelammert, the West has repeatedly been under the illusion that it should try to save humanity by destroying part of it. This is a salvific and sacrificial destruction, committed in the name of the need to radically materialize all the possibilities opened up by a given social and political reality over which it is supposed to have total power. This is how it was in colonialism, with the genocide of indigenous peoples, and the African slaves. This is how it was in the period of imperialist struggles, which caused millions of deaths in two world wars and many other colonial wars. This is how it was under Stalinism, with the Gulag, and under Nazism, with the Holocaust. And now today, this is how it is in neoliberalism, with the collective sacrifice of the periphery and even the semiperiphery of the world system. With the war against Iraq, it is fitting to ask whether what is in progress is a new genocidal and sacrificial illusion, and what its scope might be. It is above all appropriate to ask if the new illusion will not herald the radicalization and the ultimate perversion of the Western illusion: destroying all of humanity in the illusion of saving it.Such racism must be abandoned. Racism and militarism can produce annihilation and extinction through an ever-escalating cycle of racial oppression and racial threat construction. The impacts subsume and dwarf all they have to offer. Kovel, MD and Prof. Psychiatry @ Bard, 88 (White Racism: A Psychohistory, pxxix-xxx) As people become dehumanized, the states become more powerful and warlike. Metaracism signifies the triumph of technical reasoning in the racial sphere. The same technocracy applies to militarization in general, where it has led to the inexorable drive toward thermonuclear weaponry and the transformation of the state into the nuclear state. There is an indubitable, although largely obscure, link between the internal dynamic of a society, including its racism, and the external projection of social violence. Both involve actions taken toward the Other, a

term we may define as the negation of the socially affirmed self. Communist, black, Jew all have been Other to the white West. The Jew has, for a while at least, stepped outside of the role thanks to the integration of Israel within the nations of the West, leaving the black and the Communist to suffer the respective technocratic violences of metaracism and thermonuclear deterrence. Since the initial writing of White Racism, these closely linked phenomena have grown enormously. Of course, there is a major, cataclysmic difference between the types of technocratic domination. Metaracism can be played out quite a while longer. Indeed, since it is a racism that proceeds on the basis of anti-racism, it appears capable of a vastly greater degree of integration than either dominative or aversive racism, at least under the firmly entrenched conditions of late capitalist society. Thermonuclear deterrence, on the other hand, has already decayed into the apocalyptic logic of first-strike capability (or counterforce means of pursuing nuclear war), which threatens to put an end to history itself. Thus the nuclear crisis is now the leading item on the global agenda. If it is not resolved, civilization will be exterminated, while if it is resolved, the terms of society and the state will undoubtedly be greatly altered. This will of course profoundly affect the racial situation. At the same time the disposition of racism will play a key role in the outcome of the nuclear crisis. For one thing, the effectiveness of an antinuclear movement will depend heavily on its ability to involve people of all races in contrast to its present makeup, which is almost entirely white and middle class. To achieve such mobilization and carry it through, however, the movement will have to be able to make the linkages between militarization and racial oppression very clearly and forcefully. For if the third, and last, world war becomes thermonuclear, it will most likely be in a place defined by racial oppositions.

Racism is the root cause of war an d genocide Batur 7 ( Heart of Violence: Global Racism, War, and Genocide , Handbooks of the Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Relations, pg. 446) Albert Memmi argued that We have no idea what the colonized would have been without colonization, but we certainly see what happened as a result of it (Memmi, 1965:114). Events surrounding Iraq and Katrina provide three critical points regarding global racism. The first one is that segregation, exclusion, and genocide are closely related and facilitated by institutions employing the white racial frame to legitimize their ideologies and actions. The second one is the continuation of violence, either sporadically or systematically, with singleminded determination from segregation, to exclusion, to genocide. The third point is that legitimization and justification of violence is embedded in the resignation that global racism will not alter its course, and there is no way to challenge global racism. Together these three points facilitate the base for war and genocide.

Maiese 3 (Michelle, Asst. Prof of Philosophy @ Emanuel college, July 2003, http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/dehumanization/) JPGDehumanization is a psychological

process whereby opponents view each other as less than human and thus not deserving of moral consideration. Jews in the eyes of Nazis and Tutsis in the eyes of Hutus (in the Rwandan genocide) are but two examples. Protracted conflict strains relationships and makes it difficult for parties to recognize that they are part of a shared human community. Such conditions often lead to feelings of intense hatred and alienation among conflicting parties. The more severe the conflict, the more the psychological distance between groups will widen. Eventually, this can result in moral exclusion. Those excluded are typically viewed as inferior, evil, or criminal.[1] We typically think that all people have some basic human rights that should not be violated. Innocent people should not be murdered, raped, or tortured. Rather, international law suggests that they should be treated justly and fairly, with dignity and respect. They deserve to have their basic needs met, and to have some freedom to make autonomous decisions. In times of war, parties must take care to protect the lives of innocent civilians on the opposing side. Even those guilty of breaking the law should receive a fair trial, and should not be subject to any sort of cruel or unusual punishment. However, for individuals viewed as outside the scope of morality and justice, "the concepts of deserving basic needs and fair treatment do not apply and can seem irrelevant."[2] Any harm that befalls such individuals seems warranted, and perhaps even morally justified. Those excluded from the scope of morality are typically perceived as psychologically distant, expendable, and deserving of treatment that would not be acceptable for those included in one's moral community. Common criteria for exclusion include ideology, skin color, and cognitive capacity. We typically dehumanize those whom we perceive as a threat to our well-being or values.[3] Psychologically, it is necessary to categorize one's enemy as sub-human in order to legitimize increased violence or justify the violation of basic human rights. Moral exclusion reduces restraints against harming or exploiting certain groups of people. In severe cases, dehumanization makes the violation of generally accepted norms of behavior regarding one's fellow man seem reasonable, or even necessary. Dehumanization makes nuclear war, genocide, and environmental destruction inevitableBerube 7 (David, professor of speech communication, June/July 1997, Nanotechnology Magazine, http://www.cla.sc.edu/ENGL/faculty/berube/prolong.htm)IMAssuming we are able to predict who or what are optimized humans, this entire resultant worldview smacks of eugenics and Nazi racial science. This would involve valuing people as means. Moreover, there would always be a superhuman more super than the current ones, humans would never be able to escape their treatment as means to an always further and distant end. This means-ends dispute is at the core of Montagu and Matson's treatise on the dehumanization of humanity. They warn: "its destructive toll is already greater than that of any war, plague, famine, or natural calamity on record -- and its potential danger to the quality of life and the fabric of civilized society is beyond calculation. For that reason this sickness of the soul might well be called the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.... Behind the genocide of the holocaust lay a dehumanized thought; beneath the menticide of deviants and dissidents... in the cuckoo's next of America, lies a dehumanized image of man... (Montagu & Matson, 1983, p. xi-xii). While it may never be possible to quantify the impact dehumanizing ethics may have had on humanity, it is safe to conclude the foundations of humanness offer great opportunities which would be foregone. When we calculate the actual losses and the virtual benefits, we approach a nearly inestimable value greater than any tools which we can currently use to measure it. Dehumanization is nuclear war, environmental apocalypse, and international genocide. When people become things, they become dispensable. When people are

dispensable, any and every atrocity can be justified. Once justified, they seem to be inevitable for every epoch has evil and dehumanization is evil's most powerful weapon.