NEG – K AFFS – BFHR 2019

Thanks to Nick and Valorie for their work on this file!

---Militarism case neg (includes Hillman and Culp K’s against that aff)
---AFF AT: Wakanda CP
---AFF AT: Terror DA
---AFF AT: Schmitt K / Girard K / Political Theology K
NEG – MILITARISM AFF – BFHR
CASE
 1NC – DETERRENCE TURN
Every central premise in their criticism of deterrence is wrong---retaining military
force as a deterrent against highly destructive conflict is compatible with and key
to long-term anti-imperialist goals of eliminating militarism and oppression. Even
if violence exists on a continuum, the difference between war and its absence is
still highly salient. And their approach utterly fails to provide a strategy for dealing
with the possibility of conflict, which makes it complicit if we win our impact.
Lucinda Joy Peach 4, Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at American
University, 2004, “A Pragmatist Feminist Approach to the Ethics of Weapons of Mass
Destruction,” in Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Religious and Secular Perspectives,
ed. Hashmi, p. 436-441
The pragmatist feminist perspective that I develop in this chapter is deeply indebted to and affirms in many
respects the antiwar feminist approach outlined by Carol Cohn and Sara Ruddick in the preceding
chapter, but with some marked differences . These differences, I argue, reveal more completely both the
promise and the limitations of antiwar feminism.
At the outset, it is important to note that there is neither a single "feminism" nor a single "pragmatism" with which it might be
aligned. Instead, there are multiple feminisms, just as there are multiple pragmatisms. The "pragmatist feminism"
developed in this essay draws on several elements from American Pragmatism, a philosophical school
developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most prominently by Charles Peirce, William James, John Dewey,
and George Herbert Mead.
Despite the many differences among the pragmatists, they tend to share several features. Perhaps most salient to the
subject of this volume istheir presumption "that human agency in all of its higher manifestations has evolved
from ... concrete circumstances in which a vulnerable organism is confronted , often (if not usually) in
concert with other organisms of the same species, with possibilities of both injury and fulfillment ."' It is the
continuous reminder of "human fallibility and finitude"' that constrains pragmatists from
positions such as foundationalism and dogmatism and thus against ideologies that encourage the use of armed
force, and especially of WMD, in all but the most extreme circumstances. It is also a reminder that
armed conflicts are composed of embodied human beings, each of whom has the capacity
for suffering as well as happiness, a point stressed by feminist analyses of armed conflicts.
There are several significant points of commonality or intersection between pragmatism and feminism.3 Perhaps most important for
thinking about the ethics of weapons of mass destruction is that both are actively engaged in attempting to solve social problems.
The early pragmatists viewed the purpose of philosophical reflection to be "the intelligent overcoming of oppressive conditions."
Dewey, for example, recommended the criticism of beliefs underlying society that have led to "unsatisfactory conditions in order to
radically reconstruct our society according to non-oppressive and cooperative standards."5
Feminist goals of liberating women from oppression thus echo pragmatist ones . While most often
feminist movements have been focused specifically on ending the male domination and oppression of women, a more
inclusive feminist vision has as its object the elimination of all hierarchical and oppressive
relationships, including the oppression of so-called third world or developing nations (especially of the Global South) by those
of the so-called first world or industrialized nations (especially of the Global North), of ethnic, cultural, racial, or religious minorities
by majorities, homosexuals by heterosexuals, the poor by the wealthy, children by adults, and so on.
In addition, pragmatists advocate the elimination of sharp divisions between theory and practice,
reason and experience, and knowing and doing.8 Pragmatists focus much more on
consequences rather than on a priori abstract conceptualizing, captured in the phrase that pragmatists
assign value on the basis of "what works" or what provides "emotional satisfaction."9 From a pragmatist perspective, the most
important questions are practical ones.
Pragmatists consider moral agents to be actors within a concrete particular context that
both influences what is experienced and is influenced by those experiences . The inextricability of the
perceiver from what is perceived means that action , whether in the context of armed conflict and the use of
WMD or otherwise, must be situated within the larger context of which it is a part. Since
every decision to enter or engage in an armed conflict and every decision to deploy WMD, of whatever type,
must be considered within the full context of other relevant actors, agencies, and term
strategies or results ,12 a pragmatist perspective is unlikely to result in the kind of abstract
thinking that antiwar feminism criticizes in dominant just war and realist approaches.13
Feminism also shares pragmatism's rejection of traditional rationalist and empiricist approaches and its commitment to the
inseparability of theory and practice.14 Both believe that reason must be grounded in experience and requires being supplemented,
at least in particular circumstances, by emotion.15 In this respect, feminists also favor a posteriori rather than a priori forms of
knowledge, those that develop on the basis of experience rather than those that are posited prior to it.16
In sum, both pragmatism and feminism accord a central place to the particular, the concrete, and
the factual elements of experience, as opposed to the universal, the generalizable, and the
abstract.17 This opposition to abstraction is apparent, for example, in feminist understandings of women's "different voice" and
Dewey's views about the importance of the qualitative background of situations. In contrast to mainstream philosophy, both feminist
and pragmatist perspectives focus on everyday life and emphasize respect for others and the constitutiveness of community. The
pragmatists' sensitivity to the social embeddedness of persons led them to understand the "I"
"only in relation to other selves, so that the autonomy of individual agents needed to be
integrated with their status as social beings" existing in community . 18
This common conception of the "relational self" suggests that both pragmatists and feminists
will resist turning others into "the Other," who can then be demonized and made into "the
enemy," suitable to be killed. The feminist commitment to the well-being of others, in both the
local and the global community, is well illustrated by Carol Cohn's and Sara Ruddick's contribution to
this volume. However, this commitment also provides the basis for the pragmatist feminist position
articulated here that refuses to categorically rule out the moral legitimacy of any
resort to armed force or war , since such resort may be morally imperative to protect
innocent others .
In addition to these marked similarities, it is also important to acknowledge how a pragmatist feminism differs significantly from
American Pragmatism. Perhaps most important is pragmatist feminism's attention to the gendered character of the social world and
gender's impact on the formation and maintenance of male and female identities. These subjects largely were ignored by the
American Pragmatists19 but influence the analysis of the ethics of WMD outlined here. In addition, feminists tend to give greater
import to the cognitive aspects of affect than pragmatists, even though, as already discussed, pragmatists recognize the importance
of emotions to agency and cognition.
Despite its differences from more mainstream strands of feminism, pragmatist feminism shares the goals of many
strands of feminism to make gender a central consideration of the analysis (here of armed
force and WMD)20 and to eradicate (patriarchal) oppression and domination. These goals result in a
strong presumption against the use of any weapons , not only WMD, since they are in their
very inception designed as tools for domination and suppression of others designated as "the
enemy." This opposition to the use of armed force is related to feminist observations of the
patriarchal and hierarchical, male-dominated and -controlled character of the military and the
oppressive effects of war and militarism around the world, especially on women and children. In addition, the
pragmatist feminist view described here affirms much in the "constitutive positions" of antiwar feminism articulated by Cohn and
Ruddick,21 especially its observation of the gendered character of war and militarism, its suspicion of masculinist approaches to war
and conflict resolution, and its critique of the dominant tradition for its focus on the physical, military, and strategic effects of these
weapons separate from their embeddedness in the rest of social and political life.
With this brief overview in mind, in the following section, I describe how a pragmatist feminist perspective compares with the
antiwar feminist position outlined by Cohn and Ruddick in Chapter 21 with respect to the specific issues addressed by this volume.
SOURCES AND PRINCIPLES
Although pragmatist feminism itself does not directly provide general norms governing the use of weapons in war, it does so
indirectly through its affirmation of elements of justwar theory, as described below. Pragmatist feminism does not
categorically rule out the use of armed force or engagement in war. Its pragmatist
perspective steers in a different direction from the antiwar feminists' "practical" opposition to
war. Whereas the realist tradition has been unduly pessimistic in its assumption that war and armed conflict are necessary, certain,
and inevitable, on a pragmatist feminist view, antiwar feminist thinking tends to be unduly optimistic
about the human capacity to transcend the use of violent methods of resolving disputes, given the
consistent and continual resort to such means throughout most of human history.
From a pragmatist feminist perspective, the historical and contemporary experience of the
repeated resort to violence and the inability of humanity thus far to develop alternative
mechanisms for resolving large-scale disputes suggests the likelihood of future wars and armed
conflicts. In light of this history, overcoming the "war culture " that antiwar feminists view so
unfavorably can be possible only outside the immediate situation of armed
conflict . Once the aggressor has struck or threatens to do so imminently, it is too late to
change our societies and ourselves in order to avoid war . Rather, it is then
necessary to act in order to avoid annihilation in one form or another.

Given its view that some wars and some opposition to war and armed conflicts are morally necessary to protect ourselves and others
from harm, pragmatist feminists seek to impose moral limits on the harm and suffering to the minimum necessary. Despite an
awareness of its limitations,22 a pragmatist feminist perspective considers just war theory to provide a flexible and modifiable set of
criteria for attempting to act morally and in accordance with principles of justice, both in entering into an armed conflict (jus ad
bellum) and in the actual engagement of that conflict (jus in bello). In particular, pragmatist feminism shares just war's starting
premise of a strong presumption against the legitimacy of the use of armed force and violence to resolve conflicts.
A pragmatist feminist perspective thus rejects Cohn's and Ruddick's contention that
justwar theorists "implicitly accept war as a practice even when condemning particular
wars ."23 Recognizing the historical and global reality of war making and armed force as means of
resolving conflicts and adopting strategies to maximize justice and minimize
immorality when such means are adopted is not the same as "implicitly accepting the
practices of war ," at least in the absence of demonstrably effective means of eliminating
such conflicts . To ignore the reality of the continuing resort to war and armed force is itself to
revert to abstraction rather than offering a practical method for eliminating the
human suffering and incalculable damage caused by war and armed conflict.
Here Colin and Ruddick reveal (intentionally or otherwise) their situatedness as citizens of a war-making
state, one that has had the choice in many, if not all, instances since the mid-twentieth century, at least, of deciding whether or not
to go to war. Just as Cohn and Ruddick criticize just war theory for failing to explore nonviolent alternatives once
a just cause is determined or war has begun, their antiwar feminist approach fails to offer concrete
suggestions for avoiding armed conflict when a nation or people is confronted with armed
aggression or assault by others, the situation where the options boil down to " fight or die ." This
perspective fails to look at war from the point of view of the aggressed-against , when
armed conflict becomes a necessity in order to retain national and/or cultural and/or ethnic identity from subjugation
by the aggressor(s). In such circumstances, the moral necessity of armed force looks quite different .
And in such circumstances, the threatened use of WMD can be seen as less evil than the
alternatives , such as doing nothing and being conquered or fighting a conventional war and
faring poorly .
Rather than reverting to abstract thinking about war, pragmatist feminism affirms just war theory's casuistic approach to particular
armed conflicts as well as its position that such means are sometimes morally justifiable or even morally obligator)' in order to
protect oneself (individual or nation) or innocent third parties. Further, pragmatist feminism affirms just war thinking's
attention to particular conflicts rather than war in the abstract and its stance of
moderation and of imposing the minimal suffering necessary to accomplish the objective of restoring the
peace.24 Thus, with respect to the military response of the United States to the September 11 terrorist attacks, a pragmatist feminist
application of just war criteria yields the conclusion that the jus ad bellum principles of "last resort" and "proportionality," as well as
the in hello principles of "proportionality" and "discrimination," were not satisfied.
A second difference in the two feminist perspectives emerges out of the antiwar feminist observation that
war and militarism are not separate from everyday life but integral aspects of it.25 While this is an
extremely important insight into the underlying conditions of war and militarism, it needs to be joined with
alternative proposals for addressing the "large-scale military conflict ." There has
been scant attention to this issue in antiwar feminist scholarship. Even if one assumes, as antiwar
feminists do, that war is a "presence" in everyday life and not merely a discrete "event" that occasionally
"erupts,"26 it is nonetheless the case that " war" is more damaging and harmful, and
creates greater suffering in a multiplicity of ways , than the absence of war.
Pragmatist feminist thinking about the ethics of WMD is attentive to how such differences in
consequences differentiate war from “everyday life.”
A third significant area of difference between the two types of feminist theories concerns responses to the causes of war. Whereas
pragmatist feminists agree with antiwar feminists that wars are partially a mutual construction, they also insist that some wars have
much more to do with unjust aggression for which opposing sides do not share equal responsibility. Antiwar feminism fails to accept
that some wars are not only necessary as a matter of prudence, but also morally justifiable on feminist grounds, for example,
humanitarian intervention to end the severe oppression of innocent victims.
For a pragmatist feminist, the current state of international affairs unfortunately requires
consideration of the circumstances in which the threatened or actual use of such weapons
for defensive or deterrent purposes may be morally allowable or even morally necessary .
Given these circumstances, pragmatist feminism considers the just war tradition to provide a morally useful source of norms relating
to the use of weapons in war.

Deterrence’s the most moral --- proportionate response upholds restraint and
solves violent interventions
Elbridge Colby 7, adjunct staff member at the RAND Corporation & staff member in the Office
of the Director of National Intelligence and on the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities
of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, “Restoring Deterrence”, Elsevier
Limited on behalf of Foreign Policy Research Institute, Summer 2007
In between these two extremes, deterrence is a security policy that offers a way forward for the United States that is not only more
effective because more tailored, but is also more moral . It is more moral because a deterrent posture
would entail a strategy that is more proportionate, more necessary, more responsive, and, ultimately, more
just. Indeed, deterrence comports with the fundamental human intuition that it is generally only
moral to fight when attacked. In this it complies with the classical conception of just war, which mandates that wars only be conducted
when one’s cause is just, waged by a legitimate authority, motivated by a right intent, fought with a real prospect of success, conducted proportionately,
It is a defensive strategy that responds to
and undertaken only as a last resort. Deterrence satisfies these criteria.
invasions or attacks, and is therefore just; it sets out relatively clear guide-lines for when it
mandates that the government fight, and, therefore, is governed by legitimate authority. It is
driven by a desire to protect, deter, and avenge, and is therefore motivated by right intent ; its
realistic red lines and threats are backed up by the awesome power of the United States, and therefore likely to succeed; and it responds when attacked
and asks from the rest of the international community only respect for its marked out positions rather than revolutionary transformation, and is
therefore proportional.22 Finally, by its nature it is undertaken as a last resort rather than preventively.23 It was the
fundamental moral attractiveness of this position that continually frustrated both Soviet efforts to decouple Europe from the American nuclear
But theorizing about war and
umbrella during the Cold War and occasional American efforts to roll back the Soviet empire.
peace cannot remain at the level of abstraction. It must bear moral responsibility
for actual consequence and the power of contingency , as Max Weber pointed out.24 And deterrence,
defense by calculation, uniquely satisfies the moral requirement that leaders, whatever their benevolent intentions, are basically responsible for the
consequences that contingency produces from their actions. This it does
by grounding a nation’s security on its own
credible threats—not on either changing the world through force, as neo-conservatives advocate, nor by hoping that a more peaceful world will
emerge, as the left proposes. Both of these extremes ground security on radical changes in the way the world operates, and, therefore, necessarily
enmesh us in the rest of the world’s affairs, thereby exponentially expanding our vulnerability to all the permutations that chance and contingency may
produce. Deterrence, rather, narrows our profile, and thereby reduces our exposure to risk.
 1NC – ESSENTIALISM DA
Abolishing all military presence undermines analysis of militarism in specific
localities - place is under-theorized and their abstract totalizing theories of
militarism gloss over key nodes of cultural hegemony
Flint, Illinois geography professor, 2009
(Colin, “Power, Place, and Militarism: Toward a Comparative Geographic Analysis of
Militarization”, Geography Compass, 3.1, January, Wiley)
Given the theories of the importance of place, the same processes described above of reframing conceptions of the military, war, and citizenship should be observable at the local
itionally, considering the connection to everyday individuals and social
scale as well as the national and beyond. Add

life – the banality of militarization (Katz 2007; Thrift 2000) – it would follow that the
overarching ideology of militarism takes hold largely in everyday settings. If everyday settings are
the venues for militarization, place-specific differences must be negotiated by those advancing
these processes, and thus accounted for in a study of militarization. Lutz (2001) does concentrate on a particular place in
her investigation of militarization in American society. She follows the advance of this process in Fayetteville, North Carolina, the town adjacent to Fort Bragg, a major military
base. Lutz (2001) views this progression through the experiences of the townspeople, tracing how ‘war preparation has shaped the American twentieth century’ and links this
doing so, she finds that the existence of Fort
process to larger inequalities and contradictions within American society and culture (p. 9). In

Bragg has led to a local economy consisting largely of low-wage jobs and a social climate often
unfriendly to women and other marginalized groups. Despite this, the Fayetteville community
continues to organize nearly every aspect of everyday life around the presence of the military. In
short, the paradoxes uncovered in her study point to a cultural hegemony of militarism in which
political subjects are made and re-made to fulfil the militaristic goals of the state. However, case studies of
just one place provide limited insights. In order to build on Lutz's findings and bring new understanding of society-wide processes of militarization, we must investigate these
processes in diverse local settings. While Gillem (2007) and, to a lesser extent, Johnson (2004) examine the impacts of multiple overseas bases within the context of the US
military, their analyses are not directly engaged with theories of the social construction of place, especially the processes of everyday life for those impacted by the bases. Gillem
(2007), for example, emphasizes the motivations behind the design and planning of US overseas bases, with little focus on the viewpoints and attitudes of host country civilians
in adjacent communities. Moreover, studies of communities beyond active duty base towns would allow a systematic evaluation of how demographic, cultural, and historical
differences play a role in how militarization occurs. After all, while there may be consensus that many societies are becoming increasingly militarized, this is happening despite
the fact that most communities do not have a Fort Bragg or Aviano Air Base next to them. What is needed are studies that consider how the core beliefs of militarism, outlined by
Enloe (2004) and augmented in this article, are embedded differently across space but within an overarching cultural hegemony. This suggests that an analysis of militarization
would be best employed in a comparative framework that includes communities with different characteristics and varying levels of connectedness to the military. In closing, we
As the discussion of theories of place
offer some examples of comparisons that may be drawn in a case study of militarization.

emphasized, the overarching process of militarization can be expected to unfold differently in

different localities due to the ways in which these processes are mediated by unique local
contexts. Thus, some places within the geography of a state's hegemony work to (re)construct the
ideology of militarism, while others may foment resistance to it. Even among those places that
support and perpetuate this hegemony, militarized notions of nationalism and identity are likely
to differ from one locality to another due to the unique sets of social relations shaping each of them. Thus, comparative studies of
militarization are needed in order to understand the complex mechanisms by which the cultural
hegemony of militarism is supported and challenged. Such investigations may be carried out in a number of ways; the sample
frameworks we offer here are simply meant to put forth a method for case selection. However, a key point is that differences in the way

militarization unfolds at the local level are the result of the interaction of two important factors:
the nature of the military presence (or lack thereof) and the characteristics of the civilian
community. Examples of differing military presences may include: reserve units versus Active
Duty bases; a military base community versus a community where a base has been closed; a
permanent base versus a forward operating base (a temporary installation often in a hostile
zone); and bases acquisitioned in post-war arrangements versus bases acquisitioned through
peacetime defense cooperation agreements. Comparisons of differing places could include rural versus urban settings, the local political
history, racial dynamics, and economic trajectory, all of which can be operationalized using the aspects of place outlined by Agnew (1987, 1996) and discussed earlier in this
essay. Table 1, above, provides an illustration of how Agnew's aspects of place – location, locale, and sense of place – might be operationalized in a comparative study of
militarizing places. By focusing on these as ‘variables’, a researcher could illuminate the mechanisms and processes by which places become militarized. The hypothetical
examples represent two different places with differing connections to the military. A study of militarization in these different communities would consider how their location,
locale, and sense of place interact with, shape, and are shaped by each place's relationship with the military in recursive processes of place construction. As the rows in the table
indicate, the social construction of militarized place is impacted by (and may impact) the economic trajectory, advanced or contested by particular institutions, and is mediated
by a particular sense of local identity within each place. Comparative studies of militarism and militarization should select places based on variation in the two overarching
factors of type of military presence and the characteristics of place, as outlined in Table 1. Simply and schematically, in order to compare how the processes of militarization
develop in contexts of differing types of military presence a study should control for place differences. Conversely, comparisons focusing on different types of places should
control for differences in military presence (Figure 1). For example, a study can emphasize the varying processes of militarization resulting from place differences by selecting
sites that have comparable military presences adjacent to them. Such an approach is to control for variation in one of the factors (place or form of military presence) to isolate
the role of the other factor in producing place-specific manifestations of militarism and militarization (Ragin 1989). However, a research design aiming to ‘control’ and ‘isolate’
variables is an ideal that must be compromised to some degree in the real world. The very uniqueness and specificity of place that geographic studies aim to illuminate mean that
a simple typology of places allowing for the identification of ‘similar’ places is extremely problematic. Recognizing this while still aiming to explore the interaction of military
institutional factors and place construction requires a multicase study of militarization that is conscious of the variation in both aspects across the chosen study sites. With the
awareness that our schematic research designs must be more complicated when applied to real-world analysis, Figure 2 provides examples of how the framework depicted in
Figure 1 may be ‘filled in’ with study sites. We use examples of the contemporary US military as they are likely to be broadly familiar to readers. However, the proposed
framework can be applied in any historical–geographical context. Case 1 in Figure 2 outlines a comparative study of militarization based on different types of military presence.
Ramstein Air Base, which is a ‘permanent’ US base in Germany, is compared to Camp Bondsteel (n.d.), which is a lower-profile, ‘temporary’ forward operating base in Kosovo,
an area still classified as a hostile zone by the US government (Evinger 1995; http://www.globalsecurity.org). The focus of this comparison is the impact on the processes and
mechanisms of militarization in the two places of the larger footprint and higher level of civil-military interaction produced by Ramstein Air Base compared to the presence of
Camp Bondsteel which is smaller and more isolated from the surrounding civilian communities. Importantly, the towns nearest these bases – Kaiserslautern, Germany, and
Uroševac, Kosovo – are each a moderately-sized urban area with between 99,000 and 130,000 residents. In case 2 of Figure 2, which outlines a comparison based on differing
place characteristics, the two towns – Waynesville, Missouri, and Columbia, South Carolina – represent a rural area and an urban area, respectively. However, the military bases
adjacent to them, Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and Fort Jackson, South Carolina, are both similarly sized Army installations, each utilized as sites for Basic Combat Training
and other Army schools (Evinger 1995). Thus, the bases can be expected to have similar impacts on the civilian populations, and variations observed in processes of
militarization can be more easily attributed to the rural–urban differences. We stress that the complexity of place cannot be readily reduced to a simple urban–rural typology, as
in this heuristic example. However, the integration of theories of the social construction of place with theories of cultural hegemony and militarization demand that
The recent growth of analyses of militarism and
consideration of geographic variation continues through research design and analysis.

militarization in geography and other disciplines has addressed multiple scales and processes .
However, the role of place has been under-theorized and under-researched . By
linking theories of the social construction of place with understandings of hegemony , the
imperative of comparative studies of militarism as an aspect of everyday life in unique places
emerges. There are countless contexts around the globe in which processes of militarization can be fruitfully documented and analyzed; those discussed above are intended
to illustrate the sorts of features to consider when selecting specific military presences and places in which to conduct such research. A place-based comparative study of
militarization would seek to uncover and compare a number of processes across the study sites. Such a study may ask whether individuals’ attitudes toward the military's role in
society are shaped primarily by information they receive from national sources, or by their interactions with the military presence or other groups within their communities.
Which groups are more invested in the militaristic project, and why? Which sectors of the communities benefit most from militarization, and which are ‘losers’ in this process?
Are the disparities consistent across the study sites, or do they differ from place to place? And how are the places linked into broader-scale political, economic, and cultural
In any context, the key concepts and bodies of
processes that work to maintain the overarching cultural hegemony of militarism?

literature surveyed in this article: place, cultural hegemony, and the ideology of militarism, all
usefully inform the researcher who seeks to understand how and why the military sphere
continues to grow in size and influence in so many societies. Furthermore, consideration of the
variation in military and place-specific aspects across places requires thoughtful choice of
comparative study sites.
Single issue focus is comparatively better than ideological critique – the
their pedagogy gets sidelined and perpetuates the status quo
Lieberfeld, Associate Professor of Public Policy @ McAnulty College, 8
(Daniel, “WHAT MAKES AN EFFECTIVE ANTIWAR MOVEMENT? THEME-ISSUE
INTRODUCTION,” International Journal of Peace Studies, Volume 13, Number 1,
https://www.gmu.edu/programs/icar/ijps/vol13_1/IJPS13n1%20Intro%20-%20Lieberfeld.pdf)
Important definitional considerations concern the temporal and issue dimensions of antiwar protest. Opposition to a particular war motivates some
movements. These ad hoc movements seek to change government policy regarding a specific , ongoing
war . While this goal may be linked to other political agendas—be they anti-militarist , feminist ,
anti-imperialist , pro-democracy, and so forth—these are secondary to the primary focus on bringing a particular war to an end. The time-
horizon of such movements is limited and they typically dissolve or become inactive after the war ends. A different type of antiwar
activism transcends protest against specific wars. It has a more extensive temporal
dimension and greater prominence of ideologically based motives and goals —such as pacifism,
or liberal internationalism that seeks to institutionalize world order through the United Nations or a federation of countries. Ongoing protests by
secular pacifist groups or by peace churches against armaments and militarism can have much more diffuse goals than do ad hoc antiwar movements.
In addition to disarmament, these goals may include strengthening of international disputeresolution processes, promoting
international understanding, and peace education. One can designate ad hoc protests “antiwar
movements” and more ideologically motivated and long-running protests “peace movements”—although
these categories are not mutually exclusive and protesters against particular wars may also have transcendent ideological motives. Open-
ended , more ideologically motivated movements may have less potential , at least in the near term, to
influence public opinion and change public policy . In part this reflects the more diffuse goals of ongoing peace
movements: Insofar as a single-issue focus tends to correlate with greater ability to achieve movement goals (Gamson, 1990, 45-46), ad hoc antiwar
the task of ending a particular war is more achievable than
groups may be more successful. Of course,
that of ending war generally . Peace groups whose demands include the expansion of international law at the expense of state
sovereignty are also politically radical in the sense that they challenge “present distributions of wealth and power,” and advocate replacing the authority
over security policy claimed by domestic elites (Ash, 1972, 230). Scholars debate how the radicalism of a movement’s demands affects its prospects for
Antiwar
success, but the goal of displacing established political authorities is highly correlated with protest-group failure (Gamson, 1990, 42).
groups that focus on ending a particular war do not generally seek to replace the authority of
domestic elites. Rather, their challenge is directed toward particular policies and practices that they
believe depart from the responsible exercise of officeholders’ authority. Thus, a key question that bears on
questions of antiwar movements’ effectiveness and influence is “What is the relative importance to movement leaders of ideological goals broader than
ending a particular war?” It may also be useful to locate movement goals on a continuum from domestic to international politics, with world peace and
disarmament goals located on the more international and abstract end and also implying the potentially radical displacement of domestic elites.
Peace groups with broader time horizons and more abstract goals generally find it
harder to achieve favorable public responses and typically remain politically marginal. Ad hoc
protests with a single agenda of ending a war have greater potential to attract mainstream
support and to contribute to changes in policy.
 1NC – PROCESS DEBATES
Process oriented debate about military presence is critical to check base-
expansion – individual orientations alone are ineffective because governments use
issue linkages to shut down grassroots movements. That means policy change is a
prerequisite to combating militarism
Harris, Visiting Lecturer at Earlham College, 14
(Peter, “Getting Away With It: How Governments Sew Up Foreign Policies in Advance,”
http://www.e-ir.info/2014/06/13/getting-away-with-it-how-governments-sew-up-foreign-
policies-in-advance/)
Few foreign policies deal with a single subject matter in isolation from all others. Instead, any given foreign policy will likely
have an impact on multiple issue areas, whether by design or by unintended consequence. Sometimes, foreign
policy-makers have incentives to conceal or downplay the relatedness of the issues to which their policies pertain. For example,
when the U.S. supplies military aid to friendly regimes with poor human rights records, an unintended consequence of U.S. foreign
policy might be to worsen the prospects of democratic reforms taking hold in that country. Such an adverse effect of military aid is
not something that foreign policy-makers will want to trumpet; instead, they will seek to maintain a focus on the appropriateness of
the aid from a military perspective. At other times, however, foreign policy
issue areas are deliberately sewn
together in order to increase the appeal of a particular policy. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the
George W. Bush administration sought to build popular and political support for its policies with recourse to international law,
humanitarian concerns, economic objectives, as well as claims regarding regional and U.S. national security. In this essay, I discuss
how governments strategically bundle foreign policies in order to achieve political support for their actions. I argue that all foreign
policies are the results of political considerations, bargaining, and logrolling—that is, foreign policies are stitched together in order
to appease the greatest number of potential stakeholders while limiting the number of potential opponents (at home and abroad).
While understanding this phenomenon of strategic bundling is important from the analytic perspective
of foreign policy scholars, it is also critical for a normative reason : to help others in the public square
better understand and evaluate the actions taken by governments on the international stage.
Theoretically, I draw upon the scholarship of political scientist E.E. Schattschneider, whose work remains an indispensable guide to
the organization and execution of political conflict. Empirically, I focus upon U.S. (and British) foreign policy towards overseas
military bases. Politics and Foreign Policy Foreign policy, like any branch of politics, is about ‘who gets what, when,
how’ (Lasswell, 1950); it involves conflict over the distribution of resources. Moreover, the stakes can be high: contemporary U.S.
foreign policy costs billions of dollars to finance and deals with weighty issues of right and wrong, morality and immorality, life and
death. Those
charged with formulating and executing foreign policy therefore have powerful
incentive s to maintain a firm grip on the policy-making process: as E.E. Schattschneider (1957
and 1960) argued decades ago, politics is not just about conflict itself, but also the management of conflict—its scope and
organization. Before it can be decided who gets what, when, how, it must first be determined—whether implicitly or explicitly—who
is included in the conversation, what is up for grabs, and what timetables and processes will be used to conduct the discussion. These
prior questions of procedure are highly political in nature; how they are resolved will affect the subsequent decisions over substance.
Essentially, Schattschneider’s model of politics constitutes an injunction to problematize the ground upon which distributive conflict
takes place. One of his lasting contributions to the study of politics is the idea that the organization of conflict is endogenous to
political combatants must be adroit at defining the
conflict itself. This perspective implies that
salience of issues and delineating the circle of participants. All participants in conflict must be cognizant
of procedure and process ; they must be ready to expand or contract the conversation depending
upon their own strategic interests. If participants fail to organize conflict in a way that
advantages them and disadvantages their opponents , then it is highly likely that they will
incur losses on the substantive issues at stake. In the realm of foreign policy, the bundling of issue-areas
constitutes one way via which actors can achieve the strategic goals stated above. By coupling two or more foreign policy issues
through deed or through rhetoric, elected officials and bureaucrats, in particular, can enlarge the range of issues to which foreign
policies are seen to apply; at the same time, they can control the size and makeup of the interested audience. Conversely, by
downplaying the connectedness of two issue areas or by moving to uncouple particular
topics , any given debate can be narrowed in scope and certain participants excluded from
the conversation. Although it is not just governmental officials who have a say in foreign policy, Schattschneider himself was
clear that “the best point at which to manage conflict is before it starts” (Schattschneider 1960: 15).
Undoubtedly, those operating within the state’s decision-making apparatus have a first-
mover advantage in this regard. Overseas Military Bases In the real world, how does foreign policy bundling work as a
strategy of managing the scope of conflict? What are some of the practical and normative implications of the practice? A brief
consideration of U.S. (and British) foreign policies towards overseas military bases will help to answer these questions. First and
foremost, military bases are created and maintained for military purposes : they are temporary or permanent
facilities designed to host military forces in pursuit of military objectives. Since World War II, billions of dollars have been spent
maintaining U.S. overseas military bases in the name of ensuring national security and defending U.S. allies. In the Cold War, the
primary purpose of such bases was to defend against the Soviet military threat; as a consequence, the biggest concentrations of
overseas bases were to be found in Europe and East Asia, the two most important theaters of the Cold War. Since the 1990s, the
military-security rationale of maintaining a vast global footprint has shifted to center on ensuring regional stability, reassuring allies,
keeping strategic sea lanes open, fighting against transnational terrorism, and—since the early 2000s—maintaining security in active
warzones such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet military bases have much broader social and political
implications than just the promotion of U.S. national security . In her classic investigation into gender and
international politics, Cynthia Enloe (1990) found that overseas military bases wrought incredible change upon their host nations
(and vice versa). She pointed to the intermingling of service personnel and adjacent civilian populations, the economic relations that
were fostered, the personal and sexual relationships that formed, and the social attitudes that were changed. Enloe linked the
presence of overseas bases to prostitution and the spread of sexually transmitted infections. She noted that military installations
could serve as catalysts for women’s political organization, but also as institutions that marginalized and disempowered women
across the world. More recent critical investigations into U.S. bases similarly have linked overseas
installations to myriad themes (e.g. environmental destruction , colonialism and
imperialism , nuclear insecurity , gross abuses of human rights , high rates of sexual
assault ) that sit uncomfortably alongside the notion that military bases are purely military affairs (e.g. Lutz 2009; Vine 2009;
Yeo 2011). Clearly, those responsible for handling U.S. security policy have a vested interest in
downplaying these adverse policy implications of the U.S. global footprint. Instead, then, officials
tend to focus upon other—more positive—implications of overseas bases. Overseas military bases assist in the smooth functioning of
the international economy, for example, because forwardly deployed maritime forces are essential for keeping sea lanes open and
free of piracy. Military bases can be keystone employers, helping to drive local economies and regional economies. Bases also play an
important humanitarian role by creating the infrastructure necessary to mobilize rapid responses to crises such as natural disasters.
As I describe below, military bases even have been portrayed as useful tools in the service of environmental protection. Understood
via Schattschneider’s framework, U.S. officials have been wise to associate their overseas bases with such positive—albeit subsidiary
—implications and issue-areas because the reality of politics means that no foreign policy is ever set in
stone . All policy depends upon politics , and politics is fluid . Military bases , in particular, are
susceptible to political change at home if, for example, legislators decide to cut funds for overseas
bases. Such an attack could arise out of fiscal concerns, ideological opposition to overseas engagement, or simply because of a
judgment that the strategic value of overseas bases does not outweigh the negative consequences that they entail. Abroad, too,
military bases can be vulnerable to political change (Calder 2007; Cooley 2008). Host nations or local opposition
groups could (and do) mobilize against foreign bases. At times, such opposition has led to the closure of U.S. bases, including most
recently the Manas airbase in Kyrgyzstan. Given these latent threats to bases’ longevity, the political challenge for
foreign policy-makers (who have decided, a priori, that military bases are essential to the national interest) is to devise
and disseminate foreign policies in such a way as to create the broadest possible support
for bases. Bundling is one response to this pressing challenge. Military Bases and Environmentalism One
of the most interesting and overlooked ways in which foreign policy executives and bureaucrats have sought to increase the
acceptability of military bases (in the eyes of domestic and international audiences) has been to embrace environmental protection
regimes as part-and-parcel of basing strategies—that is, to bundle together military and environmental concerns. Because military
bases often impose a high degree of seclusion and insularity upon their immediate physical surroundings, resulting in the
(unintended) creation of de facto nature reserves, it is common for bases to be adjacent to areas of natural beauty or special
ecological value. Wildlife flourishes where military ordinances outlaw permanent civilian habitation—on live fire ranges, testing and
training grounds, demilitarized zones, disused fortifications, and so forth. In turn, military conservation can be used as
a post hoc rationalization for the existence of military bases: to retain military custodianship of
the countryside or the wilderness is to maintain an effective and irreplaceable conservation regime,
whereas to close such bases would be to jeopardize a vulnerable ecosystem . Guam is one
military site where a foreign policy of maintaining a permanent military presence has been bundled with a policy of
environmentalism. A U.S. territory since 1898, Guam (today an organized, unincorporated U.S. territory) is one of Washington’s
most important overseas possessions, from a military standpoint. Big enough to host large numbers of troops and heavy-duty
airstrips, and blessed with a deep harbor, Guam is a veritable anchor of the U.S. military presence in the Western Pacific. From
Guam, the U.S. can exercise control over vital sea lanes and plan to conduct military operations—air, sea, and land—across the Asia-
Pacific region. Since 1993, Guam has also been the site of an expansive environmental reserve, the Guam National Wildlife Refuge
(NWR). Indeed, visitors to Guam are encouraged to take advantage of the rich natural environment that the Guam NWR is
supposedly in place to protect. The vast majority of the wildlife refuge is under the jurisdiction of the Department of Defense and is
kept off-limits to civilians—tourists, to be sure, but also the indigenous Chamorro people of Guam. The justification given is that
Guam’s natural environment has suffered terribly at the hands of human encroachment; military stewardship of the island’s
wilderness is a good thing because it gives native flora and fauna an opportunity to thrive in peace and isolation. In short, there are
positive environmental benefits to be derived from the U.S. military’s presence on Guam and the Pentagon’s ownership (and control)
of the land. Upsetting this political status quo would be detrimental to the cause of conservation. Is the Guam NWR a genuine
attempt to preserve the natural environment? Or is it a cynical add-on to the Pentagon’s overseas basing strategy that is designed for
public consumption more than anything else? Critics have certainly accused the U.S. government of cynicism when it comes to the
construction of environmental reserves around other island bases. David Vine and Miriam Pemberton, for example, accuse the Bush
administration of using environmental protection initiatives as an excuse for maintaining control over strategically located islands in
the Pacific—especially the Johnston Atoll, Wake Island, and Midway Island. Even though military activities are known to be
disastrous for the natural environment, using the language of conservation and enacting laws that claim the mantle of
environmentalism can “add a positive environmentalist spin to the permanent U.S claim on these territories as military outposts,”
write Vine and Pemberton. The U.S. base on Diego Garcia in the British-controlled Chagos Archipelago (central Indian Ocean) is the
most recent overseas base to be surrounded by an environmental protection regime. Diego Garcia is a deeply controversial
installation, not least of all because several thousand indigenous islanders, expelled from the territory in the 1960s and 1970s, still
claim the island (and the rest of Chagos) as their rightful home (Vine 2009; Jeffery 2011; Evers and Kooy 2011). Neighboring
Mauritius, too, claims the entire Chagos Archipelago as part of its sovereign territory. The base has been marred by official
admissions that it was used as a staging post for extraordinary rendition flights and is currently mired in allegations that it is (or has
been) the location of a CIA ‘black site’ prison. Several foreign policy issues thus intersect over Diego Garcia. The base is not
merely a tool of military power-projection as it was designed to be in the 1960s and 1970s: instead, the base is
firmly
connected to questions of indigenous peoples’ rights , imperialism and colonialism ,
international law, civil liberties, human rights and torture, and much more. All of these issues threaten to spill over
and affect the U.S. base in thse political sphere; all of them are issues that the Pentagon would
prefer not to have bundled together with its military aims. How can support for Diego Garcia be
maintained, however, when there is such fertile ground for criticizing its very existence? Politically, responsibility for maintaining
Diego Garcia as a venue for the U.S. military rests with the British government—not the United States. Yet London has proven to be
just as adept at foreign policy bundling as has Washington. In 2010, Britain declared a marine protected area in the
Chagos Islands in a move that many saw as designed to buttress the Anglo-Americans’ control
over Diego Garcia and undermine the claims of their detractors (especially Mauritius and the Chagos
Islanders). In critical circles, such policy-packaging was castigated as “greenwashing ”—that is, a
cynical adoption of “green” and “environmentally-friendly” policies for disingenuous or even deceitful purposes. Nevertheless, the
conservation zone went ahead, drawing significant support from environmentalist organizations and conservation groups, including
in the academic and scientific communities. In effect, the decision to bundle military affairs and
environmentalism succeeded in redefining the political debate over Diego Garcia: the
question for many is now not so much whether it is just and proper for a military base to take
precedence over the rights of the indigenous islanders of the claims of post-colonial Mauritius,
but rather whether or not the natural environment—a “pristine” safe haven for endangered species— can be
risked by altering the status quo. Conclusion Governments are strategic when it comes to
stitching together their foreign policies. Bundling certain issue-areas together can be an important means of agenda-
setting or framing. Divorcing other issue-areas can similarly help in the ‘sale’ of foreign policies to
domestic and international constituencies. How foreign policies are put together and portrayed is rarely a matter of
happenstance, but rather is the product of political considerations. Such fusion of foreign policy issues therefore
warrants careful critical attention from analysts and ordinary citizens alike. This is clearly the case when it
comes to military environmentalism and overseas bases. Military installations are not by their nature concerned
with the preservation of the natural environment, yet have been cast as such in recent years. In
the process, new political stakeholders have come to see themselves with a vested interest in
maintaining the status quo surrounding military bases—environmentalists , conservationists, and
their financial backers. The questions that must be asked are these: Why has such an unnatural melding of
militarism and environmentalism been decided upon? Which issues pertaining to military bases are being downplayed? And
which issues are being completely concealed from public view via the foregrounding of
environmentalism? The answers will not be volunteered by those in positions of
power.
 2NC – DETERRENCE – T/C
War turns structural violence not vice versa
Goldstein 2001 – IR professor at American University (Joshua, War and Gender, p. 412,
Google Books)

First, peace activists face a dilemma in thinking about causes of war and working for peace.
Many peace scholars and activists support the approach, “if you want peace, work for justice.”
Then, if one believes that sexism contributes to war, one can work for gender justice specifically
(perhaps. among others) in order to pursue peace. This approach brings strategic allies to the
peace movement (women, labor, minorities), but rests on the assumption that injustices cause
war. The evidence in this book suggests that causality runs at least as strongly the other way.
War is not a product of capitalism, imperialism, gender, innate aggression, or any other single
cause, although all of these influence wars’ outbreaks and outcomes. Rather, war has in part
fueled and sustained these and other injustices.9 So, “if you want peace, work for peace.”
Indeed, if you want justice (gender and others), work for peace. Causality does not run just
upward through the levels of analysis, from types of individuals, societies, and governments up
to war. It runs downward too. Enloe suggests that changes in attitudes towards war and the
military may be the most important way to “reverse women’s oppression.” The dilemma is that
peace work focused on justice brings to the peace movement energy, allies, and moral
grounding, yet, in light of this book’s evidence, the emphasis on injustice as the main cause of
war seems to be empirically inadequate.
 2NC – DETERRENCE - WAR
Accurate and verifiable scholarship shows low deterrence is the most important
correlate of war
Moore 4 – Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. He formerly served as the first
Chairman of the Board of the United States Institute of Peace and as the Counselor on
International Law to the Department of State. (John Norton, Winter, “Beyond the Democratic
Peace: Solving the War Puzzle”, 44 Va. J. Int'l L. 341, Lexis Law)

there is strong evidence that deterrence - that is, the effect of external factors on the decision to go to war - is the
As so broadly conceived,

missing link in the war/peace equation. In my War & Peace Seminar, I have undertaken to examine the level
of deterrence before the principal wars of the twentieth century.   My examination has led me to believe that in n125

every case the potential aggressor made a rational calculation that the war would be won , and won
promptly. In fact, the longest period of time calculated for victory through conventional attack seems to be the roughly six weeks predicted by the German General Staff as the
time necessary to prevail on the Western Front in World War I under the Schlieffen Plan. Hitler believed in his attack on Poland that Britain and France would not take the
occasion to go to war with him. And he believed in his 1941 Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union that "[we] have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure
will come crashing down." n126 In contrast, following Hermann Goering's failure to obtain air superiority in the Battle of Britain, Hitler called off the invasion of Britain and
shifted strategy to the nighttime bombing of population centers, which became known as the Blitz, in a mistaken effort to compel Britain to sue for peace. Planners of the North
virtually all
Korean attack on South Korea and Hussein's attack on Kuwait calculated that the operations would be complete in a matter of days. Indeed,

principal wars in the twentieth century, at least those involving conventional invasion, were preceded by what I refer to as a
"double deterrence absence." That is, the potential aggressor believed that they had the military force

in place to prevail promptly and that nations that might have the military or diplomatic might to
prevent this were not inclined to intervene.   This  [*381]  analysis has also shown that many of the perceptions we have about the origins of
n127

particular wars are flatly wrong. Anyone who seriously believes that World War I was begun by competing alliances drawing tighter should examine the real historical record of
British unwillingness to enter a clear military alliance with the French or to so inform the Kaiser. Indeed, this pre-World War I absence of effective alliance and resultant war
contrasts sharply with the later robust NATO alliance and an absence of World War III. n128
Considerable other evidence seems to support this historical analysis as to the importance of
deterrence. Of particular note, in 1995 Yale Professor Donald Kagan, a preeminent U.S. historian who has long taught a seminar on war, published a superb book On
the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace.   In this book he conducts a detailed examination of the
n129

Peloponnesian War, World War I, Hannibal's War, and World War II, among other case studies.
A careful reading of these studies suggests that each war could have been prevented by
achievable deterrence and that each occurred in the absence of such deterrence.   Game theory seems to offer n130

yet further  [*382]  support for the proposition that appropriate deterrence can prevent war. For example, Robert Axelrod's famous 1980s experiment in an iterated prisoner's
dilemma, which is a reasonably close proxy for many conflict settings in international relations, repeatedly showed the effectiveness of a simple tit for tat strategy. n131 Such a
strategy is at core simply a basic method of deterrence, influencing behavior through incentives. Similarly, much of the game-theoretic work on crisis bargaining (and the danger
of asymmetric information) in relation to war and the democratic peace assumes the importance of deterrence through communication of incentives. n132 The well-known
correlation between war and territorial contiguity seems also to underscore the importance of deterrence and is likely principally a proxy for levels of perceived profit and
military achievability of aggression in many such settings.
It should further be noted that the democratic peace is not the only significant correlation with respect to war and peace, although it seems to be the most robust. Professors
Russett and Oneal, in recently exploring the other elements of the Kantian proposal for "Perpetual Peace," have also shown a strong and statistically significant correlation
between economically important bilateral trade between two nations and a reduction in the risk of war between them. Contrary to the arguments of "dependency theorists," such
economically important trade seems to reduce the risk of war regardless of the size relationship or asymmetry  [*383]  in the trade balance between the two states. In addition,
there is a statistically significant association between economic openness generally and reduction in the risk of war, although this association is not as strong as the effect of an
economically important bilateral trade relationship. n133 Russett and Oneal also show a modest independent correlation between reduction in the risk of war and higher levels of
common membership in international organizations. n134 And they show that a large imbalance of power between two states significantly lessens the risk of major war between
them. n135 All of these empirical findings about war also seem to directly reflect incentives. That is, a higher level of trade would, if foregone in war, impose higher costs in the
aggregate than without such trade, n136though we know that not all wars terminate trade. A large imbalance of power in a relationship rather obviously impacts deterrence and
incentives. Similarly, one might incur higher costs with high levels of common membership in international organizations through foregoing some of the heightened benefits of
such participation or otherwise being presented with different options through the actions or effects of such organizations.
These external deterrence elements may be yet another reason why democracies have a lower risk of war with one another. For their freer markets, trade, commerce, and
international engagement may place them in a position where their generally higher level of interaction means that aggression will incur substantial opportunity costs. Thus, the
"mechanism" of the democratic peace may be an aggregate of factors affecting incentives, both external as well as internal factors. Because of the underlying truth in the
relationship between higher levels of trade and lower levels of war, it is not surprising that theorists throughout human history, including Baron de Montesquieu in 1748,
Thomas Paine in 1792, John Stuart Mill in 1848, and, most recently, the founders of the European Community, have argued that increasing commerce and interactions among
nations would end war. Though by themselves these arguments have been overoptimistic, it may well be that some level of  [*384]  "globalization" may make the costs of war and
the gains of peace so high as to powerfully predispose to peace. Indeed, a 1989 book by John Mueller, Retreat From Doomsday, n137 postulates the obsolescence of major war
between developed nations (at least those nations within the "first and second worlds") as they become increasingly conscious of the rising costs of war and the rising gains of
peace.
In assessing levels of democracy, there are indexes readily available, for example, the Polity III n138 and Freedom House indexes. n139 I am unaware of any comparable index with
respect to levels of deterrence that might be used to test the importance of deterrence in war avoidance. n140 Absent such an accepted index, discussion about the importance of
deterrence is subject to the skeptical observation that one simply defines effective deterrence by whether a war did or did not occur. In order to begin to deal with the obvious
objections to this method and to encourage a more objective methodology for assessing deterrence, I encouraged a project to develop a rough but objective measure of
deterrence with a scale from -10 to +10 based on a large variety of contextual features that would be given some relative weighting in a complex deterrence equation before
applying the scaling to different war and non-war settings. n141 An innovative first effort uniformly showed high deterrence scores in settings where war did not, in fact, occur.
Deterring a Soviet first strike in the Cuban Missile Crisis produced a score of +8.5 and preventing a Soviet attack against NATO produced a score of +6. War settings, however,
produced scores ranging from -2.29 (Saddam Hussein's decision to invade Kuwait in the Gulf War), -2.18 (North Korea's decision to invade South Korea in the Korean War),
-1.85 (Hitler's decision to invade Poland in World War II), -1.54 (North Vietnam's decision to invade South Vietnam following the Paris Accords), -0.65 (Slobodan Milosevic's
decision to defy NATO in Kosovo), +0.5 (the Japanese decision to attack Pearl Harbor), +1.25 (the Austrian decision, encouraged by Germany, to attack Serbia,
which  [*385]  was the real beginning of World War I), to +1.75 (the German decision to invade Belgium and France in World War I). As a further effort at scaling and as a point
of comparison, I undertook to simply provide an impressionistic rating based on my study of each pre-crisis setting. That produced high positive scores of +9 for both deterring a
Soviet first strike during the Cuban Missile Crisis and NATO's deterrence of a Warsaw Pact attack and even lower scores than the more objective effort in settings where wars
had occurred. Thus, I scored North Vietnam's decision to invade South Vietnam following the Paris Accords and the German decision to invade Poland at the beginning of World
War II as -6. I scored the North Korean/Stalin decision to invade South Korea in the Korean War as -5, the Iraqi decision to invade Kuwait as -4, Milosevic's decision to defy
NATO in Kosovo and the German decision to invade Belgium and France in World War I as -2, and the Austrian decision to attack Serbia and the Japanese decision to attack
Pearl Harbor as -1. Certainly even knowledgeable experts would be likely to differ in their impressionistic scores on such pre-crisis settings, and a more objective methodology
for scoring deterrence would be valuable. Nevertheless, both exercises did seem to suggest that deterrence matters and that high levels of deterrence can prevent war.
Yet another piece of the puzzle, which may clarify the extent of deterrence necessary in certain settings, may also assist in building a broader hypothesis about war. In fact, it has
been incorporated into the efforts at scoring deterrence just discussed. That is, newer studies of human behavior are increasingly showing that certain perceptions of decision
makers can influence the level of risk they may be willing to undertake. It now seems likely that a number of such insights about human behavior in decision making may be
useful in considering and fashioning deterrence strategies. Perhaps of greatest relevance is the insight of "prospect theory," which posits that individuals evaluate outcomes with
respect to deviations from a reference point and that they may be more risk-averse in settings posing potential gain than in settings posing potential loss. n142 The evidence of this
"cognitive bias,"  [*386]  whether in gambling, trading, or, as is increasingly being argued, foreign policy decisions generally, is significant. Because of the newness of efforts to
apply a laboratory-based "prospect theory" to the complex foreign policy process generally, and particularly due to ambiguities and uncertainties in framing such complex
events, our consideration of it in the war/peace process should certainly be cautious. It does, however, seem to elucidate some of the case studies.
In the war/peace setting, "prospect theory" suggests that deterrence may not need to be as strong to prevent aggressive action leading to perceived gain. For example, there is
credible evidence that even an informal warning to Kaiser Wilhelm II from British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, if it had come early in the crisis before events had moved
too far, might have averted World War I. And even a modicum of deterrence in Kuwait, as was provided by a small British contingent when Kuwait was earlier threatened by an
irredentist Iraqi government in 1961, might have been sufficient to deter Saddam Hussein from his 1990 attack. Similarly, even a clear U.S. pledge to defend South Korea before
the attack might have prevented the Korean War. Conversely, following the July 28 Austrian mobilization and declaration of war against Serbia in World War I, the issue for
Austria may have begun to be perceived as loss avoidance, thus requiring much higher levels of deterrence to avoid the resulting war. Similarly, the Rambouillet Agreement may
have been perceived by Milosevic as risking loss of Kosovo and his continued rule of Serbia, and, as a result, may have required higher levels of NATO deterrence to prevent
Milosevic's actions in defiance. Certainly NATO's previous hesitant response against Milosevic in the Bosnia phase of the Yugoslav crisis did not create a high level of
deterrence. n143 One can only surmise whether the [*387]  killing in Kosovo could have been avoided had NATO taken a different tack, both structuring the issue less as loss
avoidance for Milosevic and considerably enhancing deterrence. Suppose, for example, NATO had emphasized that it had no interest in intervening in Serbia's civil conflict with
the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) but that it would emphatically take action to punish massive "ethnic cleansing" and other humanitarian outrages, as had been practiced in
Bosnia. And on the deterrence side, suppose it made clear in advance that any NATO bombardment would be severe, that ground troops would be introduced if necessary, that
in any assault it would pursue a "Leadership Strategy" focused on targets of importance to Milosevic and his principal henchmen (including their hold on power), and that unlike
earlier in Bosnia, NATO immediately would seek to generate war crime indictments of all top Serbian leaders implicated in any atrocities. The point here is not to second-guess
NATO's actions in Kosovo but to suggest that taking into account potential "cognitive bias," such as "prospect theory," may be useful in fashioning effective deterrence. "Prospect
theory" may also be relevant in predicting that it is easier to deter (that is, lower levels are necessary) an aggression than to undo that aggression. Thus, much higher levels of
deterrence were probably required to compel Saddam Hussein to leave Kuwait than to prevent him from initially invading that State. In fact, not even the presence of a powerful
Desert Storm military force and a Security Council Resolution directing him to leave caused Hussein to voluntarily withdraw. As this  [*388]  real world example illustrates,
there is considerable experimental evidence in "prospect theory" of an almost instant renormalization of reference point after a gain. That is, relatively quickly after Saddam
Hussein took Kuwait, a withdrawal was framed as a loss setting, which he would take high risks to avoid. Indeed, we tend to think of such settings as settings of compellance,
requiring higher levels of incentive to achieve compulsion producing an action, as opposed to lower levels of deterrence needed for prevention.
One should also be careful not to overstate the effect of "prospect theory" or fail to assess a threat in its complete context. We should remember that a belated pledge by Great
Britain to defend Poland before the Nazi attack did not deter Hitler, who believed under the circumstances that the British pledge would not be honored. It is also possible that
the greater relative wealth of democracies, which have less to gain in all out war, is yet another internal factor contributing to the "democratic peace." n144 In turn, this also
supports the extraordinary tenacity and general record of success of democracies fighting in defensive settings, as they may also have more to lose.
In assessing the adequacy of deterrence to prevent war, we might also want to consider whether extreme ideology, strongly at odds with reality, is a factor requiring higher levels
of deterrence for effectiveness. One example may be the extreme ideology of Pol Pot, which led to his false belief that his Khmer Rouge forces could defeat the Vietnamese. n145 He
apparently acted on that belief in a series of border incursions against Vietnam that ultimately ended in his losing a war. Similarly, Osama bin Laden's 9/11 attack against
America, hopelessly at odds with the reality of his defeating the Western World and producing for him a strategic disaster, seems to have been prompted by his extreme ideology
rooted in a distorted concept of Islam at war with the enlightenment. The continuing suicide bombings against Israel, encouraged by radical rejectionists and leading to fewer
and fewer gains for the Palestinians, may be another example. If extreme ideology is a factor to be considered in assessing levels of deterrence, it does not mean that deterrence
is doomed to fail in such settings but only that it must be at higher levels (and properly targeted toward the relevant  [*389]  decision elites behind the specific attacks) to be
effective, as is also true in perceived loss or compellance settings. n146
Even if major war in the modern world is predominantly a result of aggression by nondemocratic regimes, it does not mean that all nondemocracies pose a risk of war all, or
even some, of the time. Salazar's Portugal did not commit aggression. Nor, today, do Singapore or Bahrain or countless other nondemocracies pose a threat. That is, today
nondemocracy comes close to a necessary condition in generating the high-risk behavior leading
to major interstate war. But it is, by itself, not a sufficient condition for war. The many reasons for this, of course,
include a plethora of internal factors, such as differences in leadership perspectives and values, size of military, and relative degree of the rule of law, as well as levels of external
where an aggressive nondemocratic regime is present and poses a credible military
deterrence. n147 But

threat, then it is the totality of external factors, that is, deterrence, that become crucial .
The lack of deterrence is the most reliable predictor of war – instead of focusing
on root causes, we should look to variables that directly affect decision-making,
and deterrence is the most important factor
Sharp, 8 – adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center (Gary, “Democracy
and Deterrence, Foundations for an Enduring World Peace,” http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-
bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA493031&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf

Wars are not simply accidents. Nor, contrary to our ordinary language, are they made by nations. Wars are made by people; more
specifically they are decided on by the leaders of nation states—and other nonnational groups in the case of terrorism
—who make the decision to commit aggression or otherwise use the military instrument . These
leaders make that decision based on the totality of incentives affecting them at the time of the
decision. . . . Incentive theory] tells us that we simply have a better chance of] . . . predicting war, and fashioning forms of
intervention to control it, if we focus squarely on the effect of variables from all levels of analysis in generating incentives affecting
the actual decisions made by those with the power to decide on war. 42
Incentive theory focuses on the individual decisions that lead to war and explains the synergistic
relationship between the absence of effective deterrence and the absence of democracy. Together
these three factors—the decisions of leaders made without the restraining effects of deterrence
and democracy— are the cause of war:
War is not strictly caused by an absence of democracy or effective deterrence or both together. Rather war is caused by the human
leadership decision to employ the military instrument. The absence of democracy, the absence of effective
deterrence, and most importantly, the synergy of an absence of both are conditions or factors
that predispose to war. An absence of democracy likely predisposes by [its] effect on leadership and leadership incentives,
and an absence of effective deterrence likely predisposes by its effect on incentives from factors other than the individual or
governmental levels of analysis. To
understand the cause of war is to understand the human decision for
war; that is, major war and democide . . . are the consequence of individual decisions responding
to a totality of incentives. 43
 2NC – DETERRENCE – SPECIFICITY
Zero empirical correlation between innate drives or social institutions and war –
the only way to prevent conflict empirically is to look at the specific decision
calculus of national leaders
Sharp, 8 – adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center (Gary, “Democracy
and Deterrence. Foundations for an Enduring World Peace,” http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-
bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA493031&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf

While classical liberals focused on political structures, socialists analyzed the socioeconomic
system of states as the primary factor in determining the propensity of states to engage in war.
Socialists such as Karl Marx attributed war to the class structure of society; Marx believed that
war resulted from a clash of social forces created by a capitalist mode of production that
develops two antagonistic classes, rather than being an instrument of state policy. Thus
capitalist states would engage in war because of their growing needs for raw materials, markets,
and cheap labor. Socialists believed replacing capitalism with socialism could prevent war, but
world events have proven socialists wrong as well. 32
These two schools of thought—war is caused by innate biological drives or social institutions—do
not demonstrate any meaningful correlation with the occurrence or nonoccurrence of war. There
are many variables not considered by these two schools: for example, the influence of national
special interest groups such as the military or defense contractors that may seek glory through
victory, greater resources, greater domestic political power, or justification for their existence.
Legal scholar Quincy Wright has conducted one of the “most thorough studies of the nature of
war” 33 and concludes that there “is no single cause of war.” 34 In A Study of War, he concludes
that peace is an equilibrium of four complex factors: military and industrial technology,
international law governing the resort to war, social and political organization at the domestic
and international level, and the distribution of attitudes and opinions concerning basic values.
War is likely when controls on any one level are disturbed or changed. 35 Similarly, the 1997 US
National Military Strategy identifies the root causes of conflict as political, economic, social, and
legal conditions. 36
Moore has compiled the following list of conventional explanations for war: specific disputes;
absence of dispute settlement mechanisms; ideological disputes; ethnic and religious
differences; communication failures; proliferation of weapons and arms races; social and
economic injustice; imbalance of power; competition for resources; incidents, accidents, and
miscalculation; violence in the nature of man; aggressive national leaders; and economic
determination. He has concluded, however, that these causes or motives for war explain specific
conflicts but fail to serve as a central paradigm for explaining the cause of war. 37
In the final analysis, Wright is unequivocally correct—there is no single cause or explanation for
war. However, there is one clear consistency in all wars: wars always begin through the
calculated decisions of men or women, regardless of any cause, motive, or explanation. As the
UNESCO constitution asserts, “wars begin in the minds of men.” 38 People—national leaders—
are always at the core of any decision to wage war, and any strategy for preventing war must
address these individuals.
 A2 – SECURITY K
Deterrence doesn’t make securitization inevitable – it can break cycles of hostility
and generate cooperation
Lupovici 8 – Post-Doctoral Fellow Munk Centre for International Studies University of
Toronto (Amir, “Why the Cold War Practices of Deterrence are Still Prevalent: Physical Security,
Ontological Security and Strategic Discourse,” http://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-
2008/Lupovici.pdf

Since deterrence can become part of the actors’ identity, it is also involved in the actors’ will to
achieve ontological security, securing the actors’ identity and routines. As McSweeney explains,
ontological security is “the acquisition of confidence in the routines of daily life—the essential
predictability of interaction through which we feel confident in knowing what is going on and
that we have the practical skill to go on in this context.” These routines become part of the social
structure that enables and constrains the actors’ possibilities (McSweeney, 1999: 50-1, 154-5;
Wendt, 1999: 131, 229-30). Thus, through the emergence of the deterrence norm and the
construction of deterrence identities, the actors create an intersubjective context and
intersubjective understandings that in turn affect their interests and routines. In this context,
deterrence strategy and deterrence practices are better understood by the actors, and therefore
the continuous avoidance of violence is more easily achieved. Furthermore, within such a
context of deterrence relations, rationality is (re)defined, clarifying the appropriate practices for
a rational actor, and this, in turn, reproduces this context and the actors’ identities.
Therefore, the internalization of deterrence ideas helps to explain how actors may create more
cooperative practices and break away from the spiral of hostility that is forced and maintained
by the identities that are attached to the security dilemma, and which lead to mutual perception
of the other as an aggressive enemy. As Wendt for example suggests, in situations where states
are restrained from using violence—such as MAD (mutual assured destruction)—states not only
avoid violence, but “ironically, may be willing to trust each other enough to take on collective
identity”. In such cases if actors believe that others have no desire to engulf them, then it will be
easier to trust them and to identify with their own needs (Wendt, 1999: 358-9). In this respect,
the norm of deterrence, the trust that is being built between the opponents, and the (mutual)
constitution of their role identities may all lead to the creation of long term influences that
preserve the practices of deterrence as well as the avoidance of violence. Since a basic level of
trust is needed to attain ontological security, 21 the existence of it may further strengthen the
practices of deterrence and the actors’ identities of deterrer and deterred actors.
In this respect, I argue that for the reasons mentioned earlier, the practices of deterrence should
be understood as providing both physical and ontological security, thus refuting that there is
necessarily tension between them. Exactly for this reason I argue that Rasmussen’s (2002: 331-
2) assertion—according to which MAD was about enhancing ontological over physical security—
is only partly correct. Certainly, MAD should be understood as providing ontological security;
but it also allowed for physical security, since, compared to previous strategies and doctrines, it
was all about decreasing the physical threat of nuclear weapons. Furthermore, the ability to
increase one dimension of security helped to enhance the other, since it strengthened the actors’
identities and created more stable expectations of avoiding violence.
Deterrence is a way to break from the security dilemma – it allows us to alter our
perception of arms buildups and see them as non-threatening
Lupovici 8 – Post-Doctoral Fellow Munk Centre for International Studies University of
Toronto (Amir, “Why the Cold War Practices of Deterrence are Still Prevalent: Physical Security,
Ontological Security and Strategic Discourse,” http://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-
2008/Lupovici.pdf
I further claim that the arguments suggested in this paper have some policyoriented
implications on the questions of how actors can be influenced and why some actors are less
easily deterred. Deterrence norm creates a context within which weapons are interpreted as a
means of deterrence. Moreover, the importance of context and actors’ intersubjective knowledge
is not limited to the superpowers in the nuclear age, but can also apply to other kinds of actors.
In other words, deterrence strategy will generally work better when actors have intersubjective
knowledge of deterrence, which indicates that deterrence practices, to some extent, are
dependent on the processes of learning and socialization. 56 In addition, this study suggests that
strategic policy decisions must take into account not only the physical needs of the opponents
but possible threats to identity and ontological security.
In addition, the research has a few interesting theoretical and empirical implications for the
study of the connections among the concepts of physical security, ontological security, and
identity, as well for the further mapping of these connections. The idea and practices of
deterrence created the role identities of the actors, which gradually provided a substitute for
earlier identities of aggressive enemy. This allowed the superpowers to escape from the
ontological security dilemma, since they were provided with an alternative that both enhanced
their physical security and did not threaten their role identities. The point here is that this is
precisely the factor that aggravated the threats of 9/11. The American inability to deter was not
only a physical security problem but an ontological one. Thus, attempts to practice deterrence
and restore its deterrent posture resulted in the Gulf war.
A few further implications can be suggested. First, mutual deterrence practices may be
understood as a mechanism that allows for breaking away from the ontological security
dilemma. Not only are actors able to increase their ontological and/or physical security, but
increasing either of these may serve to increase the other, and through this provide a more solid
sense of security. Second, this study also enhances the assertion that establishing new identities
may serve as a mechanism that allows for breaking away from the ontological security dilemma.
Further, this research provides a reply to Copeland, who suggests that the “divide between
constructivism and systemic realism is all about past socialization versus future uncertainty.” He
argues that constructivists have difficulties explaining how prudent rational leaders deal with
future uncertainties (2000: 205-6; 210). This paper demonstrates that the constructivist
approach may explain not only how uncertainties shape behavior, but how they result from the
actors’ identities. Therefore, considering deterrence as a construction of rational practices may
explain how in some contexts it helps actors overpower uncertainties (Cold War) while in others
it creates the uncertainties (post–Cold War terrorism).
 A2 – REFORM BAD
We need to use the language of nuclear experts to challenge them --- solves co-
option
J. Michael Hogan 94, Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Pennsylvania State
University, The Nuclear Freeze Campaign: Rhetoric and Foreign Policy in the Telepolitical Age,
pg. 6-7
Most former freeze activists retain at least some faith in the democratic process. According to Solo, the freeze campaign at
least began a long process of “educating” the public, and for a time it successfully transformed “the
issues and the language used by politicians ” to facilitate discussion of nuclear
issues, breaking from “the dominant discourse of arms control and the cold war.” But just as this “war of
ideas” was beginning to bear fruit, according to Solo, “the movement narrowed its agenda, which in turn
constrained its educational program and confined its politics.” Concerned with answering its
right-wing critics and remaining “respectable” among “political and arms control elites,” freeze
advocates began defending the initiative on “technical grounds ,” thereby straying from
their “original goal of breaking out of arms control ‘negotiations as usual’ and challenging the new
militarism.” For Solo, the lesson is clear: that in order “to develop a mass base” with “potential to
develop political power without being co-opted ,” peace activists must “ promote political
literacy with a dynamic education strategy that recognizes the peculiarities of our culture
and language and does not overlook the continuing impact of television on our political life as a nation.”
 A2 – FOREIGN FOCUS BAD
The war abroad is linked to struggles for survival at home – anti-imperialist
advocacy can’t pick between one and the other – only the NEG creates a tradeoff by
prioritizing
Martinez, director of the Institute for MultiRacial Justice, 5
(Elizabeth, “Looking for Color in the Anti-War Movement,”
http://www.coloursofresistance.org/450/looking-for-color-in-the-anti-war-movement/)
There’s A War At Home, Too
The racist practices described here are symptomatic of stubbornly held ideas that include, first ,
denying there is a war at home along with today’s wars abroad, and the two are intimately
connected. Second, denying that both are racist wars (as well as apparently forgetting that U.S. foreign policy is fundamentally
rooted in racism). Angela Davis once noted that the black community did not join the anti-Vietnam war movement in great numbers
(even though blacks have been largely anti-war, one could add). One reason, she said, was that it did not see white peace activists
energetically defending the Black Panthers, who were fighting a war for survival at the time. In the same spirit, David Graham Du
Bois, stepson of the revered scholar, recently wrote in an “Open Letter to the U.S. Peace Movement” that, confronted by the Iraq war,
Black Americans “are generally silent largely because there has been so little evidence that those who call us into the streets to
demonstrate for peace understand how color racism and white supremacy are used in the United States against the interests of
peace, justice and the pursuit of happiness for all peoples. It is not enough to call up the peace legacy of Martin Luther King, in
speeches and slogans…You must organize to end racism with the same enthusiasm and determination as you organize to stop the
war.” Similarly, Earl Ofari Hutchinson wrote in 1991 soon after the Rodney King beating in L.A., “How is it that thousands of white
activists can wage passionate campaigns against oppression and human rights abuses in Chile, El Salvador, South Africa…but not in
the ghettos and barrios of their own cities?” As these African Americans affirm, peace activists have often failed to
recognize that there is a “war at home” along with the wars abroad, and that the war at home
includes an unending struggle with racism as shown in the criminalization of youth, the expanding prison industrial
complex, ongoing inequality in social institutions like schools and housing, and a constant stream of actions to take back the gains of
the 1960’s like affirmative action and bilingual education. Today the war at home has intensified. People of color suffer severely from
its effects, as seen in massive new attacks in the name of Homeland Security. Under the Special Registration program, over 13,000
Arab, Muslim, South Asian, and North African males who complied with the program face deportation, almost all for minor
immigration violations. This represents a huge increase in racial profiling and criminalizing immigrants, especially those of color.
Another direct connection between the wars abroad and at home can be seen in the deadly cuts in funding education, health care,
child care, and low-cost housing for the sake of gigantic military spending. These and other realities carry a stark
message: the same capitalist, empire-building forces that impose the wars abroad also impose
the war at home . The main victims of both are peoples of color. Both are racist wars. We cannot
oppose one and not the other. Although white anti-war activists may recognize that
communities of color are engaged in longstanding struggles against white supremacy and for
self-determination, most do not see (or want to see) the linkage between those struggles and
building the anti-war movement. That blindness underlies many of the problems we have seen in building anti-
war unity across color lines. One simple example: lack of respect for leadership by people of color, in many situations. The drive for
self-determination is also ignored in the way many white activists look at Palestine’s struggle against the Israeli occupation and fail
to see its relationship to the whole U.S. empire-building project. Instead of solidarity, Arab American activists have noted, some
whites say those who support Palestine’s struggle are anti-Semitic; some fear alienating Jews if they do support Palestine; some
dismiss that struggle out of total ignorance about Israeli, Arab, and Islamic history, or they think Islam oppresses women across the
board so too bad for Palestine. War Resisters League Resists What? A major example of resistance to defining the
anti-war struggle as anti-racist can be found in the War Resisters League, which has been almost entirely
white for 80 years. Last February David McReynolds of its Executive Committee, widely admired for his work against the Vietnam
war, resigned from all posts. The immediate cause named by McReynolds was the vote by the WRL’s National Committee to retain a
project called ROOTS (originally Youth Peace), which had been created several years earlier to increase the League’s young
membership. ROOTS is staffed by people of color. In explaining his resignation, McReynolds wrote that by voting to retain ROOTS,
the majority had set the League “on a course which… [could] result in the end of the organization. That course was to shift our
primary focus from being a peace and disarmament organization…to a ‘broader focus’ in which the League would be not only an
‘antiwar’ organization, but also an ‘anti-racist’ organization.” McReynolds commented that the causes of war “sometimes—though
not as often as the ‘politically correct caucus’ thinks—[include] racism…I have seen Clergy and Laity Concerned, once a voice for
peace and social change, vanish after it capitulated to its own ‘politically correct’ group which insisted that if CALC was serious about
racism it had to turn over a majority of its board to members of color. It did so…” McReynolds also stated very briefly and without
examples that “almost none” of ROOTS’ material (primarily a youth-oriented newsletter) is pacifist, contrary to WRL basic
principles. Some WRL members have questioned why being officially anti-racist is so controversial when the WRL had no great
problem agreeing to declare itself anti-sexist. Today upheaval continues within the WRL, with hopes of positive change. ROOTS
continues and WRL remains in the United for Peace and Justice (UPJ) coalition The Open Letter About Racism With many
problems of racism in the movement surfacing during 2002-2003, the position taken by McReynolds and others in the WRL became
“the straw that broke the back of silence concerning those problems,” as a national UPJ leader told me. The result: an “Open Letter
About Racism in the Movement” circulated among thousands of activists shortly after the February 15/16, 2003 rallies. Issued by a
multi-racial group in New York City, the Open Letter discussed white supremacy as experienced by its authors over a one-year
period. It listed many of the problems already mentioned in this article. That Open Letter was an encouraging move, especially when
compared to other events. For example, in April, 2003, in the Boston area, the popular white anti-racist speaker Tim Wise was
scheduled to speak on the topic “Racism and White Privilege in the Peace Movement.” Somehow his title was changed to “Race and
the Peace Movement.” White Efforts To Combat Racism As that Open Letter confirmed, anti-war white activists have been critical of
racism in the movement. On a minimal level, they often express regret that their meetings include too few people of color. This
regret can lead to no concrete action or tokenism. Alternately, they will agree, “Yes, we must get more people of color involved,” but
as Tonto might have said to the Lone Ranger, “Who is ‘we,’ white man?” In other words, they aim to “diversify” what continues to be
their movement in their eyes, rather than seeking to build alliances between equals. More serious efforts by white anti-war activists
to combat racist tendencies can be dated back decades. Anne Braden, the longtime, white southern anti-racist leader, wrote a
groundbreaking article in 1987, “Undoing Racism: Lessons for the Peace Movement,” offering analysis and concrete
recommendations that work for today. An unusual example of whites collaborating to solve such problems with people of color as
equals developed in September 2001 in the Albany, New York area. The Stand for Peace Anti-Racism Committee
(SPARC) wasformed “to build an anti-racist, multi-racial movement for justice and peace.” SPARC
organized a forum held last August 13 for people of color “to
discuss our involvement and leadership in working
for peace and justice” and strategies for “how we can make connections” in combatting the
wars at home and around the globe. The forum drew a diverse group of 30 or more people, about one-third of
whom had not been politically active in the past. Thus “it turned out to be more of a speakout than an in-depth dicussion of strategic
questions,” said African American scholar/activist Barbara Smith. But the spirit of the meeting was enthusiastic and participants
expressed strong interest in continuing the dialogue at a follow-up meeting that same month. In November 2001, New York
City (70 percent people of color) saw a group of 10 young(ish) white organizers and activists put out a powerful
letter called “An Anti-Racist Coalition? We have a long way to go.” They included members of
mostly local groups working for the rights of welfare recipients, workers (UNITE), gay, lesbian,
bisexual, and transgender people (FIERCE) and others who had attended meetings to plan for an October 7 march.
Their letter sharply criticized those meetings for marginalizing people of color as well as youth and working-class participants. It
also presented many practical suggestions for improvement. Other ideas and actions have come from white anti-racist groups like
Active Solidarity and Heads Up in the Bay Area, and AWARE in Philadelphia. Direct Action to Stop War, also of the Bay Area, which
shut down San Francisco’s financial district the day after war was declared, saw positive efforts in anti-racist organizing. San
Francisco’s Chris Crass, of the Challenging White Supremacy (CWS) Workshops, has put together an
informal “toolbox” for whites. It begins with a broad political recommendation: develop an
analysis of war that connects U.S. empire-building abroad to the war at home.
Understand that demands for peace without justice ring hollow in communities that face
structural violence every day, whether the U.S. is dropping bombs elsewhere or not. The list includes
what Sharon Martinas, creator of CWS programs, has called “anti-racist toilet training,” for whites. For example: Attend an anti-
racist training and encourage other white activists to do so. Recognize how white privilege consistently socializes white activists to
think of themselves as superior. Instead of that eurocentric “come join us” approach, check in with organizations of color working
against war at home and abroad. Respect the leadership of people of color. Be accountable; do what you say you will do. Prioritize
reading books by radical people of color, especially feminists. Learn more about the struggles of communities of color. Set concrete
goals for yourself that can be measured, such as: in one month, will talk with two white anti-racist activists in my community and
two of color. Remember that it is not your intentions or motives that count but the impact of your actions as a white person in a
white supremacist society. The Black civil rights movement of the 1960’s shows it is possible for vast
numbers of white people in this land to say a loud “no” to actions and policies that exclude,
demean, or marginalize people of color. Everyone should remember William Moore, Mickey Schwerner, Andy
Goodman, Jonathan Daniels, Viola Liuzzo, and other white activists killed in the southern freedom struggle. Their lives were not
worth more than any black life lost in that movement, but their commitment set an inspiring contemporary example for anti-racist
whites. The time is more than ripe to show that commitment again. Whites should not only say “no” to racism but also carry out
energetic campaigns of “yes” to any action that advances genuine collaboration. This is no simple or easy task, but what could be
more worthwhile? A young white friend wrote last year, “Wouldn’t it be beautiful if we could get thousands of white organizers all
over the country to reject those old racist habits? To stop thinking of their work as the center of everything and educate other white
folks too? To see why they have to fight racism along with militarism so the solidarity we talk about is real? Then we could truly say:
another world is possible.” Part II: Anti-War Organizing Among People of Color An Emergency Summit Conference of Asian, Black,
Brown, Puerto Rican, and Red people against the war was held in Gary, Indiana on June 3-4, the first such meeting ever held in the
United States…over 300 delegates attended the historic conference,” said the article in the newspaper El Grito del Norte. The year
was 1971. The war was in Vietnam. Today people of color do not yet have the collective strength of those years and there are major
obstacles to anti-war organizing in our communities. We cannot just blame racism from whites for blocking our participation if we
are not doing everything possible to build effectively among ourselves. People of color need to be so strong, so numerous, and so
effective that they cannot be ignored. The obstacles start with class issues. A widespread feeling exists in
communities of color that anti-war activism can’t be a priority when folks are struggling with
daily problems of survival— paying the rent, doctors’ bills, bad schools, drugs in the ’hood—as well
as direct racist attacks. Along with job and family, where’s the time? Poor and working-class African
Americans may say, “We can’t be protesting the war, we’ve got to be defending ourselves…anti-war stuff is for white middle-class
kids.” Immigrants, especially the undocumented, often
keep quiet for fear of losing their livelihood or
being deported if they speak out or sound “un-American.” Older immigrants may say they feel gratitude or
debt to the U.S. for their improved economic condition and their children’s. Low-income youth of color may be attracted to the
military as the only road to college, a good job, and U.S. citizenship. Middle-class activists of color (as well as whites)
sometimes say that grassroots people just don’t grasp foreign policy or don’t want to be
bothered. Actually those activists may really be blaming “the masses” for a supposed lack of
intelligence as a way of hiding their own unwillingness to struggle with complex international issues. When a brother says with
well-founded cynicism, “This war stuff is the same old crap”—does that really mean he would never understand or care about the
stakes? Anti-war organizing can be impeded by middle-class, conservative, often intensely anti-Communist organizations of color.
They may oppose going against the war because it could undermine their work on what they call “more important issues,” not to
mention their financial support. Among Latinos, we find the League of Latin American Citizens (LULAC) not wanting Mexicano
anti-war activists in this year’s Cinco de Mayo parade in Houston, Texas. Blacks have similar organizations as do South Vietnamese
people in northern California. For African Americans, seeing Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice at the top adds a complicating
perspective. If they had opposed the wars, their rare success as Blacks making it into the halls of power would have been impossible.
These examples leave us asking not just where is the color in the anti-war movement but also “where is the working class?”—a
question for white activists also. Other obstacles to our anti-war organizing include: The U.S. mass media with their lies, distortions
and omissions of reality. Unlike white society, few people of color have access to alternative media (especially not in Chinese or other
Asian languages). A Pew poll last April found that support for the Iraq war was far lower from immigrant Latinos—who often came
from countries with direct knowledge of U.S. imperialism—than from Latinos born here, who had been barraged by mainstream
media all their lives. The feeling that there are no leaders and ordinary people cannot take the action needed without strong leaders
(failing to think of themselves as leaders). Among Blacks and Latinos, the contradiction of anger at U.S. racism existing alongside a
desire for respect from the white-dominated society, and especially the opportunity to win that respect in wartime. Black poet Brian
Gilmore, in the Progressive, quoted W.E.B. DuBois referring to these feelings as that tragic state of “double consciousness.”
Identification with the U.S. as a nation, especially in relation to other countries: not nationalism, but nation-ism. Fear of attending
anti-war demonstrations because of repression by police, who target people of color. A general dread of any contact with the INS
(Immigration and Naturalization Service), especially since 9/11. Thousands of Arab, Islamic people and South Asians in particular
have suffered mass roundups, indefinite imprisonment without cause under brutal conditions, and deportation. The recent
expulsion of many Cambodians, and the threatened expulsion of hundreds more, has intensified that dread. Earlier, under
“Operation Tarmac,” came the raids and subsequent firing of Latino immigrant airport workers, first in Salt Lake City in December
2001 and then Seattle in April, 2002, none on criminal charges. For Latinos as for Asians, difficulty in unifying all their different
nationalities against the war, given the diversity of class, language, politics, religion, attitudes about gender and sexuality, and
others. Dislike of working within the white-dominated anti-war movement, given its racist tendencies. A single meeting can turn you
off. Fear of conflict with pro-war family or friends. Hany Kahlil, of the United for Peace and Justice staff based in New York, has
added several other very concrete problems, summarized as: When you haven’t experienced your own power to keep a health clinic
open or get a stop-sign on a street, for example, you have difficulty imagining you can take on something huge like a war, so why try?
It’s hard to sustain energy and hope if we don’t have measurable benchmarks for
progress . For example, we need to see where our campaigns fall far short of stopping a war but are
steps that strengthen our base and win allies. Many groups have shied away from taking on the war in part
because they are afraid of dividing their organization’s membership. We need to be prepared to struggle with our own people if
necessary. That fear overlaps with the problem that much of our work is concentrated in the non-profit sector, which can make
funding the priority. Lack of capacity and resources. In the case of Black Americans, Bill Fletcher of TransAfrica Forum has said that,
as a society, they are economically and psychologically depressed today. “Worn down by all the deprivation and attacks of recent
years, they are a battered people. Such a state of being leads many to think struggle is not worthwhile.” Overcoming The Obstacles
Many individuals of color are opposed to the wars and empire-building even if they don’t participate in demonstrations or join anti-
war organizations. What might overcome the obstacles and make them more ready to get involved? Anti-war organizers of color will
education is key. That process must include drawing out the connections between people’s
say:
immediate concerns—the bread-and-butter issues—and the war. An obvious example is the brutal
cutbacks in education , health care, child care, and other social services to finance the
biggest military budget seen in years . Another is the vast increase in racial profiling and
criminalizing immigrants of color by such means as the “Special Registration” program.
People of color have sometimes become active against the war in places where organizations already exist that have won respect for
their work on an issue important to local residents. In New York and Chicago, for example, organized Latino opposition to U.S.
militarism against Vieques, Puerto Rico made it natural to take on Bush’s wars and empire-building. The result has been one of the
strongest pockets of Latino organizing in the U.S. Also in New York, anti-war activism has been launched by people of color already
organized around such issues as welfare rights, reparations, and immigrant rights, like CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities. A
group in Los Angeles, Centro (CSO), had a Latino base for years that enabled it to help Latinos Against the War win support. In these
cases, the existence of trust together with education about how the foreign and domestic wars are
connected helped pave the way for involvement. Monami Maulik, director of Desis Rising Up and
Moving (DRUM) in New York has pointed out that the current war on terrorism criminalizes immigrant
communities much as the “war on drugs” crim- inalized African American and Latino
communities for years. That kind of historical comparison helps advance the
educational process. Immediate connections also exist. Korean Americans constantly hear U.S.
threats to attack their homeland because of its nuclear weapons. To them, the war abroad
and the war at home are inseparable ; recently they have energetically organized educational events and
protests in the U.S. Filipinos have similar connections . Even before the war, many were engaged, directly or
indirectly, in opposing U.S. militarism and its puppets in the Philippines . Their anti-war organizing has
been intensified by the firing of over 1,000 baggage screeners at airports in the Bay Area, the vast majority Filipino, for being non-
citizens. A subtle linkage between U.S. wars abroad and the war at home can be found in the way
African American activists often say
they will join a struggle defined as “against imperialism”
rather than “for peace.” Fighting U.S. imperialism echoes their own historical struggle, dating back to slavery. Black
Workers for Justice in North Carolina issued a statement in late 2002 taking that anti-imperialist perspective even further. It
emphasized the importance of “concretely linking the struggles of all People of Color and the oppressed internationally for a better
world.”

To claim that coloniality should proceed the “international” violence the US

commits against foreign bodies is unethical—their overly broad focus on settlerism
cannot explain particulars of interethnic conflicts and undermines effective racial
politics
Sunstrom 8, Associate Professor of Philosophy
[2008, Ronald R. Sunstrom is a black Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of San
Francisco; additionally, he teaches for USF's African American Studies program and the Master
of Public Affairs program for the Leo T. McCarthy Center of Public Service and the Common
Good. He was awarded the 2008 Sankofa Faculty Award from USF's Multicultural Student
Services, USF's 2009 Ignatian Service Award, and was a co-winner of the 2010 USF
Distinguished Teaching Award. His areas of research include political theory, critical social and
race theory, and African American and Asian American philosophy, “The Browning of America
and the Evasion of Social Justice”, pp. 65-92]

It would be odd and troubling for the nation to merrily work toward justice at “home,” all the
while neglecting the demands of those whom the nation regarded as perpetual foreigners (and
not really being at “home” in the nation) and the demands of global justice. Such a vision of
justice is self-serving and morally hollow. Long-existing civil rights claims should not
delimit the nation’s moral boundaries and its conception of civil rights , thus ipso
facto severing them from internationally determined human rights. The reactions of some citizens to the
browning of America, unfortunately, open up this possibility, which is yet another evasion of social justice.7 When I broach
these issues, or any of the particular issues discussed in this book, the response I frequently receive is that
these issues are red herrings that divert our attention away from the real enemy , that of white
supremacy.8 I am dubious about this complaint; after all, focusing on “white supremacy” does not
directly address the particulars of the interethnic confl icts that arise from the
browning of America. Perhaps, though, these critics mean that we should focus on how “white
supremacy,” in the form of institutionalized racism or white power , divides minority groups, so as
to conquer them and leave them to fi ght over a limited set of resources. Alternatively, these critiques would have us
focus on how Latinos, Asian Americans, Americans who identify as multiracial, and immigrants
adopt anti-black racism and the privileges of whiteness as they assimilate into American society .
I think the latter argument is bogus, and chapter 3 is devoted in part to explaining why. As for the former, I think
“white supremacy” is too broad and vague a category to be helpful, and that focusing on such a fl
awed category of power can be positively harmful . Such moves simply sidestep the
particular issues that are raised in interethnic confl icts and may even contribute to the evasions
I outlined earlier. The people of the United States, as they experience and participate in the browning of America,
should resist both types of evasions. The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice argues, in contrast,
that the people of the United States should see in its demographic change the transformation of social justice. They should welcome
that transformation and view it as an opportunity to satisfy old debts and expand in a cosmopolitan direction the very idea of social
justice.
DA – BASES
 1NC
The economy is stable now but delicate – a shock would trigger a global recession
– normal checks don’t apply
Langlois 6/17 (Shawn, B.A. in English from UC Santa Barbara, senior editor at Marketwatch,
“A global ‘shock to markets’ could trigger next financial crisis, warns Roubini” Marketwatch
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/a-shock-to-markets-around-the-world-could-trigger-
next-financial-crisis-says-roubini-2019-06-17)NFleming
The Federal Reserve is widely expected to strike a dovish chord when it meets this week,
clearing the way for a July rate cut — the first in more than a decade — that almost 40% of
economists in a Wall Street Journal poll are expecting. While a hawkish Fed no longer looms
large over this aging bull market, Nouriel Roubini, NYU economics professor and perhaps the
media’s favorite permabear, now says the world “has an even bigger problem on its hands.” In
our call of the day, Roubini examines “the growing risk of a 2020 recession” and the specter of
crisis in an already fragile global economy. ‘A severe enough shock could usher in a
global recession, even if central banks respond rapidly.’ Nouriel Roubini Last year, he
warned of 10 potential downside risks that could lead to a global recession next year. A friendlier
Fed, he says, removes one of them, but the others are still firmly in play and have emerged as
more dangerous than before. “U.S. equity markets have remained frothy since our initial
commentary,” he wrote. “There are added risks associated with the rise of newer forms of debt,
including in many emerging markets, where much borrowing is denominated in foreign
currencies.” Among the key risks, tensions between China and the U.S. deserve special attention,
Roubini says, particularly if they result in China retaliating by closing its market to U.S.-based
multinationals like Apple AAPL, +0.83% . Read: Wilbur Ross lowers expectations of a trade deal
coming down from G-20 talks between Trump, Xi “Under such a scenario, the shock to markets
around the world would be sufficient to bring on a global crisis, regardless of what the major
central banks do,” Roubini warned. “And given the scale of private and public debt, another
financial crisis would likely follow from that.” Also read: Business conditions are at their worst
level since the 2008 financial crisis, says Morgan Stanley At this point, he says central banks
around the world are increasingly constrained, exposing illiquid financial markets to
“flash crashes” and other disruptions, such as Trump getting into a “wag the dog”
conflict with a country like Iran. “That might bolster his domestic poll numbers,” he
said. “But it could also trigger an oil shock .” Spiking oil prices and trade wars, Roubini points
out, are more than just a supply side risk. They also threaten consumption grown — tariffs and
higher fuel costs suck up disposable income. As a result, uncertainty builds, companies cut
capital spending and investment, and the big unwind begins.
Defense industry key to the economy – spills over to innovation in other sectors
O’Hanlon, 11 [Michael, senior fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, where he
specializes in U.S. defense strategy, the use of military force, homeland security, and American
foreign policy, “The National Security Industrial Base: A Crucial Asset of the United States,
Whose Future May Be in Jeopardy,” https://www.brookings.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2016/06/02_defense_ohanlon.pdf, AC]
We must also remember that the defense industry also is a key engine in the American
economy , most specifically as an engine of trade and innovation . To use just one example, if
it was not for the defense industry’s role in everything from Global Positioning System (GPS) to
the Internet to the jet engine, we would not have global trading networks or the “Just In Time”
strategy that has raised so many organizations' returns on investment, quality, and efficiency .
Indeed, each of the major firms in this sector spin out literally thousands of copyrights and
inventions. Put more specifically, and numerically, the dilemma might be described in this way: Current
American defense spending including war-related expenditures totals more than $700 billion a year. Of that amount, just over $100
billion is normal procurement, about $80 billion is normal research, development, testing and evaluation, and another $80 billion
or so sustains acquisition costs related to the war budget. The overwhelming share of these combined amounts,
totaling more than a quarter trillion dollars a year, is directed to American firms . In addition,
defense companies garner several tens of billions of dollars a year more from accounts in the
operations and support budgets—most notably, operations and maintenance—in the war
theaters and at home. All told, American defense companies have gross revenues of well over $300 billion a year from
Department of Defense (DoD) contracts. And yet, all the analysis and data points to a current industrial base at a crossroads.

Decline causes nuke war.

Mann 14. (Eric Mann is a special agent with a United States federal agency, with significant
domestic and international counterintelligence and counter-terrorism experience. Worked as a
special assistant for a U.S. Senator and served as a presidential appointee for the U.S. Congress.
He is currently responsible for an internal security and vulnerability assessment program.
Bachelors @ University of South Carolina, Graduate degree in Homeland Security @
Georgetown. “AUSTERITY, ECONOMIC DECLINE, AND FINANCIAL WEAPONS OF WAR: A
NEW PARADIGM FOR GLOBAL SECURITY,” May 2014,
https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2/37262/MANN-THESIS-
2014.pdf))
The conclusions reached in this thesis demonstrate how economic considerations within states can figure
prominently into the calculus for future conflicts. The findings also suggest that security issues with
economic or financial underpinnings will transcend classical determinants of war and
conflict , and change the manner by which rival states engage in hostile acts toward one
another. The research shows that security concerns emanating from economic uncertainty and the inherent
vulnerabilities within global financial markets will present new challenges for national security , and
provide developing states new asymmetric options for balancing against stronger states. The
security areas, identified in the proceeding chapters, are likely to mature into global security threats in the
immediate future. As the case study on South Korea suggest, the overlapping security issues associated with
economic decline and reduced military spending by the U nited S tates will affect allied
confidence in America’s security guarantees. The study shows that this outcome could cause regional
instability or realignments of strategic partnerships in the Asia-pacific region with
ramifications for U.S. national security. Rival states and non-state groups may also become
emboldened to challenge America’s status in the unipolar international system. The potential risks associated
with stolen or loose WMD, resulting from poor security, can also pose a threat to U.S. national security. The
case study on Pakistan, Syria and North Korea show how financial constraints affect weapons security making
weapons vulnerable to theft, and how financial factors can influence WMD proliferation by
contributing to the motivating factors behind a trusted insider’s decision to sell weapons
technology. The inherent vulnerabilities within the global financial markets will provide terrorists’ organizations and other non-state groups, who
object to the current international system or distribution of power, with opportunities to disrupt global finance and perhaps weaken America’s status. A
more ominous threat originates from states intent on increasing diversification of foreign currency holdings, establishing alternatives to the dollar for
international trade, or engaging financial warfare against the United States.
 U – GENERIC
The economy is on the brink now – record personal debt means a small downturn
could cause complete collapse
Long 7/4 (Heather, Wellesley College, BA in economics and English ; Oxford University,
master's in financial economics and medieval literature, economics correspondent for CNN and
the Washington Post “’This Doesn’t Look Like the Best Economy Ever’: 40% of Americans Still
Have Trouble Paying Their Bills” The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/this-doesnt-look-like-the-best-economy-
ever-40percent-of-americans-say-they-still-struggle-to-pay-bills/2019/07/04/855c382e-99b5-
11e9-916d-9c61607d8190_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.34039686dbe5)NFleming
But this expansion has been weaker and its benefits distributed far more unevenly than in
previous growth cycles, leaving many Americans in a vulnerable position. [How healthy is the U.S. economy? Here’s
what 7 key indicators reveal.] This is a “two-tier recovery,” said Matthew Mish, head of credit strategy at the investment bank UBS.
About 60 percent of Americans have benefited financially, he said, while 40 percent have not .
The 40 percent — which Mish calls the “lower tier” — have seen paltry or volatile wage growth, rising
expenses for housing, health care and education, and increased levels of personal debt. They tend
not to own homes or many stocks. ADVERTISING In discussions with 30 Americans unable to pay all of their bills, a clear pattern
emerged: Most were able to eke by until they faced an unexpected crisis such as a job loss, cancer, car trouble or storm damage. The
extra expense caused them to get behind on their bills, and they never fully rebounded.Economists fear such
precarious financial situations put many Americans at risk if there is even a mild
setback in the economy, potentially setting up the next recession to be worse than
anything in recent history except the Great Recession. “So many Americans are living paycheck to
paycheck,” said Signe-Mary McKernan, vice president of the Center on Labor, Human Services and Population at the Urban
Institute. “ We are headed toward a political crisis, if not an economic one .” [Why nearly
350,000 workers in mostly red states aren’t seeing wage increases, even though their local lawmakers passed them] Their
vulnerability is due to a confluence of factors. First, the average American family has yet to recover
fully from the 2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve found, leaving half the nation with a diminished
cushion to handle surprise expenses — or the next downturn. The bottom half has less wealth today,
after adjusting for inflation, than it did in 1989, according to Fed data through March of this year. While wage growth has
accelerated in recent months, especially for the lowest-paid workers, families who have struggled for years have a ways to go to
return to solid footing. Sommer Johnson works a full-time job, takes online classes toward a degree in business administration and
is a mom to two teenagers and an infant. (Elijah Nouvelage for The Washington Post) Half of U.S. jobs pay less than $18.58 an hour
and more than a third pay less than $15, which makes it difficult to save or invest for a better future. Trump and his team argue that
a strong economy is lifting more and more Americans up financially, including blue-collar workers, the formerly incarcerated and
minorities. In contrast, Democrats are calling for major expansions of government programs to address inequality. How to help the
economically vulnerable is likely to be a key debate in the 2020 race. “ Just because folks on Wall Street think things
are fine doesn’t mean most Americans feel like things are fine ,” said Ray Boshara, director of the Center for
Household Financial Stability at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. “When every day is a rainy day for millions of families, things
are not fine.” To get by, Americans have borrowed heavily in recent years. Total U.S. household debt is
now $13.7 trillion, surpassing the 2008 peak in dollar terms, according to the Federal Reserve
Bank of New York. The surge in debt this time around is for cars and college, not mortgages.
 U – DIB
DIB is on the brink now – laundry list
Mehta 6/27 (Aaron, Deputy Editor and Senior Pentagon Correspondent for Defense News,
covering policy, strategy and acquisition at the highest levels of the Department of Defense and
its international partners, “Here Are the Biggest Weaknesses in America’s Defense Sector”
Defense News https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2019/06/27/here-are-the-biggest-
weaknesses-in-americas-defense-sector/)NFleming
WASHINGTON — Production of a component vital to protecting American troops from chemical attacks that can’t keep up
with need. Key suppliers of aircraft parts that could go bankrupt at any time . A key producer of
missile components that closed for two years before the Pentagon found out. These are just some of the key findings of an
annual report from the Pentagon judging the greatest risks to the defense industrial sector, underlining that while the overall
defense industry continues to bring in massive profits, not all is well among the suppliers of key
components that, while small pieces of larger systems, could impact America’s ability to wage
war. The annual “Industrial Capabilities” report, quietly released May 13 by the Defense Department’s Office of Manufacturing and
Industrial Base Policy, found that despite total dollars spent by the department on weapons and
ammunition increasing year over year since 2016, the number of vendors supplying them has
decreased. In addition, while the report found generally positive trends for the U.S. defense sector, it did warn that in certain
areas, foreign weapon sales are decreasing . For instance, the U.S. saw its market share of global
naval weapon exports go from 63 percent in 2007 to just 17 percent in 2017. And from 2008-2017,
two reliable buyers of U.S. defense goods — Pakistan and South Korea — saw their U.S. procurement
percentages drop. Pakistan went from 31 percent to 12 percent, while South Korea went from 78 percent to 53 percent. This is
the first Industrial Capabilities report to be published since the October release of a White House-mandated study on the defense-
industrial base. That study concluded, in part, that the government needs to increase use of its Defense Production Act Title
expend funds to support key production lines that
III authorities, which allows the government to
might now otherwise survive . A new report on why military space is so expensive A new report on why military
space is so expensive A new Pentagon report notes that the space industrial base remains fragile, and despite attempts to bolster it
many critical components remain nonviable commercially. By: Nathan Strout The latest report says that through March 2019, seven
presidential determinations were issued to address “key industrial base shortfalls in lithium sea-water
batteries, alane fuel cell technology, sonobuoys production, and critical chemicals production for
missiles and munitions.” However, details of those agreements, such as how much funding might go toward fixing the
issues, were pushed into a nonpublic appendix. Sign up for our Early Bird Brief Get the defense industry's most comprehensive news
and information straight to your inbox Subscribe Here are the biggest concerns, broken down by sector: Aircraft: The report
cites long product and system development timelines, high costs for development and
qualification, and limits on production as broad issues in the aircraft sector . Those issues are inherent in
major defense programs, but the report also calls out the aging workforce and consolidation among the
industrial base, which “has expanded into the sub-tiers of the supply chain , creating additional risks for
single or sole source vendors.” As an example, the report notes there are only four suppliers with the ability to manufacture “large,
complex, single-pour aluminum and magnesium sand castings” needed to make key parts of military aircraft. These four suppliers
face “perpetual financial risk and experience bankruptcy threats” due to the insecure nature of Pentagon funding. “The single
qualified source for the upper, intermediate, and sump housing for a heavy-lift platform for the Marines has experienced quality
issues and recently went through bankruptcy proceedings,” the report adds. “Without a qualified or alternate qualified source for
these castings, the program will face delays, impeding the U.S. ability to field heavy-lift support to Marine Corps expeditionary
forces.” Finding qualified software engineers is another issue identified, with the report warning it is
“increasingly difficult to hire skilled, cleared, and capable software engineers . As aircraft continue to
increase in software complexity, it will become even more important for the sector to hire skilled software engineers.” Ground
systems: The report says the Pentagon’s plan of incremental updates to existing systems rather than wholesale new designs has
created “a generation of engineers and scientists that lack experience in conceiving, designing, and constructing new, technologically
advanced combat vehicles.” But the same issues of consolidation and lack of budget stability that showed
up in the aircraft sector impact the ground vehicle sector. “Legislation and DoD industrial policy requires DoD
to manufacture all large-caliber gun barrels, howitzer barrels, and mortar tubes at one organic DoD arsenal,” the report cites as an
example. “There is only one production line at the arsenal for all of these items, and policy modifications to meet
demand and surge from overseas have led to a lack of capacity to meet current production
requirements.” Shipbuilding sector: When it comes to maritime vessels, the “most significant risks found were a dependence on
single and sole source suppliers, capacity shortfalls, a lack of competition, a lack of workforce skills, and
unstable demand,” the report found. The lack of competition goes from the highest levels, where four companies control the
seven shipyards building military vessels, to the lowest components, such as “high-voltage cable, propulsor raw material, valves, and
fittings.” Workforce concerns also dominate the shipbuilding sector. The report cites statistics from the
Department of Labor predicting that between 2018 and 2026, there
will be a 6–17 percent decrease in U.S. jobs
in occupations critical to Navy shipbuilding projects, “such as metal layout (ship-fitting), welding, and casting.” If
that is not addressed, a lack of skilled workers “will significantly impact the shipbuilding
industry’s ability to meet the Navy’s long-term demand. ” Munitions sector: A major concern in last
year’s annual report was the future of the U.S. munitions sector, and many of those issues remain in the 2019 version. The report
identified “multiple risks and issues, including material obsolescence and lack of redundant
capability, lack of visibility into sub-tier suppliers causing delays in the notification of issues,
loss of design and production skill, production gaps and lack of surge capacity planning, and aging infrastructure to
manufacture and test the products.” The US is running out of bombs — and it may soon struggle to make more The US is
running out of bombs — and it may soon struggle to make more America's best weapons now rely on parts from an increasingly
shrinking industrial base — and in some cases, is totally reliant on Chinese-made materials. By: Aaron Mehta As an example, the
report points to a voltage control switch, used in ignition devices and flight termination systems for Department of Defense missiles.
Several years ago, the foundry that made a key component for the switch was purchased by another foundry, which then decided to
close the factory. The Pentagon was not informed until two years after the foundry was closed, at which point “it became evident that
the end-of-life buy, which was designed to last from three to five years, would only last six months.” In another case, two key
chemicals in solid-fuel rocket motors became obsolete, requiring the DoD to scramble for
potential replacements. Chemical, biological and radiological sector: The chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear
defense sector provides protection for war fighters through items like respirators, masks and vaccines. But the report found
serious issues regarding the industrial base’s ability to provide that capabilities, indicating that
Title III authorities might be needed in the near future to maintain production . As an example, the
report points to production of ASZM-TEDA1 impregnated carbon, a defense-unique material with only a single qualified source that,
as a result, “precludes assurances for best quality and price.” The carbon is used in 72 chemical, biological and nuclear filtration
systems, and the report notes that current sourcing arrangements “cannot keep pace with demand .” The
DoD is already using Title III to modernize the production line and try to establish a second source for the material. Soldier systems:
The collapse of the American textile market over the last three decades has left the department
depending on single sources or foreign suppliers for soldier systems. Additionally, battery production is identified
as a potential future issue. “Lack of stable production orders has resulted in lost capability and capacity,
increased surge lead times, workforce erosion, and inhibited investments by remaining
suppliers. Surge-capacity-limiting constraints occur at several points along the value chain, from raw material to final battery
assembly,” the report says.
 L – TOP LEVEL
The military-industrial-complex is essential to economic integrity – factories, jobs,
market shares
Uchitelle 17 (Louis, He worked for The New York Times from 1980-2010, first as an editor in
the business news department (1980-1987) and then as a business and economics writer (1987-
2010).[2] He was the lead reporter for the series The Downsizing of America, which won a
George Polk Award. “The U.S. Still Leans on the Military-Industrial-Complex” The New York
Times https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/business/economy/military-industrial-
complex.html)NFleming
If you want to see what President Trump can do to expand manufacturing in America, look past his criticism of free trade and the
few jobs he may have saved at Carrier. Instead, look at his plans for the military. Manufacturing has always relied on
public funding in one form or another, and in particular on outlays for weaponry, even nearly three decades after
the end of the Cold War. Roughly 10 percent of the $2.2 trillion in factory output in the United
States goes into the production of weapons sold mainly to the Defense Department for use by the armed
forces. And the spending shows. The United States, after all, has 10 aircraft carriers in active service
versus just one for China, although China has a bigger manufacturing industry than the United States. One can argue that
China is bent on big increases in weapons production and is still in the early stages. Whatever
the case, America’s weapons production is still far greater than China’s , while China has burnished its
reputation as a manufacturer of civilian goods for export and, increasingly, for its own citizens. The United States once went that
route. In the summer of 1945, after nearly five years of wartime rationing, the civilian population of the United States was starved for
new cars and appliances, new clothing and shoes, and new homes and their furnishings. So was the rest of the world, and American
manufacturers prospered by meeting that need as well. Converting factories to civilian production was a no-brainer and sufficiently
profitable to match wartime earnings. Subscribe to With Interest Catch up and prep for the week ahead with this newsletter of the
most important business insights, delivered Sundays. SIGN UP After the Korean War in the early 1950s, however, a somewhat
similar conversion back to civilian production wasn’t as profitable. And companies that considered it in the early 1990s, like General
Dynamics in Groton, Conn., decided to stick with making weapons for the Defense Department. These companies argued —
accurately — that military work was more profitable and, in those days, generated more jobs. As weapons production increased, the
manufacture of autos and electronics shifted partly or wholly overseas. So did the production of other civilian products — leaving
behind weapons bought by the Defense Department as an ever bigger share of the nation’s factory output. Unlock more free articles.
Create an account or log in While President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the perils of the “military-industrial complex” in his
farewell address in January 1961, the Vietnam War accentuated this reliance on weapons production,
which became embedded in annual budgets. That may well continue in the years ahead. In his first
budget proposal in May, Mr. Trump called for significant cuts in domestic spending but roughly a 10
percent increase in military outlays. Given the history of recent decades, is it any wonder that we
now have a president who, at least in part, equates “making America strong again” with an
enhanced military equipped with the weaponry that an enhanced military requires ? Public
money flows to factory owners in many ways — often as a result of the frequent bidding by municipal governments to
persuade a manufacturer to locate a factory in one community rather than another. These auctions sometimes top $100
million per factory location. Editors’ Picks On the Fourth of July, Melania Trump Dresses for Independence At Lokanta,
Sheep’s Head Soup and Other Turkish Delights The House Where My Husband Doesn’t Exist A manufacturer who finally accepts a
municipality’s bid collects tax breaks, a gift of land on which to put a factory and sometimes the cost of building and equipping the
factory itself at taxpayers’ expense. Cities and towns are that eager to have a factory, with its network of
nearby suppliers and its relatively well-paying jobs — relative, that is, to the lower paying retail and service
industry work that is often the alternative for high-school- or even junior-college-educated men and women. That outlay of
taxpayer money is concentrated in eight sectors of manufacturing, including ammunition,
aircraft, guided missiles, shipbuilding and armored vehicles . Shut down production in
those areas and factory production in America, measured as value added, would
shrink 10 percent or more, according to Richard Aboulafia, a vice president of the Teal Group, a defense consulting
firm. Mr. Aboulafia based his estimate, he said, on an analysis of the Defense Department budget and export data. Dan Luria,
research director of the Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center, concurred with those figures. To put the matter graphically,
factories in the United States churn out one rifle barrel for every nine auto fenders.
 L - DIB – GENERIC
Defense sector key to the economy
Rodgers, 13 [Casey, ASA risk consultant, “Research Note: Risk Themes for America’s Defense
Industrial Base Sector,” https://www.anniesearle.com/web-
services/Documents/ResearchNotes/ASA_Research_Note_RiskThemesForAme
ricasDefenseIndustrialBaseSector_September2013.pdf, AC]
The Defense Industrial Base (DIB) sector describes the global industrial complex that supplies the
world’s governments and militaries with defense technologies, research, support, logistics and
many other vital services.1 The DIB sector is an enormously important American asset,
not only for national security and defense but also as a powerful economic engine .
The sector is truly worldwide with over 100,000 component companies and contractors
employing millions of highly skilled technical and mechanical workers .2 The sector’s
A healthy defense industrial base is a critical element of U.S. power and the
National Security Innovation Base. The ability of the military to surge in response to an
emergency depends on our Nation’s ability to produce needed parts and systems, healthy and
secure supply chains, and integral position in the United States’ national security and economic
strategy makes the sector an enticing target for other companies, militaries, terrorists and foreign governments
 L – DIB – MANUFACTURING
The DIB is critical to manufacturing and national security interests but its
declining now
US DOD 18 (Interagency Task Force, Report to President Donald J. Trump by the Interagency
Task Force in Fulfillment of Executive Order 13806, “Assessing and Strengthening the
Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States”
https://media.defense.gov/2018/Oct/05/2002048904/-1/-1/1/ASSESSING-AND-
STRENGTHENING-THE-MANUFACTURING-AND%20DEFENSE-INDUSTRIAL-BASE-AND-
SUPPLY-CHAIN-RESILIENCY.PDF)
The roots of America’s defense industrial base are planted in the broader manufacturing
ecosystem. Not only is the manufacturing sector the backbone of U.S. military technical
advantage, but also a major contributor to the U.S economy, accounting for 9% of employment,
12% of GDP, 60% of exports, 55% of patents, and 70% of U.S. R&D.24 The National Security
Strategy highlights the importance of a vibrant manufacturing sector to comprehensive national
power, while warning of the dangers inherent in the weakening of America’s manufacturing
base: Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply
Chain Resiliency of the United States UNCLASSIFIED 25 UNCLASSIFIED a skilled U.S.
workforce. The erosion of American manufacturing over the last two decades, however, has had
a negative impact on these capabilities and threatens to undermine the ability of U.S.
manufacturers to meet national security requirements. Today, we rely on single domestic
sources for some products and foreign supply chains for others, and we face the possibility of
not being able to produce specialized components for the military at home. As America’s
manufacturing base has weakened, so too have critical workforce skills ranging from industrial
welding, to high-technology skills for cybersecurity and aerospace. Support for a vibrant
domestic manufacturing sector, a solid defense industrial base, and resilient
supply chains is a national priority.25
 L – DEBASING
Removing bases would cost billions---approximately 510 billion
Ybarra 11 (Steve, JD is a retired civil rights attorney who operates a consultant company in
California. He is a member of the California Democratic State Party and is former Chair of the
Chicano Latino Caucus Voting Rights Committee and a long time political activist, "Don’t Be a
Chicken: Go for the Defense Budget!" https://www.laprogressive.com/defense-budget/)
So the question is how much does this cost? Trying to find that out would take more time
than I have, so let’s use their numbers.
In the order above a small installation costs $828 million more or less, so the total cost each
year is approximately $3,893,256,000,000 (4702x 828 million).
For the medium facilities, which cost $1.553 billion, more or less, the total is approximately
$1,879,130,000,000 (121×1.553 billion). For large facilities, the cost is equal to or greater than
$170,830,000,000 which means, the cost is likely greater.
How much greater? Nobody knows because there is no topside to the dollars (110×170.8
billion+).
PIC – ICMB’S
 1NC
The United States federal government ought to demilitarize except on military
bases and nuclear facilities.

ICBM modernization prevents war---Russia, China, and NoKo are increasing

arsenals now.
Douris 16. (Constance Douris is Vice President of the Lexington Institute. She has published
articles and white papers on the smart grid, nuclear deterrence, missile defense and European
security. Douris has given speeches on smart grid data privacy, cybersecurity of the electric grid
and the European financial crisis. Douris has been interviewed, published or quoted by the
Associated Press, New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Orange County Register,
Japan Times, CBS, NBC, ABC, China Global Television Network, Defense News, Air Force
Times, RealClearDefense, Business Insider, The National Interest and other media outlets.
Constance’s past experience includes managing events with various stakeholders to analyze
defense and energy policies. She has also worked for Representative Tim F. Murphy of
Pennsylvania and Representative Randy Hultgren of Illinois where she conducted research and
drafted correspondence to support strategic decision-making. The US’ nuclear deterrent is in
trouble. February 18, 2016. www.businessinsider.com/the-us-nuclear-deterrent-is-in-trouble-
2016-2)
While modernizing ICBMs is not cheap, it is worth noting that they are the least expensive component of the nuclear deterrent, and
they provide many benefits that the other legs do not. First of all, ICBMs are on alert status which shortens
execution of a president’s decision to launch weapons in response to a nuclear
surprise attack. De-alerting ICBMs is a bad idea; if the president decided to launch them,
execution would be delayed since missiles would have to be prepared. In addition, if ICBMs were
eliminated, an enemy would only need to strike a small number of targets to diminish the
American strategic posture. There are three bases for nuclear-capable bombers and two bases for ballistic missile
submarines (SSBNs); that makes a total of five targets on the American homeland. If an adversary were to launch a
nuclear attack, some SSBNs would be safe at sea carrying up to 24 Trident missiles with multiple
warheads on each and could launch an attack on an enemy or combination of enemies . However,
bombers are not undetectable and can be destroyed with conventional forces, thus the air leg
would be vulnerable and possibly compromised. While nuclear submarines are undetectable
in the ocean today, a technological breakthrough could occur that would make the oceans less
opaque – especially with the fast pace at which technology now develops. The sea-based leg might be severely
weakened and could be at risk of being destroyed by conventional forces . Thus, the land leg
would increase in significance as would any remaining bombers . Finally, eliminating ICBMs may
motivate potential adversaries to try even harder to develop the capability to locate nuclear
submarines underwater to put America’s second-strike capability at risk. If those reasons are
not sufficient as to why ICBMs remain relevant today, take a look at what countries are doing in other parts of the world. Moscow
plans several tests of ICBMs this year and even more in 2017 while working on a new liquid-fueled ICBM that may be able to carry
10 nuclear warheads with a combined explosive yield of about 7,500 kilotons – roughly 500 times that of the Hiroshima bomb.
Beijing tested its DF-41 road-mobile ICBM twice last year that has a range of up to 7,456 miles
– road mobile ICBMs increase survivability because they do not have set locations for an enemy
to target – and the latest flight test used two multiple independently-targetable reentry vehicles on the DF-41. China is
developing the DF-5B, a new liquid-fueled ICBM designed to strike targets anywhere on Earth
carrying four to six warheads, expected to be deployed in the next two years. North Korea
revealed a modified version of its liquid-fueled KN08 ICBM in its fall parade, and recently launched
its sixth long-range rocket test that placed a satellite into orbit (testing rockets through satellite launches
provides invaluable data for potential future ICBMs). Deterrence is effective because it causes the
enemy to fear a massive retaliatory response ; ICBMs in particular ensure an
adversary’s objectives are beyond reach because they are on alert and cannot be
destroyed by conventional forces. Without ICBMs, execution of the president’s response to
a nuclear first strike might be delayed and the challenge of disarming America in a surprise
attack would be greatly simplified. A new ICBM is an expensive but essential investment that
will prevent a potential aggressor from launching a nuclear first strike and ensure
these fearsome weapons are never used.
 2NC – IMPACT – DOMESTIC
Demilitarization collapses domestic ICBM installations---that guarantees nuke
war. ICBM’s are critical to deterrence and their spatial distribution on the
mainland is key.
Baroudos 16. (Constance Baroudos is Vice President of the Lexington Institute. Her current
research interests include ballistic-missile defense, nuclear strategy, European security, and the
Greek financial crisis. Baroudos has been interviewed, published or quoted by the Associated
Press, Washington Post, CBS, NBC, ABC, CCTV, Voice of America, Defense News, Air Force
Times, and RealClear Defense. ICBMs: America's Nuclear 911 Force Remains Crucial to
Deterrence. April 14, 2016. nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/icbms-americas-nuclear-911-
force-remains-crucial-deterrence-15786)
The only defense the U nited S tates has against a Russian nuclear attack is the threat of
retaliation . To keep that threat credible , the military maintains a “triad” of land-based
missiles, sea-based missiles and bombers that would be nearly impossible to destroy in a surprise attack. Minuteman III
intercontinental ballistic missiles ( ICBMs ) stationed in the central U.S. that make up part of the
American nuclear deterrent remain critical to national security . Eliminating
ICBMs as some have proposed would weaken America’s nuclear deterrent that protects its
homeland and allies from a nuclear first strike . ICBMs are deployed in underground
silos at three U.S. bases . Current weapons were fielded in 1970 with a planned service life of 10 years, but have lasted over 40 years
because they have been refurbished many times. The U.S. cannot continue to sustain its Cold War ICBM force any longer because it is antiquated and
hard to maintain. Thus, the Air Force will develop a new missile as part of the ground-based strategic deterrent program that will be deployed in the
2027 timeframe. The Air Force’s initial proposal calls for 642 missiles of which 400 would be operationally deployed until the 2070s. But the ICBM
force is facing controversy because funding for its modernization will take place simultaneously with replacements of other legs of the Cold War triad.
While modernizing ICBMs is not cheap, they are the least expensive component of the nuclear
deterrent, and they provide many benefits that the other legs do not . ICBMs are on
constant alert which shortens execution of a president’s decision to launch weapons in response to a surprise attack. If ICBMs
were eliminated, an enemy would only need to strike a small number of targets to
degrade the U.S. strategic posture since there are only three bases for nuclear-
capable bombers and two bases for ballistic-missile submarines . In contrast, each
hardened ICBM silo would have to be targeted separately . While nuclear submarines
are undetectable in the ocean today , a technological breakthrough could occur that would make the
oceans less opaque. The sea-based leg might be weakened and could be at risk of being
destroyed by conventional forces. Thus, the land leg would increase in significance.
Eliminating ICBMs might motivate potential adversaries to try even harder to develop the
capability to locate nuclear submarines underwater. Consider what countries are doing in other parts of the world today to
understand the importance of ICBMs to security. Moscow is modernizing its ICBM force to carry 10 nuclear
warheads each. Beijing tested its newest road-mobile ICBM twice last year – road mobile ICBMs increase
survivability because they do not have set locations for an enemy to target. North Korea recently launched its sixth long-
range rocket test that placed a satellite into orbit (testing rockets through satellite launches
provides invaluable data for potential future ICBMs). Deterrence is effective because it causes the
enemy to fear a massive retaliatory response ; ICBMs in particular ensure an
adversary’s objectives are beyond reach because they are on alert and cannot be
destroyed by conventional forces . A new ICBM is an expensive but essential investment that will prevent a potential
aggressor from launching a nuclear first strike and ensure these fearsome weapons are never used.
 2NC – DISPERSAL KEY
Dispersal is key to second strike and deterring adversaries
Dorminey 17 (Bruce, Forbes Writer, "Time To Replace America's Land-Based ICBMs," 5/31,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedorminey/2017/05/31/time-to-replace-americas-land-
based-icbms/#3fd551ca12ad)
But Struckman argues that having a dispersed ICBM force ensures that any potential enemy
is confronted with a vast amount of "target coverage" which he says makes the Minuteman
IIIs the most stabilizing piece of the U.S.’ nuclear triad.
ICBMs have long represented the ultimate existential threat in the sense that such
thermonuclear fire power could erase Earth’s 7 billion souls held hostage by such technology in
one horrific fell swoop. But to be effective, any land-based ICBM arsenal has to have the ability
to absorb an enemy first or even second strike and retaliate. Although submarines and
bombers have the advantage of mobility, as noted in a 2014 Rand Report for the U.S. Air Force,
“Historically, the main threat to ICBMs has always been other ICBMs. Basing its ICBMs in
hardened silos has always been the U.S. response to this class of threat.”
 A2 – EPISTEMOLOGY K
Their epistemology is worse—the United States has been the largest cause of the
decline of colonial empire internationally—any other reading interprets singular
actions NOT structural system effects.
Deudney & Ikenberry 15 (Daniel Deudney, Johns Hopkins University G. John Ikenberry,
Princeton University “America’s Impact: The End of Empire and the Globalization of the
Westphalian System”, August 2015,
http://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/gji3/files/am-impact-dd-gji-final-1-august-
2015.pdf)
Over the last two and a half centuries, the most important change in the international political system has
been the decline of empire , and the simultaneous spread of the Westphalian system
of sovereign states , from Europe to universal global scope. Empire – the direct coercive rule of one people over another – has
almost vanished from world politics . 1 Where once the world was made up of regional systems – most of which were empires – the
contemporary world is marked by a large number of sovereign states , now nearly two hundred. 2 Over these
centuries, one state – the U nited S tates – initially at the periphery of the European imperial system, has become the most
powerful and influential state in the system. There are many debates about America in the international system. One
prominent argument developed extensively, particularly by recent historians, is that the United States is, and has been throughout its history, imperial
and an empire. This view is widely held by many, both inside and outside the United States. In this view, the United States continued the Western
imperial project as European empires faltered in the 20th century, and in the second half of the 20th century created the last and most extensive
empire with global reach.3 Arguments along these lines are of more than just of academic interest because they connect to national identity narratives
in many parts of the world, including the rising states of China and India, which emphasize anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, as well as grievances
against Western imperialism.4 In this paper, we challenge this view and offer a different account of the American
impact on the world which emphasizes that the U nited S tates has played a key role in the decline of
empire and the globalization of the Westphalian system. In contrast to those who view the United States as an
empire, and thus as essentially antagonistic to the Westphalian sovereign state system, we argue that the U nited S tates, in an overall
ledger sheet of impacts, has been influential against imperialism and colonialism , and
has been powerfully supportive of the spread of the Westphalian system. We argue that contemporary views of the U nited S tates as
imperial profoundly misrepresent the overall impact the U nited S tates has had on the international
system over the last two and a half centuries . In this paper, we lay out the evidence for how the United States has played a
major and often decisive role as an anti-imperial and anti-colonial force. More than any other state in the system , we
argue, the U nited S tates has undermined empire and spread of the Westphalian system . Of
course, the decline of empire and the spread of the Westphalian system are the result of many forces, including the diffusion of military capabilities, the
growth of the international trading system, the rise of nationalism, and the spread of anti-colonial and human rights norms have all played powerful
empires continued well
roles in diminishing the effectiveness of imperialism and the attractiveness and longevity of empires.5 But efforts to create
into the 20th century, and their lack of success stemmed not just from these broader trends in ideas and power but also
from the grand strategies of the leading states – most notably the U nited S tates – in directly
opposing the creation and perpetuation of empires . To be sure, the U nited S tates has been
imperial and briefly had an empire in some times and places. But these episodes , we argue, are greatly
overshadowed in their overall impact by American anti-imperialismand
anticolonialism . And the global spread of the Westphalian system, by no means solely resulting from American actions, has been more
advanced by American foreign policies than of any other state in the system. There are four broad reasons why the American role as
anti-imperial and pro Westphalian have been underappreciated. First, many view the liberal international order, which
the United States has played such a pivotal role in creating over the 20th century, as a challenge to the Westphalian system and a replacement for it,
rather than an addition to it. Second, America’s
centrality in the globalization of the Westphalian system through
the thwarting and dismantlement of empire has been obscured by the widespread
tendency to conceive of Europe and the United States as together making up “the West.”6 This
makes it all too easy to see Europe’s centuries of imperialism being continued by the U nited S tates.
In contrast , we argue that a major dynamic in world politics has pitted an “old West” of
European imperialisms against the anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism of a
“new West” in America . Third, the historical literature on modern empire building widely
identifies two waves of activity (the first from the 16th century to the early 19th century, and the second from the 19th century to the
beginning of the 20th). We identify two additional waves of empire building, in the World Wars and then
in the Cold War. When these two additional waves are brought back into the picture, the case for seeing the U nited S tates as
anti-imperial and anti-colonial is significantly strengthened , since the U nited S tates
played such a prominent role in thwarting and dismantling these late-empire building efforts .
Fourth, many contemporary observers of America’s impact on the world focus on infamous
moments when the U nited S tates did exercise crude imperial behavior: in the many military interventions and
covert actions in Latin America and the Middle East over the last century and, most saliently, the 2003 American invasion of Iraq. We do not
seek to ignore or justify these episodes and patterns of behavior. The U nited S tates has been imperial in some ways and
in some instances. But we seek to place them in the context of what we argue is America’s
more significant impact on the organization of the global system.
 A2 – NOKO K
This is offense—Policymakers infantilize North Korea by ignoring threats. Our
reps avoid patronization that ultimately authorizes genocide—proves our
epistemology is best
Stanton and Lee 14 -- Joshua Stanton, an attorney in Washington, has advised the House
Foreign Affairs Committee on North Korea-related legislation and blogs at OneFreeKorea. Sung-
Yoon Lee is Kim Koo-Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies and assistant professor at
the Fletcher School, Tufts University. [“The danger of North Korea is no joke”, Mon May 12,
2014, CNN Opinion, http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/12/opinion/stanton-lee-north-korea-hate-
crimes/]RMT
Second, we should stop infantilizing North Korea and dismissing it as ridiculous . The temptation is
understandable. The North Korean regime's very weirdness causes much of the world to
dismiss its invective as the rant of a regime that is merely isolated, eccentric, and
misunderstood.
But North Korea is not just a bizarre abstraction --- an impoverished kingdom ruled by a young, overly
well-nourished hereditary leader with an affinity for the National Basketball Association. It is a
murderous regime that is approaching nuclear breakout, and whose human rights violations,
according to the Commission of Inquiry, "have no parallel anywhere in the world." North
Korea's words reflect the character of its political system . They manifest the malice of
a regime that practices hate and inflicts it on its own people and its neighbors alike . It's time to
treat Kim Jong Un like the threat to civilization that he is.North Korean drones raise fears Defector lifts curtain
on North Korea North Korea's arsenal by the numbers
Third, North Korea is not a problem the Obama administration can keep ignoring. North Korea has been caught assisting Syria's
nuclear weapons and chemical weapons program; has sold ballistic missiles to Iran and Syria; and has sold arms to Hamas and
Hezbollah. Yet, it has not been penalized for most of these actions. Indeed, North Korea may be the most influential regional actor in
history in relation to its economic, political and cultural power, and the size of its territory and population. Over the past two
decades, this poor, aid-dependent, isolationist state has outplayed the biggest and wealthiest nations in the
world, including the United States, China, Japan, Russia, and South Korea, on high international
politics -- nuclear diplomacy.
Fourth, North Korea can't be appeased or patronized away. Since the mid-1990s, Pyongyang has
reaped billions of dollars from the U.S. and its allies in return for empty pledges of de-nuclearization
while forging ahead with its nuclear and ballistic missile programs. Since 2008, North Korea has refused
to show up at six-party de-nuclearization talks, in spite of U.S. and South Korean offers of aid. Despite
years of aid and engagement, North Korea shows no interest in reform, has become more dangerous to
South Korea as well as to its own people, and has become more hostile to the U.S. and the world. Today, North Korea is on the verge
of a fourth nuclear test.
North Korea must be held to the standards of the civilized world. For decades, diplomats and nongovernmental
organizations alike have excused Pyongyang's transgressions, lies and crimes out of a desire to maintain relationships with it at all
costs.
The consequences of such appeasement are telling: Aid doesn't get to the hungry, disarmament
deals collapse, U.N. sanctions leak, and a regime sustained by hate and contemptuous of human
life and dignity acquires the bomb. Pyongyang uses its access to the civilized world to supply its increasingly wealthy
elite with cash, while, according to the United Nations, 84% of North Korean households have poor or borderline
food consumption. The world cannot sanction and subsidize the same regime at the same time.
It must first pressure Pyongyang into understanding that change is its only choice, by taking the
enforcement of U.N. Security Council sanctions seriously.
 A2 – CHINA K
China’s foreign policy doctrine is aggressive and expansionist---motivated by
great-power aspirations
Aaron L. Friedberg 15, professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University,
5/11/15, “The Sleeper Issue of 2016 Is China,”
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/05/2016-elections-beijing-117831?
paginate=false
The challenge from China has been growing since the end of 2012, which marked both the reelection of an
American president and the announcement of a new leadership team in Beijing. Since his elevation to the positions of president and
general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping has proven himself to be a forceful, ambitious and
effective figure. Moving quickly to consolidate his personal authority, Xi has also taken steps to secure and extend the CCP’s monopoly on
political power. The anti-corruption campaign that he launched immediately on assuming office now targets thousands of mid-to-high-level officials in
the military, state and Party bureaucracies. In addition to eliminating opponents and potential rivals it is clearly intended to bolster the regime’s
legitimacy in the eyes of the Chinese people. Even as he goes after official corruption, Xi
has overseen a wide-ranging
crackdown on dissent, Internet freedom and the operations of non-governmental organizations that seek to promote the development of civil
society. According to the Orwellian-sounding “Document 9” (“Communique on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere”) issued in April 2013, these
groups are rooted in a dangerous Western “socio-political theory,” which holds that “in the social sphere, individual rights are paramount and ought to
be immune to obstruction by the state.” Such notions, together with the concepts of “Western constitutional democracy” and “universal values,”
threaten to weaken “the theoretical foundations of the Party’s leadership” and must be vigorously opposed. Like his predecessors, Xi hopes to push
through measures aimed at sustaining economic growth and, with it, popular support. But in
the political realm he is no
reformer. To the contrary, China today is even more repressive and more militantly
nationalistic than it was only a few years ago. Another pillar of Xi’s program is the use of new rhetorical formulations that
blend resentment over past abuses by foreign powers, and warnings about their continued malign intentions, with
references to China’s glorious history, growing strength and future greatness . Xi has sought to
back his bold words with a sweeping, if still incomplete, vision for a “new Silk Road,” a series of massive infrastructure development projects that will
extend China’s reach and influence westward across all of continental Eurasia. Meanwhile, to the East, Xi
has stepped up an
aggressive campaign for asserting China’s maritime claims against its neighbors . Towards the end of 2013
Beijing unilaterally announced the creation of an A ir D efense I dentification Z one over a swath of ocean that
includes islands currently controlled by Japan. In the past year China has dramatically accelerated a
campaign of land reclamation, creating island bases that will greatly strengthen its ability to
enforce its self-proclaimed right to control virtually all of the waters and resources of the S outh C hina S ea.
Behind all of this is the steady, seemingly relentless expansion of Chinese military power . Of
particular concern to American planners is the rapid maturation of China’s so-called anti-access/area denial[A2/AD]
capabilities. As it builds out its network of sensors, missiles, ships, submarines, aircraft, a nti-
sat ellite system s and cyber weapons Beijing evidently aims to drive up the perceived costs
and risks of any future U.S. attempt to project military power into the Western Pacific. The belief that Washington
might hesitate to come to the aid of friendly nations, or act to preserve freedom of navigation, could undermine its alliances while increasing the danger
of miscalculation and war. With the United States constrained by tight budgets and preoccupied with other problems, China
has been
pushing hard , and with some success, to change the status quo and shift the balance of
power in its favor . While some China watchers continue to argue otherwise, it has become
difficult to escape the conclusion that Beijing’s ultimate aim is to
increasingly

displace the U nited S tates and resume its traditional position as the preponderant power in
Asia. This is a strategic challenge of historic dimensions. While attention remains riveted on other regions, there are a number of
developments that could vault Asia, and China in particular, to the top of the foreign policy agenda. According to official statistics, economic growth has
now fallen to its lowest level in twenty-five years and the reality may be even worse. A continued slump could heighten regime anxiety about domestic
instability and reinforce the tendency, evident since the onset of the global financial crisis in 2009, to use foreign quarrels to divert frustration and rally
popular support. China is already engaged in a pattern of provocative behavior towards its maritime
neighbors; towing oil rigs off Vietnam, reclaiming islands off the Philippines, and flying aircraft close to the Senkakus. If one of these
situations flares up, whether through inadvertence or by design, Beijing seems more likely to escalate than to
back down. Whatever China’s leaders intend, a crisis with the United States could easily be the result. Some older flashpoints, quiet for
a time, may also be due for a flare up. In January 2016 Taiwan will hold its own presidential election
and the results could bring to power an administration far less congenial to the mainland than the
Kuomintang government that has ruled the island for the past eight years. As it has done in the past, Beijing may use threats or
displays of force to try to influence the outcome of the election . In contrast to 1996, for example, when for lack of
better options it fired dummy missiles into the Taiwan Straits, China today has far more capability. In part as a result it may also have less patience.

Intentions are irrelevant – Chinese military modernization means we can’t take

the risk
Tellis 2014 - senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, former State
Department official, served on the National Security Council staff as special assistant to the
president (Ashley, Balancing Without Containment,
http://carnegieendowment.org/files/balancing_without_containment.pdf)
While Beijing’s intentions are no doubt important, its expanding material capabilities matter
most of all . On this count, China’s rapid growth has already produced a geopolitical disequilibrium in
Asia. It has elevated regional anxieties by engendering dramatic shifts in the local balances of power, and it has weakened the
credibility of U.S. security guarantees to the littoral states, thanks to its ability to produce strategic instruments capable of inflict-
ing great damage on U.S. military forces operating around the Indo-Pacific. In addition, it has threatened the traditional U.S.
command of the commons through its growing capac- ity to deny the United States unfettered use of the seas, space, cyberspace, and the
electro- magnetic spectrum. These realities combine to generate a serious and deepening challenge to
American primacy. If the United States is to protect first its regional and thereafter its global position amid
these challenges, it cannot afford not to balance China , even if this response must of necessity be implemented
subtly and politely and garbed in the debased language of “strategic partnership.”
 A2 – RUSSIA K
Their indifference to the threat of Russian aggression makes nuclear conflict more
likely.
Krieger & Starr 12 - President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation & Senior Scientist for
Physicians for Social Responsibility. [David Krieger & Steven Starr, “A Nuclear Nightmare in the
Making: NATO, Missile Defense and Russian Insecurity,” Nuclear Age Peace Foundation,
January 03, 2012 http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/db_article.php?article_id=321
This is a dangerous scenario, no matter which NATO we are talking about, the real one or the
hypothetical one.  Continued US indifference to Russian security concerns could have dire
consequences: a breakdown in US-Russian relations; regression to a new nuclear-armed
standoff in Europe; Russian withdrawal from New START; a new nuclear arms race between the
two countries; a breakdown of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty leading to new nuclear
weapon states; and a higher probability of nuclear weapons use by accident or design.  This is
a scenario for nuclear disaster, and it is being provoked by US hubris in pursuing missile
defenses, a technology that is unlikely ever to be effective, but which Russian leaders must view
in terms of a worst-case scenario.
In the event of increased US-Russian tensions, the worst-case scenario from the Russian
perspective would be a US first-strike nuclear attack on Russia, taking out most of the Russian
nuclear retaliatory capability.  The Russians believe the US would be emboldened to make a
first-strike attack by having the US-NATO missile defense installations located near the Russian
border, which the US could believe capable of shooting down any Russian missiles that survived
its first-strike attack.
The path to a US-Russian nuclear war could also begin with a conventional military
confrontation via NATO. The expansion of NATO to the borders of Russia has created the
potential for a local military conflict with Russia to quickly escalate into a nuclear war. It is now
Russian policy to respond with tacticalnuclear weapons if faced with overwhelmingly
superior conventional forces, such as those of NATO.   In the event of war, the “nuclear
umbrella” of NATO guarantees that NATO members will be protected by US nuclear weapons
that are already forward-based in Europe.
K – HILLMAN
 1NC
War is the ontological foundation of political community – it is a primordial
component of psychology. As such, the affirmative’s crusade against militarism is
reframed as a repression of the fundamental condition of existence and the
bedrock of all community. All that escapes the affirmative’s vision of perfect
coherence will paradoxically be purged in the name of maintaining peace. That
means their collective movement is enabled by a genocidal dedication to sacrificial
violence against an enemy that becomes the foil upon which their revolutionary
project is staged.
Hillman 4 (James, attended the University of Paris, studying English Literature, and Trinity
College, Dublin, graduating with a degree in mental and moral science in 1950, received his PhD
from the University of Zurich, as well as his analyst's diploma from the C.G. Jung Institute and
was then appointed as Director of Studies at the institute, a position he held until 1969. A
Terrible Love of War p. 21-25)NFleming
To declare war "normal" does not eliminate the pathologies of behavior, the enormities of
devastation, the unbearable pain suffered in bodies and soul s. Nor does the idea that war is normal justi£Y it.
Brutalities such as slavery, cruel punishment, abuse of young children, corporal mutilation remain reprehensible, yet find
acceptance in the body politic and may even be incorporated into its laws. Though " war is normal" shocks our morality and
wounds our idealism, it stands solidly as a statement of fact. 21 A TERRIBLE LOVE OF WAR "War" is becoming
more normalized every day. Trade war, gender war, Net war, information war. But war against cancer, war
against crime, against drugs, poverty, and other ills of society have nothing to with the actualities of war.
These civil wars, wars within civilian society, mobilize resources in the name of a heroic victory over an
insidious enemy. These wars are noble, good guys against bad and no one gets hurt. This way of
normalizing war has whitewashed the word and brainwashed us, so that we forget its terrible
images. Then, whenever the possibility of actual war approaches with its reality of violent death-dealing combat, the idea of
war has been normalized into nothing more than putting more cops on the street, more rats in
the lab, and tax rebates for urban renewal. I base the statement "war is normal" on two factors we have already seen:
its constancy throughout history and its ubiquity over the globe. These two factors require another more basic: acceptability. Wars
could not happen unless there were those willing to help them happen. Conscripts, slaves, indentured
soldiers, unwilling draftees to the contrary, there are always masses ready to answer the call to arms, to join
up, get in the fight. There are always leaders rushing to take the plunge. Every nation has its hawks. Moreover, resisters,
dissenters, pacifists, objectors, and deserters rarely are able to bring war to a halt. The saying, "Someday they'll give a war and no
one will come," remains a fond wish. War drives everything else off the front page . If war is normal, is this
because it is lodged in human nature or because it is inherent to societies ? Is war basically an
expression of human aggression and self-preservation or an extension of pack behavior-the hunting pack, the raiding
pack, all the way up to a coalition of millions in a distant land? The New Testament opts for the first: "Whence come warscome they
not hence, even of your pleasures that war is in your members. Ye lust and have not: ye kill and covet and cannot obtain: 22 WAR IS
NORMAL ye fight and war; ye have not because ye ask not" (James 4:1-2). Wars begin in the lowliness of our all-too-human material
desires. Plato concurs: "The body fills us with loves and desires and fears and all sorts of fancies and a
great deal of nonsense, with the result that we literally never get an opportunity to think at all
about anything. Wars and revolutions and battles are due simply and solely to the
body and its desires . All wars are undertaken for the acquisition of wealth, and the reason we
have to acquire wealth is the body."2o That was earlier Plato; later he found another source of war: " All states by
their very nature, are always engaged in an informal war against all other states ."21
But Kant, like Hobbes before him, takes it back from society, finding war to be an uncaused component of human nature for which
no explanation need be sought. " War ," he writes, "requires no motivation, but
appears to be ingrained in
human nature and is even valued as something noble." 22 Agreed, opines Steven LeBlanc's book
Constant Battles. Warfare is ingrained from earliest times, back to chimpanzees. Not so, argues R . B. Ferguson: archeology supports
his view that warfare is a development of only the past ten thousand years. Ingrained or acquired? Individual person's aggressive
instinct or social group's aggrandizing claims? The various contesting assertions about the origins of war can be reduced to two basic
positions. On the one side, theories of psychoanalysis that take human nature back to early loss of love objects and to the birth
trauma; theories of animal biology (inborn release mechanisms of fight-orflight; theories of determining genes pushing to get what
they want). On the other side, war is a product of the internal struct\lre of groups, their belief systems, their territorial claims, their
exogamous fertility requirements, and the collective psyche of the crowd as such. In both cases, whether human drive or societal
necessity, war requires an imagined enemy. "Warre," writes Hobbes, is that condition 23 A TERRIBLE LOVE OF WAR "where every
man is Enemy to every other man," and Clausewitz insists that " the enemy must always be kept in mind." The idea of otherness or
alterity that currently dominates thinking about gender and race and ecology is too abstract to unleash the dogs of war. Can you
imagine a war without first imagining an enemy? Whether the focus be upon prey, sacrificial victim, evil
spirit, or object of desire, enmity mobilizes the energy. The figure of the enemy nourishes the
passions of fear, hatred, rage, revenge, destruction, and lust, providing the supercharged
strength that makes the battlefield possible. War certainly does rely upon the individual's
repressions and/or aggressions, pleasure in demolition, appetite for the
extraordinary and spectacular, mania of autonomy . War harnesses these
individual urges and procures their compliance without which there could be no wars; but war is not
individual psychology writ large. Individuals certainly fight ruthlessly and kill; families feud and harbor revenge, but this is not war.
"Soldiers are not killers."23 Even welltrained and well-led infantrymen have a strong "unrealized resistance toward killing"24 which
tactically impedes the strategy of every engagement. Only a polis (city, state, society) can war: " The only source
of war is politics, " said Clausewitz. 25 "Politics is the womb in which war develops."26 For war to
emerge from this womb, for the individual to muster aggressions and appetites, there must be an enemy. The enemy
is the midwife of war. The enemy provides the constellating image in the individual and is necessary to
the state in order to collect individuals into a cohesive warring body. Rene Girard's Violence and the Sacred
elaborates this single point extensively: the emotional foundation of a unified society derives
from "violent unanimity," the collective destruction of a sacrificial victim,
scapegoat, or enemy upon whom all together, without exception or dissent, turn
on and eliminate . Thereby, the inherent conflicts within a community that can lead to internal 2
4 WAR IS NORMAL violence become exteriorized and ritualized onto an enemy. Once an enemy has been
found or invented, named, and excoriated, the "unanimous violence" without dissent, i.e., patriotism and the
preemptive strikes of preventative war, become opportune consequents . The state becomes the only
guarantor of self-preservation. If war begins in the state, the state begins in enmity . Thirteen colonies; a variety of
geographies, religions, languages, laws, economies, but a common enemy. For all the utopian nobility of the Declaration of
Independence, the text actually presents a long list of grievances against the enemy of them all, the king. Mind you now: there
may not actually be an enemy! All along we are speaking of the idea of an enemy, a phantom
enemy. It is not the enemy that is essential to war and that forces wars upon us, but the imagination. Imagination is the
driving force, especially when imagination has been preconditioned by the media, education, and
religion, and fed with aggressive boosterism and pathetic pieties by the state's need for enemies. The imagined phantom
swells and clouds the horizon, we cannot see beyond enmity . The archetypal idea gains a face. Once the enemy
is imagined, one is already in a state of war. Once the enemy has been named, war has already been declared
and the actual declaration becomes inconsequential, only legalistic. The invasion of Iraq began
before the invasion of Iraq; it had already begun when that nation was named among the axis of evil .
Enmity forms its images in many shapes-the nameless women to be raped, the fortress to be razed, the rich houses to be pillaged and
plundered, the monstrous predator, ogre, or evil empire to be eliminated. An element of fantasy creates the
rationality of war. Like the heart, war has its reasons that reason does not comprehend. These
exfoliate and harden into paranoid perceptions that invent "the enemy," distorting intelligence
with rumor and speculation and providing justifications for the violent procedures
of war 2 5 A TERRIBLE LOVE OF WAR and harsh measures of depersonalization at home in the name of security.
Only embracing the neurotic beauty of war can prevent more violent explosions of
desire – their impact arguments about interventionism and imperialism are not
the result of militarism, but from the rejection of the condition of being as
intrinsically conflictual. While the affirmative goes to war for peace, a move which
is rhetorically congruent with the sacralizing missions of imperialism they
critique, the alternative goes to war for war’s sake.
Hillman 4 ((James, attended the University of Paris, studying English Literature, and Trinity
College, Dublin, graduating with a degree in mental and moral science in 1950, received his PhD
from the University of Zurich, as well as his analyst's diploma from the C.G. Jung Institute and
was then appointed as Director of Studies at the institute, a position he held until 1969. A
Terrible Love of War p. 1-2)NFleming
We can never prevent war or speak sensibly of peace and disarmament unless we
enter this love of war. Unless we move our imaginations into the martial state of soul, we cannot comprehend its pull.
This means "going to war;' and this book aims to ,induct our minds into military service. We are not going to
war "in the name of peace" as deceitful rhetoric so often declares, but rather for
war's own sake : to understand the madness of its love . A TERRIBLE LOVE OF WAR Our civilian
disdain and pacifist horror-all the legitimate and deep-felt aversion to everything to do with the
military and the warrior-must be set aside. This because the first principle of psychological method holds that any
phenomenon to be understood must be sympathetically imagined . No syndrome can be truly
dislodged from its cursed condition unless we first move imagination into its heart . War is first
of all a psychological task, perhaps first of all psychological tasks because it threatens your life and mine directly, and the
existence of all living beings. The bell tolls for thee, and all. Nothing can escape
thermonuclear rage, and if the burning and its aftermath are unimaginable, their
cause, war, is not . War is also a psychological task because philosophy and theology, the fields supposed to do the heavy
thinking for our species, have neglected war's overriding importance. "War is the father of all," said Heraclitus at the beginnings of
Western thought, which Emmanuel Levinas restates in recent Western thought as " being reveals itself as war."l If it is a
primordial component of being, then war fathers the very structure of existence and our
thinking about it: our ideas of the universe, of religion, of ethics; war determines the thought patterns of
Aristotle's logic of opposites, Kant's antinomies, Darwin's natural selection, Marx's struggle of classes, and even Freud's repression
of the id by the ego and superego. We think in warlike terms, feel ourselves at war with ourselves, and unknowingly believe
predation, territorial defense, conquest, and the interminable battle of opposing forces are the ground rules of existence. Yet, for all
this, has ever a major Western philosopher-with the great exception 'of Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan was published three and a
half centuries ago-delivered a full-scale assault on the topic, or given it the primary importance war deserves in the hierarchy of
themes? Immanuel Kant came to it late (1795) with a brief essay written when he was past seventy and after he 2 WAR IS NORMAL
had published his main works. He states the theme of this chapter in a few words much like Hobbes: " The state of peace
among men living side by side is not the natural state; the natural state is one of war." Though war is
the primary human condition, his focus is upon "perpetual peace" which is the title of his essay. About peace philosophers and
theologians have much to say, and we shall take up peace in our stride. Fallen from the higher mind's central contemplation, war
tends to be examined piecemeal by specialists, or set aside as "history" where it then becomes a
subchapter called "military history" in the hands of scholars and reporters dedicated to the record of facts. Or its study
is placed outside the mainstream, isolated in policy insti-' tutions (often at war themselves with rival institutions). The magic of
their thinking transmutes killing into "taking out," bloodshed into "body counts," and the chaos
of battle into "scenarios," "game theory;' "cost benefits;' as weapons become " toys" and bombs
"smart." Especially needed is not more specialist inquiry into past wars and future wars, but rather an archetypal psychology-the
myths, philosophy, and theology of war's deepest mind. That is the purpose of this book.

Vote negative to bask in the sublime beauty of war – only embracing the impulse
towards violence can solve
Hillman 4 ((James, attended the University of Paris, studying English Literature, and Trinity
College, Dublin, graduating with a degree in mental and moral science in 1950, received his PhD
from the University of Zurich, as well as his analyst's diploma from the C.G. Jung Institute and
was then appointed as Director of Studies at the institute, a position he held until 1969. A
Terrible Love of War p. 126-128)NFleming
There must be a myth at work. It is as if the gods have combined to manufacture the guns , are in
the guns, as if the guns have become gods themselves. The spear that stood at a Roman altar to Mars was not a symbol; it was the
god. When Ulysses and his son hide the weapons from the crowd of suitors with whom they soon do battle, Ulysses reminds his son
of the magnetic power in the weapon, "since iron all of itself works on a man and attracts him."35 Human beings love their
weapons, crafting them with the skills of Hephaistos and the beauty of Aphrodite for the
purposes of Ares. Consider how many different kinds of blades, edges, points, metals, and temperings are fashioned on the
variety of knives, swords, spears, sabers, dirks, battle-axes, stilettos, rapiers, tridents, daggers, cutlasses, scimitars, lances, poinards,
pikes, halberds . . . that have been lovingly honed with the aim of killing. We, keep them as revered objects, display
old battle tanks and cannon in front of town courthouses, convert battleships and submarines
into museums through which tourists stream on Sundays, build gun cabinets in our homes, trade weapons at Sotheby's. How
foolish to 125 A TERRIBLE LOVE OF WAR believe we can enforce licensing and regulation. No society can truly
suppress Venus . As emblem of both death and love, of fear and care, the sublime weapon du
jour is no longer the sword over the mantelpiece or the flintlock behind the grandfather clock . It is
the handgun in the drawer of the bedside table. Along with sex toys and condoms, the handgun belongs as much
to Venus as to Mars . And if to Venus, then to Venus we shall have to turn for "gun control," since only that god who
brings a disorder can carry it away. Venus victrix states a fact: Venus will out. She will be victorious and she cannot be suppressed.
Prostitution is the oldest profession and blue laws have never been able anywhere to extinguish the redlight district. When
suppression does rule for a while under fanatic puritan literalism, the goddess goes to
compensatory extremes. She returns as a witch in Salem or in epidemics of hysteria afflicting entire convents. The Taliban
keep girlie magazines. She infiltrates the Net with pornography and the free-marketing of children for pedophiles. Or she unleashes
We must try to enter this love
sadoerotic cruelties in revenge for her suppression in prisons, schools, and offices.
of weapons. Rifle as friend, companion, trusty comforter; no teddy bears here . When
the ragtag Rebel soldiers lined up for the last time for surrender at Appomattox, they stacked their rifles. Men kissed their guns
good-bye, bid them farewell,36 spoke of them as their "wives" on whom they had relied during the long years. "Marry it man! Marry
it! Cherish her, she's your very own," quotes Paul Fussell from an epic poem of World War r.31 Curiously, however, and to the
dismay of the high commands, men love their guns but for the large part do not use them in combat. Statistics drawn from American
inductees in the Second World War are staggering: perhaps only one in four riflemen uses his weapon in battle, and this fact has
been found to be generally true 126 WA~ IS SUBLIME through a variety of wars among Western nations with conscripts. One of
war's most thoughtful authorities, S. L. A. Marshall, says, "the average man likes to fire a weapon and takes unreluctantly to
instruction on the [firing] range,"38 yet in the heat of an engagement he does not shoot. Even matured troops who have been
through many engagements follow the pattern. Marshall says this inhibition has many causes-from the paralysis of fear in general,
to the fear of revealing one's position, to the main fear, not of being killed, but of killing.39 Ducking for cover to protect oneself
comes first, which is why Patton wrote so strongly against hitting the dirt and digging in, and why Marshall entitles his chapter "Fire
as the Cure." "'After the first round the fear left me,' wrote a [Union] soldier to his mother after his initial battle."4o "The mere
rumor that a fight was in prospect would lift [Union] soldiers from the doldrums, and sustained firing on the picket line would affect
a camp like an electric shock."41 Mars is battle rage, an insane red fury in a field of action. Firing the weapon brings
Mars immediately into the scene, saving a man from cowering and trembling, from feeling himself a victim, and shakes him from his
self-occupied inertia at a loss to himself and to his unit. Since the god is in the gun, the passionate love for these
weapons may express less a love of violence than a magical protection against it. Handgun-a fetish or
amulet to hold at bay the fear of injury or death, the passivity of inertia, and, in ordinary civilian life, to have in one's hands a charm
against the paranoid anxieties that haunt the American psyche. The continent is filled with roaming revenants,
giant spirits of destroyed forests, buffalo spirits, slaughtered tribes, drowned valleys behind
dams, ghosts of the lynched hanging from trees, miasma hovering over rapacious levelings and
extractions, unjust executions named "due process," knifings, abattoirs. The land not only
remembers, it is humming with 127 A TERRIBLE LOVE OF WAR agomes, a pulsing layer of the
collective unconscious deposited there by American deeds recorded as American history. "Iron all of itself
works on a man." The automatic in my hand brings Mars to my side. God in his heaven may not smile on me or deliver me
from the valley of death; he might long ago have forgotten my name and I may not be among the chosen, but so long as my
gun is within my reach the ghosts can't get me.
 2NC – FW – PRIOR QUESTION
Psychological underpinnings are prior to ethical politics – the psyche is the
foundation of what we understand as the political
Jung 58 (Carl G., renowned scholar of psychoanalysis and founder of the Jung Institute, The
Undiscovered Self, New American Library, New York, 81-83)
For more than fifty years we have known, or could have known, that there is an unconscious as a
counterbalance to consciousness. Medical physiology has furnished all the necessary empirical and
experimental proofs of this. There is an unconscious psychic reality which demonstrably
influences consciousness and its contents. All of this is known, but no practical conclusions have been drawn from it.
We still go on thinking and acting as before, as if we were simplex and not duplex. Accordingly, we imagine ourselves to be
innocuous, reasonable and humane. We do not think of distrusting our motives or of asking ourselves how
the inner man feels about the things we do in the outside world. But actually it is frivolous,
superficial, and unreasonable of us, as well as psychically unhygienic, to overlook the reaction
and standpoint of the unconscious. One can regard one’s stomach or heart as unimportant and worthy of contempt, but
that does not prevent overeating or overexertion from having consequences that affect the whole man. Yet we think that
psychic mistakes and their consequences can be got rid of with mere words, for “psychic” means
less than air to most people. All the same , nobody can deny that without the psyche
there would be no world at all , and still less, a human world. Virtually everything depends
on the human soul and its functions. It should be worthy of all the attention we can give it,
especially today, when everyone admits that the weal or woe of the future will be decided neither by
the attacks of wild animals nor by natural catastrophes nor by the danger of worldwide epidemics but simply and solely by the
psychic changes in man. It needs only an almost imperceptible disturbance in equilibrium in a
few of our rulers’ heads to plunge the world into blood, fire and radioactivity. The technical
means necessary for this are present on both sides. And certain conscious deliberations, uncontrolled by any
inner opponent, can be indulged all too easily, as we have seen already from the example of one “Leader.” The consciousness
of modern man still clings so much to outward objects that he makes them exclusively
responsible, as if it were on them that the decision depended. That the psychic state of certain
individuals could emancipate itself for once from the behavior of objects is something that is
considered far too little, although irrationalities of this sort are observed every day and can
happen to everyone.
 2NC – FW – PREDICTABILITY K
You should embrace unpredictability as an unencumbered encounter with what
the soul has to offer – anything else necessary contains the psyche within technical
limits which limits imagination
Hillman 1990 (James, has written dozens of critically acclaimed books, received his PhD from
the University of Zurich, and is a retired Director of the Jung Institute, “A Blue Fire”, a blue fire,
Routledge; 1 edition p. 10-11)
Hillman's later essays flash with the passion he brings to the soul of the world. Beginning with his theoretical essay "Anima Mundi," or "The
Return of the Soul to the World" (delivered in Italian in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence), he moves even farther from ego psychology and
personalism to encounter the objective psyche in objects. His writing takes on concreteness and context that were implied in previous works.
Now he studies gardens, waterworks, streets, buildings, show business, bombs, racism, ecology, work, edu- cation, and architecture. We
burden ourselves, he says, when we identify personally with archetypal figures. Then we have to work
feverishly on our own microcosmic lives, when we might more lightly and effectively engage in the work
of the soul by becoming sensitive to the world's suffering . Our buildings are in pain, our governments are on the
rocks, the arts are relegated to museums where they are explained away or reduced to technical concerns. Our personal lives may
reflect these broader wounds to the world soul , and therefore a larger image of psychology itself is in order. The field of
psychology has always had a practice, a mode of implementing its theories. Hillman rarely writes directly about practice, yet his theory offers
the basis for a radical approach to psychotherapy. For the usual one-on-one format, Hillman offers a myth for analysis that is rooted in love of
the soul and in giving soul love. The great secret of archetypal psychotherapy is love for what the soul
presents , even those things the therapist and patient would like to make vanish. This love comes in many
forms: interest, acceptance, faithfulness, desire, attachment, friendship, and endurance . As a whole, James
Hillman's work aims toward an appreciation of the soul's beauty , its inspiring roseate hues and its bleak and
terrorizing black. This accent on love and beauty spreads this psychological far beyond issues of fix, control,
and cure . It takes psychology so far into the most sublime issues of philosophy, religion, and the arts that the word psychology applies
only if it is continually redefined. The way to this Neoplatonic beauty, in ideas and in analysis, is not upward and away from
the soul's earthly matrix, but through it and downward and up, in a lengthy journey not unlike those
circuits of soul-work described by alchemists and Renaissance artists . It is quite proper that Hillman has been formally
honored with a key to the city of Dallas and a medal from the citizens of Florence for his revival of the Renaissance psychology of culture and
embrace of depression and pathology paradoxically leads to a psychology beyond
beauty. Hillman's
health and normalcy , toward a cultural sensibility where soulfulness and beauty are the standards . In
the end, the name taken for his work, archetypal psychology, implies much more than archetypes and universal images. It suggests the infinite
range of psychological endeavor, rooted in everyday life and culture, but echoing the wisdom, the artfulness, and the beauty of centuries of
soulful work, love, and play. our commitment to allies and friends , underwrites regional stability, gains us familiarity with
overseas operating environments, promotes combined training among the forces of friendly countries and provides timely initial response
capabilities.
 2NC – FW – ETHICS
Only breaking from the ethical foundations of the affirmative opens up spaces for
authentic deliberation
Stewart Clegg et al. 7. One of the most published and cited authors Organization Studies, Research Director of the Centre for Management
and Organisation Studies, PhD in Management, former Foundation Professor at the University of Western Sydney, and holds multiple Visiting Fellow
and Professor at several Think Tanks and Universities. Martin Kornberger. Carl Rhodes. “Organizational ethics, decision making, undecidability.”
2007. The Sociological Review. 55:2, 393-409.
In this paper we develop a conceptualisation of organizational decision-making as a practice that is, necessarily, ethical. The paper
starts with a discussion of the notion of decision-making as it relates to organizational rationality and the relationship between
management and control. Drawing on Derrida’s discussions of undecid- ability and responsibility, we suggest that as well as
being able to consider organizational decision-making as an instance of (albeit bounded) rationality
or calculability, it can also be regarded as a process of choice amongst heterogenous
possibilities. On that basis, we follow Derrida in arguing that for a decision to be considered an instance of
responsible action it must be made with neither recourse to knowledge of its outcome nor to the
application of pre-ordained rules. Illustrating our argument with a discussion of Eichmann’s ‘I was just following
orders’ defence, we suggest that rules for ethical decision making, rather than ensuring ethical outcomes,
can work to insulate organizations from moral responsibility. We con- clude with a discussion of ethics and
democracy in relation to responsible decision making in organizations. Introduction In recent years there has been a relatively small
but burgeoning approach to the study of business ethics that is particularly critical of the way that ethics can be collapsed
by organizations into systems of rules, codes or administrative procedures (eg Desmond, 1998; Letiche,
1998; Munro, 1998; Parker, 2002; Roberts, 2003; Clegg and Rhodes, 2006). Such thinking radically questions the condition where
‘the means-end rationalization that ends in the practice now known as business ethics [. . .] seems to be destroying the very
possibility of ethics itself’ (Parker, 1998: 289). The implication is that ethics and codes or laws cannot be
equated with one another (Letiche, 1998) and that ethics is best considered in terms of the way that
organizations are sites for ethical difficulties, dilemmas and deliberations (Roberts, 2003; Clegg and
Rhodes, 2006). In seeking to draw on, and contribute to, such conceptualisations of ethics, we  examine decision-
making in organizations from the perspective of non-rule based and non-calculable ethics – an
ethics that involves freedom. In organization theory and sociology, it is perhaps Parker (1998; 2002; see also Jones,
2003a) who has done most to bring what he calls a ‘postmodern’ or ‘post-foundational’ ethics to bear on a consideration of
managerial decision making. Parker questions the assumption that ‘the management decision- maker collects the evidence, models a
set of algorithms, and then takes a decision on what actions should be taken’ (Parker, 2002: 97). For him, the idea of rational
decision-making suggests that decisions ‘happen when we bring out the machinery of judgment’
(p. 109) and further, that ‘the machinery provides some kind of rule that allows for the possibility
of things being different’ (p. 110). Parker suggests rhetorically that ‘if ethics is merely an equation that produces a certain
result with certain kinds of data then why should we bother to make such a fuss about it?’ The reason, he suggests, is that such a
conception of ethics enables one to manage oneself and others ‘without getting bogged down in the angst of endless words’ (2002:
111). Parker well knows, however, ‘that hiding behind bureaucratic codes and laws generated about modern
conceptions of the ethical is often not conducive to thinking about the wider, looser, madder
conceptions of cruelty and justice’ (Parker, 1998: 294). What we do in this paper is, first, to consider the history of
decision-making in order to understand why decision-making in organization came to be seen as being a rational and mechanical
process in the first place. We trace this approach back to Descartes (1641), seeing it develop subsequently through Adam Smith
(1776) and then through the modern management ideas of Taylor (1911) and Fayol (1949). We also examine how, in more recent
times, idealizations of purely rational decisions have been tempered by a consider- ation of the bounded rationality of decision-
making. In providing a critique of the dominant conception of rational decision-making, we then follow Derrida (1992, 1995, 1996)
in conceptualising ethical organizational decision-making using the idea of undecidability – a
condition where a decision does not concern the application of a calculable rationality but a
political and ethical responsibility (Derrida, 1996). Only where situations prevail in which the
outcomes of the decision can never be certain (Derrida, 1992) is such responsibility present. To
exemplify our discussion with a practical, yet extreme, example we turn to the infamous case of Adolf Eichmann’s claim to
have been ‘just following orders’ in his involvement with the Holocaust. This example serves to
dramatically represent how appealing to rule governed decision making as the basis for self-
justification can indeed mark the flight from moral responsibility . We end the paper by addressing the
implications of our discus- sions for the management of organizations. The primary contribution of this paper is the development of
a theorization of the ethics of ambivalence in relation to decision-making, and a consider- ation of the implications of this for ethics
in organizations. Our point is to stress that to be considered ethical, organizational decision-making must be
something beyond ‘the programmable application or unfolding of a calculable process’ (Derrida,
1992: 24). On
that basis we argue that management’s task in relation to ethics is one of enhancing
and maintaining structures that under- stand undecidability as opportunities and
responsibilities (rather than as threats and fears) and that actively foster a collective and
democratic decision-making ethos. In making this contribution the paper also seeks to extend the already established
ways in which Derrida’s work has been fruitfully drawn on to inform the study of organizations by bringing it to bear on ethics and
decision making.1 Since Cooper’s (1989) seminal article on the (then largely potential) contri- bution of Derrida to the study of
organizations, the possibilities of drawing on Derridean ideas and theories have been employed productively and exten- sively to
enhance the field. Focusing largely on Derrida’s identification with the practice of ‘deconstruction’, the bulk of this work has focused
on deconstruct- ing organizational research, management concepts, and language used in orga- nizational settings (see Jones, 2003b
for a detailed review and critique). The unifying feature of such developments stems from the idea that deconstruction is a
means radically to question and destabilize taken for granted hierarchies of concepts such as
organization/disorganization, culture/nature, order/chaos, male/female and so forth . As Kallinikos
and Cooper (1996) put it, the purposes of deconstructive critique are ‘to disclose the covert operations
by means of which the inherent undecidability of life and work is repressed and through which
certainty is constructed’ (p. 5). Far from being a ‘mere’ theoretical exercise, deconstruction is
conceptualised as critically subversive activity that has the objective to change and intervene in
reality (see Fox, 1996). While deconstruction has been used widely in organization studies, both as a method and as a mode of
critique, less attention has been paid to realising the value of Derrida’s later work, especially that on ethics and responsibility (Jones,
2003b; for a rare exception see Jones, 2003a). Thus, in extending Derrida’s purview in the study of organizations, here we turn our
attention to his (1992, 1995) discussions of ethics, responsibility and decision making and relate them to the functions of organizing
and the practice of management. Such a move is not untimely, as Parker (2002) has recently commented, given that when the
philosophy of ethics is invoked in discussions of business, management and ethics, it is most often done in relation to the ‘classics of
the analytic canon, and it is rare to find references to twentieth century “continental” philosophy’ (Parker, 2002: 96; see also Jones,
Parker and ten Bos, 2005). We shall begin with some slightly older philosophy, however, because a part of our argument concerns
exposing the roots of the philosophies that are taken for granted in contemporary accounts of management and organization theory.
Rationality, decision-making and organizations While the importance of the division of labour is a folk-tale that stretches back at
least to Adam Smith (1723–1790), with his praise for the rationally divided pin-factory and its labours in The Wealth of Nations
(1776/1961), the stress on the importance of division in execution dates back at least to Descartes (1596– 1650). Take Descartes’
reflections on architecture as a sample: One of the first things I thought it well to consider was that as a rule there is not such great
perfection in works composed of several parts, and pro- ceeding from the hands of various artists, as in those on which one man has
worked alone. Thus we see buildings undertaken and carried out by a single architect are generally more seemly and better arranged
than those that several hands have sought to adept, making use of old walls that were built for other purposes. Again, those ancient
cities which were originally mere boroughs, and have become large towns in process of time, are as a rule badly laid out, as
compared with those towns of regular pattern that are laid out by a designer on an open plain to suit his fancy; while the buildings
severally considered are often equal or superior artistically to those in planned towns, yet, in view of their arrangement – here a
large one, there a small – and the way they make the streets twisted and irregular, one would say that it was chance that placed them
so, not the will of men who had the use of reason (Descartes, 1641/1954: 15) Descartes’ architect ideally sits down in a chamber and
starts his work ‘from scratch’, planning every mark carefully. The mind plans, whereas the body, the merely extended, passive and
inert material, acts according to this plan. Indeed, the dominance of structure as an organizing metaphor for organiza- tions, places
architecture (as the designing and building of structures) in a direct relationship with how we continue to understand organizations.
Des- cartes’ architect is the rational planner of buildings and cities while the manager became the rational planner of work processes
and organizations. The workers use their bodies to implement the higher plans of the mind. By corollary the modern
manager is a ‘man’ who has the use of reason, who leaves little to chance in structuring the
optimal arrangements for work. The modern management theorist Henri Fayol (1949) proposed that ‘the
soundness and good working order of the body corporate depend on a certain number of
conditions termed indiscriminately, principles, laws, rules’ (p. 181). Such principles relate to that
unity of direction and command centrally promulgated by management to and for a
subordinated, divided, and disciplined workforce. These centralised management
principles are not to be taken as authoritarian but as authoritative in source. They derive
not from managerial fiat or the social fact of capital ownership but they belong ‘to the natural order; this turns on the fact that in
every organism, animal or social, sensations converge towards the brain or directive part, and from the brain or directive part orders
are sent out which set parts of the organism in movement’ (Fayol, 1949: 193). Fayol’s ‘body corporate’ – the members of the
organization – is conceived as if it were a body of limbs and organs controlled and directed by
the singular managerial brain. In practice, however, the metaphoricality of such language
becomes troublingly literal, as, for example, when a desperate Henry Ford asked why he always got stuck with the whole
person rather than with a pair of hands. Hands were what he hired but troublesome bodies with querulous minds were what he so
often got, despite the best work of Pinkerton’s and other agencies that sought to screen out troublemakers and those morally unfit
and insufficiently temperate in their habits for the five dollars a day regime on Ford’s line. The metaphorical body
corporate easily reduces the literal body of the worker to be treated only as exemplary if s/he
behaves as a puppet to the commands issued through the managerial pulling of strings (ten Bos and
Rhodes, 2003). Fayol and Ford were not unusual. Their sentiments were shared by that father of modern management, Frederick
Winslow Taylor, when he insisted that ‘all of the planning which under the old system was done by the workman, as a result of his
personal experience, must out of necessity under the new system be done by management’ (Taylorm, 1967/1911: 38). Here
decision-making is taken to be the domain of the superior intellect of the manager such that he
(usually) can deploy a scientific rationality in order to find the infamous ‘one best way’ proposed by
Taylor’s approach. As Taylor (1967/1911: 59) so famously wrote of one of his favourite workers: Now one of the very first
requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he
more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type [. . .] the workman who is best suited to handling pig iron is
unable to understand the real science of doing this class of work. He is so stupid that the word ‘percentage’ has no meaning to him,
and he must consequently be trained by a man more intelligent than himself into the habit of working in accordance with the laws of
this science before he can be successful. Indeed, by defining workers as brainless and unthinking hands
following orders determined elsewhere, the notion of decision-making became both elitist and
rational. Rational in that it must lead to optimum decisions because it is based on superior
intelligence. Rational also in that it applies scientific method, the hallmark of superior
intelligence, in order to result in the optimal achievement of desired organizational ends. The
divorce between decision and execution , and its echoing of the Cartesian mind/body dualism, has been a
central tenet of management science, such that employees are best regarded as being reflexive
automata whose routines are attuned to following rules and processes rationally decided by
others (ten Bos and Rhodes, 2003.) Usually, the model of decision-making is described as a perfectly well
organized, rational and logical process. Problems are defined, the relevant information is
analysed, possible solutions are generated, and the optimal solution is decided upon and
implemented. Quality management as embodied in Deming’s ‘plan- do-check-act’ (PDCA) cycle is an excellent example of how
this is done in many contemporary organizations (see Deming, 2000). The problem of recal- citrant hands is solved by turning them
into disciplined and reflexive exten- sions of the corporate mind, able to exercise discretion, but in corporately prescribed ways.
Decision-making and uncertainty Although still in powerful circulation in today’s organizations, the model of managerial decision-
making discussed above has been challenged from various sides in management and organization theory. Almost half a century ago,
March and Simon (1958) doubted whether decision makers really look for optimal solutions; rather, they suggested, they look for
‘satisficing’ solutions. On account of the limited capacity of human information processing no one
could really consider all solutions and then decide which one was the best one . However, top managers,
because of their wide experiences, have a raft of comparable cases to draw on for most decision-situations, and on are able to be
rational within the bounds of their own experiences. Further, a careful analysis of all available information would
be impossibly time-consuming given that time is a scare resource, and motivation to use it in
endless reflection and search even more limited. Facing the ‘bounded rationality’ of human
beings, Simon and March found that decision-makers work under constraints that make optimal
decisions impossible and satisfactory decisions workable. Cohen, March and Olsen (1972) pushed March and
Simon’s critique one step further announcing that the decision-making process in organizations is organized according to the logic of
what they call the garbage can. As they argue provocatively, decisions are made when solutions, problems,
participants and choices flow around and coincide at a certain point. Like garbage in a can these
adjacencies are often purely random: yesterday’s papers end up stuck to today’s dirty kleenex
just as downsizing attaches itself to profit-forecasts . Starbuck (1983) took this thinking further when he argued
that, instead of making rational decisions about how to solve problems,
organizations spend most of their time generating problems to which they already
have the solutions. Organizational decision-making processes are not really rational but
follow the concept of ‘muddling through’ (Lindblom, 1959) as organizations follow the sense of
things that they made in the past as they try and make sense of the here-and-now while
they imagine their future (Weick, 1969). As valuable and thought provoking as the critique of the rational
decision-making process is, it still remains captured by a singular logic of rationality .
While the critics see the limits of rational decision-making they still use it, albeit creatively,
rather than disrupt its logic. Indeed such models suggest that while full rationality is not
possible, it is still an ‘ideal type’ model against which real decision-making can be
judged . For instance, March and Simon’s critique still hangs on the idea of an optimal decision, but, due to human inabilities
and incapacities, this ideal model remains unreachable – a holy grail – for which a more immediate, yet sub-optimal, substitute is
found. We live with bounded rationality but always in anticipation that it will turn out to have
been really rational after all. Decision-making under undecidability As we have been arguing, the ways that decision-
making in organizations is commonly understood rests on the presumption that an ideal type of decision exists, based on a thorough
knowledge of the facts and the application of a calculable rationality, either in fact or in approximation. What we now explore is how
the dominance of this rationality fails to account both for the nature of decision-making and for
the way that people do, or do not, take responsibility for it. To begin addressing our concerns we consider an
alternative understanding of decision and responsibility based on Derrida’s (1992, 1995, 1996) notion of ‘undecidability’ and relate it
to decisions in organizations. For Derrida, the philosophical possibility of there being such a thing as a
decision relies on a prior condition, which he refers to as ‘undecidability’. Derrida suggests that in order
for a decision to be named as such it must involve some form of choice: a real
decision can be made only if one encounters different possibilities for courses of
action. Thus, decisions are not about the application of a heuristic formula or
calculation (eg Taylor’s scientific management methods, or Dem- ing’s PDCA cycle) in order to assert or predict the
outcome of a course of action. To do this would be to make no decision at all as it would
entail following a pre-determined logic rather than choosing amongst competing
possibilities – it is representative not of ‘choice’ but of an ‘urge to order and control our
human experiences’ (Chia, 1996: 803). Thus, the application of a heuristic process to define what to do
is not really a process of decision-making – it is better defined as the application of a calculable
program, often sanctioned by an organizational imprimatur . Conversely, for Derrida a true or free decision is
marked by different characteristics: The instant of decision must remain heterogeneous to all knowledge
as such, to all theoretical or reportive determination, even if it may or must be preceded by all
science and conscience. The latter are unable to determine the leap of decision without
transforming it into the irresponsible applica- tion of a program, hence without depriving it of
what makes it a sovereign and free decision (Derrida, 1997: 219) Derrida’s point here is that the application of
rational calculation is not sufficient for a course of action to be considered responsible. If a
decision is made simply by applying a system of rules to a set of data, then there is no real
decision – only the following of a particular program (see Jones, 2003a). Thus, regardless of the
possible rational calculations, the instant that a decision is made ‘must be heterogeneous to the
accumulation of knowledge . . . not only must the person taking the decision not know
everything . . . the decision, if there is to be one, must advance towards a future which is not known,
which cannot be anticipated’ (Derrida, 1994: 37). The implication is that ‘ethics and responsibility do not
involve perfect and clear knowledge and absence of [. . .] decision-making difficulties, but are
themselves emergent in and even defined by the experience of double-binds [. . .] For Derrida,
responsibility and ethics necessarily involve working with ‘undecidability’ (Jones, 2004: 53). The up-shot of Derrida’s discussion is
that while organizational decisions may occur within the context of rationally oriented rules they
cannot be reduced to the application of these if they are to be regarded as truly responsible
decisions. As he states: a ‘decision that didn’t go through the ordeal of the undecidable would not be a free decision, it would only
be the application or unfolding of a calculable process’ (Derrida, 1992: 24). A calculable process of rationality, such as a pre-ordained
organizational process of decision making, is radically opposed to what Derrida sees as the essence of decision. Instead, Derrida
ties decision-making closely to democratic notions of choice and freedom, where each case in
which a decision is to be made ‘is other, each decision is different and requires an
absolutely unique interpretation , which no existing, coded rule can or ought to guarantee
absolutely’ (Derrida, 1992: 23). What he is seeking is a practice of decision-making in which the
comfort of rule following is eschewed, and where the grooves of habit are not cut so deep that
one always stays in their tracks.2 Indeed, the rationality of their seeming to be ‘only one possible
choice would make a joke of the very notion of choice’ (Laclau, 1996: 59). A decision involves the
person being moved, temporally, into the ‘unknowability of the future’ (Derrida, 1994) – it is a
double-bind involving a conflict between demands and an experience of not knowing what to do
(Jones, 2004), in which both explicit and habituated rules need not be followed. Derrida’s theorization of
undecidability contests the very heart of decision making in organization as it is framed in
relation to rationality. Indeed, for Derrida true decision making can never be premised on rationality; following Kierkegaard
(1985, 1992) Derrida (1992) proposes that ‘the instant of decision is madness’ (p. 26) because it must always interrupt the cognitive
and rational deliberation which precedes it. For Derrida, such interruption occurs when the urgent and sudden
moment of decision has passed through the ‘ordeal of the undecidable’. This is not just a
dialectical choice between pre-determined options – ‘the undecidable is not merely the
oscillation or the tension between two decisions; it is the experience of that which, though
heterogeneous, foreign to the order of the calculable and the rule, is still obliged – it
is of obligation that we must speak – to give itself up to the impossible decision, while taking
account of law and rules’ (Derrida, 1992: 24). This impossibility is borne out of the radical
difference between decisions and rules such that a decision must be grounded in its own
singularity – there is a direct contrast here between the ‘universality of the rule and
the singularity of the decision’ (Laclau, 1996: 53). In terms of our focus on conceptualizing organizational decision
making as a necessarily ethical practice, it is critical to note that Derrida sees decision- making as irretrievably implicated with issues
of personal responsibility and ethics. The issue here is that the ethical responsibilities attendant on relations of
power always involve decisions; so, when the author of some organizational action seeks to pass
them off as structurally determined, then the abdication of ethical responsibility is usually a
trick to deceive just consideration of the choices that have, in fact, implicitly been made (see Lukes,
1974). As Bennington (2000) summarizes: Ethics begins where the case does not exactly correspond to any
rule, and where the decision has to be taken without subsumption. A decision worthy of its name
thus takes place in a situation of radical indecision or of undecidability of the case in question in
terms of any rules for judging it (p. 15) Similarly, organizational decision-making is an ethical act as
much as a practical or rational one because it involves a choice that cannot be justified by a pre-
determined calculus – as Derrida (1992) suggests the decision is a ‘moment of madness’. The madness of rationality . . . After
the Second World War, Adolf Eichmann, SS Lieutenant-Colonel and chief of the Gestapo’s ‘Jewish Office’, escaped capture and lived
in Germany for five years before moving to Argentina, where he lived under an alias for another ten years. Israeli agents finally
captured him in 1960. Following his capture he was put to trial in Jerusalem for ‘crimes against humanity’ for his role in the ‘final
solution of the Jewish question’. In her now famous account of Eichmann’s trial, Hannah Arendt (1963/1994) observed that
Eichmann presented himself as an ambitious careerist bureaucrat, who, in his own famous
words was ‘just following orders’. Although he was subsequently found guilty and executed, his defence was
important because it posed the question of the extent to which a person who is obedient to
organizationally legitimate authority and rule-based rationality can be held accountable as an
individual for what they do. As Arendt reports, what was profoundly disturbing about Eichmann’s trial was that despite
knowing that ‘it would have been very comforting indeed to believe that Eichmann was a monster [. . .] the trouble with
Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were
neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and
terrifyingly normal’ (Arendt, 1963/1994: 276). What is terrible about normality is the suggestion
that it offers no guarantees for ethicality: ethics is not about being ‘normal’ in the sense
of doing what is expected , whether out of a sense of convenience, laziness, duty, fear of
reprisal, convention – or rule following. Such a view merely displaces ethics from the
subject to an organizational or other culture which defines what is ‘normal’. Ethics
relates to a form of action that involves a rejection of such normality . For Arendt, Eichmann exemplifies
‘the lesson that this long course of human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought defying banality
evil, the very antithesis of an ethical good, is
of evil’ (Arendt, 1963/1994: 252, italics in original). It is in this sense that
characterized in relation to a lack of independence or imagination. In the context of an enquiry into
the nature of the holocaust, the renowned sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (1989) has questioned in detail the ethical con- tours of
obedience to rules. Bauman’s answer is most interesting for manage- ment scholars: essentially, he points out that many of the
normal features of organization contribute to the conditions which make ethically dubious
actions organizationally easy to produce, irrespective of the horror being visited, or damage done. At the
heart of the moral question is the interpenetration of power and ethics: why do ordinary people in organizations do
ethically bad things when asked to do so – what aspects of organization make obedience through
unethical decision or non-decision-making feasible? The holocaust is an extreme, and
cautionary, case in point. As Munro (1998) notes ‘for Bauman, the Holocaust should not be
dismissed as an inexplicable, never- to-be repeated, one off event . On the contrary, all the
conditions of its possibility are already to be found in social matters, like well
developed administrative procedures’ (Munro, 1998: 203). It is such procedures which subvert
undecidability in action. What unites Derrida’s discussion of undecidability and Bauman’s critique of rationality is the view
thatethics ‘cannot be captured in laws [. . . and is . . .] radically linked to direct person-
to-person interactions’ (Letiche, 1998: 148). Such a view of ethics originates from Emmanuel Levinas (1991a, 1991b)
who was a source of inspiration for both Derrida’s philosophy and Bauman’s sociology. For Levinas, ethics originate in face-
to-face interaction where the self comes into contact with another – represented as the other. This
interaction, however, is not one of rational knowledge but of engagement with difference and the
ontological primacy of the other. As Levinas (1991b: 42) describes, if comprehension, intelligence and knowledge are a
‘way of approaching the known’ such that ‘its alterity with regard to the knowing being vanishes’ (Levinas, 1991b: 42), then a
recognition of the other places it outside such knowledge systems and into the realm of ethics. Ethics starts with a
responsibility to the other as a person rather than being based on knowing the
other in terms of one’s own categories and systems of thought. It is an ethics that is a
matter of affect and sensibility rather than one of knowledge: ‘Knowledge would be the
suppression of the other by the grasp, or by the hold, or by the vision that grasps before the
grasp’ (p. 302). By implication, the ethics of decision making in organizations too is something that
cannot be premised on calculation, but rather must begin with a concern for and care for others.
What the case of the Holocaust places in extreme focus is how organizational rationality and
knowledge can preclude ethics (viz. undecidability) in decision-making. Kelman (1973) suggests that three
organizational attributes, at a minimum, make it easier to deal prejudicially with other people (i.e. to
disregard their alterity, and to abscond from one’s ethical responsibility to them as concrete others): • When the
organizational action is authorized • When the actions that enact it are routinized • When those
who are the victims of the action are dehumanised by ideological definitions and
indoctrination. Each one of these strategies of power involves the application of rules as a means of
silencing ethical deliberation and affect. Let us deal with authoriza- tion first, a fundamental tenet of Weber’s
(1978) definition of modern bureau- cratic organizations. What does authority mean? One version of authority would bathe it in a
warm glow of legitimated, rightful and righteous domina- tion. For those who are subject to it, authority appears most
simply as that to which obedience is owed. We obey authority: authority is exercised when
others obey it – for in its defiance it ceases to be authority. So, all the mechanisms that produce active
consent on the part of the ruled are essential to authority and obedience. Active
consent is premised on the ‘demand to obey commands of the superiors to the exclusion of all
other stimuli for action, to put the devotion to the welfare of the organization, as defined in the
com- mands of superiors, above all devotions and commitments’ (Bauman, 1989: 21). Bauman even suggests
that, for some, indeed many organizations, such dedication to organizational service is often regarded as a moral virtue. Eich- mann
appears to agree: in his trial he ‘declared with great emphasis that he had lived his whole life according to Kant’s ethical precepts,
and especially accord- ing to a Kantian definition of duty’ (Arendt, 1963/1994: 135–6) which he interpreted to mean ‘act as if the
principle of your actions were the same as that of the legislator or the law of the land’ (p. 136). Eichmann’s self pro- claimed
virtuousness concerned a ‘Third Reich categorical imperative’ that read ‘act is such a way that the Führer, if he knew your action,
would approve it’ (p. 136). Replace the word Führer with CEO, and the implications for authority in contemporary organizations
should both alert and alarm us in any situation where there might be grounds for doubt concerning the goodness of the institutions
that guide the execution of corporate action, the ethicality of the discourses in play, or the rectitude of the actors concerned. Doing
routinized organization work is often tedious, boring and repetitive : filling in forms,
entering data, assembling strategies and participating in meet- ings, doing things according to
the rules. The outcomes of this ceaseless round of activity are frequently quite
remote from the conceptions of the people performing the mundane tasks. Most
organizational members are in the middle of organizational chains whose links are not always
clear. Their actions are mediative and mediated. They perform tasks for others and others perform tasks for them;
the tasks are just a part of an endless and often very partial gestalt seen only partially in any
round of action. People are not always aware of the consequences for others of that which they
do and do not do: after all, most of the time, they are just doing what they are told – shred those files,
write those cheques, despatch those troops, maintain those train schedules. Routines numb, habituate and
occlude ethical consciousness. The greater the psychic and physical distance
between what a people do and their ultimate effects on others, the easier it is to do
that thing without ethical quandary – those people affected are dehumanized by being ‘de-
othered’. Long chains of functional dependencies insulate you from ethical
consequences and a consideration for others – as Eichmann argued and modern functionaries in high-
technology warfare would no doubt agree. The Nazi’s realized this well: at their most efficient they turned the
concentration camps into crude killing machines where willing victims, desiring a shower after a
long journey, were serviced by sanitation officers who simply poured in chemicals developed by
scientists in laboratories elsewhere. In such an authorized, routinized and dehumanized
organizational setting, responsibility is cast as being a technical rather than an ethical matter.
However, ‘technical responsibility differs from moral responsibility in that it forgets that the action
is a means to something other than itself . . . the result is the irrelevance of moral standards for
the technical success of the bureau- cratic operation’ (Bauman, 1989: 101). When technique is
paramount then action becomes purely a question of technical accountability – the use of means
to achieve given ends. For instance, as a master of logistics Eichmann was enormously proud of his achievements in the
complex scheduling of trains, camps and death (Arendt, 1963/1994). If organizational power consists of
configuring social relations such that others will likely do what has been decided
elsewhere, then the successful achievement of the exercise of such power would
render those others only technically accountable and responsible for their actions,
and without ethical responsibility to other people. It would have the profound effect of
relieving them of moral doubt – if they are authorized to do something and given targets to achieve by superordinates
working to guiding strategies and plans, then, surely, obedience is appropriate and authority should be served? As we dis- cussed
earlier, however, it is this doubt, this undecidability, which is the very condition of ethically
responsible decision making. Stressing undecidability and attesting to the limits of calculability
opens the field of decision-making to ethico-political considerations , says Derrida (1988: 116) where, if
decisions were regarded as the following of a pre-established program ‘nothing would be more
irresponsible and more totalitarian’ (Derrida, cited in Raffoul, 1998). Indeed, if a decision did not
undergo the ordeal of undecidability there would be no space for ethical or political
responsibility (Derrida, 1996). Undecidability is best regarded as a form of specificity that is not
capable of being generalised as a rule, such that following rules would mean not passing through
undecidability, and thus, as we have seen, ends up being void of responsibility (Derrida, 1995). In
relation to organizations the implications are significant – the authoritative application of rules
and calculations, when seen as the primary site of responsible decision making, render those
decisions irresponsible. Facing up to responsibility The issue that the holocaust alerts us to in relation
to organizations is how the complicity of mundane administrative procedures with human
conduct creates an ethical distance that effaces people from the effects of, and responsibility for,
their actions (Munro, 1998). Such organization is an active and rational suppression of ethics: The
moral subject has been subjected to means-end analysis, parcelled out as a set of problems to be
solved, framed within organizational discourse in relation to short-term goals of competitive
advantage and customer satis- faction. In ‘effacing the face’ the subject becomes a moral object,
excluded from the class of ‘beings’ and therefore capable of evaluation in terms of technical or
instrumental value (Desmond, 1998: 183). Even more strongly, it can be suggested that ethics is a ‘manipulative
rhetoric’ focused on getting employees to do the will of management (as inscribed in the codes) rather
than attending to ‘employees needs and points of view’ (Parker, 2002: 147) in any meaningful way. As Roberts
has argued ‘corporate responsibility will always depend upon people using their frail and vital sen- tience and following the path that
this assigns’ (Roberts, 2003: 263). Here rationality and knowledge (while still of possible importance) can only be regarded as
secondary to ethics, and never as its source.3 Our discussion suggests management’s task in relation to ethics
should be one of enhancing and maintaining structures within which moral agents face,
understand and act within the conditions of undecidability. A lack of a predetermined ethics,
rather than being resolved by codes or normalized conduct, can be seen as an opportunity and
responsibility (rather than as a threat and source of fear) that actively fosters a more democratically
responsible decision-making process (see also Charan, 2001). Such democracy, however, needs to take
into account decision-making in terms of responsibility – that is to ask both who gets to make
the decisions and how and to whom one might be responsible when making them. The answer to such
questions is frequently constituted by theorists of ‘corporate governance’ in a series of analogies with the political process (Clarke,
2004). Democracy as we experience it is, above all, representational: a government is typically seen as being held accountable by the
voters on the occasion of elections and, sometimes, the analogous idea of the shareholders meeting being a similar forum is
advanced. Here the executive board are regarded rather as the government, with the shareholders being seen as analo- gous to the
electors. But, the analogies are not apt. Electorates are based on citizenship rights; shareholder meetings are based on proprietary
rights. The citizen’s privileges as a member of a state are clearly different to the share- holder’s privileges as an owner of an in-
principle entitlement to receive a dividend from a corporation. The question this begs of management is the extent to which
dominant relations (of ownership or political leadership or whatever) form the prime means for that management to rationalise
decision-making. Being in organizations and doing things according to the conventional rule – such as
share- holder value, profit maximization, party loyalty, or discipline – is
not a sufficient account in justification of
ethical responsibility to those who will, at some time, hold the organization responsible,
irrespective of the organization’s preferences in the matter. Holding the organization
accountable to dominant interests , such as the Party, the Nation, or the Fuhrer (as in the
extreme case of Eichmann) and thus working according to rule, as the singular interest so
constituted defines it, is not a sufficient account to justify ethical responsibility. Nevertheless,
decisions cannot be made independently of organizational power/knowledge regimes but rather must be made in relation to them
– following our argument, however, ethical decisions cannot be confined by such
regimes . In other words, principles of concordance with legitimate authority as a rule for
action, as either intuited or formally expressed, are an insufficient basis to ensure
ethical outcomes. It is precisely the practical location of ethics within such
authoritative structures of domination that requires that ethics can wrestle agency
from the confines of structure. Structural determination, whatever the structure,
can only ever be the basis for an unreflective ethics. It is only by the insertion of
undecidability as a fissure in pre-calculated ethics that an ethics of responsibility
can emerge , an ethics that privileges rebuke. Derrida argues that the ‘indefinite right to the
question, to criticism, to deconstruction’ is ‘the very motif of democracy’ (Derrida, 1997: 105). It is the
possibility and the duty for democracy to de-limit itself and call ‘for its own critique . . . that
admits the fundamental revisability, and openness to challenge, of its own self- understanding’
(Fritsch, 2002: 579). It is in this sense that a democratic ethics entails the requirement of openness to an
unknowable future, to the undecidability of decision, and to the plurality of possibilities that
decision can entail. Indeed, because the ethics of decisions are based in the fundamental
undecidability of decision-making, then formal acknowledgement of the plurality of
interests and options, contingent on their institutional representation in daily
routines and reporting, at least imposes the possibility of an ethical calling to account.
Undecidability, then is not an indeterminacy, nor is it the ‘onset of passive
nihilism and the end of politics , as it is sometimes perceived to be, but is the condition of
possibility of a democratic politics worthy of its name’ (Jones, 2004: 52). In a world of social relations
increasingly dominated by organizations then there is urgent necessity for that democratic politics to be
more widespread, organizationally, and less ritualistic, politically. We need to embrace other
ways of getting things done than through hierarchy alone. In Fairtlough’s (2005) terms heterarchy and
responsible autonomy are needed in order to create spaces in which a practice of ethics might
develop. An ethics of undecidability suggests that those accounts of business that seek to ease moral
anxiety or resolve moral indeterminacy through the insti- tution of the rule or the norm should
be exposed for what they are: an unjustifiable and amoral fig leaf to cover a lack of human
decency. In their place there remains the possibility of an ethics that is prepared to embrace the
ordeal of undecidability and, in so doing, entertain the possibility of a future that does not try to
repeat the past. Without this the spectre of the banality of bureaucratic evil and the possibility of
its repetition will haunt organizations of all kinds.
 2NC – AT: PERMUTATION
The permutation refuses to take the leap of faith into imagination. This fails to
gain a connection to war because it is stuck in an overly literal form of reality
Hillman 78 (James, Founder of Post-Jungian archetypical psychology, Re-visioning
Psychology, p. 50-51)

The work of soul-making is concerned essentially with the evocation of psychological faith, the
faith arising from the psyche which shows as faith in the reality of the soul. Since psyche is
primarily image and image always psyche, this faith manifests itself in the belief in images: it is
"idolatrous," heretical to the imageless monotheisms of metaphysics and theology. Psychological
faith begins in the love of images, and it flows mainly through the shapes of persons in reveries,
fantasies, reflections, and imaginations. Their increasing vivification gives one an increasing
conviction of having, and then of being, an interior reality of deep significance transcending
one's personal life. Psychological faith is reflected in an ego that gives credit to images and turns
to them in its darkness. Its trust is in the imagination as the only uncontrovertible reality,
directly presented, immediately felt. felt Trust in the imaginal and trust in soul go hand in hand,
as depth psychologists have recognized.106 The reverse is also true: when imagi nation is not
evoked, there is a deep-seated lack of confidence to imagine fantasies in regard to one's
problems and to be free of the ego's literalizations, its sense of being trapped in "reality." Lack of
psychological faith is compensated by exaggerated personalizing, a fantastic need for people
(and a need for fantastic people), of which transference on the analyst is only one manifestation.
Soul-making, as work on anima through images, offers a way of resolving the dependencies of
transference. For it is not the therapist or any actual person whatever who is the keeper of my
soul beyond all betrayals, but the archetypal persons of the Gods to whom the anima acts as
bridge. The shaping of her amorphous moods, sulphuric pas sions, bitter resentments, and
bubbles of distraction into distinct per sonalities is the main work of therapeutic analysis or
soul-making. Therefore it works in imagination, with imagination, and for imagina tion. It
discovers and forms a personality by disclosing and shaping the multiple soul personalities out
of the primary massa confusa of arguing voices and pushing demands. Before we turn to this
massa confusa in the soul—what we nowadays call its psychopathology—let us recall the main
insight of this chapter. Psychology always has the opportunity to see through its main convic
tions and assumptions. It can bring psychological reflection to itself. It may thus dissolve the
literal belief in persons by repersonifying them into metaphors. Then personality may be
imagined in a new way: that I am an impersonal person, a metaphor enacting multiple
personifica tions, mimetic to images in the heart that are my fate, and that this soul which
projects me has archetypal depths that are alien, inhuman, and impersonal. My so-called
personality is a persona through which soul speaks. It is subject to depersonalization and is not
mine, but depends altogether upon the gift of belief in myself, a faith given through anima in my
worth as carrier of soul. Not I personify, but the anima per sonifies me, or soul-makes herself
through me, giving my life her sense —her intense daydream is my "me-ness"; and "I," a psychic
vessel whose existence is a psychic metaphor, an "as-if being," in which every single belief is a
literalism except the belief of soul whose faith posits me and makes me possible as a
personification of psyche.
 2NC – AT: AFF STOPS WAR
Desires to end war are foolish, attempting to repress war doesn’t work it only leads
to lashout.
Hillman 4 [James, attended the University of Paris, studying English Literature, and Trinity
College, Dublin, graduating with a degree in mental and moral science in 1950, received his PhD
from the University of Zurich, as well as his analyst's diploma from the C.G. Jung Institute and
was then appointed as Director of Studies at the institute, a position he held until 1969. A
Terrible Love of War p. 201-202]

There remains the wish at the end of every war that this not happen again, that war
must find its stopping point before it ever again begins. We know from what we have
read of the history of war and the nature of battle that this wish is only a wish , that war is at
the foundation of being, as are death and love, beauty and terror, which find magnification in war; and we know that our
thought and our law build upon war as do the beliefs which nourish its ceaseless continuation. What is then to do? We
cannot dismiss the wish for war's end, nor can it be satisfied, nor perhaps ought it be satisfied.
The wish to stop war is like any genuine psychological problem: it cannot be satisfied, it will not
be repressed, nor will it go away of its own accord. The final sentence of Jeremy Black's thorough study, Why
Mfczrs Happen, concludes: "The techniques of diplomatic management can help some crises, but others reflect a willingness, some-
times desire, to kill and be killed that cannot be ignored." Ares is ever-present; he belongs in the scheme of things. A method of
classical therapy turned for a cure of a problem to the problem itself. The power that brings a
disease is the very one that can take it away. Similis similibus curantur is the old motto: cure by means of
similars (rather than by means of opposites). Since Ares/ Mars puts war in our midst, we ask the same source for
relief. For clues to how Ares might help, we look to the oldest text describing the specific characteristics of the different gods and
goddesses, conventionally called the Homeric Hymns, although their attribution to a person named Homer is but a useful
simplification. What mat- ters is not their author(s) but their content. In the content of the "Hymn to Ares" we catch a glimpse of
ways to "cure" war.

War can never “stopped” completely

Hillman 4 [James, attended the University of Paris, studying English Literature, and Trinity
College, Dublin, graduating with a degree in mental and moral science in 1950, received his PhD
from the University of Zurich, as well as his analyst's diploma from the C.G. Jung Institute and
was then appointed as Director of Studies at the institute, a position he held until 1969. A
Terrible Love of War p. 70-1]
First, disfiguring the human frame, whether maiming the body, crippling the soul, or shattering the structures of
human civilizationits laws with unilateral abrogations and calculated deceits, its treasuries of arts with fire and plunder, its habits of
fairness with cold-blooded self-interest. Second, deranged behaviors such as the altered states of
possession in combat, blind obsession of policy experts, leaders and generals, inspired foolhardy
bravery, or the gradual addiction of journalist war-junkies55 and mercenary soldiers of fortune.
Third, war's inhuman weaponry, accoutrements, and symbolic abstractions. Whether stone-ax, knife-
blade, or chlorine gas drifting on the wind, war's inhumanity refers in part to the hyperrationalism of its
instruments. In map-room strategies and mathematical logistics, in the drill preparatory to battle and in battle formations
(Spartan hoplites, Macedonian phalanx, Roman legion, British square), in chain of command, as well as in the role of the horse,
uniform, metal, camouflage, battle cry, bugle, flag, escutcheon, as they transmute into the inhuman power of symbols. To these
three essentials, we need to add a fourth that reaches beyond the evident and into the heart of
war's mysterious power: uncontrollable autonomy. Wars break out, their dogs unleashed; the
soldiers rampage, fire-storms engulf cities. The fantasy of war spreads across continents, into star
wars, cyberspace. The horizon recedes into the next field of operations : Napoleon onto Moscow, Alexander
across the Indus, a new Crusade follows upon the last, MacArthur across the Yalu, Iraq after Afghanistan .. . Since war's
autonomy generates its own momentum, war has no cause other than itself ! "Is war
something which really does have 'a life of its own'?" asks Barbara Ehrenreich.56 War's inhumanity tells war's truth:
its origins lie outside the human sphere, beyond human control. "We have been misled," she
argues, pinning war onto persons, politics, economics, gender; "it is the autonomy of war as an
institution that we have to confront and explain." 57 Her explanation is remarkably imaginative: she conceives
war on the model of a living organism, "a self-replicating pattern of behavior, possessed of a
dynamism not unlike that of living things."58 Suddenly, war emerges as a fictive figure, a robotic golem, a "brutal
giant stalking his human prey;' as in these lines from Thomas Sackville (1536-1608) and quoted by Michael Walzer: Lastly stood
VUlr, in glittering arms y-clad, With visage grim, stern looks, and blackly hued; In his right hand a naked sword he had That to the
hilts was all with blood embrued, And in his left (that kings and kingdoms rued) Famine and fire he held, and therewithal He razed
towns, and threw down towers and all. 59
 2NC – LINK – TECH WAR

Modern warfare exchanges the battlefield for distant command centers where the
enemy can be eliminated with the push of a button – this doesn’t engage our desire
to fight
Hillman 4 [James, attended the University of Paris, studying English Literature, and Trinity
College, Dublin, graduating with a degree in mental and moral science in 1950, received his PhD
from the University of Zurich, as well as his analyst's diploma from the C.G. Jung Institute and
was then appointed as Director of Studies at the institute, a position he held until 1969. A
Terrible Love of War p. 90-2]
Why dwell on this archaic god of war when war has moved on, when the entire action of battle
has radically changed? Napoleon, Grant, Eisenhower, and Patton too, belong to another era. The fleets of
dreadnoughts at Jutland, and the hand-to-hand death struggles at the front-all memories and
movies. War is now either devastatingly high-tech and executed by skilled experts with their
fingertips, or so small-scale that war is fought by a single person with a bomb under her blouse
or a sneaky kid leaving a school bag at a bus stop. "When the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh .. . the first
troops were teenagers. Young girls, young boys, some under fourteen years old, bearing very heavy portable rocket launchers. The
girls wore hand grenades around their waists and across their chests like necklaces."lOO "I was ten years old when a Viet Minh
convinced me to go to a secret school. . .. At night they took me into a cemetery, behind a gravemound where two people can sit
unnoticed .... Sometimes they only train a child for one or two months before they send him somewhere with a hand grenade-inside
the city or a marketplace."101 No more battle rage; cool. Different styles of war under the aegis of
different gods with different styles of imagination. Instead of Mars/ Ares, the strategies and
political indoctrination of Athene, wars of words and leaflets, winning the hearts and minds,
conversion to reason, and the long-term planning of countermeasures to the long-term planning
of hijackers and plotters. Instead of Mars, Hermes: invisible and instantaneous Internet
communications, undercover infiltration, code-breaking, jamming, surveillance with night
vision, hearing through walls, bribes, gifts, rewards, and financial laundering . Yet more
threatening is the imagination of Apollo, "the fardarter," as he was called, who killed with
arrows shot through the air: the imagination of distancing. Weapons far from the front, the front
itself dissolved as war moves upward into the air, to satellites, outer space, transformed by the
Apollonic imagination into nuclear visions brighter than a thousand suns. Where the wars of
Mars pit armies against armies on battlefields outside the city, acknowledge "open cities"
preserved from attack, the Apollonic style makes war against cities, against civilians, against
civilization-cafes, embassies, office towers-against water lines and power lines. Children in schools
mere collateral damage. Meanwhile, the technician sits in his shelter at the control panel and with the push of an orderly series of
buttons fires missiles that can take out a town hundreds of miles away. He does not know the name of the place, the people, or see
the flames. He has commendably done his duty, obeyed orders exactly, even though he is less an actual combatant than the civilians
he has killed. Apollonic distancing . Apollo, remember, could not consummate his relations. He chased but
failed in closeness. The increasing distance between central command and actual engagement is
not overcome by speedy communication. The feeling of distance between headquarters and front, between
officers and men, that plagues armies with contempt and murderous hatred is reinforced by the
Apollonic structure of vertical hierarchy. There is distancing in language with fancy names for special operations,
acronyms for war and the places of engagement, and for casualties and death. It would seem Mars has been eclipsed. Yet the
ground must still be held under the soldier's boot. The dead must still be buried. No matter the
distance, the abstract language, the covert operations, explosions still blast, firefights erupt in
close quarters, house to house, street by street, roadblock, check-point, river bank, thicket. War
comes down to ground. Beyond the violent occasions of martial action, the god is also there, and essentially so, in the will to
fight, the love of war, the rush to win and the rush of winning. And the fanatic 's sacrifice. Mars is the fire that tempers the men and
melds them into a deployable team. His is the vision of war as the last resort that is the final life-ordeath determinant, or deterrent,
within all strategies, subterfuges, and nuclearism . The impetuous passion of Mars makes war happen in the
flesh and blood of history. If war were left only to Apollo or Hermes or Athene, war games, war
plans, and maneuvers of the mind would be enough.
 2NC – ALTERNATIVE – SUBLIME
Its independently valuable to embrace the sublime violence of war – it causes
generative introspection and activates the imagination.
Hillman 4 [James, attended the University of Paris, studying English Literature, and Trinity
College, Dublin, graduating with a degree in mental and moral science in 1950, received his PhD
from the University of Zurich, as well as his analyst's diploma from the C.G. Jung Institute and
was then appointed as Director of Studies at the institute, a position he held until 1969. A
Terrible Love of War p. 115-8]

It is this fusion that makes war so spectacular and terrible, brutal and transcendent within a
single moment. To the civilian imagining the land mines underfoot and stabbing bayonets it is ununderstandable that so
many engaged in war write of beauty, of spectacle, aesthetic delight, and use the word sublime.
"Yes, the chief aesthetic appeal of war surely lies in this feeling of the sublime."13 "The combatant who is relieved from participation
and given the spectator's role can nearly sate the eye with all the elements of fearful beauty."14 Moreover, "men expose themselves
quite recklessly for the sake of seeing."15 Remember the opening of Coppola's extraordinary war film, Apocalypse Now. A
spectacle of intoxicating power; bursting the limits . When the first nuclear blast blazed its
mushroom into the heavens, there flashed in the minds of observers images from Grunewald's resurrecting
Christ and holy script from the Bhagavad Gita. For some, the war years were the "one great lyric passage in their lives."16 "I shall
always remember above all other things in my life the monstrous loveliness of that one single view of London . .. stabbed with great
fires, shaken by explosions, its dark regions along the Thames sparkling with the pin-points of white-hot bombs, all of it roofed over
with a ceiling of pink that held bursting shells, balloons, flares and the grind of vicious engines. And in yourself the excitement and
anticipation and wonder in YOllr soul that this could be happening at all. These things all went together to make the most hateful,
most beautiful, single scene I have ever known."17 The bombing of London in 1940 impressed Malcolm Mug115 A TERRIBLE LOVE
OF WAR geridge similarly. Sometimes together with Graham Greene he went into the streets. "I remember particularly Regent's
Park on a moonlit night, full of the fragrance of the rose gardens; the Nash Terraces, perfectly blacked-out ... white stately shapes
waiting to be toppled over. ... I watched the great fires in the City and Fleet Street .... It was a great illumination, a mighty holocaust:
the end of everything, surely ... . I felt a terrible joy and exaltation at the sight and sound and taste and smell of all this
destruction."18 From the chopper, says a fresh rifleman coming in over the rice paddies of Vietnam, "it looked so beautiful. But at
the same time I was scared to death."19 As the Allied armada moved toward the North African beaches, Ernie Pyle wrote: "Hour
after hour I stood at the rail looking ... and an almost choking sense of beauty and power enveloped me."20 A member of Patton's
staff in Sicily wrote to his wife: "And speaking of wonderful things ... [t]he high water mark-and perhaps the most beautiful as well as
satisfactory sight I have ever beheldwas a flaming enemy bomber spattering itself and its occupants against the side of a mountain.
God it was gorgeous."21 Hateful and beautiful in a single scene. Exaltation at all this destruction. Others
write: "the combination of sound and color ... had a kind of wicked beauty."22 William Manchester in Guadalcanal refers to
Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal. "It was a vision of beauty, but of evil beauty."23 Leon Uris sees Guadalcanal as "the body of a goddess
and the soul of a witch."24 The British often call a raid or skirmish, even a full-scale battle, a "show." They are right not only because
of the English gift for theater but because war is spectacular. A spectacle for all the senses, but especially the eye,
which captures the scenes and resurrects them into images. War feeds on and is fed by
imagination. Long before enlistment, the images of propaganda and the war games of children have
already set the stage. Afterwards, war becomes litera1 16 WAR IS SUBLIME ture, movies, and is imagined even in its midst
into poems and thoughts and tales. The eye cannot help but see: "It must not be forgotten that we imagine with our retina," wrote
Bachelard.25 "Imagination is the faculty," not of forming, but of "deforming the images offered by perception."26 War offers
perceptions already deformed, an imaginative scene just as it is. So witnesses say: it was unreal,
fantastic, unimaginable, because war's very explosive unpredictability is imagination itself
displayed. "If an occasional image does not give rise to a swarm of aberrant images, to an explosion of images, there is no
imagination."27 The goddess in the arms of Ares makes her presence known mainly by aestheticizing. "A moonlit night, full of the
fragrance of the rose gardens;' remembers Muggeridge. A young German near Verdun in 1915 writes: "The moon shone into my
mug . . . only now and then a bullet whistled through the trees. It was the first time I had noticed that there can be some beauty in
war-that it had its poetic side."28 Southeast of Y pres another German writes about decorating his trench: "from a pinewood close
by, which had also been destroyed by shells, we dragged all the best tree-tops and stuck them upright in the ground . . .. Out of the
ruined chateaux, we fetched rhododendrons, box, showdrops and primroses and made quite nice little flower beds."29 Aphrodite,
the lovely one, the smiling one, as she was called, prompts the loving letters to a wife who was hardly known and never loved before.
She roofs over Ernie Pyle's scene "with a ceiling of pink," and she is that indomitable something that dominates the material which
Patton compares with the soul, much as Plato and Plotinus in another age identified the soul of the world with Aphrodite urania, the
goddess of th~ upper spheres and the uplift of love. To the blood of war, she brings the aestheticizing imagination of war. Pink is the
prettier part. There is as well the shudder that Sappho feels, the exaltation at the vast panoply of battle formations, gleam 117 A
TERRIBLE LOVE OF WAR of gunmetal, start-ups' of clanking tanks, the surge of joy amid the chaotic rush, and increasing sexual
intensity while waiting on picket at night. Attacks begin at the first blush of dawn, the hour of the handsome, amorous, divine Eos.
Aphrodite raises the dead into beauty with a few lines by Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke. She makes Patton dress up for killing the
bastards. Without her, there is no sublime. The
idea of the sublime as an aesthetic phenomenon akin to but
distinct from beauty entered modern discourse also via the eye . Longinus was incidental, a text for professors
of classics and rhetorical style, because his treatise focused mainly on writing and speaking in an elevated, inspiring manner.
Boileau's translation and reflections (1674) on Longinus did not deeply touch the latent romanticism of the English soul. The
sublime as a stunning concatenation of the baleful and the beautiful in one elevated moment
came from nature, from the earth. In 1688 an English writer, John Dennis, crossed the Alps into Italy and published
what he saw of mountains, precipices, raging waters "that made all such a Consort up for the eye ... in which Horrour can be joyn'd
with Harmony."3o Sights of alpine nature produced "in me a delightful Horrour, a terrible joy, and at the same time I was infinitely
pleased, I trembled." The influential essayist Joseph Addison on his Grand Tour southward wrote of an "agreeable kind of horror" in
the nature of the mountains, and he advanced the idea of the sublime further into the vast, the great, stupendous, unlimited,
perceived by the eye and strongly affecting the imagination.
 2NC – IMPACT – PATRIARCHY
It’s the root cause of gendered violence
Hillman 4 (p. 86-87)
These tales must be recalled so as to obviate the testosterone hypothesis, that is, everything to do
with bellicosity and militarism is the expression of male physiology, both the cruelty and the
courage--it's all reducible to glands of gender. The myths and legends tell it differently: the spirit of war and the
rage of battle are archetypal, forced upon all animal life, all gender, all societies.
No gland can contain it. It is irreducible , a Ding an sich. It breaks out in matriarchal and
matrilineal societies . No one is exempt. Women cannot hide from it, as its victims know, nor
can they hide it. Not only legendary Amazons but modern women in power have been war leaders; women have
clamored for admission to military academies and they serve the military with · distinction, pride, and killmg
weaponry. To imagine war to be a "man's thing," one more example of the abusive, self-inflating
activity of "the patriarchy," traps one in the genderist division of the cosmos : all things are either male
or female, tertium non datur. The genderist division takes on the absolutism of a logical opposition , an
either/or which allows no space for the "both" of compromise and ambivalence, and androgyny . 86
WAR IS INHUMAN This division then influences our fantasies of primordial societies, reducing war to an activity of violent hunter-
gatherers versus gentle cultivator-weavers. If, however, we think about war as an emanation of a god, war as an
archetypal impulse , then patriarchy does not originate war but serves war to give it
form and bring it to order by means of hierarchical control, ritual ceremony, art, and law.
Remember Foucault's idea that law is a continuation of war in another form. Patriarchy makes the forms. Rather than the
origin of war, patriarchy is its necessary result , preventing Ares from blowing up the world and leaving a few
poor remnants a life that is "nasty, brutish, and short." That this hierarchy, these forms can become tyrannical is evident enough,
since cruelties of discipline are often secondary consequents of form. Nonetheless, patriarchal tyranny is not the
primary cause of war; that cause is the god.
 2nc – impact – myth
The failure of imagination, or the separation of war from its spiritual roots, results
in dangerous literalism, which makes explosions of violence more likely
Hillman ‘87 (James, A Founding Fellow of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and
Culture, “Wars, Arms, Rams, Mars: On the Love of War,” in Facing Apocalypse
edited by Valerie Andrews, Robert Bosnak, Karen Goodwin)
We do not know much nowadays about imagining divinities. We have lost the
angelic imagination and its angelic protection. It has fallen from all curricula—
theological, philosophical, aesthetic . That loss may be more of a danger than either
war or apocalypse because that loss results in literalism, the cause of both . As Lifton
says, "The task now is to imagine the real." However, like so much of our imagination of the
archetypal themes in human nature, the wars we now imagine are severely limited
by modern positivistic consciousness. We imagine wars utterly without soul or spirit
Of Gods, just as we imagine biological and psychological life, social intercourse and politics, the organization of
nature—all without soul, spirit or Gods. Things without images. Wars show this decline of ritual
and increase of positivism, beginning with Napoleon and the War between the States (1861-65). The
Great War of 1914-18 was stubborn, massive, unimaginative; the dark Satanic mill relocated in Flanders, sixty
thousand British casualties in one single day on the Somme, and the same battle repeated and repeated like a
positivist experiment or a positivist logical argument. The repetition of senselessness. Our wars
become senseless when they have no myths. Guadalcanal, Inchon, My Lai: battles, casualties,
graves (at best); statistics of firepower and body-count—but no myths. The reign of quantity, utterly
literal. Lacking a mythical perspective that pays homage to the God in war, we run
the dangers of both war 'breaking out' and 'loving war too much'—and a third one:
not being able to bring a war to a proper close. The Allies' demand for
"unconditional surrender" only prolonged the Second World War, giving
"justification" for the atomic bomb. Polybius and Talleyrand knew better: masters of war know how
and where and when to ease out the God's fury. The very idea of an unconditional surrender evokes the blind rage
of Mars caecus, insanus, the last-ditch suicidal effort. Surrender requires ritual, a rite de sortie that
honors the God and allows his warriors to separate themselves from his dominion.
K – CULP
 1NC
The affirmative’s politics of speaking truth to power is a classic liberal tactic that
shores up resistance, prevents horizontal organizations, and invests in a false
fantasy of revolutionary politics that can only feed into the symbolic economy
which makes forms the backbone of militarism
Culp 9 (Andrew, PhD from Ohio State, teaches Media History and Theory in the MA Program
in Aesthetics and Politics and the School of Critical Studies at CalArts, “Dispute or Disrupt?
Desire and Violence in Protests Against the Iraq War” file:///C:/Users/crumb/Downloads/6114-
Article%20Text-13537-1-10-20160226.htm)NFleming
The movement against the Iraq War began with incredible force. At this time, the leading anti-war
narrative espoused the strength of a vibrant civil society in opposition to the Bush Administration’s
march to war. Riding high from the successes of the alter-globalization demonstrations, most notably a recent European Social
Forum, the movement emphasized the importance of global popular opinion as the voice the people.[xxiv] Numbers swelled,
and on February 15, 2003, protest against the Iraq War drew anywhere between six and thirty million
people in over 600 cities worldwide.[xxv] The event was championed as the loudest and clearest message ever sent by
civil society. One New York Times columnist was so amazed by the epoch-defining nature of the event that he wrote, “there may still
be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.”[xxvi] This intervention unfortunately
failed to prevent the war. In hindsight, it is obvious that the message was transmitted clearly but did
not have the intended effects on those who had their hands on the levers of state power.
Exasperated by the failure to prevent the Iraq War, the previously vibrant anti-war movement took steps to re-unify itself. So at the
June 2003 United for Peace and Justice National Convention, a lengthy unity statement was constructed to build a united front to
end the war.[xxvii] After Bush was reelected in 2004 and the search for weapons of mass destruction was officially called off,
however, a number of groups became increasingly confrontational.[xxviii] The first step in the turn toward
confrontation was to construct a line in the sand through a system of identification that ran
parallel to Bush’s “with us or against us.”[xxix] This polarizing identification had two important
parts: ad hominem attacks on President Bush’s personality, and an ‘I Told You So’ narrative repeated by
movement celebrities. To spread their message, liberals and progressives brought their case against the war
before the court of public opinion. A small group of celebrities provided the public face of the criticism, with each
wearing affiliations on their sleeves as if to point supporters toward the organization of their choice. Of those media personalities,
the most vocal was Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed while serving as a solider in Iraq. Her presence at an action at a mass
demonstration in the new phase in the anti-war movement in September 2005 is worth describing in detail. Sheehan requested a
meeting with the President to discuss her son’s death in early August of 2005.[xxx] During this new phase of anti-war activism, she
continued to publicly request these meetings while following the president around the country. Later that September while in
Washington for an anti-war demonstration, Sheehan submitted an additional request with The Gold Star Families for Peace, which
was flanked by religious leaders who opposed the war in Iraq.[xxxi] They began by approaching the guardhouse at the front of the
White House gates. The guards quickly rebuffed the protestors and delivered clear directions – those who chose to stay next to the
White House fence would be arrested. Participants calmly made their decisions, and after twenty minutes, a small string of police
wagons showed up and the slow procession of arrests began. This action was the conclusion to a weekend of demonstrations against
the Iraq War entitled “Operation Ceasefire.” The events brought together hundreds of thousands of people from around the world to
participate in a mass march on Washington, D.C. Many smaller actions and demonstrations punctuated the large-scale events of the
weekend, but the civil resistance at the White House was the most notable one. Buoyed by good feelings from the previous events,
nearly four hundred people were arrested at the White House on the final day. “Our request was, to our immense shock and
surprise, denied,” wrote Sheehan on September 26th, immediately after her arrest.[xxxii] President Bush was the target of the White
House protest, although it was common knowledge that he was not in Washington that weekend – making Sheehan’s “immense
shock and surprise” at being refused a meeting with the President at the White House appear disingenuous and prefigured. Sheehan
made her request in order for it to be refused, which reduced the potential of her actions to their rhetorical effects. Emphasizing her
struggle to generate and circulate her challenge through the rhetoric of public grief, Sheehan noted that she was most disappointed
that the capitol guards “wouldn’t even deliver any letter or pictures of our killed loved ones to the White House.”[xxxiii] The Bush
Administration’s strategy of ignoring Sheehan followed a long presidential history of dismissing protest. Richard Nixon had
famously declared, “under no circumstances will I be affected whatever” by public opposition to the Vietnam War.[xxxiv] And even
though President Bush and his officials had met with Sheehan a few times, once they modified their policy to snub her, she was
painted as nothing but a bitter mother. Their approach follows a common narrative that claims that “a refusal to forgive and forget”
as strong as Sheehan’s is not worth responding to because embittered individuals simply “recite one’s angry litany of loss long past
the time others may care to listen or sympathize.”[xxxv] The political import of such a condemnation – “you’re so bitter” – has been
made clear by feminist scholars who show the accusation of bitterness is “designed to silence the sufferer” by marking what is “of
dismissible interest,” which designates certain losses as not worthy of public mourning.[xxxvi] This strategy of dismissal ultimately
succeeded. Although words of righteous indignation filled the streets of Washington and flowed freely
from the Capitol Mall to the White House,Operation Ceasefire failed to change the course of the Iraq War.
As the feminist scholars insist, emotion itself is communicative . Therefore, the question remains: what was
being communicated, and why did it fail? The Politics of Identification: Or, Bush’s Personality Problem In addition
to critique the incoherent discourses justifying the Iraq War, Cindy Sheehan and the Gold Star Families for Peace sought moral
clarity by also going after Bush for the killing of innocents. In doing so, they personalized their rhetoric in the hope that it would
dramatize the divide between the anti-war movements message of reconciliation and Bush’s personal “crusade.”[xxxvii] Sheehan
had already written that President Bush had shown “arrogance,” had “nothing in his eyes,” and lacked “any real compassion” during
a 2004 meeting.[xxxviii] But she was further enraged when, in a speech on August 3, 2005, President Bush said that US troops killed
in Iraq had committed a sacrifice “made in a noble cause.”[xxxix] Sheehan, certain that the causes for the war were ignoble, was
confident that the President would be unable to articulate the noble cause when pressed to do so. Despite Sheehan’s message being
directed at the causes of the Iraq War, and the fact that the Bush Administration’s strategy of silence was a matter of political
calculation rather than personal insult, her approach encouraged additional personal attacks on the President’s character.
Consequently, a claim that had already existed at the margins of the anti-war movement became its most popular theme: the Iraq
War was the result of a personality problem. In his book Beyond Sexuality, Tim Dean criticizes a politics of identification particular
to how identification disputes power through rhetorical exclusion and regulation of “inside / outside or human / abject borders.”[xl]
By characterizing Bush as a soulless man beyond understanding, Sheehan founded her rhetorical critique of the war on a deep
personal incommensurability that she substantiated even further by publicly connecting her disdain for him through the intense loss
of her son. Dean argues that such identification becomes a mechanism for a restrictive, paranoid politics
of binarity, especially if subjectivity is treated as a function of one’s self-image rather than the
psychic unconscious (which would make it social, historical, and cultural).[xli] In addition to describing Sheehan’s rhetoric,
the politics of identification also helps explain the conservative assault on Sheehan, which
utilized a double bind within the incoherent discourses justifying the war to turn the criticisms
she leveled at Bush back on her. The usual crowd of right-wing pundits – Matt Drudge, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh –
attacked Sheehan by challenging her integrity as a mother and as an American. Limbaugh, for instance, argued that Sheehan was
faking her case.[xlii] Drudge went after Sheehan by publicly releasing an email written by a member of her extended family accusing
Sheehan of “promoting her own personal agenda and notoriety at the expense of her son’s good name and reputation,” and of
standing at odds with “the rest of the Sheehan Family” that “supports the troops, our country, and our President, silently, with
prayer and respect.”[xliii] These attacks share in the political strategy Sheehan herself constructed – she sought to use her position
as the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq to undermine Bush and other high profile figures of his administration. Consequently,
conservative criticism did not focus on her politics, but the authenticity of her claims, by suggesting that she was an unloving parent
politically profiting from the death of her son. This starkly demonstrates the binarist for-or-against structure of the politics of
identification; these arguments were nearly the same ones Sheehan brought against Bush – that Bush really lied about the
justifications for going to war with Iraq and that he only went to war to profit himself and his friends. Mary Thomas and
Mathew Coleman further problematize the economy of ridicule directed at Bush by providing
geopolitical arguments against treating the Iraq War as a personality problem .[xliv] Rhetorically
opposing United States policy by narrowly criticizing Bush, they argue, separates the identity of Bush from
the symbolic power that he wields and falls short of challenging whatever geopolitical power
extends beyond Bush’s term as President.[xlv] To tie the Iraq War to Bush, for instance, gives an artificial beginning
and expiration date to a complex of power that extends far beyond the office of the President or even the Pentagon. Proving the
veracity of Thomas and Coleman’s claims, the anti-war movement was so deeply invested in opposing Bush that it lost most of its
momentum when Barack Obama took office.[xlvi] The emotional relief to have Bush gone was made evident when President Obama
was given the Nobel Peace Prize simply for setting a “new climate” in Washington.[xlvii] Yet his charismatic approach does not
indicate a change in the two-party monopoly that is the foundation for American governance – the War on Terror has continued and
the military industrial complex only expanded.[xlviii] In fact, the Obama Administration serves as a case in point
of how the liberal and conservative forms of sovereignty share the same structure of authority –
while one governs, the other recharges until the pendulum swings in the opposite direction. [xlix]
So, with a nation of people driving around with ‘Obama for Peace’ bumper stickers on their cars, the United States has enlarged its
domestic spying practices, continued extraordinary rendition, bombed Yemen and Libya, extended the Afghanistan War, and
intensified conflicts through drone warfare.[l] Capturing Interest: Or, The Narrative of ‘I Told You So’ Much of the anti-
war sentiment was expressed in the register of truth and truth alone . For a dramatic example of the anti-
war attempt to win the war through truth-statements, consider Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11, which was released a few
months before the 2004 general election and became the top-grossing documentary of all time.[li] In his signature style, Moore
combined investigative journalism and folksy outrage to criticize Bush, his handling of the War on Terror, and the media campaign
that accompanied the Iraq War. Although Moore’s film was massively popular, it did not focus on political strategy or social
movement, but rather a form of consciousness-raising that ‘speaks truth power.’ The political efficacy of speaking
truth to power deserves examination. Being ‘right’ or ‘correct’ only has an indirect
ability to effect change. Truth alone does not transform reality. Rather, “‘Truth’ is
to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production,
regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements. ‘Truth’ is linked
in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to
effects of power which it induces and which extend it .”[lii] Therefore, as crowds of anti-war
protests paraded around with caricatures of Bush, they were not standing on the authority of
undeniable truths but forging a certain deployment of bodies and signs for a political purpose.
The point of this paper is not to critique the rhetoric of a single person. In fact, analyzing Sheehan as a celebrity and not as a person
reveals a wider structure of power. In the summer of 2005, the anti-war movement participated in celebrity culture as much as other
protest groups of the time – while Cindy Sheehan began a campout in front of the President’s ranch, Bono and a string of music
superstars headlined the Live 8 concerts for Live Aid.[liii] Celebrity can, in fact, be a site of struggle rather than a dead-end for
politics.[liv] However, as Jeremy Gilbert warns, celebrity is expressive of the anti-democratic nature of capitalism, particularly when
the collective identity of a group is dependent on a single individual.[lv] Yet movement celebrities like Sheehan can be
described in terms of what Steve Cross and Jo Littler call “assemblages of emulation,” which “harnesses the
potential of people to dream” of a celebrity in a collection of affects that “speaks of connections
that can be magnified.”[lvi] Considered in these terms, the role of movement celebrities against the Iraq War becomes clear:
they produced and directed subjects who repeated an ‘I Told You So’ narrative in order to share in the pleasure of opposing the Iraq
War. Protest does not introduce truth into public discourse as if the nation is engaged in a single
monolithic discussion, but as Lauren Berlant argues, it creates “affect worlds” where people are bound
by “affective projections of a constantly negotiated common interestedness .”[lvii] The clearest
demonstrations of this affective projection are slogans over the false pretenses for war, which carried with them strong affective
charges of pleasure. On their face, the protest mobilized arguments that suggested that if President Bush and his war planners were
proven factually incorrect then the war would become untenable. Yet the most immediate effect of the expression was the
constitution of a counter-public based in the pleasure of ‘sharing in the truth.’ As a consequence, the anti-war movement
was built on strong affective ties without an immediately comprehensible connection between
the strength of its communities and a political plan to end the war. While the movement may have been
impaired by a lack of political strategy, even when it was equipped with cogent strategies, the anti-war left found it difficult to
translate publics that shared different affective sentiments. Affective pleasure allowed the anti-war
establishment to stay the course even after the Republicans defeated John Kerry in the 2004 election
by casting his opposition to the Iraq War as the position of an elitist intellectual – for in defeat, members of the peace movement had
something to be proud about: they were part of a well-defined group with strong, recognizable voices that knew the Iraq War was a
bad idea from the start. Ultimately, the anti-war movement had a lot of emotion that never converted into political force.
Much like the personalized criticism of Bush, the
pleasure of the ‘I Told You So’ narrative relied on the
binary, paranoid, and defensive quality of a politics of identification . In fact, many self-certain liberals
became so dead-set on proving the Iraq War wrong that they became petty policy experts and party hacks with politics no better
than those on Capitol Hill. Celebrities played a large part in this cultivation of policy expertise. Martin Sheen took a break from
playing a president on television to give the nation policy advice,[lviii] and Sean Penn, actor turned international peace delegate,
took trips to Iraq so that he could speak “on behalf of the American dead and wounded” from personal experience.[lix] These self-
styled policy wonks enacted a classic politics of performativity, whose aim is to unsettle the
nature of mastery and reveal its contingent nature. [lx] By imitating subjects of power, such
performances aim to dispel belief in the source of that power . The anti-war movement was soon able to
marshal its own experts who could mimic and sometimes even out-perform the policy analysts and war planners. These experts
usually employed ‘law and order’ rhetoric that lauded law respecting-citizens who were doing their best
to hold a renegade President and his cabinet in check. One example was the effort to impeach President Bush, which was launched in
earnest with Representative John Conyers filing a resolution in late 2005 to create an investigative committee to consider
impeachment.[lxi] However, as Tim Dean argues, performances of power that aim to rhetorically reveal or
critique power misrecognize that power is structured by a very real desire with a
material basis that cannot be disputed – only directed or disrupted. Attempts to dispute the
official policy behind the Iraq War by being ‘more royal than the queen’ thus ended predictably: movement
celebrities would trot out military reports or international law chapter and verse without
suggesting how such policy prowess would end the war . And if anything was certain, it was that the Bush
Administration was not soliciting public advice on how to run the war. So, as long as the self-righteous liberals
obsessed over the rightness of their policy position, they traded the struggle over political power
for the performance of expertise. To summarize, the Bush Administration’s justification of the Iraq War can be
analyzed through queer critiques of rhetoricality, such as Halperin’s theory about the incoherence of homophobic discourses, which
help explain why rhetorical opposition was often ineffective. The shifting justifications for the war given by the Bush Administration
created a moving target held together by the collective trauma of 9/11 and fantasies that connect pleasure and violence. Rhetorical
attempts to dispute administration justifications one-by-one did not build an effective political opposition to the war, in part because
of their resulting rhetoric, which cast the war as a result of a presidential personality problem and offered an ‘I Told You So’
narrative. The first rhet oric
produced a binarist politics of identification that mirrored
Bush’s own divide “you are either with us or against us” approach that impeded a
deeper analysis of the geopolitical effects of American power. The second rhetoric produced
emotional publics fixed on self-righteous shared truths at the expense of political strategy.
That attachment to symbolic political change causes ressentiment
which turns the case
Berlant 11 (Lauren, George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago, “Cruel
Optimism” p. 33-36) NCF
All attachments are optimistic. When we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking
about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for
us. This cluster of promises could seem embedded in a person, a thing , an institution, a text,
a norm, a bunch of cells, smells, a good idea —whatever. To phrase “the object of desire” as a
cluster of promises is to allow us to encounter what’s incoherent or enigmatic in our attachments, not
as confrmation of our irrationality but as an explanation of our sense of our endurance in the
object, insofar as proximity to the object means proximity to the cluster of things that the object
promises, some of which may be clear to us and good for us while others, not so much. Thus attachments
do not all feel optimistic : one might dread, for example, returning to a scene of hunger, or
longing, or the slapstick reiteration of a lover’s or parent’s predictable distortions. But being drawn to return to
the scene where the object hovers in its potentialities is the operation of optimism
as an affective form . In optimism, the subject leans toward promises contained within the
present moment of the encounter with her object.1 In the introduction I described “cruel optimism” as a
relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered
either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic . What’s cruel about these
attachments, and not merely inconvenient or tragic, is that the subjects who have x in their lives
might not well endure the loss of their object /scene of desire, even though its presence
threatens their well- being , because whatever the content of the attachment is, the continuity of its form
provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on
and to look forward to being in the world. This phrase points to a condition diferent from that of melancholia,
which is enacted in the subject’s desire to temporize an experience of the loss of an object / scene with
which she has invested her ego continuity. Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an
attachment to a signifcantly problematic object . One more thing: sometimes, the cruelty of an
optimistic attachment is more easily perceived by an analyst who observes the cost of someone’s
or some group’s attachment to x, since often persons and communities focus on some aspects of their
relation to an object/world while disregarding others.2 But if the cruelty of an attachment is
experienced by someone/some group, even in a subtle fashion, the fear is that the loss of the promising
object/scene itself will defeat the capacity to have any hope about anything . Often this fear of loss of a
scene of optimism as such is unstated and only experienced in a sudden incapacity to
manage startling situations , as we will see throughout this book. One might point out that all objects/scenes of
desire are problematic, in that investments in them and projections onto them are less about them than about what cluster of desires
and afects we can manage to keep magnetized to them. I have indeed wondered whether all optimism is cruel, because the
experience of loss of the conditions of its reproduction can be so breathtakingly bad , just as the threat of the
loss of x in the scope of one’s attachment drives can feel like a threat to living on itself. But some scenes of optimism are clearly
crueler than others: where cruel optimism operates, Cruel Optimism 25 the very vitalizing or animating
potency of an object/scene of desire contributes to the attrition of the very thriving that is supposed to be made
possible in the work of attachment in the first place . This might point to something as banal as a scouring
love, but it also opens out to obsessive appetites, working for a living, patriotism, all kinds of things. One
makes affective bargains about the costliness of one’s attachments , usually unconscious ones, most of
which keep one in proximity to the scene of desire/attrition . Tis means that a poetics of attachment
always involves some splitting of of the story I can tell about wanting to be near x (as though x has
autonomous qualities) from the activity of the emotional habitus I have constructed, as a function of having x in my life, in order to
be able to project out my endurance in proximity to the complex of what x seems to offer and profer. To understand cruel optimism,
therefore, one must embark on an analysis of indirection , which provides a way to think about the
strange temporalities of projection into an enabling object that is also disabling. I learned how to do this from reading Barbara
Johnson’s work on apostrophe and free indirect discourse. In her poetics of indirection, each of these two rhetorical modes is shaped
by the ways a writing subjectivity conjures other ones so that, in a performance of fantasmatic
intersubjectivity , the writer gains superhuman observational authority , enabling a
performance of being that is made possible by the proximity of the objec t. Because this
aesthetic process is something like what I am describing in the optimism of attachment, I’ll describe a bit the shape of my
transference with her thought. In “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” my key referent here , Johnson tracks the
political consequences of apostrophe for what has become fetal personhood : a silent, afectively
present but physically displaced interlocutor (a lover, a fetus) is animated in speech as distant enough
for a conversation but close enough to be imaginable by the speaker in whose head the entire scene is
happening.3 But the condition of projected possibility , of a hearing that cannot take place in the terms of its
enunciation (“you” are not here, “you” are eternally belated to the conversation with you that I am imagining) creates a fake
present moment of intersubjectivity in which, nonetheless, a performance of address can take place. The
present moment is made possible by the fantasy of you, laden with the x qualities I can project onto you, given your
convenient absence. Apostrophe therefore appears to be a reaching out to a you, a direct movement from place x to place y, but it is
actually a turning back, an animating of a receiver on behalf of the desire to make something happen now that realizes something in
the speaker, makes the speaker more or diferently possible, because she has admitted, in a sense, the importance of speaking for, as,
and to, two—but only under the condition, and illusion, that the two are really (in) one. Apostrophe is thus an indirect,
unstable, physically impossible but phenomenologically vitalizing movement of rhetorical
animation that permits subjects to suspend themselves in the optimism of a potential occupation of the
same psychic space of others , the objects of desire who make you possible (by having some promising qualities, but
also by not being there).4 Later work, such as in “Muteness Envy,” elaborates Johnson’s description of the gendered rhetorical
politics of this projection of voluble intersubjectivity.5 The paradox remains that the lush submerging of one
consciousness into another requires a double negation: of the speaker’s boundaries,
so s/he can grow bigger in rhetorical proximity to the object of desire; and of the
spoken of, who is more or less a powerful mute placeholder providing an
opportunity for the speaker’s imagination of her/his/their fourishing. Of course, existentially and
psychoanalytically speaking, intersubjectivity is impossible . It is a wish, a desire, and a demand for an
enduring sense of being with and in x and is related to that big knot that marks the
indeterminate relation between a feeling of recognition and misrecognition. As chapter 4 argues at greater length,
recognition is the misrecognition you can bear, a transaction that afirms you without , again,
necessarily feeling good or being accurate (it might idealize, it might afrm your monstrosity, it might mirror your desire to
be minimal enough to live under the radar, it might feel just right, and so on).6 To elaborate the tragicomedy of intersubjective
misrecognition as a kind of realism, Johnson’s work on projection mines the projective, boundary- dissolving spaces of attachment
to the object of address, who must be absent in order for the desiring subject of intersubjectivity to get some traction, to stabilize her
proximity to the object/scene of promise. When Johnson turns to free indirect discourse, with its circulation of merged and
submerged observational subjectivity, the projection of the desire for intersubjectivity has even less
pernicious outcomes.7 In a narrator’s partial- merging with a character’s consciousness, say, free indirect discourse
performs the impossibility of locating an observational intelligence in one or any body, and therefore forces the reader to
transact a diferent, more open relation of unfolding to what she is reading, judging, being, and
thinking she understands. In Johnson’s work such a transformative transaction through reading/speaking “unfolds” the subject in a
good way, despite whatever desires she may have not to become signifcantly diferent.8 In this, her work predicted the aesthetics of
subjective interpenetration more recently advanced by Tim Dean’s Levinasian and Leo Bersani’s psychoanalytic optimism about the
cognitive- ethical decision to become transformed by a project of limited intersubjectivity, a letting in of the Other’s being without
any claim to knowledge of what the intimate Other is like.9 Like Johnson’s work on projection, their focus is on the
optimism of attachment, and is often itself optimistic about the negations and extensions of
personhood that forms of suspended intersubjectivity demand from the lover/reader . What follows
is not so buoyant: this chapter elaborates on and politicizes Freud’s observation that “ people never willingly
abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is already
beckoning to them.” 10 Eve Sedgwick describes Melanie Klein’s depressive position as an orientation toward inducing a
circuit of repair for a broken relation to the world.11 The politically depressed position exacerbates the
classic posture by raising a problem of attachment style in relation to a conflict of aims . The
political depressive might be cool, cynical, shut of, searingly rational, or averse, and yet,
having adopted a mode that might be called detachment, may not really be detached at all, but navigating an ongoing
and sustaining relation to the scene and circuit of optimism and disappointment. (Te seeming
detachment of rationality, for example, is not a detachment at all, but an emotional style associated normatively with a rhetorical
practice.)
Vote negative to refuse the affirmative’s politics of identification and instead clog
the symbolic machinery of popular sovereignty – their optimistic investment in the
Real is nothing more than a violent policing of liberal boundaries draped in the
language of pseudo-radical “critical knowledge production.” In the face of this, you
ought to engage a politic of communal desire which dwells in the symbolic trauma
intrinsic to being a body differentiated by language.
Culp 9 (Andrew, PhD from Ohio State, teaches Media History and Theory in the MA Program
in Aesthetics and Politics and the School of Critical Studies at CalArts, “Dispute or Disrupt?
Desire and Violence in Protests Against the Iraq War” file:///C:/Users/crumb/Downloads/6114-
Article%20Text-13537-1-10-20160226.htm)NFleming
Soon before President Bush left office, he had a pair of shoes thrown at him during a press conference on his farewell journey to
Iraq. The thrower was Muntadhar al-Zaidi, an Iraqi journalist upset with the American occupation of his country. In the middle of
the press conference, al-Zaidi stood up, yelled, “This is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog,” and threw a shoe at Bush.
[lxii] Before security personnel were able to intervene, al-Zaidi launched another shoe, saying, “This is for the widows and orphans
and all those killed in Iraq.” Showing just how unaffected he was by the whole ordeal, Bush later laughed it off by saying, “If you
want the facts, it’s a size 10 shoe that he threw,” further shrugging of the protest with the comment, “I don’t know what the guy’s
cause was. I didn’t feel the least bit threatened by it.”[lxiii] As a strategy of confrontation, al-Zaidi’s shoe-ing follows Voltairine de
Cleyre’s classic definition of direct action as one of the “spontaneous retorts of those who feel oppressed by a situation.”[lxiv]
Moreover, it matches the essential characteristics outlined by direct action advocates, being confrontational, public, disruptive, and
illegal.[lxv] Yet it was unable to affect Bush, probably because it was immediately contained by the politics of identification, which
raises an important question: can other types of embodied protest disrupt power? Tim Dean proposes a strategy to
break through the strict boundary policing employed by the politics of identification : attend
to the signs produced by bodies that cannot be dismissed through signification. To find these
signs, he argues for a distinction between “suave bodies” and “bodies that mutter .”[lxvi] As described
above, suave bodies are those bodies that inscribe desire as suasive force , which gives way to the
oppositional power of signification essential to the politics of identification. Bodies that mutter, in
contrast, are an effect of the incommensurability of the body and the subject – this
failure produces desire, which they communicate by speaking “almost inaudibly,”
“unintelligibly,” and producing signs “that are not immediately legible even as
something requiring reading .”[lxvii] Or to say it another way: it is a body that seeks
recognition but does not know how to find it . While such a muttering body is usually in pain, there are
some interesting examples of bodies employing the effects of this dissatisfaction to politically productive ends. The queer failure of
desire haunts the “dualistic economy” of identification that is organized “in terms of oppositions.”[lxviii] These oppositions are
inherently unstable, which has been made visible as gender binaries and the opposition between straight and gay identities are
deconstructed in increasingly public ways. As Dean notes , the social threat posed through the unraveling of
these binaries explains both the cultural campaigns launched to retrench them but also the
intensely personal violence unleashed “when this instability becomes too evident .”[lxix]
Psychoanalytically, the violent securing of these binaries is done through signification, which
“exceeds expressive intention and consciousness” to restore subjective identification .[lxx] The
consequence is “symbolic alienation” as a subjective condition, which describes the experience of subjective division enforced
through the linguistic machine of the symbolic.[lxxi] How do bodies that mutter change embodied protest? Dean’s answer comes
from the queer potential in “the inability of language to say everything.”[lxxii] According to Dean, the rhetorical
demystification of persuasion – such as a critique of the persuasive power of advertising to sell forms of sexual and social
relations – is less persuasive than the form of persuasion it is critiquing.[lxxiii] And because rhetorical
critique is unable to “cancel the opposing persuasive form” and often leaves advertising’s suasive
power “spectacularly undiminished,” Dean is convinced that confrontations with persuasion must
come from something beyond rhetoric.[ lxxiv] Instead of challenging power at the level of signification – as do
the two discursive strategies of personal attacks and ‘I Told You So’ narratives outlined in the first part of this paper – Dean suggests
that political strategy should engage with the queerness of the Lacanian Rea l, which is the aspect of
While the
experience where “all words cease and all categories fail,” and is therefore “the object of anxiety par excellence.”[lxxv]
Real is elusive, its effects can be observed in the mismatch between the body and language . The
body, as Dean argues, is a site of encoding – language cuts up and maps the body by dissecting it with grids
and networks .[lxxvi] Language is “like a net that settles over the body” that “has a ripple-like
effect on human subjects.”[lxxvii] And as language “hits the body,” he writes, “its impact produces not merely the
subject of the signifier but also the subject of desire.”[lxxviii] For while the body and the symbols that intersect it never really match
up, it is those mismatches that generate desire. Good and bad fits between bodies and language abound. Especially bad fits cause
striking ruptures, and intense, often uncontrollable flows of desire that make up queerness.[lxxix] And while
all bodies
contain zones of resistance that repel symbolization , queer subjects of desire are an effect of
symbolic disruption.[lxxx]The conventional approach to bodies in politics is direct action, which uses their physical presence
to disrupt a scene. Al-Zaidi’s “shoeing” of Bush, for instance, instigated a public confrontation through the material power of a
person and his shoes. The challenge of direct action, however, is that the political of identification prefigures the response to
disruption. So in al-Zaidi’s case, although he clearly stated his motivations (but in Arabic and not English), Bush never became
bodies that mutter circumvent the
aware of them. This paper thus ‘queers direct action’ by studying how
politics of identification by producing subjects of desire, in particular, how they
blur the binary boundaries established through rhetoric and unleash a politics of
desire based in collective trauma. “The Ground Noise and the Static”: The Queer Effects of Bodies that Mutter
In early September 2008, thousands of anarchists and other radicals descended on the Republican National Convention in the Twin
Cities to ‘crash the party.’[lxxxi] The protests lost focus after the McCain campaign cancelled the first day of the convention –
possibly nervous about the impending protests, even though the official claim was that the cancellation was to wait for Hurricane
Gustav to make landfall.[lxxxii] Confrontations between riot police and anarchists were numerous, but for days, a huge police force
outnumbered and outmaneuvered them, and prevented them from being more than a mild nuisance.[lxxxiii] Yet on Thursday night
during McCain’s acceptance speech as the Republican Party nominee for President, a series of Code Pink anti-war protestors rose
from the gallery and interrupted the event.[lxxxiv] McCain, looking irritated, dismissed the protestor by saying “Americans want us
to stop yelling at each other, ok?”[lxxxv] Another protestor soon interrupted McCain. Subsequently, McCain was so distracted that
he stopped his speech to directly address the protests and urged the audience to ignore them. Those protests, along with McCain’s
off-the-cuff responses, soon became the most memorable part of an otherwise routine speech. Beyond Signification: Or, How to
Have a Good Time Strictly speaking, it was the Republican audience that interrupted McCain’s speech and not the Code Pink
protestors. Every time a lonely protestor raised their voice, a whole chorus of ‘USA! USA!’ thundered through the convention center
to drown them out. In that way, the delegates turned potentially insignificant irritations into event-shaping disruptions. If the crowd
had responded as they did the day before, when two Code Pink protestors rushed toward the stage during Sarah Palin’s speech only
to be snatched by the Secret Service at the last moment, then McCain would have continued without interruption.[lxxxvi] Yet it
appeared difficult to calm down McCain’s chanting crowd – a group so incensed by the mere presence of a dissenter in their midst
that they were compelled to match her verbal outbursts with an overwhelming vocal response of their own. This excessive
response is indicative of the paranoia present in a group obsessed with the politics of
identification – so anxious to erase an otherwise minor disruption, the intensity of the crowd’s
reaction reveals the precarity of the imaginary fantasies that bind together state
discourses. Caught within a perspective that structures relations in terms of identity and
opposition, the politics of identification leads to an aggressive policing of borders that
reacts violently to anything that evades categorization .[lxxxvii] Although the Code Pink interruption
provoked a massive outburst from the Republican crowd, they showed how bodies could jam political discourse, demonstrating a
resistant bodies can cause
subversion of the usual politics of identity. The Code Pink interruption elucidates how
unspeakable irruptions of the Real and thus makes language sputter .[lxxxviii] During their
interruption, McCain’s speech began to spit and sputter, as he lost his breath and forgot his words. By calling their actions ‘ground
noise and static,’ McCain made it clear that he did not know, nor did he care to know, the cause of the protestors interrupting him.
Yet in the few short moments when McCain was forced off his script, there was a feeling that anything could happen. Far from any
microphone, and then repeatedly shouted down, the protestors were stripped of coherent speech. All the protestors had left were
their bodies and whatever howls they could let out while being dragged away. But the relative success of their protest
demonstrates a basic point about the connection of the body and politics illustrated at the Republican
Convention in 2008, but also in the city streets across the South during the civil rights movement when
black and white youth were assaulted by firehouses and bitten by dogs; regardless of all of the
new and innovative forms of protest that have followed the boom in social and media
technologies of the twentieth century, the body remains the basic tool of protest – especially
when is not reduced to its suasive power. Even when discourse breaks down, the body continues to exert force. A strategy that
emerged during summit protests provides a useful example of the power of bodies the mutter. For years, the battle lines drawn by
politicians and bureaucrats trying to keep out protestors had led to the worst kinds of conflict. At the Free Trade Agreement of the
Americas summits in Quebec City in 2001 and Miami in 2003, for instance, protestors were met by fierce police repression. In
Miami, in particular, the police used a set of heavy-handed tactics that included “large scale pre-emptive arrests, deployment of
heavily armed, sometimes unidentifiable law enforcement officers who infringed protester rights, and the collection of intelligence
by police and others on activists engaged in lawful protest.”[lxxxix] When the tactic of radical clowning was
introduced, however, police attempts at crowd-control became more difficult. In addition to
lightening the mood, clown interventions disrupted the normal boundary-policing that allowed
business as usual to continue unperturbed. The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA), for instance,
dresses up in army fatigues and clown gear. At protests, CIRCA has used funny chants and disorder
for the purpose of distracting, confusing, and disrupting police lines. By introducing humor and hiccups
into the usual modes of identification, clowning disrupts the steely resolve of protesters and police alike . It is
not as if the clowns introduce confusion into identification itself, as it is fairly easy to distinguish between the police and someone in
a rainbow wig and full facepaint. But the clowns therefore exhibit a performance whose effects are not to
clarify identity but to disrupt it. Anarchist academic David Graeber has written about a protest where mass arrest seemed
all but inevitable.[xc] Penned in by the cops, a bandana- and mask-clad anarchist black bloc tried to
break through police lines on multiple occasions, but their militant tactics failed. Yet when a
group of people dressed up as goats, a group dressed as puppeteers, and the clown army began
an impromptu carnival with streamers, horns, and rubber mallets, “the tenor of the whole
event” changed, and the police lines gave way and everyone escaped arrest.[xci] Therefore, through a series
of movements, gestures, and slogans that are not immediately legible, clowning demonstrates the power of mobilizing bodies that
mutter. Radical clowning makes up for some of the problems found in rhetorical challenges to the Iraq War. While clowning
or the Code Pink disruptions did not derail the war, they show that little things like jokes, gaffes,
slips of the tongue, and misfires inevitably erupt when the official story breaks dow n. And it is
these unplanned utterances that haunt the fantasy of state control that paper over its
incoherent discourses. In contrast to the self-assured affective world sharing in the ‘I Told You So’ narrative, Benjamin Shepard
clowning functions as a bridge between multiple publics . Clowns connect
explains that
with the general public through pleasure to disrupt the usual barriers put up by the general
public, the media, and their opponents.[xcii] The key mechanism for creating these contact zones is performative
irony, which functions differently than simply treating the Iraq War as the result of a presidential personality problem. As L.M.
Bogad notes, t his
produces an economy of ridicule that provokes critical reflection that
dissolves the easy binary of a politics of identit y.[xciii] This ridicule visibly appropriates,
changes, and recasts discourses to publicly deconstruct them, as seen in a 2007 rally against the
KKK where a group of clowns disrupted the Nazi chant of ‘White Power!’ with ‘White Powder!’
and ‘White Flowers!’ while dancing and throwing flour and flowers in the air. [xciv] In effect, what
radical clowning produces are alternative forms of identities that are ambiguous and therefore “dynamic, shifting and unstable”
which challenge boundaries, power relations, and knowledge production.[xcv] Clowning is only one example of bodies that mutter,
however. Tim Dean warns that locating queerness in camp or parody focuses too much on the visible, which reintroduces
rhetoricality and the politics of identification through questions of naturalness, realness, and passing.[xcvi] This is not meant as a
challenge to clowning, which has proven to be effective in many instances, but as a provocation to study bodies with an even deeper
connection to the invisible realm of the Real and whose mutters are that much more subtle . In addition to blurring the
categories of the usual politics of identification , the Code Pink interruption of McCain’s speech illustrates
another capacity of subjects of desire: to generate events . Unlike many of the other direct actions at the
Republican Convention, which were quickly dismissed, the Code Pink disruption caused a specific type of rupture
that explains why McCain was compelled to continue addressing what he declared to be a non-event – these disruptions caused
trauma. As Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis write, psychoanalytic trauma is “an event in the
subject’s life defined by its intensity, by the subject’s incapacity to respond adequately to it, and
by the upheaval and long-lasting effects that it brings about in the psychical organization. ”[xcvii]
Therefore, it is McCain’s simultaneous dismissal of and inability to move beyond the interruption that constitutes trauma, and it is
this trauma that transformed the protests from mere actions into true events .
Consider an example that carries considerable historical weight – Mario Savio’s stirring speech during the Berkeley Free Speech
Movement urging others to use their bodies in direct action: There is a time when the operation of the machine
becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively
take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears, upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve
got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working
at all.[xcviii] Against the more traditional interpretation of Savio’s prescription, that bodies should be used to physically clog spaces
the suasive power of politics can be
of power, perhaps we should perform a more psychoanalytic reading – that
interrupted by jamming its symbolic machine with bodies that mutter, which
frustrate rhetorical attempts to contain the desiring force of bodies through the
politics of identification. Moreover, jamming the symbolic machine is not painless, it produces
trauma, but it is not the pain of an individual subject but a shared blockage with potentially
enormous effects. Such an incitement to anti-rhetorical protest calls for a redefinition of activism as trauma,
or more specifically, of activism as generating and sharing trauma. Douglas Crimp, Ann Cvetkovich, and others have
described queer activism during the AIDS crisis this way, yet it is rarely applied to other activism, in large part because of the
historical specificity of that moment and attempts to limit queerness to queer identity or ‘the queer community.’[xcix] To be clear,
this is not clinical trauma but its psychoanalytic version; one that emphasizes the jouissance of trauma as
an intense mixture of pleasure and pain that are felt in excessive experiences that evade
categorization.[c] Such activism furthermore calls for a distinction between traumatic testimony or the
inevitable trauma of being an activist, and actually putting oneself in traumatizing
situations in order to cause an upheaval . In contrast to the suasive power of Cindy Sheehan, who gave voice
to the trauma of losing a son to the Iraq War, the trauma generated and shared by a body that mutters comes from “the
incommensurability between the body and subject.”[ci] The queer power of bodies comes from the failure of
language to connect their inside and outside; the effect of which is subjective alienation , which is
spread by bodies that mutter. “All other sounds and substances emitted by the body’s orifices or at its
borders” thus provide the material for interventions that disrupt the false mastery of power
through unspeakable acts that draw on resources unique to every body, which upset the official story and
make it skip a beat.[cii] Ultimately, this redefinition of protest highlights the failures of the anti-war
movement. Although the movement held some of the largest protests ever recorded, their size alone was not enough to end the
war. While many feel that the anti-war movement needed more of the same – more people, more demonstrations, more people at
protest as sharing in bodily trauma offers a change of course .[ciii]
demonstrations –
Rather than looking for more convincing arguments or better ways to cut through
the noise, bodies that mutter produce ‘ground noise and static’ to undermine the
official story. And even though this form of protest was not the primary focus of the anti-war movement, its limited use still
resulted in memorable actions. Furthermore, if disruptions of this kind had been more common, the fragile pretense may have been
harder to maintain. But this redefinition of protest has profound and dangerous consequences. On the one hand, it is
profound because it promises to redirect desire from private pleasure and suffering – the joy of intimacy or
the sadness of losing a son – and transform these private emotions into shared political
experiences . Yet there are significant financial, social, and bodily costs that come with this form of activism, with some
immediately visible (being beaten by the police) while others are less so (legal fees, loss of wages, the stigma of criminality, familial
disapproval, mental trauma, stress and burnout). But forms of life that seem impossible for some may be
necessary for others, for as Sara Ahmed notes, queerness highlights how we are not all free, but more importantly, how we
are not all free in the same way. So on the other hand, using trauma as a lever for political change threatens to
unleash uncontrollable forces that could possibly open a utopian queer horizon but may also
grievously upset the modest lives people have built for themselves. The anxious reality of this proposition is its potential, for bodies
that mutter are more powerful and meaningful than the pleasurable politics of identification, but its power is often the result of pain.
 2NC – PERMUTATION – CODE
The permutation merely assimilates the alternative into a genocidal system of
value-making which is driven by the eradication of difference – only an absolute
break from the affirmative’s rhetorical approach to politics can solve
Shapiro 14. Alan Shapiro, senior lecturer at Offenbach Art and Design University in Germany,
“Jean Baudrillard and Albert Camus on the Simulacrum of Taking a Stance on War,”
International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 11, Number 2 (May, 2014)
The Military-Industrial Complex and the Vietnam War The stance of opposition to a war undertaken by America’s
’military-industrial complex’ (MIC), as President Dwight D. Eisenhower termed it in his Farewell Address to the nation on January
17, 1961 after spending 8 years as President, seems to be based on the assumption of the discursive viability
of projecting oneself into the imaginative space of being a sort of ‘shadow government of truth-
speakers’, empowered by democracy into the democratic position of being able to make ‘better’
decisions for the body politic of democracy than those who hold institutional power in political
economy and government. Most political discourse in the U.S., including the anti-war stance, seems to take
for granted the idea that we should clarify ‘our politics’ by imaginatively putting ourselves ‘in the
shoes’ of national strategists choosing among the policy options available. Apocalypse Now Jean Baudrillard expands our
sense of what is history because he does not operate with a strict separation between what are ‘the facts’ and what are the engaging
stories that we as a culture have written and enacted about important ‘historical’ events. Much of what we know about the
Holocaust, the Second World War, and the Vietnam War comes from Hollywood films about the Holocaust, the Second World War,
and the Vietnam War that we have seen. In his essay on Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 blockbuster Vietnam War movie Apocalypse
Now, Baudrillard writes that Coppola’s masterpiece is the continuation of the Vietnam War by other means. “Nothing else in the
world smells like that,” says Lt. Colonel Bill Kilgore – played by Robert Duvall – in the 2 hour and 33 minute film. “I love the smell
of napalm in the morning… It smells like victory.” The high-budget extravaganza was produced exactly the same way that America
fought in Vietnam, says Jean Baudrillard of the film made by director Francis Ford Coppola (Baudrillard 1981: 89-91). “ War
becomes film ,” Baudrillard writes of Coppola’s spectacularly successful cinematic creation. “ Film becomes war,
the two united by their shared overflowing of technology” (Ibid.: 89). There is implosion
or mutual contamination between ‘film becoming Virtual Reality’ and War. Think also of Steven Spielberg’s
Saving Private Ryan (1998): total immersion in the Virtual Reality of combat – an aesthetics of VR different from ‘critical distance’ –
as a new kind of ‘testimonial position’ with respect to war and atrocities. In Vietnam-slash-Apocalypse Now, War is a Drug Trip
and a God Trip, a psychedelic and pornographic carnival (Baudrillard 2010), a savage cannibalism
practiced by the Christians, a film before the shooting and a shoot before the filming, a vast machine of excessive special
effects, a ‘show of power’, a territorial lab for testing new weapons on human guinea pigs , and the
sacrificial jouissanceof throwing away billions of dollars – all these aspects alluded to or mentioned by
Baudrillard. Coppola’s film, according to Baudrillard, is the carrying on of an undeclared, unfinished and unending War. An
interminable Heart of Darkness. Baudrillard: Neither For Nor Against Jean Baudrillard is not ‘against war’, not even against specific
wars like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He says this explicitly in “Le masque de la guerre,” published in the Parisian daily
newspaper Libération, just prior to President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. Ni pour ni contre. Neither for nor against.
“This war is a non-event,” writes Baudrillard, “and it is absurd to take a stance on a non-event (Baudrillard
2003).” The
non-events of the Iraq War and the War on Terror opposed themselves to the event of
September 11th, 2001. Hostages of the Screen Baudrillard’s two most explicit texts about war are The Gulf War Did Not Take
Place (1991), written just before, during, and just after the Persian Gulf War of 1991 that was initiated by President George H.W.
Bush, and The Spirit of Terrorism (2002), written just after 9/11. At the very beginning of the essay “The Gulf War Will Not Take
Place,” the first of the three essays that comprise The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Baudrillard explains that non-war – which is
what the military-industrial complex or the (non-)war machine has become very adept at carrying out in the age of virtuality – “ is
characterised by that degenerate form of war which includes hostage manipulation and
negotiation (Baudrillard 1995: 24). The Eisenhower-coined term of the military-industrial complex is used by Baudrillard in his
essay "No Reprieve For Sarajevo," published in Libération, January 8, 1994. He sees the MIC as still operative yet in need of
conceptual upgrading. “Hostages and blackmail ,” Baudrillard continues in “The Gulf War Will Not Take Place,” “ are the
purest products of deterrence. The hostage has taken the place of the warrior. He has become the
principal actor, the simulacral protagonist, or rather, in his pure inaction, the protagoniser (le protagonisant) of non-war”
(Baurillard 1995: 24). And we, the television viewers of the non-war, are all in the situation of hostages, “ all of us as
information hostages on the world media stage” (Ibid.). Hostages of the screen, of the intoxication of the
media, dragged and drugged into a logic of deterrence, "we are no longer in a logic of the passage
from virtual to actual but in a hyperrealist logic of the deterrence of the real by the virtual ” (Ibid.:
27). Four Aspects of a Baudrillardian Theory of War The post-structure [the successor to a sociological structure with less stability
and with less of a center] of the (non-)war machine in the age of media virtuality has properties of binary/digital,
simulation/modeling, viral metastasis, and complex intricate paradoxical topology. Let us consider all four of these properties as
aspects of a Baudrillardian theory of war (or a theory of war in honour of Jean Baudrillard). War as Imposed Binary Choice First of
all, the post-structure of the (non-)war machine in the age of media virtuality has the property of binary/digital. It presents
itself to us through the dualistic structure of a forced binary choice, where the system obliges
each of us to take a position ‘for’ or ‘against’ war, or ‘for’ or ‘against ’ particular wars, as waged, for
example, by the Pentagon, the EU ‘humanitarian’ forces, or the surveillance state’s War on Terror. It is this very binary
logic of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ that is the news media discourse, the rhetoric of politicians, and the hybrid virtual-and-real-killing of the
screen and the bomb. Today, of course, the Internet has superceded television as the prevailing universal media (although there is
much convergence and combination of the two). And the Internet is much more interactive and participatory. There is much more
response. There is much less of a ‘spectacle’ than there was when Guy Debord and the Situationists
conceptualized their media theory in the 1960s. Yet everywhere that the ‘news media’ and the (non)-war
machine still prevail, everywhere that they are still massively influential, everywhere that they still
exercise their power, we are not quite liberated from the ‘speech without response’ described by the early Baudrillard. When
Muammar Gaddafi, the former dictator of Libya, was brutally killed by rebel forces on October 20, 2011, during the Libyan Civil
War, the event, having been filmed by a cell phone, was presented to worldwide viewers by almost all of the ‘news media’ as some
kind of triumph for ‘justice’, even though it was clearly a loss for democratic principles and the possible coming to light of priceless
information about the decades of atrocities committed by Gaddafi’s regime during a public trial which would never take place. The
the only authentic communicative exchange that is
later Baudrillard develops the powerful idea that
possible today in the context of over-saturation with, of and by simulacral media
pseudo-exchanges is an ‘impossible exchange ’. In the chapter “Living Coin: Singularity of the Phantasm”
in the book ImpossibleExchange (1999), Baudrillard elaborates his idea of a generalized economy (not the same as Bataille’s
principle of solar expenditure or the basing of a general economy on a solar economy): “ the reinvesting of the sphere of
all exchange by that which cannot possibly be exchanged” (Baudrillard 2001: 122-131, see also Baudrillard
1976). There is something of no-value at the heart of the economic order. Baudrillard provides the example of the film Indecent
Proposal (1993), in which the billionaire character John Gage, played by Robert Redford, in the setting of a Las Vegas casino,
purchases the sexual-amorous favours of the married woman character Diana Murphy, played by Demi Moore, for the sum of one
million dollars. As Baudrillard interprets the film, Redford seeks to possess the “unexchangeable part of this woman,” that portion of
herself that is outside of the exchange nexus for the simple reason that she herself does not own and therefore cannot sell what she
is. Baudrillard calls this “obliterating wealth in and through the sign of wealth (Baudrillard 2001: 123-124). In the moment of their
first meeting, Gage asks Murphy to bet a million dollars at the roulette table for him. She and his chips are wagered, thereby
establishing the shared valuelessness – in the sense of being outside the system of value – of both the clichéd legendary sum of one
million dollars and the enjoyment of and by this singular woman. The Model Precedes the Real In writing about
the Persian Gulf War in 1991, Baudrillard notes the victory of the model which precedes ‘t he
real’, the triumph of ‘war
processing’ (on analogy with ‘data processing’ and ‘word processing’), the predomination of virtual technologies. The post-
structure of the (non-)war machine in the age of media virtuality has the property of
simulation/modelling. There is the simulacrum of the disappeared “historical” referent of war,
and the triumph of informational and gaming technologies. Baudrillard writes in “The Gulf War: Is It Really Taking Place?”: “ The
victory of the model is more important than victory on the ground. Military success consecrates
the triumph of arms, but the programming success consecrates the defeat of time . War-processing,
the transparency of the model in the unfolding of the war, the strategy of relentless execution of a
program” (Baudrillard 1995: 55-56). In that non-war that ‘did not take place’, there was the emergence of an abstract, electronic,
speculative, informatic space. “Just as wealth is no longer measured by the ostentation of wealth but by the secret circulation of
speculative capital, so war is not measured by being waged but by its speculative unfolding in an abstract, electronic and
informational space, the same space in which capital moves” (Ibid.: 56). In addition to careful management of images
and information content, the true devastation of war is kept at bay from our perceptions by simulation technologies
ranging from the televisual screen to the military ‘smart weapons’ deployed from altitudes of tens of thousands of feet. During
months of preparation for the ‘war’, viewers experience endless military experts paraded across their screen, endlessly analyzing
scenarios before they happen. The pilot in his simulator cockpit, or the gunner in his high-tech tank, is surrounded by a virtual
environment and motion-dependent images which are the same whether he is in a war game training exercise or a ‘real engagement’.
A Non-Euclidean Spacetime The post-structure of the (non-)war machine in the age of media virtuality
has the property of complex intricate paradoxical topology . There is the “non-Euclidean”
spacetime of multiple refracting waves in an enigmatic hyperspace beyond any classical
geometry. In “The Gulf War: Is It Really Taking Place?,” Baudrillard (1995: 49-50) writes: At a certain speed, the
speed of information, things lose their sense… War implodes in real time, history implodes in
real time, all communication and all signification implode in real time … The space
of the event has become a hyperspace with multiple refractivity, and that the space of war
has become definitively non-Euclidean. To understand the complex non-Euclidean informational space of non-war,
we need a new mathematics, a new unconventional metric space. In mathematics, a metric space
is a set where a specific concept of distance between elements of the set is defined and implemented. Three-dimensional
Euclidean space – a way of thinking about space that belongs to the Western metaphysical ‘construction of reality’ as it was
originated by the Ancient Greek thinkers – corresponds to our ‘intuitive understanding’ of space . 1991 Persian
Gulf War Shortly before 7 PM on the evening of January 16, 1991 (January 17, early AM, in the Gulf), Network nightly news viewers
were informed that heavy bombing of strategic targets inside Iraq had been initiated. At 9 PM, President George H.W. Bush
enthusiastically told the viewing audience that “the liberation of Kuwait has begun.” Pentagon spokespersons explained that massive
pinpoint strikes by high-tech planes against carefully selected military sites and command headquarters had caught the Iraqis
entirely off guard. Reports of great success came in. The nation rejoiced. It was our grand celebration. We feted our triumph in the
Cold War. The glamorous high-tech weapons, developed and paid for over years, could finally be used in the real thing, and the
Soviets were nowhere in sight. We were back. After the wrenching stalemate of Vietnam, we could finally start again. The enemy
was an inert physical installation, a blip on a radar screen to be methodically darkened . The Fourth
Order of Simulacra The post-structure of the (non-)war machine in the age of media virtuality has the property of viral metastasis.
There is the news media becoming part of the terror. There are the surveillance policies of the state becoming part of the terror. In
the essay “After the Orgy” in the book The Transparency of Evil, Baudrillard writes of the “ epidemic of simulation,” a
networked mode of fractal or viral dispersal. Updating his famous theses of “the three orders of
simulacra” (in Symbolic Exchange and Death) and “the precession of simulacra” (in Simulacra and Simulation), he
seeks to introduce “a new particle into the microphysics of simulacra (Baudrillard 1993: 5): The first of
these stages had a natural referent, and value developed on the basis of a natural use of the world. The second was founded on a
general equivalence, and value developed by reference to a logic of the commodity. The third is governed by a code, and value
develops here by reference to a set of models. At the fourth, the fractal (or viral, or radiant) stage of value, there is no
point of reference at all, and value radiates in all directions …(Ibid.: 5, 7). This is the fractal or viral stage of
fourth-order simulacra. In Baudrillard’s post-simulation epistème or "epidemic of simulation," value - if that term is still appropriate
- radiates in all directions in a cancerous metastasis. There is "no relationship between cause and effect, merely
viral relationships between one effect and another ” (Ibid.: 108). All spheres of society pass into their
free-floating, excessive, and ecstatic form. September 11, 2001 In “The Spirit of Terrorism,” the first essay of the book
The Spirit of Terrorism(2002), Baudrillard writes of the event of September 11, 2001: The more concentrated the system becomes
globally, ultimately forming one single network, the more it becomes vulnerable at a single point (already a single little Filipino
hacker had managed, from the the dark recesses of his portable computer, to launch the ‘I love you’ virus, which circled the globe
devastating entire networks)…
 2NC – PERMUTATION – DESIRE

Only a radical break from the affirmative’s system of desire can solve – the
permutation is a neurotic disavowel of reality which demands seeks complete
political congruency where there is none – causes lash-out and externalization of
fear
Zizek 08 [Slavoj, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at
University of London, Senior Researcher at the Institute of Sociology at University of Llubljana,
the Elvis of cultural theory, former candidate for Slovenian presidency, For They Know Not
What They Do, p.241-3]
This predominance of the superego over the law disturbs the relationship of knowledge and
belief that determines our everyday ideological horizon: the gap between (real) knowledge and (symbolic) belief.
We can illustrate it with the well-known psychological experience of when we say of something (as a rule terrible, traumatic) "I
know that it is so, but nevertheless I can't believe it": the traumatic knowledge of reality
remains outside the Symbolic, the symbolic articulation continues to operate as if
we do not know , and the "time for understanding" is necessary for this knowledge to be
integrated into our symbolic universe.2 3 This kind of gap between knowledge and belief, in so far as
both are "conscious", attests to a psychotic split, a "disavowal of reality" ; propositions of this type are what
linguistic analysis calls "pragmatic paradoxes". Let us take, for example, the statement "I know that there is no mouse in the next
room, but nevertheless I believe that there is a mouse there": this statement is not logically irreconcilable - since there is no logical
contradiction between "there is no mouse in the next room" and "I believe there is a mouse in the next room" - the contradiction
comes only on the pragmatic level, in so far as we take into account the position of the subject of the enunciation of this proposition:
the subject who knows that there is no mouse in the next room cannot at the same time, without contradiction, believe that there is a
mouse there. In other words, the subject who believes this is a split subject. The "normal" solution to this
contradiction is of course that we repress the other moment, the belief, in our unconscious : in its
place enters some spare moment which is not in contradiction to the first - this is the logic of so-called
"rationalization". Instead of the direct split "I know that the Jews are guilty of nothing, but
nevertheless... (I believe that they are guilty)" comes the statement of the type "I know that the
Jews are guilty of nothing; however, the fact is that in the development of capitalism, the Jews,
as the representatives of financial and business capital, have usually profited from the
productive labour of others"; instead of the direct split "I know that there is no God, but nevertheless... (I believe that
there is)" appears a statement of the type "I know that there is no God, but I respect religious ritual and take part in it because this
ritual supports ethical values and encourages brotherhood and love among people." Such
statements are good
examples of what might be called "lying by way of the truth": the second part of the
statement, the claim which follows the syntagm "but nevertheless... ", can on a
factual level be largely accurate but nevertheless operates as a lie because in the
concrete symbolic context in which it appears it operates as a ratification of the
unconscious belief that the Jews are nevertheless guilty, that God nevertheless exists, and so on - without
taking into account these "investments" of the unconscious belief, the functioning of such statements remains totally
incomprehensible. One of the greatest masters of this was the Stalinist "dialectical materialism", the
basic achievement of which, when it was necessary to legitimize some pragmatic
political measure which violated theoretical principles, was "in principle it is of
course so; nevertheless, in the concrete circumstances... ": the infamous "analysis
of concrete circumstances" is basically nothing other than a search for
rationalization which attempts to justify the violation of a principle. This gap
between (real) knowledge and (symbolic) belief determines our everyday ideological attitude: "I
know that there is no God, but nevertheless, I operate as if (I believe that) he exists" - the part in brackets is
repressed (belief in a God whom we witness through our activity is unconscious).
 2NC – TRUTH TO POWER XT
Your liberal moralizing sabotages material organization and turns militarism
Culp 9 (Andrew, PhD from Ohio State, teaches Media History and Theory in the MA Program
in Aesthetics and Politics and the School of Critical Studies at CalArts, “Dispute or Disrupt?
Desire and Violence in Protests Against the Iraq War” file:///C:/Users/crumb/Downloads/6114-
Article%20Text-13537-1-10-20160226.htm)NFleming
The movement against the Iraq War was an exercise in failure . The February 15, 2003 global
demonstration against the Iraq War was “the largest protest event in human history,” yet it did not
prevent the war.[ii] A year and half later, the movement was again unsuccessful when the Democratic
presidential candidate promising to the end the war lost the general election despite wavering public support for
the ongoing conflict.[iii] Media attention gave rise to movement celebrities , such as Cindy Sheehan, who
demanded that President Bush explain the ‘noble cause’ for which her son died in Iraq, but was unable to secure a
meeting with the President. Even after the Democrats had enough political power to end the war,
having gained control of Congress in 2006 and then the Presidency in 2008, they only completed full withdrawal in
December 2011.[iv] In addition to these many defeats, this paper focuses on another: the failure of
rhetoric – its inability to dispute official discourses of state violence, and the
politics of bodies that fail to achieve rhetoricality .[v] In the former, the paper identifies an impediment
to the anti-war effort, and in the latter, the paper finds the constitutive lack of queer desire that overcomes political strategy’s
rhetorical limits. This paper has two parts, a queer critique of rhetoricality and a theory of desire. The first part analyzes rhetorical
challenges to state violence, and the second part proposes a ‘queering’ of direct action. To begin, the argument generalizes a
problematic posed by David Halperin, who argues that homophobic discourses function through incoherence
and thus refuting them does not impair those discourses’ strategic function . Examining the Bush
Administration’s justifications for the Iraq War and its opponents, this paper shows how discourses of state
terrorism operate according to a similar incoherence . Through close analysis of Cindy Sheehan’s
politics of presidential ridicule and the celebrity narrative of ‘I Told You So,’ the argument claims that rhetorical critiques of
state violence can lead to what queer theorist Tim Dean criticizes as the politics of identification , which
cedes moral self-righteousness to the opposition without upsetting the political balance of
power. The paper finds that anti-war activists fixated on the truth were correct but still unable to
produce effects, and instead found themselves in emotional publics that focused on disputing
official discourses at the expense of a more diverse political strategy. To locate an alternative to
disputing the discourses underwriting the Iraq War, this paper analyzes Code Pink’s interruption of John McCain’s
speech in contrast to the other anti-war direct actions at the 2008 Republican National Convention. Contrary to conventional
theories of direct action, this approach does not emphasize the power of bodies as physical impediments
that occupy space but the potential for subjects of desire to produce events . This paper finds
‘queer’ forms of direct action that uncover different political potentials and generate disruptive events that subvert the politics of
identification. These actions are theorized by way of Dean’s distinction between ‘suave bodies’ and ‘bodies that mutter.’ For Dean,
rhetoric is the tool of suave bodies that use a discourse of signs and signifiers that can be easily
spoken or written. Bodies that mutter, in contrast, make noises and sounds that are not directly understood because they are
vocalizing desire “as something in language but not itself linguistic.”[vi] Accordingly, Dean’s psychoanalytic alternative
to rhetoricality focuses on bodies that are not analyzed according to their “suasive” power but
their disruptive potential – a power that is expressed at the limits of discourse
through failed discourses and inarticulate muttering .[vii] This paper outlines two effects of
subjects of desire: first, how they blur boundaries, which opens up potentials not otherwise available ;
and second, how they share trauma, which causes disruptions that evade immediate rhetorical
dismissal. Through its analysis of the Republican National Convention, the paper finds an unexplored potential in the Code Pink
disruption. Rather than proposing their interruption as a model for future political action, it asks
what aspects of their disturbance would need to be expanded on and experimented with to
develop bodies that mutter into a fully formed queer politics of direct action. Justifications for the Iraq
War as Incoherent Discourses President Bush’s ex post facto justification for the war was quite vague: “that the Iraqi people are
much better off without Saddam.”[viii] Daalder and Lindsey argue, however, that the wide berth of this justification relies on the
“basic but highly salient fact that there would not have been a war without his argument that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction
posed an unacceptable threat that was both immediate and serious.”[ix] Restoring clarity to the Bush Administration’s initial claims
about WMDs seems hardly possible, given the incoherence of the discourse through which the justifications for war were presented.
As James P. Pfiffner points out, administration officials made WMDs a moving target, with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz claiming that the verifiable presence of WMDs was not the paramount issue for policymakers while Secretary of Defense
Colin Powell was asserting its centrality.[x] Pfiffner concludes that even while President Bush made “few untrue statements” and
accepted some widely shared claims, his statements were also systematically misleading, gave false impressions, and defied the
better judgment of others.[xi] Sentimentality aided the Bush Administration’s incoherent war on public opinion. The Bush
Administration pitched the war as the perfect plan to fill the emotional void left by the September Eleventh attacks. President Bush
associated Iraq with 9/11, expanding the targets of the War on Terror to an “axis of evil” – Iraq,
at
Iran, and North Korea – during his State of the Union Address in 2002. And during the one-year commemoration of the attacks
Ground Zero, he formally announced his intentions to attack Iraq . Rhetorically ‘sticking’ the
attack in New York to Iraq, he made a promise: “What our enemies have begun, we will
finish.”[xii] With this full-scale media blitz, the Bush Administration amplified the emotional resonance between
9/11 and his campaign against Iraq, leading supporters to offer over-the-top acclamations, such as “turn
Baghdad into a parking lot. You know, blow up the bridges, blow up the factories. Just level it,” or “I’m kind of excited to be here
now. Someday we’ll tell our children that we were in Washington when the war started.”[xiii] The union of multiple
contradictory discourses and the politicization of loss is a combination familiar to queer
activists. Challenging what losses count as grievable was essential to turning collective mourning to militancy during the AIDS
crisis.[xiv] Describing the transformation, Ann Cvetkovich writes, “the AIDS crisis, like other traumatic encounters with death, has
challenged our strategies for remembering the dead, forcing the intervention of new forms of mourning and commemoration.”[xv]
These forms of mourning and commemoration should not be isolated to queer activism during 1980s and ‘90s, for as Sara Ahmed
contends, public responses to events such as 9/11 pose similar challenges to queer politics; or as Bush’s post facto justification for
the Iraq War demonstrates, violence can be cast as an act of compassion, such as offering war as a gift of
hope to the Iraqi people, which allowed Administration officials to “be full of love in the midst of
the violence.”[xvi] In addition to the use of compassion to conceal state violence, other conservative forms of
mourning tap into the basic structure of paranoid fantasies that, in Elaine Scarry’s words, attempts to connect
“disembodied beliefs with the force and power of the material world” through the “massive
opening of human bodies.”[xvii] Foreign policy hawks have repeated a phrase that reveals how this “structure of feeling”
motivates the conservative desire for war.[xviii] The narrative goes like this: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick
up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”[xix] The consequence of
this violent sentiment is clear: war hawks construct fantasies that bring together pleasure and violence to stoke the population.
Queer alternatives to the state rhetoric of public loss, whether clothed in compassion or bathed in blood, thus provide helpful
historical and theoretical tools for reorienting activism toward less violent ends. Sara Ahmed theorizes how incoherent discourses,
such as those that justified the Iraq War, can be unified through emotion.[xx] Following Derrida, Ahmed explains that emotion fills
the disjunction between signification and context. Through repetition, words detach from the context in which they emerge, leaving
emotions as symbolic traces of their lost context. Appearing as personal, ahistorical, or natural fact, these emotions accumulate
cultural value through associations with words that generate material histories that remain concealed. In the case of Bush
Administration’s defense of the Iraq War,
grief and aggression stood in for coherent discourse,
demonstrating how state violence can use affective force to make politics with contradictory
statements. Outlining the impact of violent discourses on political strategy, David Halperin argues that disputing the lies
of homophobia is pointless . His argument is not that homophobic discourses are irrefutable, but on the contrary,
that they are endlessly disputable because they are based on series of mutually contradictory
double binds. Halperin uses the legal debate over homosexuality as an “immutable characteristic” to illustrate such a double
bind whereby if homosexuality is inborn, it justifies medical and legal discrimination on the basis of biological difference, or
alternately, if homosexuality is a choice, then medical practitioners and politicians can restrict and punish homosexual behavior as a
matter of volition.[xxi] Theoretically describing this discursive problematic , Halperin draws on the work of Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet to argue that since “ homophobic
discourses contain no fixed
propositional content,” they “operate strategically by means of logical contradictions ” whose infinite
substitutability empowers those discourses while simultaneously incapacitating queers through incoherence.[xxii] For Halperin,
following Sedgwick, the consequence is that homophobic lies are easily falsifiable when taken one at a time, but
refuting them one by one “does nothing to impair the strategic function of discourses that operate
precisely by deploying a series of mutually contradictory premises in such a way that any one of them can be substituted for any
other as different circumstances may require, without changing the final outcome of the argument.”[xxiii] The Bush
Administration’s case for the
Iraq War, with its many divergent justifications, expresses a discursive
incoherence like homophobia, which frustrates rhetorical attempts to restore clarity to
politics . In summary, queer critiques of rhetoricality, especially Halperin’s theory of homophobic discourses, can be used to
describe the Bush Administration’s justification of the Iraq War. Furthermore, as we will see with some critics of the Iraq War,
rhetorical challenges to state violence can often fail to mobilize an effective political response.
 2NC – BERLANT XT
Only the alternative can open up new spaces beyond the politics of identification –
that’s necessary to mobilize radical political responses to violence outside the
fantasies of sentimental wholeness recreated by the 1ac
Berlant and Edelman 14 [Lauren Berlant, Professor of English at the University of Chicago,
and Lee Edelman, Professor of English at Tufts, Sex, or the Unbearable, Duke University Press:
Durham and London, 2014, p. xv-xvii]
Given the inevitable, and often unbearable, disturbances onto which sex can open, how is it possible, we asked ourselves (and each
other and Sedgwick as well), to address that negativity as inseparable from what is most compelling in sex? In pursuing this thought
we had to deal with the difficulty of articulating the join of psychic and social scenes and dynamics. Any analytic encounter with sex
should push psychoanalytic accounts of the subject and of the subject’s psychic experience to acknowledge and address their
constitution within an invariably political field. Sedgwick’s interest in Silvan Tomkins and Melanie Klein—especially as her
theoretical and activist concerns intersected with her own therapeutic ambitions in A Dialogue on Love—encouraged us to tackle a
question that followed directly from our previous dialogue: Can we hope to transform our relation to the
structural disturbance of the subject’s coherence without just producing ever new fantasies of
simplifying or repairing it? Our efforts to respond to the challenge posed by such ruptures of
continuity gave shape to the talk that later became our second chapter , “What Survives.” Sedgwick’s
death, which viscerally brought home the insistence of rupture in relation, impelled us to explore what follows—
affectively, narratively, and politically— from the persistence of negativity in every practice of
repair . Among the responses that greeted our presentation of “What Survives” were several that wondered how to
survive the irreparable negativity it evoked. The possibility of a life not governed by the logic
of repair seemed, according to some in the audience, unbearable to imagine . How, in the absence of
wanting to repair, could one possibly go on ? What would such going on look like if we
turned our theory into practice ? Would living with negativity entail the death of the
optimism that animates desire and energizes politics ? We felt a responsibility to address these
questions as clearly as possible and to flesh out the imbrication of negativity, politics, and the phenomenality of life in order to show
how negativity is not the opposite of politics , not a practice of withdrawal from
contesting the terms or structures of existence, but rather a challenge to engage with politics
in unexpected places and in unpredicted ways. We also felt the need to think about
theory as a type of social practice and to consider the aesthetic in terms of the narratives
with which we turn life to account. In the first chapter we focused on separate aesthetic (and, in each case, visually
iconic) objects through which to organize our speculations on what sex without optimism might mean. In the second we used
what’s beyond the optimistic model of attachment forms meant
Sedgwick’s texts to approach
to solve the problem of living . What survives once the model of reparative relation is forced
to share space with all sorts of negativity or when it starts to open onto a negativity of its own ?
For the final chapter we thought it important to link the question of living with negativity to the processes of narrating it, gathering
up the diverse kinds of realism, causality, fantasy, and organization in movement that narrative forces to the fore. It struck us as
crucial, in that regard, to engage a common text, one that would somehow speak to the question of living with negativity while
opening onto the interrelations among sex, narrative, and the prospect for changing how we inhabit and relate to the world. After
considering a wide array of objects that might galvanize our thought, we read Lydia Davis’s Collected Stories together and knew we
had found our author. Though drawn to a dozen of Davis’s texts, each perfect for this chapter’s project, we decided to direct our
energies to a close reading of only one. A single text seemed fitting here because this chapter, following our speculations on repair in
“What Survives,” concerns finding ways of living with an object, or with the loss or breakdown of an object, that roots one in the
world. “Break It Down,” the story we finally chose, engages living with others and living on in their absence. Enigmatic and
haunting, filled with the pathos of a narrator not fully controlling what he reveals, “Break It Down” provides a scaffold for this
chapter’s meditations on negativity. It does so, moreover, while enacting a continuous interrogation of what “sex” means. Because it
plays so crucial a role in “Living with Negativity” and because we want it to enter our conversation here in its own right, we have
reprinted “Break It Down” as an appendix to our dialogue with the generous approval of Lydia Davis and the permission of her
publishers. In this way we hope the story makes audible another voice in this book and provides the opportunity for another
encounter with Davis’s work—an encounter different, we hope, from reading the story in a different context and one that adds a
different context to the dialogues gathered here. We have suggested that this book uses dialogue to refine theoretical
questions and to bring different aesthetic and critical archives to bear upon them . Those
questions about the overwhelming intensities that shape ordinary subjectivity, even in noncrisis times,
are harder than any one dialogue can bear, and we are not seeking to do justice to them, in the sense of
repairing the world in which they operate as registers of subjectivity and power —if, that is, repair and
justice could ever be construed as synonymous. We
aim instead, through our own conversation, to initiate many others,
including one among theorists of politics, affect, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics , that would try to
account for the disturbances and anchors within relationality (to ourselves, across ourselves, to the world at
large) and for the effects those disturbances and anchors have on our thinking about sociality . We
believe that such conversations can expand our sense of sociality and the possibility of
political movement . Paradoxically, though, our strategy of enlargement relies on narrowing our focus here. In other
work we each might have moved outward to different exempla and archives. Here the form of the dialogue impels us to ever greater
specificity as we respond to a recurrent anxiety about whether our iterations of words, objects, and scenes are understood in the way
we intended. Along with the disturbance it occasions, though, the dialogue form affords us the chance
to experience the “same thing” as different and to encounter the metamorphic potential that the
sameness of things contains. Ultimately for us, it isn’t a choice between disturbance and
transformational possibility. We are interested in the inseparability of the two, in what can
never be predicted or controlled in any engagement with the world , with
otherness , and thus with ourselves as well .
AFF – AT: HILLMAN
 2AC – WAR BAD
War is bad – their argument is ivory-tower theorizing that selectively ignores the
daily misery imposed on millions of people across the world - their argument
participates in the same asymmetric valuation of Western values that we are
critiquing
WBW 14 (worldbeyondwar.org , international organization against war and militarism,
https://worldbeyondwar.org/beneficial/)NFleming
Myth: War is Beneficial Fact: The profits gained by a few weapons manufacturers and the
temporary power gained by politicians who promote wars are so miniscule compared to the
suffering of both victims and victors, and the damage to the environment, economy,
and society , that almost any alternative to war is more beneficial . Related posts. Probably the most
common defense of wars is that they are necessary evils. That myth is debunked on its own page here.powell But wars are also
defended as being in some way beneficial. The reality is thatwars do not benefit the people where they
are waged, and do not benefit nations that send their militaries abroad to wage wars. Nor
do wars help to uphold the rule of law — quite the reverse. Good outcomes caused by wars are dramatically
outweighed by the bad and could have been accomplished without war. Polls in the United States through the 2003-2011
war on Iraq found that a majority in the U.S. believed Iraqis were better off as the result of a war that severely damaged — even
destroyed — Iraq[1]. A majority of Iraqis, in contrast, believed they were worse off.[2] A majority in the United States believed Iraqis
were grateful.[3] This is a disagreement over facts, not ideology. But people often choose which facts to become
aware of or to accept. Tenacious believers in tales of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” tended
to believe more, not less, firmly when shown the facts . The facts about Iraq are not pleasant, but they are
important. War Does Not Benefit Its Victims To believe that the people who live where your nation’s
government has waged a war are better off for it , despite those people’s contention that they are worse off,
suggests an extreme sort of arrogance — an arrogance that in many cases has explicitly relied on
bigotry of one variety or another: racism, religion, language, culture, or general xenophobia. A
poll of people in the United States or any nation involved in occupying Iraq would almost certainly have found opposition to the idea
of their own nation being occupied by foreign powers, no matter how benevolent the intentions. This being the case, the idea of
humanitarian war is a violation of the most fundamental rule of ethics , the golden rule that requires giving
others the same respect you desire. And this is true whether the humanitarian justification of a war is an afterthought once other
justifications have collapsed or humanitarianism was the original and primary justification. There is also a fundamental
intellectual error in supposing that a new war is likely to bring benefits to a nation where it is
waged, given the dismal record of every war that has occurred heretofore. Scholars at both the anti-war Carnegie
Endowment for Peace and the pro-war RAND Corporation have found that wars aimed at nation-building have an extremely low to
nonexistent success rate in creating stable democracies. And yet the temptation rises zombie-like to believe that Iraq or Libya or
Syria or Iran will finally be the place where war creates its opposite. Advocates for humanitarian war would be more
honest if they totalled the supposed good accomplished by a war and weighed it against the
damage done. Instead, the often-quite-dubious good is taken as justifying absolutely any tradeoff. The U.S. didn’t count the
Iraqi dead. The U.N. Security Council required that the U.N.’s human rights officer report on Libyans killed by NATO only in closed
session. Believers in humanitarian war often distinguish genocide from war. Pre-war demonization of dictators (often dictators who
have been generously funded by their would-be assailants for decades prior) frequently repeats the phrase “killed his own people”
(but do not ask who sold him the weapons or provided the satellite views). The implication is that killing “his own people” is
significantly worse than killing someone else’s people. But if the problem we want to address is mass-killing, then war and genocide
are siblings and there is nothing worse than war that war can be used to prevent — even were it the case that war tended to prevent,
rather than to fuel, genocide. Wars fought by wealthy nations against poor ones tend to be one-sided
slaughters; quite the opposite of beneficial, humanitarian, or philanthropic exercises. In a common
mythical view, wars are fought on “a battlefield” — a notion that suggests a sportsmanlike contest between two armies apart from
civilian life. On the contrary, wars are fought in people’s towns and homes. These wars are one of the most
immoral actions imaginable, which helps explain why governments that wage them lie about
them to their own people.dead The wars leave lasting damage in the form of brewing hatred and violence, and in the form
of a poisoned natural environment. Belief in the humanitarian possibilities for war can be shaken by looking closely at the short- and
long-term results of any war. War tends to leave behind danger, not security — in contrast to the more
successful record of nonviolent movements for fundamental change . War and preparations for war
removed the entire population of Diego Garcia; of Thule, Greenland; of much of Vieques, Puerto
Rico; and of various Pacific Islands with Pagan Island next on the endangered list. Also threatened is the village
on Jeju
Island, South Korea, where the U.S. Navy has built a new base. Those who have lived down-wind or down-stream
Violations of
from weapons testing have often been little better off than those who have been targeted by weapons use.
human rights can always be found in nations that other nations wish to bomb, just as they can be found in nations
whose dictators are being funded and propped up by the very same humanitarian crusaders, and just as they can be found within
those warrior nations themselves. But there are two major problems with bombing a nation to expand its respect for human rights.
First, it tends not to work. Second, the right not to be killed or injured or traumatized by war ought to be
considered a human right worthy of respect as well. Again, a hypocrisy check is useful: How many people
would want their own town bombed in the name of expanding human rights ? Wars and militarism
and other disastrous policies can generate crises that could benefit from outside assistance , be it in the form
of nonviolent peaceworkers and human shields or in the form of police. But twisting the argument that Rwanda needed police into
the argument that Rwanda should have been bombed, or that some other nation should be bombed, is a gross distortion. Contrary to
some mythical views, suffering has not been minimized in recent wars. War cannot be civilized or
cleaned up. There’s no proper conduct of war that avoids inflicting serious and unnecessary pain. There is no
guarantee that any war can be controlled or ended once begun. The damage usually lasts much longer
than the war. Wars do not end with victory, which cannot even be defined. War Does Not Bring Stability War
can be imagined as a tool for enforcing the rule of law, including laws against war, only by ignoring the hypocrisy and the historical
War actually violates the most basic principles of law and encourages
record of failure.
their further violation . The sovereignty of states and the requirement that diplomacy be conducted without
violence fall before the hammer of war. The Kellogg-Briand Pact, the U.N. Charter, and domestic laws on
murder and on the decision to go to war are violated when wars are launched and escalated and continued. Violating those laws
in order to “enforce” (without actually prosecuting) a law banning a particular type of weapon, for example, does not make nations
or groups more likely to be law abiding. This is part of why war is such a failure at the task of providing security. Organizing a
group of nations, such as NATO, to jointly fight a war does not make the war one iota more legal or beneficial; it
simply employs a criminal gang. War Does Not Benefit the War Makers War and war preparations drain and weaken an
economy. The myth that war enriches a nation that wages it, as opposed to enriching a small number of influential profiteers, is not
supported by evidence. A further myth holds that, even if war impoverishes the war making nation, it can
nonetheless be enriching it more substantially by facilitating the exploitation of other
nations. The leading war-making nation in the world, the United States, has 5% of the world’s population but consumes a quarter
to a third of various natural resources. According to this myth, only war can allow that supposedly important and desirable
imbalance to continue.homeless There is a reason why this argument is rarely articulated by those in power and plays only a minor
role in war propaganda. It is shameful, and most people are ashamed of it. If war serves not as philanthropy but as extortion,
admitting as much hardly justifies the crime. Other points help weaken this argument: Greater consumption and destruction does
not always equal a superior standard of living. The benefits of peace and international cooperation would be felt even by those
learning to consume less. The benefits of local production and sustainable living are immeasurable. Reduced consumption is
required by the earth’s environment regardless of who does the consuming. One of the largest ways in which wealthy
nations consume the most destructive resources , such as oil, is through the very waging of
the wars. Green energy and infrastructure would surpass their advocates’ wildest fantasies if the funds now invested in war were
transferred there. War provides fewer jobs than alternative spending or tax cuts, but war can supposedly provide noble
and admirable jobs that teach young people valuable lessons, build character, and train good citizens. In fact, everything
good found in war training and participation can be created without war. And war
training brings with it much that is far from desirable. War preparation teaches and conditions people for behavior
that is normally considered the worst affront to society possible . It also teaches dangerous
extremes of obedience . While war can involve courage and sacrifice, paring these with blind support for ignoble goals
sets a bad example indeed. If thoughtless courage and sacrifice is a virtue, ant warriors are demonstrably more virtuous than human
ones. Advertisements have credited recent wars with helping to develop brain surgery techniques that have saved lives outside of
wars. The internet on which this website exists was developed largely by the U.S. military. But such silver linings could be shining
stars if created apart from war. Research and development would be more efficient and accountable and more directed into useful
areas if separated from the military. Similarly, humanitarian aid missions could be run better without the
military. An aircraft carrier is an overpriced and inefficient means of bringing disaster relief. The use of the wrong tools is
compounded by justifiable skepticism from people aware that militaries have frequently used disaster relief as cover for escalating
wars or stationing forces permanently in an area. War Creators’ Motives Are Not Noble Wars are marketed as humanitarian, because
many people, including many government and military employees, have good intentions. But those at the top deciding to wage war
almost certainly do not. In case after case, less than generous motives have been documented.
 2AC – ALTERNATIVE
The alternative’s embrace of war is impractical, reductionist, and makes collective
organization to alleviate immediate problems impossible
Stuhr 8 (John, BA, Carleton College MA, Vanderbilt University PhD, Professor of American
Studies at Emory University, Vanderbilt University The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New
Series, Vol. 22, No. 4, Symposium III: Words, Bodies, War p. 283-285)NFleming
If Hillman is right, he is only partly right. We may have a terrible love of war. But we can and do
have other loves as well. It is not my only love, but I confess to an unshakable, terrible love of
hope, and peace too. Because I do not share Hillman's Jungian psychological commitments, I
am not sure that this love is archetypal or universal. Maybe Paul Simon is right that "everybody
loves the sound of a train in the distance," that "the thought that life could be better is woven
indelibly into our hearts and our brains."10 Or maybe only some people love this sound,
and maybe this thought is woven only precariously into some hearts and bones
sometimes. But I am sure that this love of hope and peace has a history and expres
sion equal in duration and depth to those of love of war. I am sure that for every
General Patton, quoted by Hillman, who proclaims love of war beyond love of life, there is a
General MacArthur, who proclaimed just as strongly, "I have seen war.... I hate war" Or there is
a General (and President) Eisenhower, who observed in 1953 that war "is not a way of life at all
in any true sense" but only "humanity hanging on a cross of iron." Or there is a General
Sherman, who said that "war is hell." Or there is a Senator John McCain, who said: "War is
wretched beyond description, and only a fool or a fraud could sentimentalize its cruel reality."
And then what, now what? What should a meliorist do? Terrible lovers of hope and peace often
have answered this question in one or both of two ways. The first is the way of individual self-
transformation. I think of this strategy as an "Inward Bound" program. "War and peace start in
the hearts of individuals," Pema Chodron writes.11 The way to peace is the way of turning hearts
of war into hearts of peace and nonviolence; hearts open to what Gandhi called the "infinite
possibilities of universal love," universal truth, and the God within us all; and hearts in
community and communion with one another.12 All we need is love?though, of course, that is a
lot, and this way is difficult. It requires that we reject as our ideal the strategic warrior: War will
exist, John F. Kennedy said, "until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the
same reputation and prestige as the warrior does today." Whatever its merits, and I think there
are real merits, this approach has not proven very effective. It has proven difficult for individuals
to embody and enact it. And it has proven difficult for individuals who do embody it to
transform those who do not. Perhaps most people need to try a lot harder, or perhaps this
approach just demands too much of most people. In either case, this approach is too
individualistic and voluntaristic. It is not very useful to demand that people act virtuously,
peacefully, lovingly, cooperatively without attending to the cultural conditions that would enable
them significantly to do so. If one takes the self less as archetypal and more as cultural, as, for
example, the irreducibly social self explained by George Herbert Mead, then so too one must see
the self's vices and virtues, including loves and hopes, as social. It is some version of this insight
that underlies a second approach to peace by those with a terrible love of hope: the way of
societal transformation. I think of this strategy as an "Outward Bound" program. On this view,
war and peace start in cultural conditions. The way to peace is the way of social action: the
amelioration of oppression, domination, abuse, threats, humiliation, poverty, hunger, illness,
ignorance, and miscommunication. All we need is social change, though, of course, that is a lot,
and this way is difficult, piecemeal, and never complete. Whatever its merits, and, again, I think
there are real and great merits, this approach has not proven very effective. It has been difficult
to greatly reduce, much less eliminate, social conditions that nurture and sustain war. And it has
proven difficult to spread or export even partial, local, temporary success. This is not surprising;
those conditions are in part nurtured by our love of war. Perhaps more work is needed, or
perhaps the problems are just too great in light of this love of war. If concrete cases of love of
hope and peace point toward, and result from, both self and societal transformation, so too do
concrete cases of love of war. We may discipline ourselves to become more loving or more
hateful. We may engage in social action to foster harmony or conflict. Recognizing this fact, we
should not only strive to eliminate love of war through inward-bound self-
transformation or outward-bound societal reconstruction. Hillman argues that
this is impossible, and whether it is necessarily impossible, as he says, or just contingently
impos sible, neither of these strategies has worked so far. Instead, we should focus on changing
the conditions that call forth action on behalf of love of war, and thereby change the
consequences of love of war. In other words, if a healthy dose of realism suggests that we cannot
eliminate love of war, then a healthy dose of meliorism suggests that we need to work to (1)
reduce, not eliminate, but reduce, its manifestations or outbreaks and (2) redirect its energy.
 2AC – PSYCHOANALYSIS
Their psychoanalysis is a fantasy that turns their links and precludes progressive
gains
Adam Rosen-Carole 10, Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Bard College, 2010, “Menu Cards in Time of
Famine: On Psychoanalysis and Politics,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Vol. LXXIX, No. 1, p. 205-207
On the other hand, though in these ways and many others, psychoanalysis seems to promote the sorts of subjective dispositions and habits
requisite for a thriving democracy, and though in a variety of ways psychoanalysis contributes to personal emancipation— say, by releasing individuals
from self-defeating, damaging, or petrified forms action and reaction, object attachment, and the like— in light of the very uniqueness of what

it has to offer , one cannot but wonder: to what extent, if at all, can the habits and dispositions—broadly, the forms of
life—cultivated by psychoanalytic practice survive, let alone flourish, under modern social and political
conditions? If the emancipatory inclinations and democratic virtues that psychoanalytic practice promotes are
systematically crushed or at least regularly unsupported by the world in which they would be realized ,
then isn’t psychoanalysis implicitly making promises it cannot redeem? Might not massive social and
political transformations be the condition for the efficacious practice of psychoanalysis? And so, under
current conditions, can we avoid experiencing the forms of life nascently cultivated by psychoanalytic practice as something
of a tease, or even a source of deep frustration? (2) Concerning psychoanalysis as a politically inclined

theoretical enterprise, the worry is whether political diagnoses and proposals that proceed on the basis
of psychoanalytic insights and forms of attention partake of a fantasy of interpretive efficacy ( all the world’s a
couch, you might say ), wherein our profound alienation from the conditions for robust political agency
are registered and repudiated? Consider, for example, Freud and Bullitt’s (1967) assessment of the psychosexual determinants of Woodrow
Wilson’s political aspirations and impediments, or Reich’s (1972) suggestion that Marxism should appeal to psychoanalysis in order to illuminate and redress
neurotic phenomena that generate disturbances in working capacity, especially as this concerns religion and bourgeois sexual ideology. Also relevant are Freud’s,
Žižek’s (1993, 2004), Derrida’s (2002) and others’ insistence that we draw the juridical and political consequences of the hypothesis
of an irreducible death drive, as well as Marcuse’s (1970) proposal that we attend to the weakening of Eros and the growth of aggression that results from the
coercive enforcement of the reality principle upon the sociopolitically weakened ego, and especially to the channeling of this aggression into hatred of enemies.
Reich (1972) and Fromm (1932) suggest that psychoanalysis be employed to explore the motivations to political irrationality, especially that singular irrationality of
joining the national-socialist movement, while Irigaray (1985) diagnoses the desire for the Same, the One, the Phallus as a desire for a sociosymbolic order that
assures masculine dominance. Žižek (2004) contends that only a psychoanalytic exposition of the disavowed beliefs and suppositions
of the U nited S tates political elite can get at the fundamental determinants of the Iraq War . Rose (1993) argues that it
was the paranoiac paradox of sensing both that there is every reason to be frightened and that everything is under control that allowed Thatcher “to make this
paradox the basis of political identity so that subjects could take pleasure in violence as force and legitimacy while always locating ‘real’ violence somewhere else—
illegitimate violence and illicitness increasingly made subject to the law” (p. 64). Stavrakakis (1999) advocates that we recognize and traverse
the residues of utopian fantasy in our contemporary political imagination.1 Might not the psychoanalytic
interpretation of powerful figures ( Bush , Bin Laden, or whomever ), collective subjects (nations, ethnic
groups, and so forth), or urgent “political” situations register an anxiety regarding political impotence or
“castration” that is pacified and modified by the fantasmatic frame wherein the psychoanalytically
inclined political theorist situates him- or herself as diagnosing or interpretively intervening in the
lives of political figures , collective political subjects , or complex political situations with the idealized
efficacy of a successful clinical intervention? If so, then the question is: are the contributions of
psychoanalytically inclined political theory anything more than tantalizing menu cards for meals it
cannot deliver? As I said, the worry is twofold. These are two folds of a related problem, which is this: might the very seductiveness of
psychoanalytic theory and practice—specifically, the seductiveness of its political promise — register the
lasting eclipse of the political and the objectivity of the social , respectively? In other words, might not everything
that makes psychoanalytic theory and practice so politically attractive indicate precisely the necessity
of wide-ranging social/institutional transformations that far exceed the powers of psychoanalysis? And
so, might not the politically salient transformations of subjectivity to which psychoanalysis can contribute

overburden subjectivity as the site of political transformation , blinding us to the necessity of

largescale institutional reforms? Indeed, might not massive institutional transformations be necessary
conditions for the efficacy of psychoanalytic practice , both personally and politically? Further, might not the so-called
interventions and proposals of psychoanalytically inclined political theory similarly sidestep the question of
the institutional transformations necessary for their realization, and so conspire with our blindness to
the enormous institutional impediments to a progressive political future? The idea, then, is to use the limits of
psychoanalytic practice and psychoanalytically inclined political theory as a form of social diagnosis. I want to read the limits of

psychoanalytically inclined political theory for what they can tell us about the lasting eclipse of the political, and so, inversely, for
what they can tell us about what a viable political culture requires , just as I want to read the limits of the political efficacy of
psychoanalytic practice for what they can tell us about what would be required for their successful realization.2
aff – at: culp
 2AC – RESSENTIMENT GOOD
Ressentiment inevitable – instead of preventing it we should mobilize it against
the authoritarian Trump regime
Dolger 16 (Stefan, Professor at Brock University, “For Ressentiment: An Alternative to Trumpism”
http://www.publicseminar.org/2016/08/for-ressentiment-an-alternative-to-trumpism/#.WXE3Z4jytPa)NCF
Donald Trump’s campaign of anger may have jumped the shark this past week, and I am afraid that may lead my friends on the Left
(whether you like Bernie, Jill, or Hillary) to mistake the lessons of this electoral cycle. It is tempting to believe that the collapsing
Trump campaign signals something larger, a triumph of optimism over fear, but that is precisely the lesson we should not draw.
Trump’s successes draw on the well of despair and rage in the American voter, but his failure would not mean that despair and rage
have lost their political salience. It is high time we on the Left learned to embrace instead of reject
ressentiment — the feeling of impotence that leads to anger directed against enemies we blame for our suffering — as a means
of mobilizing voters. Ressentiment is a potent political weapon , as Friedrich Nietzsche knew so well, but for
the last forty years it has been almost the exclusive provenance of the Right. It’s time for that to change. First some context: despite
Trump’s unprecedented series of offensive, treasonous, and ignorant gaffes, this election is not over yet. Second , we should
face up to this ugly political reality: regardless of Trump’s failure, the House and Senate are likely to remain in
Republican hands. But third, and even more importantly: another liberal president will do little to alter the
Republican dominance[1] — I use that word not just for emphasis — of state legislatures and governorships, where
Republicans hold approximately a 2:1 advantage. Yes, you read that number right. [2] The Right’s tapping into
ressentiment, of which Trump is merely the symptom of rather than the cause, is one very powerful reason for this
profound electoral success. We of the Left need to start thinking more creatively about the upside
of anger in politics if we want a more enduring Left coalition, because the sad truth is that
America in 2016 has already chosen the path of ressentiment. And it did it a long time ago. You may want to
think of this as the era of Obama/Clinton, but the numbers say otherwise. What Trump and the right wing “resonance machine” (as
political theorist William Connolly has sagely termed it) have done so well, is to craft a mythic story that is broadly appealing to large
numbers of American voters. This story goes thusly: you, the American citizen, are entitled to a life of freedom,
comfort and safety, but your entitlement has been stolen from you . The thieves are many —
government bureaucrats, Mexican immigrants, terrorists, “race hustlers,” feminists, Muslims, China, big business — but all are
united by their efforts to undermine the American Dream. Is this narrative true? Not particularly. And the patent falsehoods
and disavowals of this narrative have led us on the Left to try (and try, and try), to reveal the lies
underlying this story of America. We have become a tribe of fact-checkers and myth debunkers,
always ready with our handy copy of Thomas Piketty or Michelle Alexander, to try to reveal the facts to those gulled by these lies. But
as political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler have convincingly shown, trying to fact-check errors in others,
typically only reinforces the mistaken belief .[3]
even when those errors are indeed demonstrably false,
So what if we just stopped trying ? I don’t mean we should stop the political struggle. Instead, I suggest that we
retool some of our efforts, to move away from a “politics of truth,” and instead embrace the
politics of ressentiment . As political thinkers like Connolly, Wendy Brown, and Lauren Berlant[4] have argued, the
American economy is a ressentiment generating machine par excellenc e — relentlessly
distributing hardships unequally while maintaining, at the same time, that the American Dream
is achievable by all — resulting in a strong cognitive desire to find an enemy who is “really” to
blame for your individual failures. When everyone is supposed to be able to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps,
but you in Canton or Indianapolis can’t, it’s not surprising that you direct your rage at whatever targets can be plausibly linked with
your suffering. But instead of finding suitable outlets for rage (though Bernie’s campaign and Black Lives Matter
made a start of it, and Hillary is now clueing into the Trump/Putin bromance as another opportune target [5]), we
on the Left
have relied on reason, empathy, and hope to inspire and mobilize. And theorists on the Left have
been diametrically opposed to cultivating ressentiment , following Nietzsche in his belief that such a disposition
poisons the soul. You know what? Nietzsche may have been right. But in a world that runs off of ressentiment, it seems a tad utopian
to abjure its use. Did America swear off tanks, because the Germans used them in the Blitzkrieg? My worry, in a nutshell, is that we
on the Left have misunderstood the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement. By focusing too much
on ushering in Martin Luther King’s “beloved community ,” where love triumphs over hate, we have lost
sight of the most basic of political wisdom . We have instead thought that since “another world is
possible,” that it is somehow immoral to use the tools of THIS world to get there (and we forget how
much rage was cultivated by the Left in the 1960s). And when we have been taken to the woodshed (electorally speaking), we
have comforted ourselves with our good intentions and the purity of our political
tactics , as if that somehow excuses our very real failures. You know how on those days when you think everyone is a jerk, it’s
usually you that’s being the idiot? Same rule applies in politics. It’s a bad idea to think that the entire world is wrong, and that you
have the secret keys to the new kingdom. The upshot of this shift, from fact-checking to myth-creating, might be more profound than
meets the eye. Consider that one of the common complaints by those in “middle America” is that they don’t like being lectured to by
“pointy-headed intellectuals” about their beliefs, their tastes, their choices. In effect, they think we think they’re stupid. And, well,
judging by my Facebook feed, they’re largely right about that. But
embracing ressentiment, as I suggest, might
loosen this divide between the supposedly knowing and the assumed ignorant . If we
stop seeing ourselves, for just a moment, as the fact-tellers to the world, but instead as blinkered
ressentiment-laden subjects who are just as eager to find enemies to blame as the “ignorant,”
then maybe, just maybe we can start again to make common cause . And if I’m suggesting
that we use ressentiment as a tool of manipulation (I am), it’s not out of any sense that we’re superior or
somehow immune to it. In fact quite the opposite — we are all the subjects of Queen Ressentiment, and we’d
be smarter political actors if we stopped thinking otherwise. What I am suggesting is not that we can
overcome our ressentiment, but that we can make better use of it . Instead of the white hot
rage that erupts in us, when we see the latest video of Trump supporters chanting racist slogans (and they do this, no doubt),
perhaps instead of thinking of them as the enemy who needs to be lectured, we can shift our focus a little. See the rage in
them. And feel the rage in yourself . And give in to it… and give in (a little) to theirs. And then see if you can find
a target that both of you can aim that rage at, instead of fantasizing about lecturing them on their stupidity. In other words: don’t
give them more truth; give them a better villain . The world is full of enemies — a veritable cornicopia! —
so let’s go find some useful bad guys. Putin is one good candidate. But he won’t do entirely, since what is really needed is a villain
responsible for the current suffering across the Rust Belt, etc. While “the 1%” is also a good target, I would suggest yet more
refinement of that label — something that focuses attention on those who become wealthy not by “hard work” but by feeding like
parasites off of the labor of “real” Americans. And if the story has a whiff of conspiracy, and tales of licentious excesses by the
conspirators… well then, even better. Is someone getting their rocks off, while Appalachia suffers? That’s where to look. Marx liked
vampire-imagery to describe capitalism, so there is good precedent for this rhetorical pivot to parasitism by the Left — we just need a
more sustained campaign against specifically identified robbers of the American Dream, if we ever want Congress or the States out
of Republican hands. This is less satisfying, in some ways, than our preferred Left political-economic story, because we have to give
up a little of our own moral superiority. We’re not inherently more rational, or more righteous. We don’t own a “spiritual discipline
against resentment” (to quote Reinhold Niebuhr) that our opponents lack. But if we don’t want a bloodbath in the 2018 midterm
elections to erase whatever crumbs of liberalism come to us in 2016, we had better find a way to overcome our distaste, and just
“embrace the bitter.”
 A2 – BERLANT

We’re impact turning it – your political nihilism empowers the alt-right and is
responsible for the rise of Trump
Claudio 7-1, (assistant professor of development studies and southeast Asian studies at the
Ateneo de Manila University, Intellectuals have ushered the world into a dangerous age of
political nihilism, qz.com/721914/intellectuals-have-ushered-the-world-into-a-dangerous-age-
of-political-nihilism/)
On the surface, it would seem that intellectuals have nothing to do with the rise of global
illiberalism. The movements powering Brexit, Donald Trump and Third-World strongmen like
Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte all gleefully reject books, history and higher education in
favor of railing against common enemies like outsiders and globalization. And you’ll find few
Trump supporters among the largely left-wing American professoriate. Yet intellectuals are
accountable for the rise of these movements—albeit indirectly. Professors have offered
stringent criticisms of neoliberal society. But they have failed to offer the public viable
alternatives. In this way, they have promoted a political nihilism that has set the stage for
new movements that reject liberal democratic principles of tolerance and institutional reform.
Intellectuals have a long history of critiquing liberalism, which relies on a “philosophy of
individual rights and (relatively) free markets.” Beginning in the 19th century, according to
historian Francois Furet, left-wing thinkers began to arrive at a consensus “that modern liberal
democracy was threatening society with dissolution because it atomized individuals, made them
indifferent to public interest, weakened authority, and encouraged class hatred.” For most of the
20th century, anti-liberal intellectuals were able to come up with alternatives. Jean-Paul Sartre
famously defended the Soviet Union even when it became clear that Joseph Stalin was a mass
murderer. French, American, Indian, and Filipino university radicals were hopelessly enamored
of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in the 1970s. The collapse of Communism changed all this.
Some leftist intellectuals began to find hope in small revolutionary guerrillas in the Third World,
like Mexico’s Subcomandante Marcos. Others fell back on pure critique. Academics are now
mostly gadflies who rarely offer strategies for political change. Those who do forward
alternatives propose ones so vague or divorced from reality that they might as well be proposing
nothing. (The Duke University professor of romance studies Michael Hardt, for example, thinks
the evils of modern globalization are so pernicious that only worldwide love is the answer.) Such
thinking promotes political hopelessness. It rejects gradual change as cosmetic, while
patronizing those who think otherwise. This nihilism easily spreads from the classroom
and academic journals to op-ed pages to Zuccotti Park, and eventually to the public at large. For
academic nihilists, the shorthand for the world’s evils is “neoliberalism.” The term is used to
refer to a free market ideology that forced globalization on people by reducing the power of
governments. The more the term is used, however, the more it becomes a vague designation for
all global drudgery. Democratic politics in the age of neoliberalism, according to Harvard
anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff, is “something of a pyramid scheme: the more it is
indulged, the more it is required.” They argue that our belief that we can use laws and
constitutional processes to defend our rights is a form of “fetishism” that is ultimately
“chimerical.” For the University of Chicago literary theorist Lauren Berlant, the democratic
pursuit of happiness amid neoliberalism is nothing but “cruel optimism.” The materialist things
that people desire are “actually an obstacle to your flourishing,” she writes. According to this
logic, we are trapped by our own ideologies. It is this logic that allows left-wing thinkers to
implicitly side with British nativists in their condemnation of the EU. The radical website
Counterpunch, for example, describes the EU as a “neoliberal prison.” It also views liberals
seeking to reform the EU as “coopted by the right wing and its goals—from the subversion of
progressive economic ideals to neoliberalism, to the enthusiastic embrace of neoconservative
doctrine.” Across the Atlantic, Trump supporters are singing a similar tune. Speaking to a black,
gay, college-educated Trump supporter, Samantha Bee was told: “We’ve had these disasters in
neoconservatism and neoliberalism and I think that he [Trump] is an alternative to both those
paths.” The academic nihilists and the Trumpists are in agreement about a key issue: The system
is fundamentally broken, and liberals who believe in working patiently toward change are weak.
For the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “indifference” is the “the hallmark
of political liberalism.” Since liberals balance different interests and rights, Santos writes, they
have no permanent friends or foes. He proposes that the world needs to “revive the friend/foe
dichotomy.” And in a profane way, it has: modern political movements pit Americans against
Muslims, Britain against Europe, a dictatorial government against criminals. Unfortunately,
academic anti-liberalism is not confined to the West. The Cornell political scientist Benedict
Anderson once described liberal democracy in the Philippines as a “Cacique Democracy,”
dominated by feudal landlords and capitalist families. In this system, meaningful reform is
difficult, since the country’s political system is like a “well-run casino,” where tables are rigged
in favor of oligarch bosses. Having a nihilist streak myself, I once echoed Anderson when I
chastised Filipino nationalists for projecting “hope onto spaces within an elite democracy.” Like
Anderson, I offered no alternative. The alternative arrived recently in the guise of the Duterte,
the new president of the Philippines. Like Anderson and me, Duterte complained about the
impossibility of real change in a democracy dominated by elites and oligarchs. But unlike us, he
proposed a way out: a strong political leader who was willing to kill to save the country from
criminals and corrupt politicians. The spread of global illiberalism is unlikely to end soon. As
this crisis unfolds, we will need intellectuals who use their intellects for more than simple
negation—professors like the late New York University historian Tony Judt, who argued that
European-style social democracy could save global democracy. Failing that, we need academics
who acknowledge that liberal democracy, though slow and imperfect, enables a bare minimum
of tolerance in a world beset by xenophobia and hatred. For although academics have the
luxury of imagining a completely different world, the rest of us have to figure out
what to do with the one we have.
 A2 – SHAPIRO
What is required is not an abandonment of meaning – your authors over-
compensate in their assumption that the contemporary dominant beliefs will
structure the code forever – instead we should accommodate contingent
circumstances through rhetorical and material resistance practices
Robinson 4, Andy Zizek hater, Baudrillard, Zizek and Laclau on "common sense" - a critique,
http://andyrobinsontheoryblog.blogspot.com/2004/11/baudrillard-zizek-and-laclau-on-common.html
Similarly, at times, Baudrillard admits both the unsatisfactory nature of the society of the spectacle for many of its participants, and
the existence of spheres of belief and discourse beyond its borders. For instance, people don't fully believe the hyperreality which
substitutes for reality (SSM 99); some groups, so-called "savages" such as the Arab masses, are not submerged in simulation and can
still become passionately involved in, for instance, war (GW 32); the real still exists underground (GW 63). Indeed, although his
analysis of the Gulf War suggests that the WEST is trapped in simulacra, his account of the rest of the world suggests it follows a
different logic (eg GW 65). Wars or non-wars today are waged by the west against symbolic logics which break with the dominant
system, such as Islam (GW 85-6), to absorb everything which is singular and irreducible (GW 86). Also, though he thinks the risk of
admits that an accident, an irruption of Otherness, or an event which breaks the control
it is low, he
exerted by information can disrupt the "celibate machine" of media control (GW 36, 48). If this is the case,
however, there is no basis for assuming its totality, and it is still meaningful to try to win people over to alternatives.
In SSM Baudrillard retreats from this analysis, suggesting the reduction of society to a rat race is a result of the masses' resistance to
'objective' economic management (SSM 45) - the system benefits as a result but that is not the main issue. This contrasts with Baudrillard's
earlier analyses and also those of others such as Illich, who see the destructive social effects of such competition. However, Baudrillard does
attack "the social", which he identifies with control through information, simulation, security and deterrence (SSM 50-1) - though how it can be
resisted since he thinks it "produces" us is never explained. ¶ Baudrillard
tends to conflate existing dominant beliefs with
thought and meaning per se. As a result, he leaves it impossible to critique dominant ideas in a
meaningful way. For instance, he poses political problems in terms of "resistance to the social ", with the social
in general being conflated with the EXISTING social system (SSM 41); ditto on the existing sign system, which Baudrillard
identifies with meaning per se. In such cases, Baudrillard misses the whole question of countercultural practices
and the creation of alternative hegemonies .¶ Baudrillard's conflation of meaning per se with dominant
beliefs leads to a refusal to countenance the possibility of transforming mass beliefs . Raising the cultural level of
the masses, Baudrillard claims, is "Nonsense" because the masses, who want spectacle rather than meaning, are
resistant to "rational communication " (SSM 10). An "autonomous change in consciousness" by the masses, Baudrillard
tells us, is a "glaring impossibility" (SSM 30) - though he never tells us how he deduces this . Furthermore, he also
claims that people who try to raise consciousness, liberate the unconscious or promote subjectivity "are acting in accordance with
the system" (SSM 109). This anathematisation is a result of Baudrillard's strange claim that the system's logic is based on total
inclusion and speech! It is on this basis that Baudrillard rejects argument based on empirical claims and locates truth outside such
claims (SSM 121-2).
A2 NEG ARGUMENTS
ESSENTIALS
 AT: ENDLESS WAR
No endless war – empirically denied, BUT their invocation of skepticism about
American international stability is a dangerous approach that greenlights
aggression by rising powers --- DA to the alt
Carafano 7/2 (James Jay, holds an M.A. in British and early modern European history from
Georgetown University, an M.A. in strategic studies from the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle,
Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in diplomatic history from Georgetown, vice president of foreign and
defense policy studies at The Heritage Foundation, “James Carafano: What Those Decrying
America’s “Endless Wars” Are Really Talking About” in Fox News 7/2/2019
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/james-carafano-what-those-decrying-americas-endless-
wars-are-really-talking-about)NFleming
From the presidential candidate debate stage to new think tanks, voices from both left and right
are demanding an end to America’s endless wars. Only one problem: We’re not fighting any
endless wars . No matter. The endless-war warriors want us to do less on the world stage . Even in this
age of great power competition, these “new” isolationists would prefer America step off the playing field
and wave from the sidelines. It’s a strategy that would work well for Beijing, Tehran and
Moscow – but not for the U.S. No one is denying we’ve seen plenty of wars – and long ones at that. The U.S. has fought more
than it ever wanted, including the global war on terrorism and related conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. But America’s
endless war days have ended – at least for now. JAMES CARAFANO: TRUMP ADOPTS SHREWD IRAN STRATEGY
That’s not to say we don’t have troops in combat zones around the world. But, by any reasonable definition, America
just isn’t at war. We are, for sure, dealing with the aftermath of conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. But President Obama’s
withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq marked the end of that war, and he transitioned the effort in Afghanistan all-
out fighting to an advice-and-assist mission. History supplies overwhelming evidence that weakness and
indifference do not deter aggression and exploitation , they invite it. Today, what America does
around the world is pretty much what it has been doing since 1945 – providing forward presence, deterrence,
counterterrorism, training, assistance, and freedom of navigation. That’s important work and a heavy lift, but it ain’t
war. So what the carpers are really complaining about is not “endless wars” (an admittedly powerful albeit
dishonest catch-phrase), but U.S. foreign policy in general . So the question is: what foreign policy do they want
instead? The U.S. is a global power with global interests and responsibilities. That’s not a
choice; it’s just who we are. No one today is arguing that the U.S. can child-proof the world to make America safe.
The overly ambitious efforts of the George W. Bush era clearly created as many problems as they solved. But, walking away
from problems doesn’t work well either – as the Obama team more than amply demonstrated. They ended
the war in Iraq. And, for that, we got a war with the caliphate. They ended the war in Afghanistan. For that, we got the resurgence of
the Taliban. The reset with Russia produced a war in Ukraine. Tried to buy Iran off, and that didn’t work. And they stood by as China
moved to make the South China Sea its own and North Korea’s Kim built out his nuclear arsenal. Trump has tried to stake out a
middle ground. He isn’t interested in being the world’s babysitter, but he is willing to stand up and demonstrate sufficient resolve to
protect America’s interest. Trump has tried to stake out a middle ground. He isn’t interested in being the world’s
babysitter, but he is willing to stand up and demonstrate sufficient resolve to protect America’s interest. He
has managed to
do that – and finish off the Caliphate – without starting any new wars . So where are the endless
wars? Or, more to the point, what’s so bad about this administration’s foreign policy? Look around, and you’ll see Russia
stonewalled in Crimea. Iran just failed to close the Straits of Hormuz. The DPRK is negotiating. The Stars and Stripes proudly sail
the South China Seas, and there is nothing Beijing can do about. Apparently, that’s not good enough for the end the endless-war
warriors. They want us to do even less. But “ do less” is a poor prescription for dealing with the
world as it is . History supplies overwhelming evidence that weakness and indifference do not deter aggression and
exploitation, they invite it. CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP What America needs now are
discussions about how to prudently exercise its power in a complex world: what’s
the right balance of multilateral action, prodding allies, making compromises and
standing strong. What we don’t need are politicians and pundits who suggest that, if America simply does nothing, our
enemies and competitors will behave just as they should and everything will be just fine . Trump’s foreign policy has been
dramatically successful at rebalancing U.S. interests. It has not brought war, much less endless war. To withdraw
further from the world stage would only invite the world’s bad actors to take center stage once more.
 AT: ETHICS FIRST
Pragmatism is better than purity—ethics and politics aren’t mutually exclusive
BUT require political solutions.
Frederic C. RICH, J.D., University of Virginia School of Law, practiced at Sullivan & Cromwell
LLP (1981-2014), Vice Chair of the Land Trust Alliance, head of the Environmental Leaders
Group in New York State, 16 [Getting to Green, 2016, p. 196-198]
Bill Clinton recently said of the U.S. Constitution, "[I]t ought to be subtitled: 'Let's make a deal.'"10 He's right. But the Green
movement has for decades been led by policy experts who are confident that their policies present the best
solutions to environmental issues and who often are unwilling to consider alternatives, or accept
incremental progress when a comprehensive solution is not possible. Green advocates have
appeared to many to prefer confrontation to compromise, and Green colleagues are often harsh in
criticizing others [END PAGE 196] who accept partial solutions or show willingness to deviate from the movement's ask in
order to show some progress.11
Even after the fact, Green orthodoxy often paints landmark compromises as failures. David Brower, longtime head of the Sierra
Club, came to regret the deal that saved Dinosaur National Monument because it involved a compromise that permitted a single dam
at the spectacular Glen Canyon.12 Rejection of compromise is deeply embedded in the DNA of the more
radical part of the movement. Earth First!, for example, has as its slogan "No compromise in the defense of Mother
Earth." And although the rest of the movement does not share the approach of these more radical groups, their rhetoric
echoes in the consciences of mainstream Greens. As a result, among Greens purity too often is prized
above pragmatism . The former president of the Izaak Walton League complains bitterly about some of his colleagues in
the Green movement, where, he says, "people often want to be viewed as the most holy defender of the faith, rather than the most
effective at making progress."13
The Green movement has had a particular problem accepting incrementalism, although recent
history is filled with examples, such as the gradual tightening of fuel efficiency and auto
emissions standards, that are successful models of exactly this approach. In some cases opposition
to incremental gain is strategically sound, or is simply a tactic designed to improve and broaden the scope of a law or rule.
But when it results in positive legislation or regulation being stalled or killed, with no realistic
hope of anything better replacing it, then it is a mistake. When motivated by pure politics , such as the
desire to deny the Republicans an environmental victory, then it is a betrayal of our environmental mission for
partisan gain.
Greens also sometimes seem to take pride in spewing out "big thinking" without regard to its political feasibility. Gus Speth, for
example, wrote, "If someone says these proposals are impractical, [END PAGE 197] or politically naïve, then I would respond that
we need impractical answers."14 These habits—reluctance to compromise, distrust of incrementalism,
and insufficient attention to pragmatism—have contributed to the movement's failures
and resulted in missed opportunities to make at least some progress on climate change. Any well-managed
organization should insist that results define success. If the perfect policy is dead on arrival as a political
matter, then compromise. The environmental movement is funded by its supporters to make a difference in the
environment. So figure out what is achievable and go for that, even if it means you are negotiating with yourself, compromising
before you sit down at the table with the other side, or "thinking small," all of which have been cardinal sins in many NGO cultures.
Incremental progress is progress, and progress is what is urgently needed .
 AT: SUBJECTIVITY FIRST
Debate’s focus shouldn’t solely be the production of ethical subjectivities. Rather,
taking stances on global issues is necessary to develop accountability to global
violence.
Chandler 9 (David, Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster,
[“Questioning Global Political Activism,” in What is Radical Politics Today? Ed. Jonathan Pugh,
2009, p. 81-84]
Today more and more people are ‘doing politics’ in their academic work. This is the reason for the boom
in International Relations (IR) study and the attraction of other social sciences to the global sphere. I would argue that the
attraction of IR for many people has not been IR theory but the desire to practise global ethics .
The boom in the IR discipline has coincided with a rejection of Realist theoretical frameworks of power and interests and the
sovereignty/anarchy problematic. However, I would argue that this rejection has not been a product of theoretical
engagement with Realism but an
ethical act of rejection of Realism's ontological focus .
It seems that our ideas and our theories say much more about us than the world we live in.
Normative theorists and Constructivists tend to support the global ethical turn arguing that we
should not be as concerned with 'what is' as with the potential for the emergence of a global
ethical community. Constructivists, in particular, focus upon the ethical language which political elites
espouse rather than the practices of power. But the most dangerous trends in the discipline
today are those frameworks which have taken up Critical Theory and argue that focusing on the
world as it exists is conservative problem-solving while the task for critical theorists is to focus
on emancipatory alternative forms of living or of thinking about the world . Critical
thought then becomes a process of wishful thinking rather than one of engagement, with its
advocates arguing that we need to focus on clarifying our own [END PAGE 81] ethical frameworks
and biases and positionality, before thinking about or teaching on world affairs . This
becomes 'me-search' rather than research . We have moved a long way from Hedley Bull's (1995) perspective
that, for academic research to be truly radical, we had to put our values to the side to follow where the question or inquiry might
lead.
The inward-looking and narcissistic trends in academia, where we are more concerned with our reflectivity- the awareness of our
own ethics and values - than with engaging with the world, was brought home to me when I asked my IR students which theoretical
frameworks they agreed with most. They mostly replied Critical Theory and Constructivism. This is despite the fact that the students
thought that states operated on the basis of power and self-interest in a world of anarchy. Their theoretical preferences
were based more on what their choices said about them as ethical individuals, than about how
theory might be used to understand and engage with the world .
Conclusion
Politics has
I have attempted to argue that there is a lot at stake in the radical understanding of engagement in global politics.
become a religious activity, an activity which is no longer socially mediated; it is less and less an
activity based on social engagement and the testing of ideas in public debate or in the academy. Doing
politics today, whether in radical activism, government policy-making or in academia, seems to
bring people into a one-to-one relationship with global issues in the same way religious people
have a one-to-one relationship with their God.
Politics is increasingly like religion because when we look for meaning we find it inside
ourselves rather than in the external consequences of our 'political' acts. What matters is
the conviction or the act in itself: its connection to the global sphere is one that we increasingly tend to provide idealistically.
Another way of expressing this limited sense of our subjectivity is in the popularity of globalisation theory - the idea that
instrumentality is no longer possible today because the world is such a complex and interconnected place and therefore there is no
way of knowing the consequences of our actions. The more we engage in the new politics where there is an
unmediated relationship between us as individuals and global issues, the less we engage
instrumentally with the outside world, and the less we engage with our peers and colleagues at the
level of political or intellectual debate and organisation. [END PAGE 82]
You may be thinking that I have gone some way to describing or identifying what the problems might be but I have not mentioned
anything about a solution. I won't dodge the issue. One thing that is clear is that the solution is not purely an
intellectual or academic one; the demand for global ethics is generated by our social reality and
social experiences. Marx spent some time considering a similar crisis of political subjectivity in 1840s Germany and in his
writings - The German Ideology, Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Theses on Feuerbach, and elsewhere -
he raged against the idealism of contemporary thought and argued that the criticism of religion needed to be replaced by the
criticism of politics - by political activism and social change based on the emerging proletariat (see Marx, 1975, for example). Nearly
two centuries later it is more difficult to see an emerging political subject which can fulfil the task of
'changing the world' rather than merely 'reinterpreting it' through philosophy .
I have two suggestions. Firstly, that there is a pressing need for an intellectual struggle against the
idealism of global ethics. The point needs to be emphasised that our freedom to engage in politics, to
choose our identities and political campaigns, as well as governments' freedom to choose their
ethical campaigns and wars of choice, reflects a lack of socialties and social engagement .
There is no global political struggle between 'Empire' and its 'Radical Discontents'; the Foucauldian
temptation to see power and resistance everywhere is a product of wishful or lazy thinking
dominated by the social categories of the past. The stakes are not in the global stratosphere but much closer
to home. Politics appears to have gone global because there is a breakdown of genuine
community and the construction of fantasy communities and fantasy connections in global
space. Unless we bring politics back down to earth from heaven , our critical, social and
intellectual lives will continue to be diminished ones.
Secondly, on the basis that the political freedom of our social atomisation leads us into increasingly idealised approaches to the
world we live in, we should take more seriously Hedley Bull's (1995) injunction to pursue the question, or in Alain
Badiou's (2004: 237-8) words subordinate ourselves to the 'discipline of the real'. Subordination to the
world outside us is a powerful factor that can bind those interested in critical research, whereas
the turn away from the world and the focus on our personal values can ultimately only be
divisive . To facilitate external engagement and external judgement , I suggest we experiment with
ways to build up social bonds with our peers that can limit our freedoms and develop our
sense of responsibility and accountability to others. We may have to construct these
social connections artificially but their [END PAGE 83] value and instrumentality will have to be
proven through our ability to engage with, understand, critique and ultimately overcome the
practices and subjectivities of our time.
 AT: INTERVENTION
The age of intervention is over---budget constraints, declining approval, and
geopolitical shifts make offensive military operations obsolete---the debate is only
about modelling.
Traub 12. (James Traub is a columnist at foreignpolicy.com, a fellow at the Center on
International Cooperation and the author of “The Freedom Agenda.” The End of American
Intervention. February 18, 2012. www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-
american-intervention.html?mcubz=0)
FOR the last 20 years we have lived amid the furious clangor of war — and debates over how to
wage it. The intense and urgent clashes in the 1990s over “humanitarian intervention” gave way
to pitched battles over “regime change” and “democracy promotion” after 9/11, and then to
arguments over “counterinsurgency strategy,” a new battle for hearts and minds, as Barack
Obama ramped up the war in Afghanistan. The foreign policy debate has often felt like an
ideological cockfight. And now, although we have not yet realized it, that era has come to an
end . For proof, you need look no further than the Pentagon’s new “strategic guidance”
document, issued last month in the wake of Mr. Obama’s pledge to cut $485 billion from the
defense budget over the coming decade. It repeats many of the core objectives of recent
American national security strategy: defeat Al Qaeda, deter traditional aggressors, counter the
threat from unconventional weapons. But it also states, “In the aftermath of the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States will emphasize nonmilitary means and
military-to-military cooperation to address instability and reduce the demand for
significant U.S. force commitments to stability operations.” It goes on to note that
“U.S. forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability
operations.” With this paragraph military planners signaled an abrupt end to the
post-9/11 era of intervention . Only a few years ago the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — wars
of occupation, nation-building and counterinsurgency — looked like the face of modern conflict.
Now they don’t. Americans don’t believe in them and can’t afford them anymore . The
strategic guidance hit one other very new note: While American forces will continue to maintain a significant presence in the Middle East, the planners wrote, “We will of
necessity rebalance towards the Asia-Pacific region.” This is bureaucratic code for “we will stand up to China,” which, the Obama administration has concluded, has superseded
Al Qaeda as the chief future threat to American national security. To say this is not merely to assert that one region has taken precedence over another but that the traditional
threat of the expansionist state has supplanted the threat of the stateless actor that emerged after 9/11. Of course, global problems like climate change, epidemic disease, nuclear
proliferation and terrorism won’t go away. But in matters of war and peace, we seem to be returning to a more familiar world in which great powers maneuver for advantage. We
left that world behind, or so we thought, with the end of the cold war, which deprived America of its traditional enemy and thus raised the question of whether and when we
would resort to force. The answer came in the mid-1990s, when the Clinton administration felt compelled to respond to political chaos in Haiti and mass violence in the Balkans.
Force could be used in the pursuit of justice. During the 2000 election campaign, George W. Bush vowed to put an end to these moralistic enterprises and to focus instead on
great-power relations. But 9/11 turned those plans upside down. Indeed, the Bush administration’s 2002 national security strategy asserted that “America is now threatened less
by conquering states than we are by failing ones.” Mr. Bush, far more than Mr. Clinton, yoked the use of force to a transcendent principle, insisting that America “must defend
liberty and justice because these principles are right and true for all people everywhere.” Those were fighting words, and not just abroad. The debate over the war in Iraq revived
many of the old debates from the Clinton era. Liberal internationalists like the British prime minister, Tony Blair, joined American neoconservatives like William Kristol and
Robert Kagan in arguing for the use of force to bring about transformative political change, while “realists” on the left and right warned of the danger of reckless adventures.
The era we have now entered will be a less ideologically charged one. The questions
raised by China’s growing ambitions are categorically different from those provoked by 9/11.
China is an emerging power, and once having found their footing, emerging powers usually seek
to expand at the expense of their neighbors. The world is accustomed to dealing with this
kind of problem, which involves persuading the bumptious power that its interests
lie in cooperation rather than in confrontation. And there is a fair amount of consensus
in policy circles about how to deal with it. Conservatives have been sounding alarms about
China’s military ambitions for several years, and the Obama administration has now begun to
execute a “pivot” to Asia. On a visit to the region, President Obama announced that America
would station 2,500 Marines in Australia, even as it decreased military commitments elsewhere.
WHATEVER policy the Obama administration or its successor adopts toward
China, the broader East Asian region, unlike the Middle East, is filled with stable,
and largely democratic, states. The United States does not have to defend liberty
and justice there . Regime change, democracy promotion and nation-building will
be off the table. So, for that matter, will war. America is not about to go to war with
China, or with anyone else in Asia. The struggle to balance Chinese ambition will be left
mostly to the Navy and Air Force, and our allies in the region. And it will not be a metaphysical
one: the very complicated relationship with China is much less a clash of worldviews than of
interests. Finally, there is the elemental fact that America can no longer afford its
own ambitions. The failure of last year’s bipartisan effort to solve the deficit crisis triggered
automatic cuts that are supposed to double the half-trillion dollars already scheduled to be
sliced from the Pentagon budget. In his 2010 book, “The Frugal Superpower,” Michael
Mandelbaum argued that the contraction of the American economy meant that “the defining
fact of foreign policy in the second decade of the 21st century and beyond will be ‘less.’ ” Mr.
Mandelbaum, himself a leading realist, suggested that the chief victim of the new austerity
will be “intervention.” It may be so, though the NATO air campaign in Libya shows that
humanitarian intervention is neither defunct nor doomed to failure. Such ventures, however,
will be very rare, as the current stalemate over Syria implies. The coming years may well be
a period of at least relative austerity, modesty and realism. Should we feel relieved? It
is easy enough to say that the United States should no longer fight wars of occupation in the
Middle East, or seek to promote democracy through regime change, or undertake
counterinsurgency campaigns on a massive scale. But in a world of weak and failing
states, are we also to abandon ambitious hopes to help build stable and
democratic institutions abroad? Is foreign aid to wind up on the junk heap of failed
dreams? America has been and can continue to be a force for good in the world . But
those of us who have championed an idealistic foreign policy have been deeply chastened by the
failure of so many fine hopes and have been forced to recognize both how much harm the United
States can do with the best of intentions and how very hard it is to shape good outcomes inside
other countries. So we must accept, if uneasily, the future which now seems to lie before us: We
will do less good in the world, but also less harm.
 AT: IMPERIALISM
Their argument is a theoretical shortcut that gives up on the hard work necessary
to heal the wounds of colonialism
Michael Walzer 14, a professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in
Princeton. Walzer was first employed in 1962 in the politics department at Princeton University.
He stayed there until 1966, when he moved to the government department at Harvard. He
taught at Harvard until 1980, when he became a permanent faculty member in the School of
Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. He is co-editor of Dissent and he has written
27 books and published over 300 articles, essays, and book reviews in Dissent, The New
Republic, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harpers, and
many philosophical and political science journals. – “A Foreign Policy for the Left” - Dissent –
Spring, 2014 – obtained via OmniFile Full Text Select (H.W. Wilson) database
The second shortcut, perhaps even more popular than the first, is to stand up always against “imperialism”—or, a shortcut
inside the shortcut, always to oppose American policies abroad. Anti-Americanism is a common left politics, which, again,

sometimes gets things right, and sometimes doesn’t. I believe that it got things right in Vietnam in 1967; it mostly got things right
from the beginning of the twentieth century to the end in Central and South America; it got Iran right in 1953 (when leftists criticized the anti-Mossadegh coup), and Iraq in
that’s still not enough to make it a reliable shortcut. Remember that the defeat of
2003; it gets NAFTA right, and the IMF, too. But

Nazism and Stalinism, the two most brutal political regimes in world history, was in significant ways
American work. This was work that many people on the left supported, as we should have. In 1967 Dwight Macdonald wrote to Mary McCarthy that the American
war in Vietnam proved “that despite all the good things about our internal political-social-cultural life, we have become an imperialist power, and one that, partly because of
these domestic virtues, is a most inept one.” We have continued to be inept: in December 2005, with 100,000 American soldiers in Iraq, we organized an election—and our man
came in third. This is a result, I think, without precedent in imperial history. Macdonald’s understanding of U.S. imperialism reflects a political intelligence and a moral balance
The anti-American shortcut sometimes produces a short-
that is mostly missing in contemporary anti-American writing.

circuited politics —as in the Syrian case where leftist writers predicted terrible consequences if
the Americans inter - vened on the side of the anti-Assad forces. The predictions have come true even though the

United States didn’t intervene, but once it was clear that the awfulness was not America’s fault,
many leftists simply lost interest — except for an ongoing but not very effective engagement on behalf of the war’s victims. Who was
responsible for the ongoing war, for the killing, the terror, and the refugee crisis; what social forces were involved; what should we (on the left) make of
them and how should we respond to them? This kind of analysis , standard in left critiques of impe

- rialism, has mostly been missing. One reason for its absence is that it offers no opportunity to
criticize America; a second reason is that it would require a close reading and sharp critique of Islamist politics. Another much-used shortcut (though it doesn’t
work in the Syrian case) is to oppose everything Israel does and to blame it for much that it hasn’t done, since it is the “lackey” of American imperialism or, alternatively, the
dominant force in shaping American foreign policy. The policies of the current Israeli government require radical criticism—the occupation, the settlements, the refusal to
suppress Jewish hooliganism on the West Bank. Nonetheless, the anti-Israel shortcut is an example, to paraphrase August Bebel, of the leftism of fools. The last shortcut is
simply to support every government that calls itself leftist or anti-imperialist and sets itself against American interests. This is different from the old Stalinist shortcut: support
the Soviet Union whatever it does because it is the first proletarian dictatorship and the first workers’ paradise. That kind of politics is, I think, definitively finished, though it
had a brief afterlife, focused on China and then, with very few believers, on Albania and North Korea. The more recent version celebrates Maximal Leaders like Nasser, Castro, or
Hugo Chávez— along with occasional short-lived infatuations, as in the case of Michel Foucault and the future Ayatollah Khomeini. Leftist enthusiasm for populist dictatorships
is one of our sad stories, which ends when resources run out, the failure to build the economy is suddenly apparent, and the military takes over. But often the Maximal Leader is
a military man himself, and the repressive role of the army simply becomes more obvious over time. In Latin America today, the better left is repre - sented by socialists and
social democrats who reject demagogic populism and struggle to produce economic growth, greater equality, and a stronger welfare state—and who attract less enthusiasm from
leftists are idealists, and so we tend to idealize other people and to imagine that the
American leftists than they deserve. Most

world is more hospitable to our ideas than it actually is. At the same time, we know better; so I call this the politics of pretending.
Consider the response of many leftists to the al Qaeda attack of 9/11. They argued that the United States should call the attack a crime and look to the UN and the International
Criminal Court to deal with the criminals. That was the “Dial 911” response to 9/11 (it has been repeated again and again in response to later terrorist attacks), and it would have
made sense if we lived in a world that was actually run by the UN and the ICC. But, as I argued in Dissent at the time, there was no one answering the phone at 911. Self-help
isn’t, indeed, the only effective and justified response to criminal attacks; different forms of mutual assistance and collective security are possible, and the left should take a
forward position in exploring them. But self-help has to be part of the story, given the world we live in, and it isn’t a good idea to pretend otherwise. Another example: some
leftists who opposed the Kosovo intervention argued that it didn’t have what every legal and justified use of force requires: UN authorization. Indeed, it didn’t. The UN Security
Council is incapable, almost all the time, of acting in a timely way. Think of the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia to shut down the killing fields; or the Indian invasion of East
Pakistan, now Bangladesh, to end the terror there; or the Tanzanian invasion of Uganda to overthrow the murderous regime of Idi Amin. None of these had or could have gotten
UN approval. Many leftists opposed each of these interventions, pretending that the UN was already what leftists want it to be, an effective political agent. It isn’t that, and so the
The best and last example of leftist pretending
unilateral use of force is often, as Jürgen Habermas said of the Kosovo case, “illegal but morally necessary.”

is the insistence on the reason - ableness of people who give no sign of being reasonable. Paul Berman
writes of the large numbers of French socialists who supported the Munich Agreement that “they

gazed across the Rhine and simply refused to believe that millions of upstanding Germans had
enlisted in a political movement whose animating principles were paranoid conspiracy theories
[and] blood-curdling hatreds. . . .” In the same spirit, many leftists were eager to describe the Chinese communists as “agrarian reformers.” And many
today have been quick to grant the legitimacy of Islamist opposition to American bases in Saudi Arabia, say, or to the exis - tence of Israel—and to ignore the demand for a
shari’a state and the radical subordination of women. I am fairly sure that most of the people involved in all these cases
knew, deep down, that they were pretending. There is a lot to be said for the default position. We should work in the place we know best to
make things better. The improvement of humanity begins at home. This argument has special force for Americans, who live in an increasingly inegalitarian society that is also a
near-hegemonic world power: we need to be wary of adventures abroad that make our work at home more difficult. Still, good leftists can’t avoid
internationalism. We can’t escape what Václav Havel in 1993 called “the feeling of co-responsibility for the world.”
Our deepest commitment is solidarity with people in trouble, and some of the worst troubles —poverty, hunger, tyranny, and

mass murder—are being experienced right now in other people’s countries. So we are going to be engaged again
and again in arguments about what we can do to help. There is no magical way of getting these arguments right. But certain

ideological positions, rigidly held, are almost certain to get them wrong : that the use of force is
never justified; that “imperial” powers, like the United States, can never act well in the world; and that revo - lutionaries and
fighters for liberation, populist leaders and political vanguards, must never be criticized. In all these cases, ideological commitment means that

we will only get things right by accident. Political intelligence and moral sensitivity work much better than ideology, and it is these two that
should guide our choice of comrades and our decisions about when and how to act abroad. Dictators and terrorists are never our comrades, but only those men and women who
really believe in, and who practice, democracy and equality. We should act abroad only with those who share our commitments, and we should act only in ways consistent with
those commitments. Leftists have done that often in the past, but often also, we have not: we have mistaken or betrayed our comrades and acted in ways that did not serve either
We need to learn from our history—and the first lesson is this: no more
democracy or equality.

shortcuts , no more pretending.

 AT: ROOT CAUSE – OPPRESSION
Systems of oppression are interlocking --- there is no one “root” but they stem
from the ability to make value-hierarchies. The negative’s attempt to posit animal
rights as the “root cause” of other oppressions re-creates this value hierarchy and
undermines social justice.
Carol L. Glasser, 2011. Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology, University of California, Irvine. “Tied Oppressions: An
Analysis of How Sexist Imagery Reinforces Speciesist Sentiment,” The Brock Review 12.1,
http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/30512230/Glasser_BrockReview2011.pdf?
AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJ56TQJRTWSMTNPEA&Expires=1391628887&Signature=Q8G6sI2nby1ciYx9p5F6nUSFilQ
%3D&response-content-disposition=inline.

Social justice movements are typically single-issue ventures . While this may be necessary in order to set
achievable goals, make coherent claims, and develop a larger base of supporters, it can also lead to a lack of
mutual identification between social justice movements. Social movement organizations are vying for
limited resources, including members, funds, and political allies. In this context, competition can develop
between social movement organizations within a single social movement , 2 as well as between
different social justice movements. 3 Inter-movement competition often leads to situations in
which social justice movements make claims or take actions that place their goals over the goals
of other movements. For example, social movements may use patriarchal organizing structures and devalue the
work of women as Belinda Robnett shows in the case of the Civil Rights movement 4 and Julian McAllister Groves 5
shows in the case of the animal rights movement. Movements may also intentionally assert their cause
over other movements, as has occurred with debates over live animal markets in San Francisco’s
China town. Animal rights activists claim that the welfare of the animals is the most important
issue, while community activists in China town claim that preserving cultural autonomy is of
paramount concern. In this article I speak specifically to the effects of a third way that social justice movements
undercut each other. Though less common, it is the case that social movements actively oppress other disadvantaged
groups to further their own aims. This is particularly problematic because oppressions are interlocking 7 and
mutually reinforcing within an overarching system of domination . Therefore, when any social
justice movement asserts privilege over another social justice movement it hurts all movements
fighting oppression. I demonstrate how this works by focusing on one example that ties two social movements:
women’s movements and animal rights. I present two advertisements by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
(PETA) and take the reader through a feminist reading of these images to demonstrate 1) they are sexist, 2) the way in
which they are sexist relies on paralleling women to nonhuman animals, and 3) this parallel reasserts speciesist
ideology and reinforces both anti-woman and anti-animal sentiments. The argument that some PETA ads are sexist is
not new, 8 and has long been a discussion among both feminists and animal rights activists. I extend this debate by
arguing that these images also reinforce speciesist and anti-animal ideology through their use of sexism. I tie this
argument back to the larger need for social justice movements to recognize that all oppressions are interlocking and
when any oppression is embraced all oppressions are strengthened. I focus on these specific advertisements and on
PETA for a number of reasons. PETA is in no way representative of all animal rights organizations, but it is currently
the largest animal rights social movements organization in the United States. 9 According to their mission statement
they currently have over 2 million members and supporters internationally. Furthermore, they are an organization
that is popularly recognized in the United States for advertising campaigns that often feature famous actors (e.g.
Alicia Silverstone, Jack-Ass’s Steve-o), musicians (e.g. Paul McCartney, Pink) and pop icons (e.g. Pamela Anderson,
Playboy Playmates) in risqué poses. Since PETA campaigns are more visible to a larger audience than are most animal
rights campaigns, the tactics they choose are particularly important as they can potentially direct popular sentiment
toward animal rights. I selected the advertisements I refer to in this article not because they are indicative of all
animal rights campaigns or even of all PETA advertisements, but because they are clear examples of the main points I
am making in this paper; namely, that utilizing sexism reinforces the oppression of animals. (Un)Tied Oppressions
All forms of discrimination, including homophobia, racism, sexism, speciesism, ageism,
disableism and bias based on weight and citizenship status, are rooted in the same system of
oppression. This is not to say that experiences of or histories of oppression are the same for
different groups. In fact, oppression never looks the same; this is why it is difficult for oppressed
groups to recognize the ways in which their oppressions are similar and can actually reinforce
each other. Different groups have different histories and daily experiences of oppression. Further, within any
group, oppression and discrimination is experienced differently on an individual basis. Each
individual embodies a unique array of oppressed and privileged positions simultaneously, based
on their biography and social experiences; as such systems of oppression intersect differently for
different individuals. This is what Kimberly Crenshaw describes as “intersectionality.” 10 At its most basic level,
intersectionality refers to the fact that any one form of oppression is experienced differently in light of other positions
of oppression an individual holds. In other words, an Asian woman experiences sexism differently than a black
woman and experiences racism differently than an Asian man. For example, discrimination in the labor market works
differently for men and women and varies by race in a complex way, so that an individual is multiplicatively affected
by race and gender. Though men within any ethnic group make more than their female counterparts on average, this
gap varies depending on the ethnic group. The largest average wage gap within any U.S. ethnic group is between
Asian men and Asian women ($205/week), followed by whites ($152/week), blacks ($67/week), then Hispanics
($47/week). At the same time, differences between ethnic groups are such that the general tenant that men make
more than women fades; the median weekly earnings of Asian and white women is greater than that of black and
Hispanic men. 11 This example demonstrates the way that oppressions intersect in a complicated manner, such that
each individual experiences oppression in a unique way. This makes it particularly difficult to recognize
oppression as a systemic rather than an individual problem . In addition to the intersections of
oppressions that individuals experience, it is necessary to recognize that different types of oppression mutually
reinforce one another. David Nibert 12 identifies the systematic and institutional nature of oppression, highlighting
the way in which oppressions are “entangled”: [T]he oppression of various devalued groups in human societies is not
independent and unrelated; rather, the arrangements that lead to various forms of oppression are integrated in such a
way that the exploitation of one group frequently augments and compounds the mistreatment of others. U.S.
slaughterhouses provide a stark example of the way that oppressions are entangled. The push for inexpensive food
has led to a system of exploitation that oppresses workers, the poor, nonhuman animals, and immigrants. The
exploitation of nonhuman animals is obvious—in 2009 a total of 9,078,208,000 cows, calves, sheep, lambs, pigs,
chickens, turkeys, and ducks were murdered in U.S. slaughterhouses. 14 Workers in these slaughterhouses face one of
the highest risk jobs in the U.S. Slaughterhouses were identified in 2005 as the most dangerous factory job in the U.S.
by the Human Rights Watch, 15 with workers experiencing serious injuries at a rate five times higher than the
national average. 16 Further, companies often recruit workers without documentation, 17 leaving them no recourse
for opposing unsafe labor conditions. Work stresses spillover into the community, putting women at particular risk.
Amy Fitzgerald, Linda Kalof and Thomas Dietz found “that slaughterhouse employment increasestotal arrest rates,
arrests for violent crimes, arrests forrape, and arrests for other sex offenses in comparison with other industries.” 18
The fast pace of the slaughterhouse also increases the risk of errors that can lead to contamination by pathogens such
as E. coli and Lysteria. The lowest grades of meats involve the mixing of parts from multiple animals, increasing this
risk even further; it is this meat that is incorporated in the country’s free lunch programs, and is fed to the poorest of
the country’s children. Oppressions are entangled in such a way that they mutually generate and
reinforce each other because they are all linked through a single overarching system of
oppression—what Patricia Hill Collins has labeled the “matrix of domination ”: Intersectionality
refers to particular forms of intersecting oppressions, for example, intersections of race and gender, or of sexuality
and nation. Intersectional paradigms remind us that oppression cannot be reduced to one
fundamental type and that oppressions work together in producing injustices . In contrast, the
matrix of domination refers to how these intersecting oppressions are actually organized.
Regardless of the particular intersections involved, structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and
interpersonal domains of power reappear across quite different forms of oppression . 19 The
overarching structure currently bolstering all oppression is patriarchy, a social system premised on an unequal
distribution of power that privileges and maintains the power of humans, men, whites, U.S. citizens and the wealthy.
Patriarchy enforces and maintains an inegalitarian power structure through the use of dichotomous epistemologies
and value-ordered hierarchies. Dichotomous thinking defines something in relation to what it is not
as opposed to what it is. A dichotomy establishes only two opposite ways of being and only one
is valued. All that are not on the valued end are devalued because they are defined as not like
what is valued. 20 Two of the most salient dichotomies are the man/woman and man/nature dichotomies, which
create boundaries that are so accepted they are almost rendered invisible. The man/woman dichotomy that is the root
of misogyny clearly demonstrates this point. In the man/woman dichotomy, “man” is privileged and everything else is
devalued. “Man” is not just a biological male; it is equated with masculinity, whiteness and heterosexuality. In this
dichotomy, one version of masculinity is valued and all others are relegated to “not man.” This applies not only to
women, but also to men who don’t embody this dominant masculinity. A man who is not white or straight is not fully
a man, and a qualifier is typically attached to him; he is an “Asian man” or a “black man” or a “gay man.” 21
Dichotomous thinking not only reinforces gender inequality through the man/woman dichotomy that devalues
women and feminine traits; it also perpetuates racial inequality. For example, Espiritu explains the consistent
oppression of Asian Americans and Asians in the United States as a result of their being defined as “not-American,”
which relegates them as a group to being “forever foreigners.” 22 Patriarchal dichotomous thinking explains why
animals don’t deserve equal rights as a function of their status as not human, rather than because of their status as
animals. Importantly, there can be no concept of animal as not human without establishing the concept of humanity,
when in reality humans are animals. This erects the man/animal species barrier and propagates an inegalitarian
relationship of power. Within the matrix of domination there are multiple oppressions operating simultaneously so
that people, including nonhuman animals, have different positions along a dynamic continuum of power relations.
Carol J. Adams refers to this rank ordering as a value-hierarchy . 23 Within this hierarchy, certain
groups, ideas and institutions are privileged over others. This hierarchical system of ordering
society has also come to influence the way that we think about inequality, providing the
justification needed to maintain oppressions : Oppression has to be rationalized and
justified. It relies heavily on hierarchical views in which certain groups are believed to be undeserving of
consideration and fair treatment, promoting a ranking based on purported virtue or worth. 24 The most prominent
example of the way this system of oppression and power works is capitalism. Nibert identifies economics, particularly
capitalism, as the foundation of oppression. 25 I, however, position capitalism as a tool of patriarchy. In the current
social-historical context, capitalism is likely the main tool of patriarchy, but patriarchy provides the structural and
ideological foundation under which capitalism operates. Capitalism is a clear example of how patriarchy builds
institutions that appear to be fair when in reality they maintain power structures. Economic inequality established
under capitalism parallels and maintains the myriad inequalities perpetuated by patriarchal domination at the same
time that it masks inequalities and systemic oppression. Because currency looks the same no matter who holds it, and
because of the current cultural perpetuation of the “boot strap myth,” 26 people do not question or have the means to
oppose this system. It therefore becomes a self-sustaining and self-regulating system that exploits the majority
economically, keeping them in competition with each other for resources, rather than in conflict with those in power.
In this way the privileged few effortlessly, and perhaps unreflexively at times, maintain power. The concept of
value-hierarchies can also help us understand why social justice movements choose not to
mutually support each other and how patriarchy allows movements to undercut one another .
The notion of value-hierarchies explains why social justice movements may claim that some
oppressions are more immediate or necessary or important than others—at times leading
movements to engage in an unnecessary competition amongst each other for legitimacy,
members, or resources.
 AT: ROOT CAUSE – SETTLER COLONIALISM
Failure to recognize the contingent nature of the world fractures solidarity by
foreclosing shared histories of oppression in favor of an over-determined,
essentialized structuralism.
Joanne BARKER 17, Professor of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University,
former Visiting Scholar in the American Indian Studies Program of the Inter-American Cultures
Institute at UCLA, has received fellowships from the University of California, the Rockefeller
Foundation, and the Ford Foundation, self-identifies as an enrolled member of the Delaware
Tribe of Indians, holds a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness from the University of
California-Santa Cruz [“The Analytic Constraints of Settler Colonialism,” Tequila Sovereign,
February 2, 2017, https://tequilasovereign.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/the-analytic-
constraints-of-settler-colonialism/]
I’d like to re-frame my critique of the constraints of settler colonialism with the twelve little women in
mind. I am going to try to show that a certain analytic within the studies has, however unwittingly,
foreclosed and even chilled understandings of Black and Indigenous histories and identities
in ways that derail our understandings of U.S. imperialism as a social formation and so our
work with one another. One of the consequences of this goes to our ability to think through how
#BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, #NoDAPL, and #MMIW are co-generative — even as I
recognize the reasons why each of these movements have at different times demanded we respect their particularity.
Drawing from Marxist structuralism, Patrick Wolfe defines the settler colonial society through two
key differentiations.
The first is between the structure and the event of invasion. Wolfe maintains that the
permanence of invasion distinguishes the structure of a settler society , which originates with the
withdrawal of the empire and the rise to power of a land-holding class who always intended to stay. Wolfe defines the
ideology that cements this structure together as the logic of elimination . The settler exploits Indigenous
labor but more importantly seeks to eliminate all vestiges of Indigenous land claims by the elimination of Indigenous cultures and
identities.
Wolfe’s definition is to mark how it rearticulates the
The quickest way I can explain my concerns with
problematics of structuralism. It treats society as a fixed, coherent thing that can be
objectively described . The descriptions are simultaneously over-determined by the
historical event of the empire’s withdrawal and the exceptionalism of a permanent invasion.
We’ve been in this trouble before – we know structuralism generates all kinds of ahistorical
and apolitical problems , not to mention essentialisms , even as it is conditioned by the
intersectionalities of originary events and political identities.
For instance, Lorenzo Veracini argues that settler colonialism is “characterized by a settler capacity to
control the population economy” as a marker of sovereignty and that this situation is “associated
with a particular state of mind” and “narrative form” so powerful that “the possibility of ultimately
discontinuing/decolonizing settler colonial forms remains problematic.” Veracini maintains
that “settlers do not discover: they carry their sovereignty and lifestyles with them. As they move
towards what amounts to a representation of the world, as they transform the land into their image, they settle another place
without really moving.”
I would argue that the
settler colonial is a contested and unstable concept . Drawing from critical
Indigenous, race, and feminist approaches — such as those developed by Jodi Byrd, Mishuana Goeman,
Jennifer Denetdale, and Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers — that understand colonialism, racism, sexism, and
homophobia as permanent features of U.S. society, I would argue that society is not an
objectively settled structure to be described, nor an imaginary that travels as an integral
whole around the world. It is a set of contested meanings caught up in struggles over power
and knowledge.
And resistance is most certainly not futile .
The second differentiation on which Wolfe’s
settler colonialism rests is between the settler and the
Indigenous. While many assume the settler to be white – and perhaps more so to be a white heterosexual male – Wolfe,
Veracini, and others characterize the settler as both white and all other non-Indigenous people
irrespective of gender and sexuality . Pressed on the politics of such characterizations, particularly of figuring
Blacks as settlers, Wolfe explains:
Willingly or not, enslaved or not, at the point of a run or not, they arrived as part of the settler-colonial project. That
doesn’t make them settlers in the same sense as the colonizers who coerced them to participate—of course not—but it does
make them perforce part of the settler-colonial process of dispossession and elimination. — Patrick Wolfe (2012)
As the work of Circe Sturm, Tiya Miles, Sharon Patricia Holland, and so many others have demonstrated, Black and
Indigenous histories and identities (not necessarily distinct) are intersectional messes of racialized and
gendered contestation over and within the ongoing colonial forces of U.S. imperialism. We
need their analyses to understand these histories and identities and the ways we have inherited
them. We need to be careful about grouping all racial, ethnic, diaspora, and immigrant
communities in with settlers and pitting them and their presumably shared struggles for
civil rights against Indigenous sovereignty and territorial claims. The kinds of polemics that
result are not helpful . What if reparations and return are not antithetical political objectives? Who decides their
antithesis?
Creation, Generation
In 1985, during a speech at the United Nations Decade for Women Conference in Nairobi, Lilla Watson said:
If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation
is bound up with mine, then let us work together.
Watson, a member of the Murri indigenous to Queensland, has said since and repeatedly that she was “not comfortable being
credited for [saying] something that had been born of a collective process” and preferred that the words and their meaning be
credited to “Aboriginal activist groups, Queensland, 1970s.” She thus held herself – and the practice of citing her – accountable to
the community to whom she belonged. That ethic is further reflected in her — in her community’s — perspective that genuine
decolonization will happen as our movements address our shared conditions of oppression. Our
liberation is bound together .
“But,” Oklahoma-based Black activist tells me, “I want Indigenous peoples to take responsibility for the way they enslaved Black
bodies and internalized white racism towards Blacks in the conduct of their tribal sovereignty.” “But,” Mississippi Choctaw scholar
says to me, “I want Blacks to take responsibility for the way they grabbed at Indian lands after the Civil War. For the way the U.S.
illegally and violently acquired the lands from us that they promised to give to Freedmen. That Freedmen and their descendants
ignore this when they call for reparations.”
But… I’m still trying to figure out how in the difficult moments when the transgenerational
trauma of land dispossession, slavery, and racism so profoundly precludes our perceptions and
expectations of one another, we can find a way to affirm one another’s concerns and move our
liberation struggles forward .
A way that rejects the “respectability” of U.S. recognition and the containment politics of financial settlement. As Glen Coulthard
argues, recognition is a bullshit lie of capitalism that dresses up exploitation in liberal inclusion. As Alyosha Goldstein argues,
settlements “foreclose the lineages of historical injustice” and “individualize” in liberal fashion what is a matter of collective and
sovereign claims to territories and economic reckoning.
A way that rejects the kinds of legally and economically inconsequential responsibility-taking performance of church and
government apologia. A way that refuses to be settled up or settled down to negligible levels of financial compensation that change
nothing.
I believe we must draw from what Leanne Simpson argues are our cultural teachings for behaving towards
one another. She offers compassion, generosity, and humility as the points at which genuine
restoration of ourselves and our relationships are possible. From there, as Coulthard argues, we
must carve a way forward through a “disciplined maintenance of resentment,” a “politicized anger” towards
state oppression that refuses to accept guilt ridden, meaningless gestures of acknowledgment and
payouts for genuine reparations and land return.
Conclusions
As a conclusion I want to think about Black Lives Matter supporting the #NoDAPL actions at Standing Rock.
I don’t think it’s an accident that it is water that has brought the movements together. As the
Black community of Flint and the Lakota peoples of Standing Rock have taught us, water links
us together in our struggles for life. It points our attentions to what is destroyed by military,
security, and corporate concerns in Ferguson, Mexico, Palestine, and British Columbia; what
highlights the illegal seizing of lands for the illegal construction of pipelines; what has been
contaminated with hubris in the Delaware River basin, Flint Michigan, the Dakotas, and too
many other places to name.
Melissa Nelson writes that,
Most of us find it easier to separate ourselves from nature than to embrace the liquid mystery of our union with it. As
freshwater disappears on the earth, so do the water stories that remind us that we too can freeze, melt, conceive, and
evaporate. We too can construct a confluence of cultural rivulets where the natural and cultural coalesce. — Melissa
Nelsen
Perhaps we too can embrace the life of water to recognize the ways our movements co-generate , to
find our coalescence.
 AT: ROOT CAUSE - IR
No single root cause of violence or conflicts
Bleiker 14 – (6/17, Roland, Professor of International Relations at the University of
Queensland, “International Theory Between Reification and Self-Reflective Critique,”
International Studies Review, Volume 16, Issue 2, pages 325–327)
This book is part of an increasing trend of scholarly works that have embraced poststructural critique but want to ground it in more positive political foundations, while retaining a reluctance to return to the
positivist tendencies that implicitly underpin much of constructivist research. The path that Daniel Levine has carved out is innovative, sophisticated, and convincing. A superb scholarly achievement.

the key challenge in international relations ( IR ) scholarship is what he calls “unchecked reification” : the
For Levine,

widespread and dangerous process of forgetting “the distinction between theoretical concepts
and the real-world things they mean to describe or to which they refer” (p. 15). The dangers are real, Levine stresses,
because IR deals with some of the most difficult issues, from genocides to war . Upholding
one subjective position without critical scrutiny can thus have far-reaching consequences . Following
Theodor Adorno—who is the key theoretical influence on this book—Levine takes a post-positive position and assumes that the world cannot be known outside of our human perceptions and the values that are
inevitably intertwined with them. His ultimate goal is to overcome reification, or, to be more precise, to recognize it as an inevitable aspect of thought so that its dangerous consequences can be mitigated.

Levine proceeds in three stages: First he reviews several decades of IR theories to resurrect critical moments when scholars displayed an acute awareness of the dangers of reification. He refreshingly
breaks down distinctions between conventional and progressive scholarship, for he detects self-reflective and critical moments in scholars that are usually

associated with straightforward positivist positions (such as E.H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau, or Graham Allison). But Levine also shows how these moments of self-
reflexivity never lasted long and were driven out by the compulsion to offer systematic and scientific knowledge.

The second stage of Levine's inquiry outlines why IR scholars regularly closed down critique. Here, he points to a range of factors and phenomena, from peer review processes to the speed at which
academics are meant to publish. And here too, he eschews conventional wisdom, showing that work conducted in the wake of the third debate, while explicitly post-
positivist and critiquing the reifying tendencies of existing IR scholarship, often lacked critical self-awareness. As a result, Levine believes
that many of the respective authors failed to appreciate sufficiently that “ reification is a consequence

of all thinking —including itself” (p. 68).

The third objective of Levine's book is also the most interesting one. Here, he outlines the path toward what he calls “ sustainable critique ”: a form of self-reflection that can counter the

dangers of reification. Critique, for him, is not just something that is directed outwards, against particular theories or

theorists. It is also inward-oriented, ongoing, and sensitive to the “limitations of thought itself” (p.
12).
The challenges that such a sustainable critique faces are formidable. Two stand out: First, if the natural tendency to forget the origins and values of our concepts are as strong as Levine and other Adorno-inspired
theorists believe they are, then how can we actually recognize our own reifying tendencies? Are we not all inevitably and subconsciously caught in a web of meanings from which we cannot escape? Second, if one
constantly questions one's own perspective, does one not fall into a relativism that loses the ability to establish the kind of stable foundations that are necessary for political action? Adorno has, of course, been
critiqued as relentlessly negative, even by his second-generation Frankfurt School successors (from Jürgen Habermas to his IR interpreters, such as Andrew Linklater and Ken Booth).

The response that Levine has to these two sets of legitimate criticisms are, in my view, both convincing and useful at a practical level. He starts off with depicting
reification not as a flaw that is meant to be expunged, but as an a priori condition for
scholarship. The challenge then is not to let it go unchecked.
Methodological pluralism lies at the heart of Levine's sustainable critique . He borrows from what
Adorno calls a “constellation”: an attempt to juxtapose, rather than integrate, different perspectives. It is in this spirit that Levine advocates multiple methods to

understand the same event or phenomena . He writes of the need to validate “multiple and
mutually incompatible ways of seeing” (p. 63, see also pp. 101–102). In this model, a scholar oscillates back and forth
between different methods and paradigms, trying to understand the event in question from
multiple perspectives. No single method can ever adequately represent the event or
should gain the upper hand . But each should, in a way, recognize and capture details or
perspectives that the others cannot (p. 102). In practical terms, this means combining a
range of methods even when— or, rather, precisely when —they are deemed incompatible.
They can range from poststructual deconstruction to the tools pioneered and
championed by positivist social sciences .
The benefit of such a methodological polyphony

is not just the opportunity to bring out nuances and new perspectives . Once the false hope of a
smooth synthesis has been abandoned, the very incompatibility of the respective perspectives
can then be used to identify the reifying tendencies in each of them. For Levine, this is how reification may
be “checked at the source” and this is how a “critically reflexive moment might thus be rendered
sustainable” (p. 103). It is in this sense that Levine's approach is not really post-foundational but, rather, an attempt
to “balance foundationalisms against one another” (p. 14). There are strong parallels here with arguments advanced by assemblage thinking and
complexity theory—links that could have been explored in more detail.
A2 GIRARD
 2AC – MIMESIS
Their mimesis arguments are reductionist and ignore the way desire can be
channeled into positive cooperation – their account of desire is too pessimistic and
devolves into endless violence that turns the links
Kaplan 18 (Grant, Ph.D. is an associate professor of theology in the Department of Theological
Studies at Saint Louis University. “Rene Girard: Unlikely Antropologist” in Syndicate
https://syndicate.network/symposia/theology/rene-girard-unlikely-apologist/)NFleming
As Kaplan notes, Girard argues that the scapegoating mechanism marks the origins of religion
and culture, which are somewhat to be identified, sort of religion-culture (109). In this way
Girard renders the universal presence of primal religion more transparent, not as merely the
product of primitive superstition, but as inherent in the notion of culture itself. My concern here
is that Girard’s portrayal of the origins of culture present culture itself as intrinsically
problematic; or as Milbank suggests, there is more than a hint here of the ontological
priority of violence. Culture’s origins lie in a primitive originating murder, recast as a
founding religious myth to mask its true nature. Culture/religion is then built on a lie. The
gospel is then cast as the unmasking of this lie and the laying bear of the scapegoating
mechanism and our complicity in it. Again my concern is not with the plausibility of this
construct to explain important features of primal religious culture. The question is whether it is
a complete account. Is there a place in our story of culture’s origins for intelligence,
reasonableness and responsibility? Is there a place for a non-mimetic wonder and awe in an
awaking into consciousness of the universe of being in those first human beings? In a more
down-to-earth way, is there a place for the practical intelligence that developed the axe heads
and spears, the pottery and leatherwork, the nascent agriculture and the like, that allowed
human populations to grow and flourish creating the leisure for an emerging mathematics and
science to raise above the demands of common sense and strive for genuine explanatory
knowing? If I may draw on Eric Voegelin’s cultural typology, Girard is strong on cosmological
culture in his account of primal religious culture; and equally cognizant of soteriological culture
in the role he gives to the gospel; but what is missing is any recognition of the role of
anthropological culture (always keeping in mind that these are types, not cultures per se).7
While Girard acknowledges the importance of Karl Jasper’s notion of an axial period (115), it
seems to me that he does not attend to the two different responses that emerge at this time to
cosmologically dominated cultures: one anthropological as exemplified in the person of
Socrates; the other soteriological as initially revealed in the Old Testament culminating in the
person of Jesus. These represent two different responses to the mimetic crisis. The first seeks an
intelligent, reasonable and responsible resolution to the crisis; the second is to recognize the
innocence of the victims of history. These possibilities suggest three ways of resolution: the way
of sacrificial violence (the scapegoating mechanism); the way of self-transcendence
(anthropological); and the way of self-sacrificing love (soteriological).8 One advantage here is
that it allows us to understand the scapegoating mechanism as parasitic on a more fundamental
good; it is a privation of the good and hence not in itself foundational to culture. While it may
share in the omnipresence of sin, still sin is not fundamental to what it is to be human .
Conclusion It seems to me what we have playing out here in the realm of cultural anthropology
is the very traditional theological schema of grace, nature and sin. Girard’s approach, it seems to
me, is a transposition into the cultural realm of a very Augustinian grace-sin dialectic, and
carries with it all the problems associated with that dialectic: e.g., rather than the total
corruption of the sinner we now have the totally corrupt origins of human culture. Into this dark
picture the recognition of a human nature teleologically oriented to meaning, truth and
goodness offers a shard of light, something that may be diminished by sin but
never extinguished. Indeed I might go so far as to suggest that without the recognition of this
“natural” element, Girard’s cultural grace-sin dialectic runs the risk of perpetuating a
further system of “us graced—them sinners” and consequent mimetic doubling
and the very scapegoating that he was seeking to avoid.

Not all desire is mimetic, but even if it was, that wouldn’t escalate to mimetic
rivalry. Their arguments fly in the face of psychology.
Wilson 17 (Andrew, Teaching Pastor at King’s Church London, and has theology degrees from
Cambridge (MA), London School of Theology (MTh), and King’s College London (PhD).
“Debunking Girard” https://thinktheology.co.uk/blog/article/debunking_girard)NFleming
René Girard is intriguing for several reasons, but for me the most intriguing is that so many people take
his famous mimetic theory seriously. I've been pointed in his direction numerous times by well-meaning readers
(often, it must be said, eager to dissuade me from preaching substitutionary atonement), and there are sections of the academy
where his (admittedly fascinating) concept is revered as if it has been demonstrated, rather than merely suggested. So Joshua
Landy's article, Deceit, Desire and the Literature Professor: Why Girardians Exist, is very welcome, not just for its readability and
caustic wit—though that too—but for its compelling critique of a widespread idea. Landy certainly pulls no punches. “What’s the
difference between Girardianism and Scientology?” he asks early on. “Why has the former been more successful in the academy?
Why is the madness of theory so, well, contagious?” He begins by summarising Girardianism for the uninitiated: (1) all desire is
“mimetic,” in that we desire things because other people desire them; (2) therefore we have rivalry, and thus violence; (3) thus we
have scapegoating, as a single victim takes the collective rage of a society; (4) at which point we turn to Jesus, and find that the
victim of collective violence is actually innocent, which exposes the structure of society and thus removes its power. Elements (3)
and (4) are, he suggests, “so fanciful that it’s hard to know what to say about them,” but the body of the article is taken up with
rejecting (1) and (2), both sociologically and literarily. So, for a start , shared desire does not produce rivalry or
violence unless, as Hobbes argued a long time back, there is not enough to go round: Is it really true that
all violence is a by-product of mimetic rivalry? Here’s the kind of situation Girard is asking us to imagine. Two
men, Jimmy and Joey, stand beside a lake on a hot day. Jimmy decides to go for a swim. Joey,
who would never have had this idea in his life, immediately decides to do likewise. Inevitably,
this causes a death struggle between the two men as they fight over the lake . The scenario above is of
course absurd. Not only is it ludicrous to imagine that Joey couldn’t have had his own, autonomous
hankering to take a dip (we’ll come to that in a moment); it’s also ludicrous to imagine that anyone in
their right mind would start a fight in these circumstances. (Beaches are simply littered with people not
fighting with each other.) But why not? Isn’t it true that “as soon as we desire something that is desired by a
model sufficiently close to us in space and time . . . we strive to snatch the object away from
him”? No, of course it isn’t . Jimmy and Joey are standing right next to each other, yet Joey has no desire whatsoever to
deprive Jimmy of his opportunity to swim. And the reason is simple: there’s plenty of lake to go around. Mimetic
desire is not enough to cause rivalry ; in order to have rivalry, you also need scarcity of
resources. Neither is all desire mimetic in the first place: “Nothing is more mimetic,” declares Girard,
“than the desire of a child.” One wonders, has he ever met a child? Has he ever tried to feed one a brussels sprout? “ Yum yum,”
we say, absurdly hoping that our desire for healthy food will carry over mimetically . “Blech,” says
the child, unceremoniously spitting it out. You can’t get a child to want to eat brussels sprouts , be cause
this kind of desire depends on liking, and children just don’t like brussels sprouts. They do not get all
their desires from parents (even in such a wonderfully closed environment, with so little outside stimulus). They can see
their parents eagerly eating healthy food till the cows come home, but they will stand right by their decision to yell for
marshmallows. (Not to mention their decision to yell for more. Where did little Suzie get the desire to hear the same story ninety-six
times in a row? Surely not from the grownup she’s tormenting with it.) At this point, Girard’s defenders might be inclined
to respond that although desire is not always mimetic, it sometimes is , and that’s what Girard really meant.
To which Landy responds: Well, yes and no. I mean, imagine if I tried to stage a comeback for Thales, that famous preSocratic
philosopher who claimed (more or less) that everything is made of water. Here I am, then, running around saying “everything is
water” to anyone who will listen. “Don’t be ridiculous,” you tell me, “not everything is water.” “All right,” I
concede, “only some things are water (namely, the watery things); but isn’t that more modest
observation an important one to bear in mind?” The problem with my “Some Things Are Water”
campaign is not that the claim is false; it’s that everyone already knows it.
 2AC - CONFIRMATION BIAS
Girard has no explanatory potential – his arguments are only persuasive because
of confirmation bias
Landy, 12 – Andrew B. Hammond Professor in French Language, Literature and Civilization
at Stanford University. He is also a Professor of Comparative Literature and co-director of the
Literature and Philosophy Initiative at Stanford (Joshua, “Deceit, Desire, and the Literature
Professor: Why Girardians Exist.” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge,
Politics, and the Arts 3, no. 1, http://rofl.stanford.edu/node/108.)
THE REAL REASON To be fair, very few people have been taken in, all in all, by the
Girardian theory and method; as Girard himself recognizes, actual
anthropologists (and, one might add, actual psychologists) have not paid him that
much attention.72 Still, as we saw at the outset, he has a number of admirers in high places. I
am sure it helps that he writes truly beautifully, with a wonderful combination of clarity, punch,
and systematic rigor. I am also sure it helps that he is an extremely nice person. (I’ve met him
personally, and can attest to this.) But an election to the Académie française and a creation of an
institute require more of an explanation than that. What, then, shall we say? It seems to me that
his followers have four reasons for being so passionate about his work. One group is
primarily attracted by its religious dimension, in the hope perhaps that mimetic
theory can bring new souls to Christianity. That is a pious wish explicitly expressed by
Girard,73 and it may seem to draw some plausibility from the fact that he himself, as he tells us,
converted to Christianity because of his discovery of the scapegoat mechanism.74
(Fascinatingly, mind you—and to my knowledge, no one has noticed this before—that last claim
is very unlikely to be true. Girard converted in 1959,75 while working on Deceit, Desire, and the
Novel, a book he published in 1961; while there is plenty of Christianity in that book,76 there is
not a single scapegoat, and Violence and the Sacred, which contains plenty of scapegoats, was
published some eleven years later.) What is more, the Girardian theory appears to offer an
answer to the question why the messiah has to come twice, not just once—or to put it another
way, why the First Coming appears to have changed so little.77 A second group of followers hails
from literature departments. Such followers delight, I imagine, in the combination of negativity
and hyperbole—that promise to provide a single unified explanation of all phenomena while
striking the proper world-weary, Gauloise-smoking, leatherjacket-wearing pose—that has been
such catnip for critics over the years. And they probably also enjoy the ease with which the
Girardian theory can be applied to works of fiction. All you need to do is to find, or indeed
invent, a “triangular” relationship among characters, then append Girard’s magic name, and hey
presto, you have yourself an article. The world of literary theory, like the world of fashion, is one
of those places where mimetic mechanisms do function; with ironic appropriateness, the
primary reason that people drop the name “Girard” is that other people do.78 The third, and
most depressing, group comprises those who use the dread word “generative”
when speaking about Girard’s approach. Such people do not care whether a given theory
is true or false; all they care about is whether it spawns “interesting” readings. Now I’m prepared
to concede that a reading of Hamlet according to which the main character has no desires of his
own is an interesting one. But I think a reading of Hamlet according to which the main character
is riddled with body thetans is an even more interesting one. (It has rockets! and aliens!)
Generative brigade, what I said about Scientology was for you. If you wish to rule Scientology
out of court (and I tend to think you do), it is not on the grounds of its generativity but on the
grounds of its accuracy; and you should, it seems to me, start applying the same standards to
everything else. There is, however, a fourth reason for taking an interest in Girard, and I believe
it has been the single most influential. This reason can be simply stated: Girardian doctrine
is a theory of everything, on the cheap. It’s one of those systems that make you feel
as though you know everything about everything while in fact requiring you to
know almost nothing about anything; it’s enough to “know” the four stages
mentioned above and bingo, you have an explanation for the stock market crash,
the evils of capitalism, and your neighbor’s ugly divorce. (As a bonus, you can also
feel superior to those who don’t see the deep truth of such things.79 From his
surprisingly caustic condemnations of people like Frazer and Auerbach and Plato80—not to
mention of ethnologists, classicists, and theologians at large,81 or indeed academic readers tout
court82—it is clear that Girard himself is no stranger to that particular feeling.) This illusion
is strengthened, of course, by confirmation bias (whenever a case of
mimetic desire presents itself, it is easy to think, “see? Girard
was right!”; whenever a case of spontaneous desire presents itself, it is easy not to
notice).83 And it’s also strengthened by a number of convenient conflations . Envy, for
example, may look superficially like mimetic desire, but it doesn’t have to be: it may well be that
I want what you have because it’s intrinsically valuable, not because you wanted it first.84 The
same goes for peer pressure (maybe I join your knitting circle just to fit in, but I do so without
adopting your desire to be there)85 and for taking expert advice (reading reviews, say, before
buying a new camera). It goes, too, for revenge, whose psychic origins have little to do with
imitation.86 In every one of these cases, we are dealing with illicit extensions of the term
“mimetic desire.” Some admirers of Girard may feel that his theory gains support
from the fact that I park where other cars are parked,87 that Pontius Pilate
succumbs to peer pressure, that Joseph’s brothers are envious of him, or that
people sometimes retaliate for injuries done to them. (They may also, equally
fallaciously, believe that it gains support from the existence of mirror neurons.) Such
phenomena, however, are irrelevant. Girard’s style—his repeated use of the word
“mimesis” in a variety of different contexts—cunningly invites the inattentive
reader to conflate them, and many inattentive readers have gleefully accepted his
invitation. That is no reason for us, however, to follow suit. All in all, then:
the Girardian theory is not true; it does not make us better readers;
and it’s not an exaggeration of anything important. Like the
“everything is water” claim attributed to Thales, the “all desire is
mimetic,” “all violence is mimetic,” and “all culture comes from
violence” claims reduce, at best, to something trivial. And while
Girardianism may well be “generative,” it is surely no more so than
Scientology. Yet there it is, still going strong at a literature department near you. I’m not
sure how we can stop it. Maybe an advertising campaign? Involving Cindy Crawford and
Penélope Cruz? Maybe I could just hang around the Imitatio foundation and wait until everyone
has mimetically adopted my desire not to have to listen to people saying all these outlandish
things? If only desire worked the way they say it does . . .
 2AC – PERMUTATION
Combining approaches is key to avoid reductionism---the alt alone overreaches
and oversimplifies.
Jodok Troy 15. Researcher, Lecturer, and Project Leader in International Relations at the
University of Innsbruck (Austria), former Research Fellow at the Center for Peace and Security
Studies at Georgetown University, former Affiliate Scholar of the Swedish National Defence
College, holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and International Relations from the University of
Innsbruck. February 2015. “Desire for power or the power of desire? Mimetic theory and the
heart of twentieth-century realism,” Journal of International Political Theory, Volume 11, Issue
1.
Having had a look at Girard’s anthropological theory and various themes of international relations, it is obvious that there is still
much to learn from each other. However,
Girard’s theory is certainly in danger of being overstretched
and oversimplified . It is in danger of being overstretched in using it for every phenomenon
that comes along in international relations. The use of anthropological assumptions in order to better understand certain
conflicts, especially the problem of unveiled violence, has potential for issues of international politics in a globalized and
interconnected world. It is furthermore in danger of getting oversimplified by using the scapegoat
mechanism as an excuse for explaining certain policies. Considering the oft-occurring double
standards in international politics and the insight that the scapegoat mechanism , in terms of Girard’s
cultural theory, only “works” if perpetrators are convinced of the guilt of the victim, it is obvious that
it is first and foremost an anthropological theory. Adapting anthropological theories, starting
with the “first image,” to the other two images may prove to be too limiting to explain each
and every political action . Psychological and socio-psychological studies have proved potential for explaining issues
such as perception and misperception (Allison, 1971; Jervis, 1976). It is certainly too confident to use a one-
size-fits-all approach . This does not mean that international relations scholars, such as Morgenthau or Aron, were not
able to point to the dangers of violence provoked by mimetic desire, unstoppable by instinct. Probably the best and all we
can ask for “while the military force heaps itself up around us” is what the historian and English School scholar Herbert
Butterfield (1954) already asked: “Can the world be made more tolerable in spite of this power
which solidifies in great masses amongst nations and empires?” (p. 12). It is therefore that international
relations, while looking to anthropological theories like mimetic theory, must bet, in the words of Aron (1994), “on the education of
humanity, even if he is not sure he will win his wager” (p. 170). The
open-ended discussion between mimetic
theory and the one of twentieth-century Realism can help, as this article illustrated, to pursue a better
understanding of international relations and its basic theoretical claims. That remains true even an appreciation
of Girard’s thoughts can only help to make implicit claims and theoretical assumptions of Realism—like Morgenthau’s stressing of
desire and the evolution of power—more explicit.
A2 SCHMITT
 2AC – NAZI
You should refuse to separate Schmitt’s antisemitism from his work – his hatred
of Jews is fundamental in his work and underlies his thesis about the political
Gross 17 (Raphael, (Director LBI London, Fritz Bauer Institute Frankfurt, Jewish Museum
Frankfurt “The “True Enemy”: Antisemitism in Carl Schmitt’s Life and Work” in Oxford
Handbooks Online p. 15-16)NFleming
In this manner, confronting the conceptual sweep of Schmitt’s antisemitism involved deciphering a
specific antipositivist and antiliberal code—one conveying a polemic forming a unifying
conceptual framework to the jurist’s oeuvre. Legal philosophers or theorists wishing to salvage
Schmitt may offer objections along the following lines: whatever the historical setting of Schmitt’s work, and whatever the
particular valence of his concepts in an antisemitically stamped environment, his texts also have a significance located beyond that
framework. In other words, Schmitt’s ideas can be freed from their special antisemitic context . We can
abstract these ideas from Schmitt’s critique, possibly inherent in them, of the “Jews” and “das Jüdische”; and inversely, taking up his
arguments in a generalized manner, we can use them to show, for instance, the weaknesses and aporias of our own political-legal
culture. In theory, such an effort to read Schmitt beyond history is certainly conceivable . After all, why
not? (It is also the case that with enough abstraction, any author can be read in that way.) Still,
a grave problem appears
attached to this particular effort: the possibility—certainly not a remote one—that the codifying
process described here did not simply vanish in the decades after the war . In actuality, it would
seem incumbent on cultural theorists and others now prone to positively assessing Schmitt—
academic authors who prize him as a “thinker,” naturally not as a “person”— to be profoundly skeptical when it
comes, precisely, to the enthusiasm for the antiliberal, antipositivist, and antisemitic jurist
circulating in both Europe and American universities from the postwar period to the present. Conclusion Why,
in any case, should the antisemitism that Schmitt openly expressed between 1933 und 1945, together with the structurally
antisemitic thinking before and after that has now become clear from the diaries, be considered important enough to be addressed at
Schmitt, for whom
length? For a start, a historiographical response to this question seems to suggest itself:
antisemitism evidently counted as one of his deepest convictions , continues to figure as one
of the most important authors in German legal history and political thought. For that reason alone, we should not trivialize this
central aspect of his life and work. We should not forget that intellectuals like Schmitt were responsible
for shaping Nazi antisemitism and played their part in its genocidal development .
With a close look at the hatred revealed in Schmitt’s texts and diaries, and especially at the racial
hatred expressed in the Nazi period, it becomes clear that the jurist did not draw any clear line
between “left-wing” and “right-wing” antisemitism, Jew-hatred of the “Protestant,” “Catholic,” or
“religious,” “political,” or “racial” sort, but fully appropriated all these variants. Beyond historical considerations, political
scientists and constitutional specialists will need to themselves inquire into the relevance of Schmitt’s
antisemitism for his work as a whole. The historical analysis has in any event already shown that Schmitt tied
many of his central ideas extremely closely to the “Jewish question.” For example, as David
Egner (p. 111) (2013) recently confirmed in the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Schmitt’s political theology
needs to be read very directly in the context of his antisemitic thinking . The concept
of the nomos is extremely closely connected to the struggle against what Schmitt understood as
“Jewish law” or “pure normativism”; in fact it cannot really be understood outside that struggle’s framework. H is
concept of the political can likewise only be removed with great difficulty from the
context of his identification of a Jewish enemy . Without a doubt Schmitt’s many-layered and deeply
rooted antisemitism also intensified his alignment with Nazism in 1933 in an essential way. In 1932 it was not at all clear whether
Schmitt would emerge as a radical National Socialist. But his antisemitism—we see this in, precisely, the diaries —
was already very radical long before 1932; it was hatred, a daily obsession with those he
considered “the true enemy” (1991, 18).21 Against this backdrop, I find it difficult, as a historian, to imagine
how contemporary political theory could profit from Schmitt’s work . Continuing
to assimilate and use Schmitt’s ideas without an acknowledgment of the strong
role antisemitism played in them means passing on elements of that same
conceptual substance—albeit for the most part in encoded form.
 2AC – BUBER
Schmitt’s understanding of the political is recklessly deterministic and ignores the
abundant potential for communities to form around positive forces of cooperation
and gradual reformism. This is offense – reducing political community to
moments of instantaneous violence is an ahistorical account that increases the
likelihood of conflict, forecloses incremental progress, and maps violence onto
politics. The very concept of the friend-enemy distinction is too surface-level to
account for the fundamental determinant of peace, order vs disorder, which only
the affirmative can directly effect.
Lesch 18 (Charles, received his Ph.D. in political theory from Harvard University in 2016 and
spent two years as a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis.
“Theopolitics Contra Political Theology: Martin Buber’s Biblical Critique of Carl Schmitt” in
American Political Science Review p. 3-4)NFleming
Buber responds to Schmitt by rejecting the analogical thinking underlying political theology, first
through a philosophical critique, and then more substantially through a new reading of the Hebrew Bible. The
“political,” Buber insists in his 1936 essay “The Question to the Single One,” appears not in moments of
violence between friends and enemies but in the concrete organization of
societies. It has no existential meaning. Yet Buber neither rejects nor quarantines politics. Instead, he
seeks out a new, morally defensible concept of the political, one bound up in an orientation toward the world that he
calls “religious” ([1936] 1957). Buber takes Schmitt seriously not only as a philosophical but theological opponent, arguing that
Schmitt’s “political” can only be understood in light of a religious institution: the “ trial by
combat ” or “duel” ([1936] 1957, 73).12 In a duel, the outcome—who lives or dies—is understood to reflect
divine will; in effect, the disputants make God into their judge . It is precisely this logic, Buber
argues, that is at work in Schmitt. Though Schmitt uses the language of secular political theory, his
secret intent is to scale up the “trial by combat ” from interpersonal struggles to those of
states . “Every classic duel is a masked ‘judgment of God,’” Buber writes. “That is what Schmitt, carrying it over to
the relation of peoples to one another, calls the specifically political ” (ibid., 74). Thus the political is not
merely a vitalist celebration of violence. It is a whole theology of bloodshed. It lends war a divine sanction. Buber offers three
arguments in response, which, taken together, point toward an alternative concept of the political. His first is methodological.
Schmitt holds that the specifically political appears at times of “the most intense and extreme
antagonism” between foes ([1932] 2007, 29). In those moments, conflict has its own meaning; it is irreducible to any reason,
value, or justification. For Buber such a view is unworkable . It suggests something absurd : that
politics only truly exists “in times in which the common life is threatened , not in times in which
it experiences its stability as self-evident and assured” (Buber [1936] 1957, 74). Schmitt, in other words,
would reduce politics to transient periods of war and emergency. According to Buber, by contrast, the
true site of the political must be found in what is “lasting ” (74). Second, Buber argues that
Schmitt’s theory suffers from an internal contradiction. The political manifests in struggles between “friends”
and “enemies,” which Schmitt notes may be “domestic” and “internal,” as for example rebels in
civil war ([1932] 2007, 46–7). Yet as Buber points out, rebels generally seek to transform, not dissolve, their
state. And if that is the case, then there must be concrete political structures and institutions over
which the conflict is being fought ([1936] 1957, 74). Thus by Schmitt’s own criteria, it cannot be
that the political is defined by conflict alone . It must reflect something more permanent. Finally, Buber
takes aim at the friend–enemy distinction itself. Schmitt had arrived at this idea by comparing it with
other oppositional pairs: “beauty” and “ugliness” in aesthetics, “good” and “evil” in morality, and so forth
([1932] 2007, 26–7). But what Schmitt failed to recognize, Buber argues, is that each of these pairings
actually implies yet another pair of concepts . Behind the beautiful–ugly distinction, for
example, is a contrast between “form” and “formlessness.” So too with the political. Enemies and
friends do not fight over nothing; their hostility takes place against a more fundamental
juxtaposition between “order” and “absence of order .” 13 Thus it is only when a challenge arises to
what political life should look like that an “enemy” emerges.Anditis this“dynamic of order” thatis the “real principle of the political”
(Buber [1936] 1957, 75). Buber concludes by returning to the religious plane and attacking Schmitt’s “theological associate” Friedrich
Gogarten, an important scholar of religion in the first half of the twentieth century and one of the founders, along with Karl Barth, of
“dialectical theology.”14 Gogarten, Buber argues, was correct to reject the religious individualism of thinkers like Søren Kierkegaard.
Where he erred was by adopting the opposite, collectivist extreme: that “the ethical is valid as the ethical only by its connection
toman’s political being” (ibid., 76). For Buber, such a perspective abdicates individual moral responsibility. If our decisions receive
their meaning solely from political interests, we cannot distinguish between the state’s good and the moral good in a broader sense.
Thus although “Gogarten may speak in theological terms,”Buber contends, he gives free reign to a Machiavellian mentality (76). He
lends religious imprimatur to Schmitt’s celebration of violence. Buber’s alternative to Schmitt’s political is a new but equally all-
encompassing ethos: the “religious.” To begin with, the religious is not merely one Weberian sphere of value among many; it
potentially interpenetrates all of them. “If communal life were parceled out into independent realms, one of which is ‘the spiritual
life,’” Buber had written in I and Thou, this would “rob the spirit completely of reality” ([1923] 1958, 50–1). A genuinely “religious”
person, therefore, cannot live a double (or triple) life. She cannot be a caring mother in the evening, a back-stabbing politician in the
morning, and an apathetic consumer in the afternoon. While she can perform many roles, all of them must be informed by the same
Politics , Buber insists, should neither be
wellspring of value. At the same time, the religious is not anti-political.
rejected nor sequestered from other parts of human life; it should be morally
transformed and redeemed.1 5 Thus in a sense, what Buber articulates is a kind of inverted rendering of political
theology:While Schmitt’s “total state” is one that “no longer knows anything absolutely nonpolitical,” Buber’s ideal polity is one that
no longer knows anything absolutely non-“religious.” “If ethical problems receive their relevance from the
political realm,” Buber writes, “they cannot also receive them from the religious, not even [as in
the case of Gogarten] if the political has a religious basis ” ([1936] 1957, 76). Yet by what means can political life
be neither sequestered nor abandoned but still infused with a moral ethos? What does this “religious” orientation look like? In
places, Buber seems to answer in a sociological key. “To the political sphere,” he writes in a later essay on community, “there was
always opposed the organic, functionally organized society as such, a great society built of various societies” ([1949] 1958, 131).16
But at other times, he hints at a different and deeper strain: “There is no separate sphere of ethics in Judaism” (1946, 9). Or as he
puts it in his book Moses: “The tradition of the pyramid faces that of the campfire” ([1946] 1965, 28).
 2AC – SCHMITT WRONG/NO ENDLESS WAR
Schmittian understandings of liberal world-ordering are insufficient to grapple
with the complexities of the international order – you should prefer contingent
readings of IR that don’t rely on sweeping generalizations like, “endless war”
Teschke 11 (Benno Gihrard, Lecturer in the Department of International Relations & Politics at
the University of Wales, Swansea. In 1998/99, he was an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at
the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at the University of California, Los
Angeles. Benno received his PhD from the Department of International Relations, London
School of Economics and Political Science. Role “Fatal attraction: a critique of Carl Schmitt's
international political and legal theory” p. 217-219)NFleming
For at the centre of the heterodox – partly post-structuralist, partly realist – neo-Schmittian analysis stands the conclusion of The
Nomos: the thesis of a structural and continuous relation between liberalism and violence (Mouffe 2005, 2007; Odysseos 2007). It
suggests that, in sharp contrast to the liberal-cosmopolitan programme of ‘perpetual peace’, the geographical expansion of liberal
modernity was accompanied by the intensification and de-formalization of war in the international construction of liberal-
constitutional states of law and the production of liberal subjectivities as rights-bearing individuals. Liberal world-ordering
proceeds via the conduit of wars for humanity, leading to Schmitt's ‘spaceless universalism’. In
this perspective, a straight line is drawn from WWI to the War on Terror to verifys Schmitt's
long-term prognostic of the 20th century as the age of ‘neutralizations and de-politicizations’
(Schmitt 1993). But this attempt to read the history of 20th century international relations in terms of
a succession of confrontations between the carrier-nations of liberal modernity and the
criminalized foes at its outer margins seems unable to comprehend the complexities and
specificities of ‘liberal’ world-ordering , then and now. For in the cases of Wilhelmine, Weimar
and fascist Germany, the assumption that their conflicts with the Anglo-American liberal-capitalist heartland
were grounded in an antagonism between liberal modernity and a recalcitrant Germany outside its
geographical and conceptual lines runs counter to the historical evidence . For this reading
presupposes that late-Wilhelmine Germany was not already substantially penetrated by capitalism
and fully incorporated into the capitalist world economy, posing the question of whether the causes of WWI lay
in the capitalist dynamics of inter-imperial rivalry (Blackbourn and Eley 1984), or in processes of belated and incomplete liberal-
capitalist development, due to the survival of ‘re-feudalized’ elites in the German state classes and the marriage between ‘rye and
iron’ (Wehler 1997). It also assumes that the late-Weimar and early Nazi turn towards the
construction of an autarchic German regionalism – Mitteleuropa or Großraum – was not deeply
influenced by the international ramifications of the 1929 Great Depression, but premised on a
purely political–existentialist assertion of German national identity . Against a reading of the early 20th
century conflicts between ‘the liberal West’ and Germany as ‘wars for humanity’ between an expanding liberal modernity and its
political exterior, there is more evidence to suggest that these confrontations were interstate conflicts within the crisis-ridden and
nationally uneven capitalist project of modernity. Similar objections and caveats to the binary
opposition between the Western discourse of liberal humanity against non-liberal foes apply
to the more recent period. For how can this optic explain that the ‘liberal West’ coexisted (and
keeps coexisting) with a large number of pliant authoritarian client-regimes (Mubarak's Egypt,
Suharto's Indonesia, Pahlavi's Iran, Fahd's Saudi-Arabia, even Gaddafi's pre-intervention Libya, to name but a few), which
were and are actively managed and supported by the West as anti-liberal
Schmittian states of emergency, with concerns for liberal subjectivities and
Human Rights secondary to the strategic interests of political and geopolitical
stability and economic acces s? Even in the more obvious cases of Afghanistan, Iraq, and, now,
Libya, the idea that Western intervention has to be conceived as an encounter between the
liberal project and a series of foes outside its sphere seems to rely on a denial of their
antecedent histories as geopolitically and socially contested state-building projects in pro-
Western fashion, deeply co-determined by long histories of Western anti-liberal colonial and post-colonial legacies. If these
states (or social forces within them) turn against their imperial masters, the conventional policy expression is ‘blowback’. And as
the Schmittian analytical vocabulary does not include a conception of human agency and social
forces – only friend/enemy groupings and collective political entities governed by executive decision – it also lacks
the categories of analysis to comprehend the social dynamics that drive the struggles
around sovereign power and the eventual overcoming, for example, of Tunisian and Egyptian states of emergency
without US-led wars for humanity. Similarly, it seems unlikely that the generic idea of liberal world-ordering
and the production of liberal subjectivities can actually explain why Western intervention
seems improbable in some cases (e.g. Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen or Syria) and more likely in others (e.g. Serbia,
Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya). Liberal world-ordering consists of differential strategies of building,
coordinating, and drawing liberal and anti-liberal states into the Western orbit, and overtly or
covertly intervening and refashioning them once they step out of line . These are conflicts within a world,
which seem to push the term liberalism beyond its original meaning. The generic Schmittian idea of a liberal
‘spaceless universalism’ sits uncomfortably with the realities of maintaining an America-
supervised ‘ informal empire’ , which has to manage a persisting interstate system in diverse and case-specific ways.
But it is this persistence of a worldwide system of states, which encase national particularities, which renders challenges to American
supremacy possible in the first place.
 2AC – LAWFARE
Their lawfare thesis ignores the positive potential of government to organize
towards the common good
Luban 11 (David, forthcoming, Case Western International Law Review, symposium on
lawfare, “Carl Schmitt and the Critique of Lawfare” p. 12-13) NFleming
Among these associations is the positive, constructive side of politics, the very foundation of Aristotle's conception of politics, which
Schmitt completely ignores. Politics, we often say, is the art of the possible. It is the medium for organizing
all human cooperation. Peaceable
civilization, civil institutions, and elemental tasks such as collecting
the garbage and delivering food to hungry mouths all depend on politics. Of course, peering into the
sausage factory of even such mundane municipal institutions as the town mayor's office will reveal plenty of nasty politicking,
jockeying for position and patronage, and downright corruption. Schmitt sneers at these as "banal forms of
politics, . . . all sorts of tactics and practices, competitions and intrigue s" and dismisses them
contemptuously as "parasite- and caricature-like formations ." n55 The fact is that Schmitt has nothing
whatever to say about the constructive side of politics , and his entire theory
focuses on enemies, not friends. In my small community, political meetings debate issues as trivial as whether to
close a street and divert the traffic to another street. It is hard to see mortal combat as even a remote possibility in such disputes, and
so, in Schmitt's view, they would not count as politics, but merely administration. Yet issues like these are the stuff of peaceable
human politics. Schmitt, I have said, uses the word "political" polemically--in his sense, politically . I have
suggested that his
very choice of the word "political" to describe mortal enmity is tendentious,
attaching to mortal enmity Aristotelian and republican associations quite foreign to it. But the more basic point is that
Schmitt's critique of humanitarianism as political and polemical is itself political
and polemical . In a word, the critique of lawfare is itself lawfare . It is self-undermining
because to the extent that it succeeds in showing that lawfare is illegitimate, it de-
legitimizes itself . What about the merits of Schmitt's critique of humanitarianism? His argument is straightforward: either
humanitarianism is toothless and [*471] apolitical, in which case ruthless political actors will destroy the humanitarians; or else
humanitarianism is a fighting faith, in which case it has succumbed to the political but made matters worse, because wars on behalf
of humanity are the most inhuman wars of all. Liberal humanitarianism is either too weak or too savage. The argument has obvious
merit. When Schmitt wrote in 1932 that wars against "outlaws of humanity" would be the most horrible of all, it is hard not to salute
him as a prophet of Hiroshima. The same is true when Schmitt writes about the League of Nations' resolution to use "economic
sanctions and severance of the food supply," n56 which he calls "imperialism based on pure economic power." n57 Schmitt is no
warmonger--he calls the killing of human beings for any reason other than warding off an existential threat "sinister and crazy" n58
--nor is he indifferent to human suffering. But international humanitarian law and criminal law are not the
same thing as wars to end all war or humanitarian military interventions, so Schmitt's important
moral warning against ultimate military self-righteousness does not really apply . n59 Nor does
"bracketing" war by humanitarian constraints on war-fighting presuppose a vanished order of
European public law. The fact is that in nine years of conventional war, the United States has significantly
bracketed war-fighting, even against enemies who do not recognize duties of reciprocity . n60 This
may frustrate current lawfare critics who complain that American soldiers in Afghanistan are being forced to put down their guns.
Bracketing warfare is a decision--Schmitt might call it an existential decision--that rests in part
on values that transcend the friend-enemy distinction . Liberal values are not alien
extrusions into politics or evasions of politics ; they are part of politics , and, as Stephen
Holmes argued against Schmitt, liberalism has proven remarkably strong, not weak. n61 We could choose to abandon liberal
humanitarianism, and that would be a political decision. It would simply be a bad one.
 2AC – PERMUTATION – LAWFARE
It is possible to disinvest from the illusion of the law as moral while holding on to
its strategic applications to avert clear and present dangers
Smith, UC Riverside media and cultural studies professor, 2013
(Andrea, “The Moral Limits of the Law: Settler Colonialism and the Anti-Violence Movement”,
Settler Colonial Studies, Taylor and Francis)
At the same time, violence against Native women is at epidemic rates. The 1999 Bureau of Justice Statistics report, American Indians and Crime, finds that sexual assault among Native Americans is 3.5 times
higher than for all other races living in the US. Unlike other racial groupings, the majority of sexual assaults committed against Native American women are inter-racial.3 In particular, the majority of people who
perpetrate sexual assault against Native women are white. Because of the complex jurisdictional issues involving tribal lands, the majority of sexual assaults against Native women are committed with impunity.
Depending on the tribe, non-Native perpetrators of sexual assault on Indian reservations may fall out of state, federal and tribal jurisdiction. And tribes themselves have not developed effective means for
addressing violence in their communities. The intersections of gender violence and colonialism in Native women’s lives force Native anti-violence advocates to operate through numerous contradictions. First, they
must work within a federal justice system that is premised on the continued colonisation of Native nations. Second, they must work with tribal governments that often engage in gender oppressive practices. In
addition, as Native studies scholar Jennifer Denetdale argues, many tribal governments act as neo-colonial formations that support tribal elites at the expense of the community.4 Third, they must also address
women who need immediate services, even if those services may come from a colonising federal government or a tribal government that may perpetuate gender oppression. Given the logics of settler colonialism, it

we are often
may seem to be a hopeless contradiction to work within the US legal system at all. In fact, many social justice advocates eschew engaging in legal reform for this reason. Consequently,

presented with two dichotomous choices: short-term legal reform that addresses immediate
needs but further invests us in the current colonial system or long-term anti-colonial organising
that attempts to avoid the political contradictions of short-term strategies but does not
necessarily focus on immediate needs. This essay will explore possibilities for rethinking this
dichotomous approach by rethinking the role of legal reform in general . The essay foregrounds alternative approaches using a Native feminist analytic towards
engaging legal reform that may have a greater potential to undo the logics of settler colonialism from within. As I have argued elsewhere, Native feminism as well as Native studies is not limited in its object of analysis.5 Rather, in its interest in addressing the intersecting logics of heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism, it is free to engage with diverse
materials. In looking then towards alternative strategies for undoing settler colonialism through the law, I contend that it is important to engage important work that might not seem to be directly about Native peoples or settler colonialism if this work helps provide new resources for how we could strategically engage the law. Consequently, I engage the
work of legal scholars and activists that address very different areas of law as a means to challenge some of the current assumptions that undergird both reformist and revolutionary approaches to the law. DECOLONIAL REALISM Critical race theorist Derrick Bell challenged the presupposition of much racial justice legal reform strategies when he
argued that racism is a permanent feature of society. While his work is generally cited as a critical race theoretical approach, I would contend that his work implicitly suggests a settler colonial framework for understanding legal reform. That is, many of the heirs of Derrick Bell do not follow the logical consequences of his work and argue for an approach
to race and the law that seeks racial representation in the law.6 However, Bell’s analysis points to the inherent contradictions to such an approach. Rather than seeking representation, Bell calls on Black peoples to ‘acknowledge the permanence of our subordinate status’.7 Espousing the framework of ‘racial realism’, Bell disavows any possibility of
‘transcendent change’.8 To the contrary, he argues that ‘[i]t is time we concede that a commitment to racial equality merely perpetuates our disempowerment’.9 The alternative he advocates is resistance for its own sake – living ‘to harass white folks’ – or short-term pragmatic strategies that focus less on eliminating racism and more on simply ensuring
that we do not ‘worsen conditions for those we are trying to help’.10 While Bell does not elaborate on what those strategies may be, he points to a different kind of reasoning that could be utilised for legal reform. In his famous story, ‘Space Traders’, aliens come to planet Earth promising to solve the world’s problems if world leaders will simply give up
Black people to the aliens. This story narratively illustrates how thin white liberal commitments to social justice are. First, the white people of course do give up Black people to the aliens without much thought. But what more dramatically illustrates this point is that the reader knows that, almost without a doubt, if this were to happen in real life, of
course Black people would be given up. Within this story, however, is a little-commented scene that speaks to perhaps a different way to approach legal reform within the context of white supremacy. Gleason Golightly, a conservative black economics professor who serves as an informal cabinet member for the President, becomes embroiled in a fight with
the civil rights legal establishment about the best means to oppose the proposed trade. Golightly had previously pleaded with the President and his cabinet to reject it. When his pleas are not heard, he begins to reflect on how his support for conservative racial policies in the interests of attaining greater political power had been to no avail. He realises the
strategy behind his appeal to the President was doomed to fail. In retrospect, though [his] arguments were based on morality […] [i]nstead of outsmarting them, Golightly had done what he so frequently criticised civil rights spokespersons for doing: he had tried to get whites to do right by black people because it was right that they do so. ‘Crazy!’ he
commented when civil rights people did it. ‘Crazy!’ he mumbled to himself, at himself.11 Realising the error of his ways, Golightly interrupts this civil rights meeting in which activists plan to organise a moral crusade to convince white Americans to reject the space traders proposal. Instead, he suggests that they should tell white people that they cannot
wait to go on the ship because they have learned they are being transported to a land of milk and honey. White people, argues Golightly, so oppose policies that benefit Black people, even if they benefit white people, that they will start litigating to stop the space traders’ proposed plan.12 The civil rights establishment rejects this strategy as a moral
outrage and begins a racial justice campaign, ultimately to no avail. What this story troubles is social justice movements’ investment in the morality of the law. Despite the US legal system’s complicity in settler colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism and white supremacy since its inception, they advocate strategies for change that rest on the presupposition
that the law can somehow be made to support the end of sexism, racism and classism. Historically, as more radical racial and social justice organisations were either crushed or co-opted by the US governments during the 1970s, these movements shifted from a focus on a radical restructuring of the political and economic system to a focus on articulating
identity based claims that did not necessarily challenge the prevailing power structure.13 If groups were not going to directly challenge the state, they could then call on the state to recognise their claims to equality and redress from harms perpetrated by other social actors. Ironically, then, the same US government that codified slavery, segregation, anti-

it
immigrant racism, and the genocide of indigenous peoples, now becomes the body that will protect people of colour from racism. The fact that the US itself could not exist without the past and continuing genocide of indigenous peoples in particular does not strike liberal legal reformists as a contradiction. Bell suggests that

may be possible to engage in legal reform in the midst of these contradictions if one foregoes the
fantasy that the law is morally benevolent or even neutral. In doing so, more possibilities for
strategic engagement emerge. For instance, in the ‘Racial Preference Licensing Act’, Bell suggests that rather than criminalise racial discrimination, the government should
allow discrimination, but tax it. Taxes accrued from this discrimination would then go into an ‘equality’ fund that would support the educational and economic interests of African-Americans.14 As I have argued
elsewhere, the law enforcement approach has been similarly limited in addressing the issues of gender violence when the majority of men do, or express willingness to engage in, it.15 As a result, criminalisation
has not actually led to a decrease in violence against women.16 Anti-violence activists and scholars have widely critiqued the supposed efficacy of criminalisation.17 As I will discuss later in this essay, Native
women in particular have struggled with the contradictions of engaging the legal system to address the legacies of colonial gender violence. While there is growing critique around criminalisation as the primary
strategy for addressing gender violence, there has not been attention to what other frameworks could be utilised for addressing gender violence. In particular, what would happen if we pursued legal strategies
based on their strategic effects rather than based on the moral statements they propose to make? DISTRUSTING THE LAW Aside from Derrick Bell, because racial and gender justice legal advocates are so
invested in the morality of the law, there has not been sustained strategising on what other possible frameworks may be used. Bell provides some possibilities, but does not specifically engage alternative strategies
in a sustained fashion. Thus, it may be helpful to look for new possibilities in an unexpected place, the work of anti-trust legal scholar Christopher Leslie. Again, the work of Leslie may seem quite remote from

to disinvest in the
scholars and activists organizing against the logics of settler colonialism. But it may be the fact that Leslie is not directly engaging in social justice work that allows him

morality of the law in a manner which is often difficult for those who are directly engaged in
social justice work to do. This disinvestment, I contend is critical for those who wish to
dismantle settler colonialism to rethink their legal strategies . In ‘Trust, Distrust, and Anti-Trust’, Christopher Leslie explains that while the economic impact of cartels is incalculable, cartels are
also unstable.18 Because cartel members cannot develop formal relationships with each other, they must develop partnerships based on informal trust mechanisms in order to overcome the famous ‘prisoners’ dilemma’. The prisoner’s dilemma, as described by Leslie, is one in which two prisoners are arrested and questioned separately with no
opportunity for communication between them. There is enough evidence to convict both of minor crimes for a one year sentence but not enough for a more substantive sentence. The police offer both prisoners the following deal: if you confess and implicate your partner, and your partner does not confess, you will be set free and your partner will receive
a ten-year sentence. If you confess, and he does as well, then you will both receive a five-year sentence. In this scenario, it becomes the rational choice for both to confess because if the first person does not confess and the second person does, the first person will receive a ten-year sentence. Ironically, however, while both will confess, it would have been
in both of their interests not to confess. Similarly, Leslie argues, cartels face the prisoners’ dilemma. If all cartel members agree to fix a price, and abide by this price fixing, then all will benefit. However, individual cartel members are faced with the dilemma of whether or not they should join the cartel and then cheat by lowering prices. They fear that if
they do not cheat, someone else will and drive them out of business. At the same time, by cheating, they disrupt the cartel that would have enabled them to all profit with higher prices. In addition, they face a second dilemma when faced with anti-trust legislation. Should they confess in exchange for immunity or take the chance that no one else will
confess and implicate them? Cartel members can develop mechanisms to circumvent pressures. Such mechanisms include the development of personal relationships, frequent communication, goodwill gestures, etc. In the absence of trust, cartels may employ trust substitutes such as informal contracts and monitoring mechanisms. When these trust and
trust substitute mechanisms break down, the cartel members will start to cheat, thus causing the cartel to disintegrate. Thus, Leslie proposes, anti-trust legislation should focus on laws that will strategically disrupt trust mechanisms. Unlike racial or gender justice advocates who focus on making moral statements through the law, Leslie proposes using
the law for strategic ends, even if the law makes a morally suspect statement. For instance, in his article, ‘Anti-Trust Amnesty, Game Theory, and Cartel Stability’, Leslie critiques the federal Anti-Trust’s 1993 Corporate Lenience Policy that provided greater incentives for cartel partners to report on cartel activity. This policy provided ‘automatic’ amnesty
for the first cartel member to confess, and decreasing leniency for subsequent confessors in the order to which they confessed. Leslie notes that this amnesty led to an increase of amnesty applications.19 However, Leslie notes that the effectiveness of this reform is hindered by the fact that the ringleader of the cartel is not eligible for amnesty. This policy
seems morally sound. Why would we want the ringleader, the person who most profited from the cartel, to be eligible for amnesty? The problem, however, with attempting to make a moral statement through the law is that it is counter-productive if the goal is to actually break up cartels. If the ringleader is never eligible for amnesty, the ringleader
becomes inherently trustworthy because he has no incentive to ever report on his partners. Through his inherent trustworthiness, the cartel can build its trust mechanisms. Thus, argues Leslie, the most effective way to destroy cartels is to render all members untrustworthy by granting all the possibility of immunity. While Leslie’s analysis is directed
towards policy, it also suggests an alternative framework for pursuing social justice through the law, to employ it for its strategic effects rather than through the moral statements it purports to make. It is ironic that an anti-trust scholar such as Leslie displays less ‘trust’ in the law than do many anti-racist/anti-colonial activists and scholars who work
through legal reform.20 It also indicates that it is possible to engage legal reform more strategically if one no longer trusts it. As Beth Richie notes, the anti-violence movement’s primary strategy for addressing gender violence was to articulate it as a crime.21 Because it is presumed that the best way to address a social ill is to call it a ‘crime’, this strategy
is then deemed the correct moral strategy. When this strategy backfires and does not end violence, and in many cases increases violence against women, it becomes difficult to argue against this strategy because it has been articulated in moral terms. If, however, we were to focus on legal reforms chosen for their strategic effects, it would be easier to
change the strategy should our calculus of its strategic effects suggest so. We would also be less complacent about the legal reforms we advocate as has happened with most of the laws that have been passed on gender violence. Advocates presume that because they helped pass a ‘moral’ law, then their job is done. If, however, the criteria for legal reforms
are their strategic effects, we would then be continually monitoring the operation of these laws to see if they were having the desired effects. For instance, since the primary reason women do not leave battering relationships is because they do not have another home to go, what if our legal strategies shifted from criminalising domestic violence to
advocating affordable housing? While the shift from criminalisation may seem immoral, women are often removed from public housing under one strike laws in which they lose access to public housing if a ‘crime’ (including domestic violence) happens in their residence, whether or not they are the perpetrator. If our goal was actually to keep women safe,
we might need to creatively rethink what legal reforms would actually increase safety. REVOLUTIONARY REFORMS As mentioned previously, there has been insufficient evaluation of the strategic effects of legal strategies opposing gender violence. However, the work of Native anti-violence scholar and activist, Sarah Deer, points to possible new
directions in engaging legal reform for the purpose of decolonisation. Deer notes that the issues of gender violence cannot be separated from the project of decolonisation. For instance, currently, tribal governments are restricted to sentencing tribal members to three years in tribal prison for even major crimes such as rape. Much of the focus of the anti-
violence movement has been on increasing the number of years tribal governments can incarcerate members. Because of this effort, the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010 increased the length of sentences from one to three years. However, Deer notes that prior to colonisation, violence against women was virtually unheard of, even though tribes did not
have prisons.22 Instead, tribes utilised a number of social mechanisms to ensure safety for women and children, and none of these mechanisms are prohibited by federal legislation. Because the federal government restricts the amount of prison time allowed for sexual offenders, tribes primarily call on the federal government to expand tribes’ ability to
incarcerate. However, as a variety of scholars have noted, expanded sentencing has not actually led to decreased violence.23 Thus, rather than focusing their attention simply on incarceration, Deer suggests that tribes look to pre-colonial measures for addressing violence and begin to adapt those for contemporary circumstances.24 At the same time,
Deer notes that it is not necessarily a simple process to adapt pre-colonial measures for addressing violence. Unfortunately, many of the alternatives to incarceration that are promoted under the ‘restorative justice model’ have not developed sufficient safety mechanisms for survivors of domestic/sexual violence. ‘Restorative justice’ is an umbrella term
that describes a wide range of programs that attempt to address crime from a restorative and reconciliatory rather than a punitive framework. As restorative justice frameworks involve all parties (perpetrators, victims, and community members) in determining the appropriate response to a crime in an effort to restore the community to wholeness,
restorative justice is opposed to the US criminal justice system, which focuses solely on punishing the perpetrator and removing him (or her) from society through incarceration. These models are well developed in many Native communities, especially in Canada, where the legal status of Native nations allows an opportunity to develop community-based
justice programs. In one program, for example, when a crime is reported, the working team that deals with sexual/domestic violence talks to the perpetrator and gives him the option of participating in the program. The perpetrator must first confess his guilt and then follow a healing contract, or go to jail. The perpetrator is free to decline to participate in
the program and go through the criminal justice system. In the restorative justice model, everyone (victim, perpetrator, family, friends, and the working team) is involved in developing the healing contract. Everyone is also assigned an advocate through the process. Everyone is also responsible for holding the perpetrator accountable to his contract. One
Tlingit man noted that this approach was often more difficult than going to jail: First one must deal with the shock and then the dismay on your neighbors faces. One must live with the daily humiliation, and at the same time seek forgiveness not just from victims, but from the community as a whole […]. [A prison sentence] removes the offender from the
daily accountability, and may not do anything towards rehabilitation, and for many may actually be an easier disposition than staying in the community.25 These models have greater potential for dealing with crime effectively because, if we want people who perpetuate violence to live in society peaceably, it makes sense to develop justice models in which
the community is involved in holding him/her accountable. Under the current incarceration model, perpetrators are taken away from their community and are further hindered from developing ethical relationships within a community context. However, the problem with these models is that they work only when the community unites in holding
perpetrators accountable. In cases of sexual and domestic violence, the community often sides with the perpetrator rather than the victim. As Deer argues, in many Native communities, these models are often pushed on domestic violence survivors in order to pressure them to reconcile with their families and ‘restore’ the community without sufficient
concern for their personal safety.26 In addition, Native advocates have sometime critiqued the uncritical use of ‘traditional’ forms of governance for addressing domestic violence. They argue that Native communities have been pressured to adopt circle sentencing because it is supposed to be an indigenous traditional practice. However, some advocates
contend that there is no such traditional practice in their communities. Moreover, they are concerned that the process of diverting cases outside the court system can be dangerous for survivors. In one example, Bishop Hubert O’Connor (a white man) was found guilty of multiple cases of sexual abuse but his punishment under the restorative justice
model was to participate in a healing circle with his victims. Because his crimes were against Aboriginal women, he was able to opt for an ‘Aboriginal approach’ – an approach, many argue, that did little to provide real healing for the survivors and accountability for the perpetrator. Deer complains that there is a tendency to romanticise and homogenise
‘traditional’ alternatives to incarceration. First, she notes traditional approaches might, in fact, be harsher than incarceration. Many Native people presume that traditional modes of justice focus on conflict resolution. In fact, Deer argues, penalties for societal infractions were not lenient – they entailed banishment, shaming, reparations, physical
punishment and sometimes death. Deer notes that revising tribal codes by reincorporating traditional practices is not a simple process. It is sometimes difficult to determine what these practices were or how they could be made useful today. For example, some practices, such as banishment, would not have the same impact today. Prior to colonisation,
Native communities were so close-knit and interdependent that banishment was often the equivalent of a death sentence. Today, however, banished perpetrators could simply leave home and join the dominant society. While tribes now have the opportunity to divest from the US colonial system, many Native women remain under violent attack. They
may need to use the federal system until such time that more advanced decolonisation becomes possible. Thus Deer advocates a two-fold strategy: 1) The short-term strategy of holding the federal government accountable for prosecuting rape cases; and 2) encouraging tribes to hold perpetrators accountable directly so that they will eventually not need to
rely on federal interference. This approach can be misread as a simple formula for reform. However, it is important to remember that the project of prison abolition is a positive rather than a negative project. The goal is not to tell survivors that they can never call the police or engage the criminal justice system. The question is not, should a survivor call
the police? The question is: why have we given survivors no other option but to call the police? Deer is suggesting that it is not inconsistent to reform federal justice systems while at the same time building tribal infrastructures for accountability that will eventually replace the federal system. If we focus simply on community accountability without a
larger critique of the state, we often fall back on framing community accountability as simply an add-on to the criminal justice system. Because anti-violence work has focused simply on advocacy, we have not developed strategies for ‘due process’, leaving that to the state. When our political imaginaries are captured by the state, we can then presume that
the state should be left to administer ‘justice’ while communities will serve simply as a supplement to this regime. To do so, however, recapitulates the fundamental injustice of a settler state that is founded on slavery, genocide and the exploitation of immigrant labour. Further, we are unable to imagine new visions for liberatory nationhood that are not
structured on hierarchical logics, violence and domination. We face a dilemma: on the one hand, the incarceration approach for addressing sexual/domestic violence promotes the repression of communities of colour without really providing safety for survivors. On the other hand, restorative justice models often promote community silence and denial
under the rhetoric of community restoration without concern for the safety of survivors. Thus, our challenge is to develop community-based models that respond to gender violence in ways that hold perpetrators accountable. Unfortunately, in this discussion advocates often assume only two possibilities: the criminal justice system or restorative justice.
When anyone finds faults with the restorative justice model, it is assumed that the traditional criminal justice approach must be the back-up strategy. Deer’s approach, by contrast, is to work with the criminal justice system while continuing to develop effective strategies for addressing violence. These will eventually eliminate the need to rely on the
criminal justice system. Of course, the trap of pursuing reforms is that they can create investment in the current US legal system and detract from building new systems of governance that are not based on violence, domination and control. At the same time, we are not going to go from where we are now to revolution tomorrow. Thus, it becomes
important to strategise around what may be called ‘revolutionary’ reforms. Other abolitionists have argued that the only reforms that should be supported are those that diminish the criminal justice apparatus. Other abolitions have argued that this approach leaves people vulnerable to the ‘crimes of the powerful’, such as rape and domestic violence.27 It
is in this context that we can understand Deer’s current projects. She has worked on building tribal infrastructure by encouraging and assisting tribes to develop tribal civil protection orders. Her strategy is not so much based on the rationale that civil protection orders will in themselves provide protection for women. Rather, by developing these orders,
tribes gain the practice of developing their own systems for addressing violence. Deer notes that this is one area that is not likely to be interfered with by the US federal government. At the same time, it is not an approach that is directly tied with investing tribes in the project of incarceration. Thus, it becomes a reform that tribal communities may adopt
now as they develop creative responses for addressing violence. The reason for this suggested reform is that many tribal governments incorrectly think that the federal government is already adequately addressing gender violence and do not take initiative to address it themselves.28 In the end, the importance of Deer’s recommendation is not so much an
investment in that particular strategy, but the manner in which it encourages us to think of short-term strategies that are not simply based on increased incarceration, strategies that will more likely fall under the federal radar screen so that tribal communities have more time to practice new ways of supporting accountability for violence. This will
encourage communities to develop better decolonial practices in the future. As Deer notes, a ‘long-term vision for radical change requires both immediate measures to address sexual violence and a forward-looking effort to dismantle the culture of rape that has infiltrated tribal nations’.29 At the same time, many other Native activists are engaging
community accountability strategies that do not work with the current system at all. These strategies are not broadly advertised because these activists do not want to gain the attention of federal authorities. Yet, many communities have developed informal strategies for addressing authorities. For instance, one man who assaulted a relative was banished
from his community. As he was simply able to move to the city, tribal members would follow him to various work places, carrying signs that described him as a rapist. Again, this may be a strategy that we may or may not support. But the point is that it is important to engage the experimental and ‘jazzy’ approaches for developing community-based

Those who call for decolonisation often

accountability strategies.30 In his recent book X-Marks, Scott Lyons engages with Native activists and scholars who call for decolonisation as a central focus for organising.31

do not effectively engage in any short-term reformist strategy, even though they
may save the lives of indigenous peoples who are currently under immediate
attack. As a result, the immediate needs of people often get sacrificed in favour of
articulating seemingly politically-pure ideals. Conversely, those who do engage in short-term reform strategies often decry the goal of decolonisation as ‘unrealistic’. In doing so, they do not critique the
manner in which these strategies often retrench rather than challenge the colonial status quo. Lyons affirms the need for decolonisation, but notes that decolonization happens with pre-existing materials and institutions. He calls on Native peoples to think creatively about these institutions and about the ways in which they can be deployed not just for
short-term gains but for a long-term vision of liberation. BEYOND SHAMING THE SYSTEM Legal reformists who often focus on shaping the law to reflect their moral values and those who focus on extra-legal revolutionary strategies often share the same goal. Often the presumed ‘radical’ strategy adopted by social justice groups is to engage in civil
disobedience. While these groups ostensibly break the law, they often do so in rather ceremonial fashion; they essentially want to shame the system. People are supposed to get arrested, and those in power are supposed to be so shamed by the fact that an unjust system required people to break the law. The expectation is that they will then change the
laws. Acts of civil disobedience often are not targeted toward changing a policy directly or building alternative systems to the current one. Many Native groups in the southwest US, however, have developed an alternative framework for extra-legal social change. Rather than breaking the law to change the system, they propose to make Native communities
ungovernable. For instance, during the passage of SB1070, Native groups with the Taala Hooghan Infoshop, O’odham Solidarity Across Borders, and others occupied the Border Patrol Office.32 However, rather than engaging in the occupation with the expectation of getting arrested, they chained themselves to the building so that the office could not
perform its work. This approach has continued with their efforts to stop the US government’s desecration of the San Francisco Peaks through the construction of a ski resort. While they have not eschewed legal strategies for stopping this desecration, they have focused on preventing tourists from visiting the area so that the ski resort will no longer be
economically viable. According to their promotional material on TrueSnow.org: For the last decade defenders of the peaks have used every legitimate way they could think of to try to stop the US Forest Service from allowing treated sewage effluent to be sprayed on the Peaks to make snow. More than 20,000 people took part in the Forest Service
Environmental Impact Statement process with letters and appeals asking them not to spray treated sewage effluent on the peaks to make snow. Thousands of us went to Flagstaff City Council meetings to voice our opposition to the sale of treated sewer water for the project. Yet still they approved it – before even an environmental impact statement was
done. They were the most clueless of all. Currently the Hopi tribe is seeking lawsuit against the city because of this treated sewage effluent sale. A group of tribes and environmental and social justice organizations took a lawsuit all the way to the steps of the Supreme Court. The lawsuits have only called into question the legitimacy of what is loosely
termed the ‘justice’ system. For it seems there is no justice in this system. It is just us, IN this system. There is also yet another lawsuit in play which I have termed ‘Save the Peaks Coalition vs The Snowbowl Movement’ which may have the possibility of stopping this project in the long term. But if we wait for a verdict, all the trees will be cut and the
pipeline installed. This has not stopped the politically connected ski area from going ahead with their project right now and they have already clear-cut 100,000 trees (or more) and have already buried a few miles of pipeline along Snowbowl road. If they lose in court they would be expected to repair the damages. How do you get back 400 year old trees?
Greed and hatred seems to be Snowbowl's only motivation […]. But isn't there some way to stop it? Well we could hit them where it hurts! In the pocketbook. If you live in the Fort Valley area of Flagstaff you must see by now how little Arizona Snowbowl really cares about the ‘economic benefits’ it brings our fair town. I know some of us had a good deal
of trouble even going to work when the snow was good and Snowbowl was busy. The traffic jam was incredible. Stretching more than 15 miles. They took our livelihood away and hope to make that a daily occurrence by having a ‘predictable’ ski season using sewer water to make snow. This jam up gave us an idea! Why don't we do the same thing? Arizona
Snowbowl does not own the mountain, and it is perfectly legal to drive up to the area for any permitted public lands use. This means hiking, camping, praying, skiing, sitting, loving, mushroom hunting, etc. So what do I do? It is time to stop waiting for a government entity, an environmental group, or any of the people you have come to expect to save the
peaks for us. The time has come to show them how much power the people have! And believe me, you are the most powerful people in all of the world! You! Yep you! You can do it! All summer the Arizona Snowbowl is open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday for scenic skyrides, food, and alcohol. They do get a pretty good business up there and it would have
an impact if the mountain was just ‘too busy’ with people doing all the other things our Public Forests are for. There is nothing illegal about it and it would send a clear message to the forest service that we don't need Snowbowl to ‘recreate on the mountain’. Heck, we don't even need a ski area up there to ski! In essence, take a vacation. Just do it up on
the peaks and don't use Snowbowl. Our government officials are forgetting what ‘all power to the people’ really means. You cannot wait any longer for someone else to save the peaks for you. It will take of all us together to do this. So what are you waiting for? Pack a lunch this Saturday morning and Converge on the Peaks!33 What these activists suggest
is to divest our moral investment in the law. This will affect not only what legal reforms we may pursue, but what revolutionary strategies we might engage in. Rather than engaging in civil disobedience to force legislators to change laws to conform to our moral principles, we might be free to engage creatively in strategies that build political and economic
power directly. CONCLUSION In the debates prevalent within Native sovereignty and racial justice movements, we are often presented with two seemingly orthogonal positions – long-term revolutionary extra-legal movements or shortterm reformist legalist strategies. Short-term legal strategies are accused of investing activists within a white

.
supremacist and settler colonial system that is incapable of significant change. Meanwhile, revolutionaries are accused of sacrificing the immediate needs of vulnerable populations for the sake of an endlessly deferred revolution. The reality of gender violence in Native communities highlights the untenability of these positions

Native women’s lives are at stake now – they cannot wait for the revolution to achieve some
sort of safety. At the same time, the short-term strategies often adopted to address gender violence have often increased violence in Native women’s lives by buttressing the prison industrial complex and its violent
logics. While this reformist versus revolutionary dichotomy suggests two radically different positions, in reality they share a common assumption: that the only way to pursue legal reform is to fight for laws that
that reinforce the appropriate moral statement (for instance, that the only way to address violence against Native women is through the law and to make this violence a ‘crime’). Because the US legal system is
inherently immoral and colonial, however, attempts to moralise the law generally fail. It is not surprising that the response to these failures is to simply give up on pursuing legal strategies. However, the works of

We can challenge the

Derrick Bell, Christopher Leslie, and Sarah Deer, while working in completely different areas of the law, point to a different approach.

assumption that the law will reflect our morals and instead seek to use the law for
its strategic effects . In doing so, we might advocate for laws that might in fact contradict
some of our morals because we recognize that the law cannot mirror our morals anyway. We
might then be free to engage in a relationship with the law which would free us to
change our strategies as we assess its strategic effects. At the same time, by divesting from
the morality of the law, we then will also simultaneously be free to invest in
building our own forms of community accountability and justice outside the legal
system. Our extra-legal strategies would go beyond ceremonial civil disobedience tactics designed to shame a system that is not capable of shame. Rather, we might focus on actually building the
political power to create an alternative system to the heteropatriarchal, white supremacist, settler colonial state.
a2 wakanda cp
 A2 MOVEMENTS
Protests and grassroots movements serve to produce the illusion of progress at the
expense of it occurring
Blühdorn 05 (Ingolfur Blühdorn, University of Bath, “Social Movements and Political
Performance. Niklas Luhmann, Jean Baudrillard, and the Politics of Simulation”, Macht –
Performanz, Performativität, Polittheater)//vl
In the present context, Luhmann's model is interesting because it reflects characteristics which the observations above have revealed
as typical of the late-modern condition: it abandons the Marxist categories of alienation and emancipation; it shifts the analytical
focus from questions of system transcendence to questions of system stabilization; and its emphasis on systemic imperatives and
complexity echoes contemporary debates about the end of politics. Most importantly, however, Luhmann's transition from
the traditional modernist actors-perspective to a systems-perspective opens up avenues for a
genuinely innovative analysis of late-modern society's discourses of radical change . Luhmann
interprets political protest movements as one of several systems within functionally
differentiated modern society. He understands them not primarily as groups or networks of
physical human beings, i.e. as individual activists or collective actors, but as a system of a
specific kind of communications. This implies that individuals who traditional social movement theory would not have
associated with the social movements can contribute to the system of protest communication. Reversely, individuals who
traditional social movement theory would have considered as members of a particular
movement can at the same time, through other communications, participate in completely
different social systems. Thus, as a conscious entity, the individual is able to exist simultaneously in several different
systems, yet with each of its communications it is part of only one system at any one time. Luhmann thus allows for significantly
higher degrees of flexibility and life world complexity than traditional social theory and social movement theory. The modernist
criteria of identity and consistency are not applied to human individuals but to systems of communication, including, inter alia, the
system of protest communication. The affinity of Luhmann's conceptualization of the system of protest communication to the notion
of discourses of radical change as employed in this article is immediately evident. However, in his writings Luhmann oscillates
between a focus on social movements in his communicative sense and social movements in a more traditional sense. This gives rise
to inconsistencies and represents an obstacle to the full appreciation of his analytical approach. According to Luhmann,
the emergence of social movements or, more accurately, of the system of protest communication
is 'related to the transition of society to functional differentiation' (1998, p. 848). Functional
differentiation is the structural form of modern society that allows for an unprecedented degree
of specialization and complexity, but which also gives rise to 'negative side effects' such as
'problems of individuality as well as ecological problems' (1998, p. 805). Luhmann suggests that like all
other societal function systems, the system of protest, too, depends for its identity
and closure on a particular communicative code . More specifically, 'the unity of the system ... emerges
from its form, namely protest' (1998, p. 852). In the most general sense, protest is the communication of opposition
against political decisions by those who are affected by them. But according to Luhmann, modern
society's system of protest communication ultimately centres on the critique of
functional differentiation as the structural principle of modern society. Contrary to the
conceptualizations of traditional social movement theory, access to Luhmann's system of protest
communications is not dependent on particular actions or ideological beliefs but on the correct
reproduction of the code of protest. The communication of protest, Luhmann suggests,
distances itself from society and establishes a dichotomy of 'us or society' (1996, p. 178).
It pretends to adopt an external point of view from where it observes and describes modern
society, i.e. from where it diagnoses societal problems and suggests remedial strategies. In
actual fact, however, the communication of protest always remains a system within
functionally differentiated society, which 'cannot be observed and described from
without' (1993, p. 140). Thus, 'protest communication takes place inside of society', but 'as if it were
from the outside' (1998, p. 853). The description of society which it delivers has the status of a
societal 'self-description' from 'a fictitious external standpoint' (1993, p. 140). In other words, through
its protest movements, modern society generates a particular image of itself. The
communication of protest is the communicative duplication of society. Social movements 'believe themselves
to be (the good) society' which takes 'responsibility for society' (1998, p. 853), and
therefore protests 'within society for society against society' (1998, p. 862). In contrast to
mainstream social movement research, Luhmann does not believe it is promisinglo understand these new social movements from
the perspective of their goals' (1998, p. 849). Because it is difficult to establish any 'consistency in the inconsistency of protest issues'
(1998, p. 861), Luhmann focuses, instead, on the systemic function which the communication of protest fulfils quite irrespective of
the protesters' own narratives about the objectives and strategies they supposedly pursue. In Social Systems (1995, 403) he
tentatively describes social movements as the 'immune system' of modern society which 'react(s) to
perturbations'-caused in particular by the lack of coordination between modern society's
autonomous and mutually incompatible function systems. He later elaborates on this idea, suggesting that the
communication of protest 'espouses subject matter that none of the function systems, neither
politics nor the economy, neither religion nor education, neither science nor law would
acknowledge as its own' (1996, 142f.). By taking up issues which emerge as side-effects of functional
differentiation, but which are systematically ignored by all other function systems, protest
communication 'compensates for modern society's manifest inadequacies in reflection' (1996,
142f.).

Black Panthers are a bad model for grassroots organization

Reed 19 (Adolph Reed, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, “What
Materialist Black Political History Actually Looks Like”, Nonsite.org,
https://nonsite.org/editorial/what-materialist-black-political-history-actually-looks-like)//vl
There is no singular, transhistorical “Black Liberation Struggle” or “Black Freedom Movement,”
and there never has been. Black Americans have engaged in many different forms of political
expression in many different domains, around many different issues, both those considered
racial and not. They have engaged in race-solidaristic formations and in close concert with
others, in class-based and multiclass alliances. As Cedric Johnson has argued forcefully,
contemporary scholarly discussion reads “black politics”—the ethnic pluralist group politics
articulated mainly since the 1960s—back anachronistically onto the varying and pragmatically
grounded political expressions in which black Americans have engaged since Emancipation,
which he describes as “black American political life.” Political differentiation has been as
common among black Americans as among all others. Moreover, issues bearing specifically on
race or racial disparities have never exhaustedf, or exclusively defined, black Americans’
expressed political concerns. As a corollary of 3, the issues driving the postwar southern mass
mobilization against segregation and the emergent black interest-group urban politics in the
North and West, and the big city South, were distinct. Lumping them together under a blanket
construct like the “long civil rights movement” does not help us comprehend the discrete
features of either or, more important, the distinct trajectories each set in motion. Black Power
was not a mass, radical insurgent movement. It was a militant expression of ethnic pluralism.
Radicals of various sorts—including ideological race nationalists—occupied its fringes, but the
driving and commanding forces of Black Power politics were always the assertive elements
within the new black political and professional-managerial class that emerged from opportunity
structures opened by the victories of the Civil Rights movement, the dynamics of urban
demographic transition and incorporation into governing regimes, and War on Poverty, Model
Cities, and foundation-funded programs. Nominally radical groups, such as the Black Panther
Party (BPP), the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and others with less cachet among the
left, were not serious alternatives, certainly not the romantic “roads tragically not taken” of
post-New Left fantasies. General Baker, longtime United Auto Workers activist and co-founder
of both the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) and the League of Revolutionary
Black Workers, was emphatically clear that those tendencies were entirely specific to Detroit and
the centrality of the union in local Democratic politics. The BPP was founded in 1966, and by
the end of the decade was already in disarray, especially outside Oakland, as a result of
police repression, to be sure, but also of their political incoherence. Neither Malcolm
X, Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James, nor Stuart Hall can tell us anything strategically useful about the
black American political situation. Appeals to their putative wisdom stem from academic leftists’
romantic attachments and commitments to race-reductionist politics. Malcolm was dead before
nearly all the big events understood to define “The Sixties” had occurred. Fanon died several
years before Malcolm, and in any case his focus was always elsewhere; he gave only the most
general, perfunctory attention to the United States. James’s time in the United States, as I have
said, was on the political equivalent of a tourist visa. He was not enmeshed in black American
politics and understood its internal and external dynamics in only an abstract, formalist way.
The same pertains to Stuart Hall. Attachments to the likes of Malcolm, Fanon, James, and Hall
are more totemic than intellectually or politically productive. There is a more pernicious aspect
of embrace of those figures’ supposed cultural authority. Each is read as propounding trans-
contextual insights about “race.” And such insights are necessarily race-reductionist.
Social movements create the illusion of radicalization of society at the expense of
action
Sörbom and Wennerhag 11 (Adrienne Sörbom, Stockholm University; Magnus Wennerhag,
Södertörn University, “Individuation, Life Politics, and the Reformulation of Social Critique: An
Analysis of the Global Justice Movement”, Critical Sociology, 39 (3))//vl
In recent decades, the emergence of ‘new social movements’, as well as the general crisis of the party system (indicated
by declining membership within political parties), has been thought to express a radical individualization in
society. Within the primarily Western debates about these developments, a more extensive focus on
self-expression, individual autonomy, identity, struggles for cultural recognition in society, and
a more critical stance towards the functioning of parlia- mentary democracy are often pointed to
as central examples of this broader development (see e.g. Giddens, 1991; Inglehart and Welzel, 2005; cf. Fraser,
2005). Frequently, such claims rely on an implicit or explicit idea that individuals have been
increasingly ‘disembedded’ from the different types of collectivities and organizations that had
structured social and political life during an earlier period of modernity, and for this reason,
social movements tend to be understood as expressions of a radicalized ‘individualization’ of
contemporary society (Beck, 1997; Castells, 2000; Giddens, 1990, 1991).1 Regarding political action, a supposed
unwillingness on the part of individuals to subject them- selves to collective structures, norms,
or identities, has either been interpreted as the cause behind the turn toward ‘life-political forms
of action’ (cf. Giddens, 1990; Thörn, 2002), or as the result of ‘artistic critique’ (Boltanski, 2002). These two concepts imply
a transformed understanding of the relationship between the individual and the
collective within social movements, as well as within society at large . In some influential
accounts (e.g. Giddens, 1991), this characterization of contemporary political action ends up positing a sharp distinction between, on
the one hand, a new politics of individual life style, which is claimed to have gained importance since the 1960s and is associated
with new social movements, and, on the other, an older collective emancipatory poli- tics, which is often portrayed as having lost its
primacy and is associated with the ‘old social movements’ (and the Labor Movement in particular). This article seeks to scrutinize
this polarized account of an ever-increasing individualization happening on the expense of collective
emancipation, and takes the contemporary political activ- ism of ‘the global justice movement’2 as an illustrative case. In light
of our empirical findings, we question the alleged division between life politics and emancipatory politics. To grasp the com-
plexities of contemporary social movement activism, we argue that these two kinds of politics should be understood as intertwined
practices. Moreover, we will argue that in order to speak about individualization, one must also situate that concept historically. In
contrast to the notion of individualization as a process that has become radicalized during contemporary modernity, we propose
instead that this supposed change – of the individual’s relationship to collective political action
and collective belonging – is better thought of as a transformation grounded in epochal shifts
within modernity. As such, it expresses a qualitatively different interpretation of individual autonomy than those proposed
during earlier epochs of modernity. This argumentation will be supported by some central ideas in Peter Wagner’s theory of
modernity (Wagner, 1994, 2008). To elaborate these questions concerning the relationship between life politics and emancipatory
politics, we offer a theoretically grounded analysis of quantitative data gathered from a survey of Global Justice Movement activists
participating in the fifth European Social Forum (held in Sweden 2008). These data are interpreted and further explored using
qualitative interviews with Swedish activists from the movement. This movement context is of particular interest since it consists of
different contemporary political actors belonging to both ‘old social movements’ (the Labor Movement) and ‘new social movements’
(environmentalists, feminists, peace activists, etc.), making it possible to analyze whether there are differences between these
groups. Given the fact that the Global Justice Movement encompasses a wide range of contemporary political activ- ism, we believe
that an analysis of this diverse movement context will enable us to spot more general developments among movement activism at
large. In the present analysis, we focus on the activists’ norms and attitudes, as well as their actual political action repertoires, and
we look at how these factors differ between activists from the new versus the old social movements. These norms and actions are
understood to be either ‘life-political’ or ‘organizational belonging’ oriented. By ‘life-political’ oriented, we designate political actions
that are possible to perform on one’s own, as well as those political values that promote diversity, self-fulfillment, and independence
from political parties and institutions. In contrast, we designate ‘organizational belonging’ oriented as those actions that presuppose
organizational membership, and those values that give priority to loyalty towards the collective or prioritize collective political
efforts directed at political institutions. These latter
kinds of actions and values are thus understood as being
structured by the individual’s belonging to a group, or by an idea of the centrality of
‘belongingness’. It should be emphasized, however, that such a distinction, between ‘life-political’ and ‘organizational
belonging’ oriented action, does not distinguish between individual and collective action, since all forms of political action are more
or less collectively oriented. Thus, life-political forms of actions are also considered as instances of collective political action (cf.
Micheletti, 2003; Sörbom, 2010: 16 f.). What makes the latter different is that they do not presuppose formal organizational
belonging, but are enacted on the basis of values emphasizing independence from formal political organizations.

Their presentation of Wakanda as radical ignores the way it’s misused in the
interest of capital
Reed 18 (Adolph Reed, professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, “The
Trouble with Uplift”, The Baffler, https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-trouble-with-uplift-
reed)//vl
This year’s blockbuster, Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, takes the further step of jettisoning history
altogether and rendering the narrative of black heroism—in fact Superheroism—in the realm of pure
fantasy. Coogler intends the mythical African nation of Wakanda to be black Americans’ “fairy tale
version of Africa,” as he told an interviewer for Rolling Stone. “‘We were kings and queens, and we walked around and ate
perfect food, and everyone was free.’” Revealingly, the Superhero from which the film (like the comic book from which it is derived)
draws its name is a king, and the conflict with his supervillain antagonist is rooted in a struggle over monarchical succession.
Everyone was only as free as the king would permit them to be, in other words. Whatever Coogler’s auteurish
intentions to render Black Panther a fable of American black empowerment, its release triggered
an all-too-familiar torrent of hype that alchemizes the collective struggle for racial justice into
still one more praise song hymning a hyperindividualist hero Challenging Stultifyingly Generic
White Oppression and Overcoming It Against All Odds. Literature professor Salamishah Tillet, writing in the
New York Times on the film’s release, approvingly quotes Jonathan Gray’s summary of the film’s fan-boy appeal: Now there you
have every black boy’s fantasy. He is richer than Bill Gates, smarter than Elon Musk, better looking than Denzel . . . He is the
hereditary rule of the richest nation on Earth. The movie is about wish fulfillment. When you see Bruce Wayne, this dashing
billionaire, where is the black version of that? You got T’Challa. On the breathless extreme of the spectrum, commercial
imperative and outsized political claims fuse into an indistinguishable unity; phony liberationist
calls to respond to obvious marketing and merchandising tie-in ploys—e.g., guides for
identifying and purchasing replicas of “African” artifacts and styles displayed in T’Challa’s
kingdom and guides for “mapping Wakanda”—urge participation in the commercial hype
machine as though it were a form of political engagement. Amid this marketing land rush, the
irony scarcely registers that the separatist monarchy of Wakanda was invented by two white
men, Stan Lee and Jack Kirbye—a considerable challenge to the race-first rhetoric of white-
savior spotters. Of course, Black Panther did not invent this conflation of Hollywood consumerism
with racial uplift; it’s merely cashed in on it. This cynical maneuver has figured prominently in the promotion of a
host of politically reactionary films like Waiting for “Superman” (2010), Won’t Back Down (2012), and Beasts of the Southern Wild
(2012), each of which sold seeing the film and talking it up to one’s friends as something akin to political movement-building.
Parker’s and Coogler’s films are innovative in one sense, however; they each foreground the specific ideological
program that arises out of the anti-historical celebration of individual black heroism. To be sure,
their appeal conforms to a general formula of escapist entertainment that’s by no means limited
to black cultural expression—the Hero Overcoming Against All Odds. And many black people,
both autonomously and with the prod of cultural cues, no doubt derive a particular satisfaction
from racial identification with themes and characters—however fleeting such pleasure may be in
the frenzied marketing of images and brands in the American omni-entertainment state. What
sets the contemporary genre of inspirational black hero films apart is the way the fantasies they
enact connect with the race-first sensibilities prominent among black and other professional-
managerial strata. These race commentators share a body of ideological assumptions and
material interests, deeply invested in parsing, interpreting, and administering inequality in
terms of racial disparities. Specifically, this genre of critique typically looks to measure and
remediate the exclusion of black professionals from traditionally white power elites . Identifying the
tacit social agenda embedded in the “white savior narrative” charge brings us to the heart of the matter. The New Hollywood Shuffle
Dismissals of Glory and Free State of Jones, as well as DuVernay’s explanation for the historical falsifications at play in Selma, may
give the impression that the detractors of white saviorship are voicing a populist sensibility, complaining that black people are
represented as incapable of effective social action without a white person (usually a man) leading them. And there is ample
precedent in the history of popular culture for suspicion in that regard. The Tarzan films are perhaps the crassest and best-known
examples; my father often remarked sarcastically that Africans should be grateful for Tarzan’s presence, since otherwise they
apparently would all have been eaten by lions and crocodiles. The 1988 film Mississippi Burningincongruously makes FBI agents
(white, though does that really matter?) the heroes of the civil rights campaign. Richard Attenborough’s 1987 Cry Freedom describes
the struggle against apartheid and the murder of Stephen Biko through the travails of his white friend, the journalist Donald Woods.
And there are many more examples; it is in fact the long history of such narratives that makes what might
otherwise be simple feel-good stories, presented with an interracial twist —Conrack (1974), Dangerous
Minds (1995), and The Blind Side (2009), among many others—something more distasteful and pernicious than just a set of
interchangeable thematic variations on the maudlin human-interest narrative of uplift and overcoming. But “white savior”
objections to Glory and Free State are a different matter. Those films hinge largely on the prominence of black agency, which race-
first critics apparently deem irrelevant. Their objection is not that blacks’ agency is absent; it is rather
about who is represented as leading their efforts. Decisions by blacks to support nonblack
candidates or social policies not expressed in race-first terms are interpreted as evidence of
flawed, limited, misguided, or otherwise co-opted black agency. The idea that blacks, like
everyone else, make their history under conditions not of their own choosing becomes
irrelevant, just another instance of insufficient symbolic representation. The notion that black
Americans are political agents just like other Americans, and can forge their own tactical
alliances and coalitions to advance their interests in a pluralist political order is ruled out here
on principle. Instead, blacks are imagined as so abject that only extraordinary intervention by
committed black leaders has a prayer of producing real change. This pernicious assumption
continually subordinates actually existing history to imaginary cultural narratives of individual
black heroism and helps drive the intense—and myopic—opposition that many antiracist
activists and commentators express to Bernie Sanders, social democracy, and a politics centered
on economic inequality and working-class concerns.
 A2 AFROFUTURISM
Afrofuturism becomes weaponized by capitalism against the creation of
alternative futures
Shaviro 10 (Steven Shaviro, professor of English at Wayne State University, “Post-Cinematic
Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales”, Film-Philosophy 14.1)//vl
Of course, all this has grave consequences for the Afrofuturist project. Without transgression, how can there be transformation or
transcendence? In his ‘Further Considerations on Afrofuturism’ (2003), Kodwo Eshun points out how problematic posthuman
futurism has become, at a time when the dominant order is itself entirely futuristic and science fictional: ‘ power now
operates predictively as much as retrospectively. Capital continues to function through the
dissimulation of the imperial archive, as it has done throughout the last century. Today,
however, power also functions through the envisioning, management and delivery of reliable
future. The powerful employ futurists and draw power from the futures they
endorse, thereby condemning the disempowered to live in the past’ (289). In
consequence, the very idea of ‘the future’ seems to have been drained of all hope and
all potential. This ‘future’ leaves us blank and numb, even as it arrives in the present and
radically changes our lives. In his 1983 film Videodrome, David Cronenberg imagined a ‘new flesh’ of visceral video
embodiment. This ‘new flesh’ was a source of both wonder and terror, as well as a political battleground: ‘the battle for the mind of
North America,’ we were told, ‘will be fought in the video arena – the videodrome.’ But today, Cronenberg’s extreme vision has
become a banal actuality: this is the real message of ‘Corporate Cannibal.’ Grace Jones’s modulating electronic flesh
is the chronic condition of our hypermodernity, rather than a radical rupture or an acute
symptom of change. In other words, now that the posthuman future once prophesied by
Afrofuturism has actually arrived, it no longer works as an escape from the domination of
racism and of capital. Rather, it serves as yet another ‘business scenario’ for
capitalism’s own continued expansion. ‘As New Economy ideas take hold,’ Eshun says, ‘virtual futures
generate capital. A subtle oscillation between prediction and control is engineered in which
successful or powerful descriptions of the future have an increasing ability to draw us towards
them, to command us to make them flesh... Science fiction is now a research and development
department within a futures industry that dreams of the prediction and control of tomorrow’
(Eshun 2003, 290- 291). Capitalism has always depended upon the ever-accelerating extension of
credit, which is a way of monetising – and therefore appropriating and accumulating – the
future itself. In the last twenty years or so, this stockpiling of the future has reached unprecedented levels,
thanks to the way that financial instruments like derivatives have objectified and quantified –
and thereby ‘priced, sold, and circulated’ – ‘risk’ in general, understood as the sum of all
uncertainties about the future (LiPuma and Lee 2004, 148-150 and passim). Today, we have gone so far in this process
that (as Marlene Dietrich says to Orson Welles in Touch of Evil) our future is all used up. It has already been premediated for us:
accounted for, counted and discounted, in advance.24

Afrofuturism an example of scenario planning and useful to inform policy analysis

Pillow 17 (Wanda Pillow, Associate Professor of Education, Culture & Society at the University
of Utah, “Imagining Policy [Data] Differently”, Policy and Inequality in Education, pp.133-
151)//vl
Specifically, this chapter considers (1) how policy actors interact with data to construct knowledge defining
what policy futures are imaginable for Black expectant and parenting youth (EPY2) in the United States; and (2)
what occurs when Afrofuturism is used to confront and open up how data and EPY are thought and imagined at a policy table.
Examples from my involvement sitting at a policy table, 2014–2015, with a committee charged with identifying ways to improve EPY
education outcomes, extend discussion of strategies of policy negotiations (Gale 2001) and “the who and how of policy production”
(Gale 2003, p. 64) to a close examination of how futures are felt, thought and imagined as part of the policy process. This emphasis
requires engagement with the complexities of how, in this exemplar, teen pregnancy is constructed through research, theory, media
and public perception and the linkage of these representations to how data are thought at a policy table. Data theorization—
including what counts as data and when data counts—are key to thinking about what and who is imagined or unimaginable in this
context. Overwhelmingly Black culture and families, including young parents, are characterized in research, popular culture and
social policy as culturally deficient, creating a moral and economic drain on society (Kunzel 1993; Lawson and Rhode 1993; Pillow
2004, 2013; Solinger 1992). In the US, research and media link teen pregnancy to school disengagement characterized by high
truancy, disciplinary problems, and low graduation rates (Pillow 2006). These reports create tropes, conceptualizations and images,
of a predictable future: EPY form unstable homes, participate in volatile relationships, make irresponsible choices, require social
welfare assistance, and their children will likewise repeat patterns of failure and delinquency. Given the accepted
diagnostic strength of these predictions, what policy futures are imaginable for EPY? Asking
how futures are imagined at a policy table shifts focus from how EPY are discursively
constructed to include consideration of how feelings about policy subjects matter. This
recognition—that one of the roles of policy studies is to analyze how policy subjects are felt and
imagined—builds on feminist analysis of state bureaucracy, power and discourse (Fraser 1987, 1989;
Singer 1993) and reflects recent turns to affect theory (Berlant 2011; Sellar 2015). Turning the gaze from
who EPY are to how EPY futures are and are not imagined adds affect and futurity to analytics
investigating how policy subjects are defined. Such an emphasis requires interdisciplinary approaches that are
“wide and open” (Allen 2012, p. 215) while similarly, Webb and Gulson ask scholars to “reinvigorate policy studies” by “turn(ing) our
gaze on the epistemologies and ontologies of policy studies itself” (2015, p. 161). Given the entrenched tropes
surrounding specifically Black teen pregnancy, Afrofuturism is utilized as a radical interruption
of how subjects are theorized, felt and imagined at a policy table. This move reflects Webb and
Gulson’s call for policy studies to be open to “an emerging set of analyses” (2015, p. 167), a
“policy scientificity 3.0” influenced by “post studies” linked to the critiques and foundations of
“policy scientificity 1.0 (policy sciences)” and “2.0 (critical policy studies and policy sociology)” (2015, p. 161). According to
Webb and Gulson, policy scien- tificity 3.0 can “contribute to the reimagining of inquiry ”
(2015, p. 162) while attempts to constitute policy analysis firmly within the world that is concerned
with the representations and materialities of policy – its effects, affects, disputations and re-
articulations and examples of policy processes and practices in the settler societies throughout
the world that continue to (re)produce preferred colonial representations and materialities at
such a rapid pace ... Webb and Gulson’s concentration on “representation and materialities” as
tied to colonialism, challenges policy studies to employ analytics that are able to see and trace
colonial legacies. Afrofuturism is one example of thinking with the complexities of
policy scientificity 3.0 and in the case of EPY, supports analytics to rethink the epistemology and
ontology of deficit tropes, while attending to the materialities EPY experience and embody and the affective responses to
EPY lives. Afrofuturism expressly identifies the tight linkage between the impossibilities of
(re)imagining Black youth pasts, present, futures (Baldridge 2014; Pillow 2015b) and a continued inability to
reimagine Black EPY as policy subjects worthy of future investment.
 TURN- WAKANDA
The fantasy of Wakanda obscures liberal-capitalist interventionism
Wansbrough 18 (Aleksandr Andreas Wansbrough, University of Sydney, “Political
Representation in Slavoj Zizek’s Antigone and Marvel Studio’s Black Panther by Slavoj Zizek”,
Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture, Penn State University Press, 3(2), pp.342-53)//vl
Black Panther appears to be most radical when it poses an alternative history, in its reimagining
of Africa without colonization. What if African nations had been able to preserve their resources and minerals from
European conquest? Karl Marx himself comes close to praising alternative history by imagining new possible relations to resources.
For instance, in one of Marx’s letters to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov, he argues that the belief that the United States needed slavery
in order to become the most modern and liberal nation on the planet is based merely on an illusory necessity.14 In The Communist
Manifesto, Marx praises the Utopianism of utopian socialists, arguing that their limitation is not being utopian enough.15 Moreover,
in his A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx was not merely condemning religion when he called it the
opium of the people.16 He did not merely mean that it stupefied them or relaxed them. Opium was a drug associated with Asia and
therefore had oriental, magical connotations. For Marx, religion like opium allowed us to dream, but the dream must not be cut off
from real action; an uprooting of the problem. Marx’s understanding of the imagination as limited by social relations is relevant in
understanding contemporary Hollywood spectacle and the delirious jubilation that heralded Black Panther. [End Page 346] For
all the utopian imagination of Wakanda, Black Panther is embedded within the paucity of the
liberal capitalist imaginary. Black Panther, in spite of itself, reveals that liberal sympathies have
regressed to favoring a hereditary, enlightened monarch, a sympathy found in the writings of
some liberal philosophers from the eighteenth century. This belief in the enlightened ruler is
reflected in today’s ideology of liberal preferences: Hilary Clinton’s nepotistic induction was
expected to triumph over the vulgar populism of Trump. The Democratic Party made clear that
Hilary Clinton was entitled to rule based on her being the most experienced candidate, without
examining Clinton’s experience of making decisions to support various reactionary policies
(such as the intervention in Iraq) or the network that allowed her to come so close to assuming
power. Phantoms of the liberal-capitalist imagination haunt the world of Black Panther. The
wondrous world of Wakanda depends not on an alternative political model but a fantastical
resource. Through the exploitation of the magical Vibranium, Wakanda has developed hidden power, but only
under enlightened leadership to share that power in a globalized way, through charity and the
geopolitical statist equivalent, liberal interventionism. The legitimacy of Killmonger’s crusades becomes
distorted by his desire for revenge; his suffering is one that, as the liberal imaginary insists, is self-destructive. Killmonger scars his
own flesh for every kill; by harming others he expresses his own suffering, his own exclusion. His brutal realism is thereby visually
traduced to an unhealthy pathology, a scarification divorced from context, induced by a system that rejected him and was not open
to him. The underlying logic is that if only he had been looked after through charity and maybe a welfare state, he wouldn’t have
become a deranged cold-blooded killer. His perverted pseudojustice can then simply stem from the crime of political omission, of
not being inclusive enough. Take Helen Lewis in The New Stateman, who states: Walkandans are not pacifists— Black Panther
can, and will, kill people with his claws—but Killmonger experiences violence as chaotic, meaningless and random. He has been
brutalised by the reality of life as a black man in America, and later as a soldier in America’s
foreign wars. How radical is that: a $200m Hollywood film where the villain is a personification
of America’s domestic and foreign policy? 17 [End Page 347] One is tempted to answer “not very radical.” As
Mark Fisher points out, in Capitalist Realism, capitalism often profits by critiquing itself through the sale of
its various cultural products whether these products are Che Guevara T-Shirts, popular music
campaigns for peace and the end of poverty, or Hollywood movies with subversive tropes .18 The
film is also not as open to interpretation as one may at first think. Lewis praises the complexity of issues, but this complexity is
a pretense. There is, in the film, a scene of violence between T’Challa and Killmonger when he challenges for power. The
sequence serves a couple of ideological functions. First, the witnessing of tribal violence indulges in a liberal pluralism, whereby we
may very well disapprove of such practices, and Wakanda isn’t perfect but we must nevertheless accept its cultural rites and indulge
the “other” in its uncomfortable authenticity. Such a gesture signals a pretend openness but it is one that is prescribed. Second, it
serves the function of limited openness because the brutal challenge itself is a dead letter of the law—only invoked in drastic,
improbable circumstances, by a revolutionary summoning of atavistic brutality. The film does consider, or at least presents, three
geopolitical positions: (1) isolationism (Wakanda’s resource is initially hidden from the rest of the world), (2) permanent revolution
(Killmonger supporting a global revolution), and (3) liberal interventionism coupled with charity. Number 3 sits easily within the
mainstream ideology of the U.S. Democrats. Brutal political realism is also gestured to through the criminal organization, Klaw. It is
revealed that Killmonger was made and not born a monster.19 After his father’s disappearance Killmonger grew up on U.S. streets
and ended up fighting in brutal wars. Liberal interventionism could have prevented his trauma: if only he wasn’t abused by racists,
sent to fight in cynical wars, and then abandoned by his isolationist nation for being too contaminated by the outside world! As
Eliran Bar-El perceptively notes: The ultimate lesson for the viewer is also ideological, since the rebel
who is fighting for the liberation of all blacks is characterized (even by name) as a
hot-headed violence-seeking savage, opposed to the rationally moderate king who
eventually wins. The conclusive lesson is first, politically, that mild reforms are better
than violent revolutions; second, ethically speaking, we should give up on our desire for the sake of tradition; and
third, psychologically, it also repeats [End Page 348] from within the black community the white argument of superior rationality
against black excessive emotionality.20 Bar-El’s critique is perceptive, as he notes the fetishistic move where Vibranium and
technology are the answer to saving the planet rather than offering an alternative economic model. (Eliran Bar-El has, in fact,
translated Žižek’s Antigone for Resling Publishing.) But in the spirit of fairness, the supposed vacuous progressivism inscribed
within Black Panther can further be discerned in most of Marvel’s other films. Time and time again galactic problems face the planet
and the solution is that the Avengers assemble. Another offering from Marvel, The Avengers: Infinity War (2018), ends with the
Avengers defeated. The heroes no longer have the answers and they overtly attempt to protect the status quo against a radical
inhumane solution. Perhaps, Thanos’s own position itself is in fact deeply conservative and entwined within the liberal political
order. His supposed radical act of culling half of all life in the universe in a single instant amounts to no actual transformation of the
basis of political community, no underlying change to economic structures or even the consumption of resources. Isn’t he then
nothing more than a purple David Cameron or Theresa May, championing austerity through a benevolent conservatism that is
nevertheless brutal. Such brutality amounts to nothing more than a Band-aid covering over the real structural problem of capitalism.
His position naturalizes the economic order; apparently, all intelligent alien species go through cycles of boom and bust with
resources until they all disappear. Even Thanos’s flirtation with deep ecology falls short; it isn’t that intelligent life is evil; there
should just be less of it. As with recent capitalism the ethical demand is placed on us: we need to learn to live within our means.
Žižek himself has observed the ideological limits of the Marvel universe in his review of Black Panther, whereby he asserts: The first
sign of ambiguity is the fact that the movie was enthusiastically received all across the political
spectrum: from partisans of black emancipation who see in it the first big Hollywood assertion
of black power, through liberals who sympathize with its reasonable solution—education and
help, not struggle—up to some representatives of the alt-right, who recognize in the film’s
“Wakanda forever” [End Page 349] another version of Trump’s “America first” (incidentally, this is why Mugabe, before he
lost power, also said some kind words about Trump). When all sides recognize themselves in the same product, we can be sure that
the product in question is ideology at its purest—a kind of empty vessel containing antagonistic elements.21 Yet Žižek also points out
that this aspect of ideology whereby the film elicits sympathy has a radical possibility. Such a possibility is both concealed and
revealed by its triadic form: isolationist (T’Chaka), radical (Killmonger), moderate (T’Challa). He notes that on final analysis, we
realize the truth of the villain, Killmonger, and see that in his opposition to T’Challa there is no personal grievance. Despite the
austerity politics of Thanos and the personalized vengeance of Killmonger, their collective claims refer back to resources. Although
these films present liberalism as the de facto approach—one that must be defended—for all their super powers, the heroes are always
on the defensive, resisting change, while winning battles in a losing war. Their constant managing seems incredible. Politicians, even
Shield, have vanished beyond being a supportive mechanism. Only superpowered heroes can make this system work and keep the
status quo barely going. From this vantage the Marvel films dialectically reveal not only that it is
easier to imagine the end of the world—or the universe—than the end of capitalism
(as Žižek and Fisher have argued) but also that although solutions are often all too marred by
capitalism, new potentials are presented. These potentials have been monstrously denigrated by the Marvel
terminology but they nevertheless problematize themselves. Capitalist realism as Mark Fisher framed it has descended into capitalist
despair, where capitalism increasingly doesn’t believe in itself. In this way, perhaps Black Panther has some qualities in common
with Antigone. As with Žižek’s rendition of Sophocles’s play , Black Panther brings to the surface the
problems with and the limitations of the logic of representation . [End Page 350]

Wakanda buys into neo-colonial fantasies- justifies conservative policies

Saunders 19 (Robert A. Saunders, Professor of History, Politics and Geography at
Farmingdale State College, “(Profitable) imaginaries of Black Power: The popular and political
geographies of Black Panther”, Political Geography, vol. 69, pg. 139-49)//vl
Black Panther's debut is perhaps most famous for coinciding with the Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale's establishment of the
Oakland-based Black Panther Party for Self-Defence (BPP); the organisation officially formed a few months after FF #52 hit
newsstands. While there were no causal connections between Lee and Kirby's creation and the transnational black separatist BPP,
the synchronicity is uncanny. Contrary to his association with the politics of ‘Black Power’, Marvel's
T'Challa is far from a revolutionary. As the alt-right's recent appropriation of the Coogler's
iteration of Wakanda's greatest son via the meme #blackpantherisaltright (2018) argues, the Black Panther –
despite a track-record of battling the Ku Klux Klan and white imperialists –
promotes a list of conservative principles for his homeland, including: anti-
immigration policies, strict trade restrictions and ethno-nationalism. While a global
audience of POCs have held up BP as a testament to the progressive power of film, other critics
have marked out the original conservatism that the character trades in, which despite numerous
ret-cons,3 is an African(ist) version of an identitarian  Weltanschauung; or as Bennett (2018) argues:
‘Wakanda basically screens an ultra-high-resolution racist movie all around itself, its version of a
national border-spanning wall’. From the perspective of political geography, this heteroglossic reading
of BP – as a radical-traditionalist race warrior whose ‘mission’ supports Make America Great
Again (MAGA) and similar European identitarian narratives (through example, if not ideology) –
exemplifies the ‘constant, but often neglected multiplicity of voices that speak in any one
particular discourse’, thus highlighting the polysemic power of popular culture in geopolitics (Ciută, 2016, p. 31).Despite the
discursive interpellations of the alt-right, the political geographies conjured up by Black Panther's various writers instantiate a
political project that has been in (black) geographical imagination since 1512, when the first auto-emancipated slaves of the New
World established maroon communities in the ‘forested hills above the mines and fields of Spain's colony, Santo Domingo’
(Connolly, 2018). In its own Marvelesque way, BP ‘invents Africa’, choosing to make the world's second-largest continent a place of
next-stage technological advancement, therein functioning as a ‘redemptive counter-mythology’ to centuries of Africa-bashing in the
West (Cobb, 2018). Chadwick Boseman, who portrays the Black Panther, even roots this representation in history, remarking that
Wakanda is based on a synthesis of ‘the Mutapa empire of 15th-century Zimbabwe’ and the ‘stargazing kingdom of the Dogon’ in
modern-day Mali (qtd. in Ito, 2016). In the film's enthusiastic reception among descendants of Africans, we see Marvel's imprint on
lifeworlds, as the political attitudes and cultural orientations of prosumers are influenced by mediated world-building projects, thus
resulting in the taken-for-granted background knowledge that informs how people see the world across both time and space.
However, as Gathara (2018) argues, Marvel's mythic Wakanda also trades in retrograde, neo-
colonial fantasies wherein African geographies are reduced to spaces of violence
(Springer 2011), with its peoples being presented simply as ‘royalty and warriors’ that cannot but
fight amongst themselves. Moreover, the notion that an ‘American’ can take over the country in a
matter of hours only reinforces the racist ideologies of high imperialism (even it is
a black American doing the conquering).4

Wakanda is impossible because of historical conditions- attaching hope onto it is

cruelly optimistic
Baker 18 (Bennie W Baker, MA from Liberty University, MPA from University of Texas-
Arlington, “The Death of Wakanda: The Impact of Chattel Slavery on the Advancement of the
Descendants of the African Enslaved”, Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies, 11(9),
p.61-63)//vl
The fictitious nation of Wakanda is pictured in the movie Black Panther as a geographic location somewhere
in Africa. Its resources were vaster than any other geographic location on earth. Its people were
smarter, stronger, and more progressive. Its technological capacity was second to none . Needless to
say, Wakanda was a jewel. To protect their systems, education, political, sociological, economic, as well as their very manner of life,
the source of their power and status, vibranium, was to be concealed from the outside world. Thus, the very existence of the
nation itself was clandestine. The secret land of Wakanda could be fantasized by the readers of
the 1966 comic as what might have been, even as a way of escaping what was . Janken (Janken
2010) recalls the violence and turmoil of the 1960s, a time of vivid imagery capturing racial
hostility, mob and police violence against blacks and worse. The creators may have used their talents for
producing imaginary worlds as a method to provide an escape from the reality of their readers’ present world through various
Marvel Comic products. However, the relevance of Wakanda possibly spoke to one audience while the wonder of it entertained
another. It spoke to those who were subject to racial discrimination, brutal race-based violence
and intimidation, and the continued unjust enforcement of Jim Crow laws as a reminder that
the dream of Wakanda had been stolen. There was a time and a place where the concept
of a Wakanda was alive in the dreams and ambitions of the people of Africa . It was not only alive in their
dreams but was attainable since the land was so rich in resources. Pheko (Pheko 2016) rightly observed that Africa is the
home of most minerals that could be found in any other area of the world such as chrome, gold,
diamonds, iron, uranium, vanadium, cobalt, oil, platinum, and the list goes on . This was an opportunity
that European countries seized. According to Davidson (Davidson, 1980) southern Africa was stable when Europe
was beginning to thrive. They took advantage of this stability to seize upon Africa’s resources to
support their fast growth. This was the pre-colonized Africa. Many nations around the world rely upon the
riches of Africa to sustain their economies, including the United States. Schaefer (Schaefer, 2006) claims that the United States
relies on the resources of Africa for both economic and security purposes, and that this reliance is projected to increase in the
coming years. Maddox (Maddox, 2018) attributes the map of modern day Africa to the impact of colonialism. He explains that its
very societies were altered from every perspective, political, economic, as well as social, due to
the forced integration into the world’s economy. Hirabarren (Hiribarren 2015) outlined the dependence of much of
the world on Africa’s resources and stated that the plunder of South Africa began in the nineteenth century when outsiders came into
the interior for its mineral resources. Martiniano et al. (Martiniano, et al. 2015) would disagree and state that the plunder started in
the fifteenth century when Africa’s greatest resource was taken and sold as slaves. This is when the land rich in
tradition, resources and people was discovered, uncovered, deconstructed and pillaged. It was
then that Wakanda began a slow death and its Black Panther was taken captive and sold time
and time again. Africa’s education system, according to Babaci-Wilhite and Geo-JaJa (Babaci-Wilhite and Geo-JaJa 2011), has
made very little impact on its citizens. In fact, they (Babaci-Wilhite and Geo-JaJa 2011) state that Africa has the highest illiteracy
rate in the world. Thus, the system that educated kings and pharaohs is a shadow of the one in Wakanda that educated royalty. Yet
even education is incapable of resuscitating it. In conclusion, the Black Panther comic book was released in 1966 during one of the
most racially volatile periods in the history of the US. The land the comic book created, Wakanda, was free, but
typifies a subdued land that seemingly will never be released . Its resources are too vast; its
people too beautiful; its contributions too necessary. Wakanda has died and its king has been sold a thousand times to bring beauty
to the world beyond its shores. The denigration of education for the African in Africa prohibits the
possibility of becoming Wakanda, the bastion of intellect and ingenuity. Africa could have been what Wakanda was
created to be. It had all the pieces in place, unfortunately its power and promise were interrupted by the
exportation of millions of its people. The dream, the hope, the concept of Wakanda, is dead.
 A2 TERROR DA
Their theory is wrong- the US isn’t the dictator of arms controls globally- countries
have other means of acquiring weapons
Cooper 07 (Neil Cooper, International Relations and Security, Department of Peace Studies at
University of Bradford in the UK, “What’s the point of arms transfer controls?”, Contemporary
Security Policy, 27 (1))//vl
A third challenge is that represented by the extension and intensification of illicit global arms networks that
exploit porous borders, corrupt officials and tax regulation. For instance, there are 21 known arms trafficking
routes into Colombia from Venezuela, 26 from Ecuador, 37 from Panama and 14 from Brazil.25 At the higher and more
local and
sophisticated end of the illicit arms trade actors have particularly benefited from the mechanisms of globalization. Thus
global deregulation, coupled with the high-technology revolution, improvements in transport
technology, and increased migration, have facilitated the development of local, regional and
global trade networks that sustain illicit arms and conflict trade networks . For instance, overland
transport networks have improved markedly in the developing world since the 1980s whilst developments such as containerization
have simultaneously lowered the unit of cost of trade and made it more anonymous.26 Indeed, the cost of sea, freight and air
transport have all fallen significantly over the last 70 years.27 At the same time, decommissioned aircraft from the Soviet military
fleet have created a direct link between remote airfields in conflict zones and the international networks of supply.28 Furthermore,
the growth in global financial markets (more than US$1.5 trillion is now exchanged daily in world markets29) has not only made it
easier to launder the profits from such operations, but has made it correspondingly more difficult for investigators to discern
illegitimate from legitimate transactions. An example of one arms shipment to Liberia neatly illustrates the flexibility and global
reach of contemporary illicit arms networks: A consignment of rifles was purchased from the Slovak Republic for the Ugandan
military through an Egyptian arms broker with a company, Culworth Investments Corporation, with offices in Liberia. On receipt of
the consignment, the Ugandans discovered that it did not conform to their specifications. An Illyushin-18, registered in Moldova but
chartered by Centrafrica Airlines, a company in the Central African Republic, arrived in November 2000, supposedly to fly the
weapons back to the Slovak Republic. In fact, a new purchaser, Pecos Company of Guinea had been found. Pecos had an end-user
certificate from the Ministry of Defence of Guinea, but the Illyushin actually flew to Liberia with seven tons of sealed boxes on board,
which included 1,000 submachine guns. The Liberian representative on the flight was Carlos Alberto La Plaine, a Portuguese
diamond dealer. Three days later the plane flew back to Uganda to pick up a second consignment of 1,250 machine guns but,
suspecting the plane was engaged in sanctions busting, was impounded by the Ugandan authorities.30Furthermore, local actors
do not necessarily have to rely on highly sophisticated global networks. Much of the illicit trade
in small arms is conducted by 'ants' who bring small quantities of arms across borders. This is
the case, for instance, in Colombia where small quantities of arms are brought in by boat or
hidden in overland shipments of legitimate goods such as potatoes or cereal.31 Similarly, the
small arms trafficked into North Eastern DRC from Uganda includes weapons carried by car,
bicycle or even on foot.32 It is also the case that combatants may simply resort to theft from state
arsenals, take advantage of the re-circulation of arms from neighbouring conflicts or produce
arms locally. For instance, both the FARC in Colombia and the LTTE have developed quite
significant repair and production capabilities for small arms,33 whilst home-made weapons
made up more than half those surrendered to peace monitors in Bougainville .34 Thus, the statist
and sclerotic architecture of arms transfer control is faced with policing dynamic, flexible global
networks of supply. Moreover, such illicit networks are capable of rapid mutation in response to
shifting geographies of regulation. For instance, the embargo on the export of diamonds from Liberia imposed because
of its role in facilitating the trade in conflict diamonds from Sierra Leone has produced new opportunities for shadow trade with an
estimated $350,000 per month of diamonds now being laundered through Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea, Sierra Leone and even direct to
Belgium.35Such changes in the nature of the contemporary arms market have led a number of
commentators to argue that the proliferation model, with its emphasis on the export of
arms by a few suppliers is outdated. Instead, it is argued that the diffusion model, with its
emphasis on the diversity of suppliers, recipients and networks of both funding and supply is
now more accurate, particularly with respect to the trade in light weapons that underpins
internal conflicts.36 It might also be added that the metaphor of 'arms transfers' is equally problematic
given the realities of the current defence market, as arms are not so much transferred (in the
sense that finished defence equipment is transferred whole from supplier to buyer) but rather
arms, technology and knowledge are circulated and re-circulated, often passing between a
number of actors. Indeed, many small arms in particular may be moved from one conflict to
another with (temporary) end-users essentially acting as the next arms merchant in waiting.
Only US control of arms sales solves insecurity of smaller states
Fatton 16 (Lionel P. Fatton, research associate at CERI-Sciences Po and Doctoral Fellow at the
Geneva Centre for Security Policy, Ph.D. thesis on the phenomenon of unilateralism in security
policy, “The impotence of conventional arms control: why do international regimes fail when
they are most needed?”, Contemporary Security Policy, 37 (2))//vl
From a theoretical standpoint, the main international consequence of arms control is a
reduction in the level of insecurity among member states . Arms control helps to improve
perceptions of others' intentions and the predictability of behaviour . With no supranational
authority able to govern international relations, countries feel insecure because they
cannot be sure that others will abide by their promises and respect the terms of cooperation . The
problem is particularly acute in the security domain due to the high cost of being exploited. Others may acquire a military advantage
that endangers the territorial integrity, sovereignty, and even survival of the state.6 Arms control may reassure
countries that others hold peaceful intentions and will not become aggressive. Arms control
allows member states to signal their benign intentions. Countries possess a set of tools that enable them to
communicate with each other. These tools take the form of verbal, but also behavioural communication.? In the security domain,
countries can inform others of their intentions by shaping their defence policy, unilaterally or in a coordinated manner. Joining an
arms control agreement with a potential opponent helps countries signal their peaceful intentions.8 Also, for member states
to create mutual assurance mechanisms by which they exchange information about military
assets and activities indicates their desire to cooperate .9Additionally, arms control improves the
predictability of member states' behaviour. It thus reassures that the countries will not become
aggressive. Arms control is a form of 'security regime'.10 The most extensively used definition states that
regimes are 'sets of implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures
around which actors' expectations converge in a given area of international relations' .11 Arms
control can be an effective instrument in providing countries with a certain degree of
predictability regarding each other's military expansion and posture. To summarize, arms control is a mix
of international law and diplomacy. The former aspect may help mitigate mistrust among countries by shaping
their expectations about others' future behaviours. The diplomatic aspect can provide
reassurance over peaceful intentions. By doing so, arms control reduces the level of perceived
insecurity among states. It eases tensions that may emerge from security-related affairs, and
preserves cooperation and constructive relations in other areas of common interest.
Assume US arms control dampens conflict until proven otherwise- their authors
have a military bias to assume the worst-case scenario
Fatton 16 (Lionel P. Fatton, research associate at CERI-Sciences Po and Doctoral Fellow at the
Geneva Centre for Security Policy, Ph.D. thesis on the phenomenon of unilateralism in security
policy, “The impotence of conventional arms control: why do international regimes fail when
they are most needed?”, Contemporary Security Policy, 37 (2))//vl
This article hypothesizes that countries tend not to join or remain in a conventional arms control
regime when the leadership perceives national security as endangered by the behaviour of other
(potential) member states. In such circumstances, the phenomenon of contextual adaption implies that the
military is influential in the decision-making process on foreign policy . The biases of the military affect
government leaders. Because these biases are not reconcilable with the exercise of arms control,
leaders tend to lose interest in it. They focus on arms control's negative strategic
consequences instead of diplomatic benefits. The most pronounced military bias is the
tendency to adopt worst-case analyses. Because it is their duty to be prepared for all contingencies in case
governments fail to settle international disputes peacefully, military institutions assume the worst of others'
intentions.21 Building on this assumption, they provide insight and advice to government leaders based on military logic and on
the relative military capabilities possessed by countries.22 Military institutions thus perceive the world as a self-
help system in which the worst scenarios can materialize . This way of assessing the international
environment distorts their perception, often leading to exaggerations of external threats .23
Consequently, military institutions tend to be dissatisfied with their security situation and to
recurrently call upon governments to address deficiencies in national defence.24 These
institutional biases imply that military establishments are at best suspicious about the benefits
of arms control in terms of national security. Arms control does not change their perception that
the international system is a dangerous place. Other countries continue to be perceived as
hostile and unpredictable. Additionally, military institutions seek to guarantee national security
through military means and the accumulation of military power. Arms control, and to a greater
extent disarmament, is thus frequently regarded as impeding the fulfilment of their missions.
When government leaders assess that national security is threatened by other countries, the perceptions held by both the leadership
and the military about others' intentions are relatively similar. Therefore, the leadership collaborates closely with the military
institution in order to understand and address external threats . The diplomatic benefits of arms control lose
importance for government leaders. They also pay more attention to the strategic consequences of the exercise, basing
their judgement on the evaluation made by the military. In such circumstances, it is unlikely that the leadership comes out with a
positive assessment of the value of arms control.

US control of arms markets solves conflict- fill in is worse

Coyne and Hall 14 (Christopher Coyne, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
and Associate Director of the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics,
and Economics at the Mercatus Center, Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of
Economics at George Mason University; Abigail R. Hall, Professor of Economics at the
University of Tampa, “The Case Against a US-Arms Monopoly”, Atlantic Economic Journal,
42(2))//vl
By Dominating the Arms Market, the U.S. Will Drive Out Smaller Foreign Firms Allowing
Poorer Nations to Focus on Other Industries This argument states that if the U.S. fully utilizes its
comparative advantage in weapons production, it will be able to reduce the cost of
manufacturing weapons via economies of scale . Smaller firms abroad will be unable to compete on similar margins
and will be driven out of the market. It follows that the resources which were used to manufacture weapons
will be allocated to other, more productive uses. As Kapstein (1994: 13) notes, “With inefficient defense
firms put out of their costly misery, [foreign] governments will be able to put scarce resources
toward more productive pursuits.” If the U.S. Doesn’t Supply Arms, Someone Else Will As per the
previous categories, proponents of a U.S. global-arms monopoly posit that the U.S. can maintain significant control
over international peace, stability, and policies all while contributing to domestic economic
activity. As a result, it is often argued that if the U.S. were to lose or relinquish this authority, other
governments would step into this role and reap these benefits . Given that U.S. policies may not align with a
potential replacement supplier(s), the logic goes, the U.S. government should work to maintain its role as a global monopolist.
Furthermore, proponents of U.S. arms sales argue that a competitive arms market with several suppliers could
destabilize many regions throughout the globe. “Shifts could prove destabilizing. [If] the U.S.
los[es] its position as principal arms supplier in [a] region, producers will proliferate [. . .]U.S.
firms can be more selective in their approach to exports [. . .]Washington can withhold its
supplies, reducing the amount of advanced weaponry in the world . . . [The U.S. government]
should focus on preventing most foreign weapons from being built at all .” (Caverley and Kapstein 2012a:
130–132).

No link between US control of arms and acquisition of weapons by other countries

Kroenig 16 (Michael Kroenig, Department of Government and School of Foreign Service at
Georgetown University, “US nuclear weapons and non-proliferation: Is there a link?”, Journal of
Peace Research)//vl
According to a widespread conventional wisdom, there is a link between US nuclear weapons
and nuclear prolifera- tion and, therefore, in order to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons to other states, the US
government must first make changes to its own nuclear arsenal. This article challenges the notion that US nuclear
posture has a significant bearing on the proliferation and non-proliferation behavior of other
states. Contrary to the received wisdom in policy circles, this article maintains that state decisions on nuclear non-proliferation
issues are driven by a range of other security, economic, and political factors and, once these considerations are taken into account,
there is little if any remaining variance to be explained by US nuclear posture. Using a dataset on US nuclear arsenal size from 1945
to 2011, this article examines the relationship between the size of the US nuclear arsenal and a
variety of nuclear non- proliferation outcomes. It finds that there is no evidence of a
relationship between the size of the US arsenal and: the exploration, pursuit, or
acquisition of nuclear weapons by other states ; the provision of sensitive nuclear assistance to non-
nuclear weapon states; and voting on non-proliferation issues in the United Nations Security Council. The results are robust
to alternate conceptualizations and measurements of US nuclear weapons and in various sub-
samples of data. This article breaks new ground on an empirical research agenda on how the
nuclear policies and postures of the major nuclear powers affect the spread of nuclear weapons
and has important implications for nuclear security policy.

US support of arms control is effective

CRS 19 (Congressional Research Service, “Arms Control and Nonproliferation: A Catalog of
Treaties and Agreements”, https://fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/RL33865.pdf)//vl
Arms control and nonproliferation efforts are two of the tools that have occasionally been used
to implement U.S. national security strategy. Although some believe these tools do little to
restrain the behavior of U.S. adversaries, while doing too much to restrain U.S. military forces
and operations, many other analysts see them as an effective means to promote transparency,
ease military planning, limit forces, and protect against uncertainty and surprise . Arms
control and nonproliferation efforts have produced formal treaties and agreements, informal
arrangements, and cooperative threat reduction and monitoring mechanisms . The pace of
implementation for many of these agreements slowed during the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration usually
preferred unilateral or ad hoc measures to formal treaties and agreements to address U.S. security concerns. The Obama
Administration resumed bilateral negotiations with Russia and pledged its support for a number of multilateral arms control and
nonproliferation efforts, but succeeded in negotiating only a few of its priority agreements. The Trump Administration has offered
some support for existing agreements, but has announced the U.S. withdrawal from the INF Treaty, citing Russia’s violation of that
agreement, and has not yet determined whether it will support the extension of the 2010 New START Treaty through 2026. It shows
little interest in pursuing further agreements. The United States and Soviet Union began to sign agreements
limiting their strategic offensive nuclear weapons in the early 1970s . Progress in negotiating and
implementing these agreements was often slow, and subject to the tenor of the broader U.S.-Soviet relationship. As the Cold War
drew to a close in the late 1980s, the pace of negotiations quickened, with the two sides signing treaties limiting intermediate-range
and long-range weapons. But progress again slowed in the 1990s, as U.S. missile defense plans and a range of other policy conflicts
intervened in the U.S.- Russian relationship. At the same time, however, the two sides began to cooperate on
securing and eliminating Soviet-era nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. Through these
efforts, the United States has allocated more than $1 billion each year to threat reduction
programs in the former Soviet Union. These programs have recently reached their conclusion.
The United States is also a prominent actor in an international regime that attempts to limit the
spread of nuclear weapons. This regime, although suffering from some setbacks in recent years
in Iran and North Korea, includes formal treaties, export control coordination and enforcement,
U.N. resolutions, and organizational controls . The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) serves as the cornerstone
of this regime, with all but four nations participating in it. The International Atomic Energy Agency not only monitors nuclear
programs to make sure they remain peaceful, but also helps nations develop and advance those programs. Other measures,
such as sanctions, interdiction efforts, and informal cooperative endeavors, also seek to slow or
stop the spread of nuclear materials and weapons.
US arms sales are not to expand imperialism but rather in the interest of
maintaining its ethical posture in policymaking
Perkins and Neumayer 10 (Richard Perkins, Department of Geography and Environment,
London School of Economics and Political Science, Plymouth International Studies Centre
(PISC), University of Plymouth; Eric Neumayer, Department of Geography and Environment,
London School of Economics and Political Science, Centre for the Study of Civil War,
International Peace Research Institute Oslo; “The organized hypocrisy of ethical foreign policy:
Human rights, democracy and Western arms sales”, Geoforum, 41 (2))//vl
A defining feature of geopolitics over the past two decades has been the extent to which Western
political leaders have placed ethical and moral considerations at the heart of their foreign policy
discourse (Chandler, 2003, Dodds, 2005, Slater and Bell, 2002). In practice, this has meant different things in different
countries, and the centrality ascribed to ethical concerns has waxed and waned across and within political administrations. Yet it has
invariably included a heightened commitment to promote human rights and, to a greater or lesser extent, discursive endorsement
for the principle of protecting or advancing democracy in extra-territorial spaces (Gaskarth, 2006, Manzo, 2003, Perkins and
Neumayer, 2008, Webber, 2001). For geographers, Western
powers’ self-declared ethical foreign policy is of
particular interest. Assertions about the need to consider the rights, freedoms and well-being of
distant strangers script a geographic imaginary of a universal moral space where everyone,
everywhere is governed by the same moral rules, and a stretching of state responsibility to
protect beyond the national territory (Dodds, 2005, Flint and Falah, 2004). Public declarations by Western
elites to pursue a value-based foreign policy signal a more cosmopolitan, post-sovereign
geopolitical order whereby international politics is increasingly guided by shared principles and
norms, and state power is deployed in order to tackle non-territorial challenges of global justice
(Beck, 2006, Behr, 2008, Rosenau, 1990). Accompanying these discursive scripts has been a reworking of notions of the national
interest. Acting to protect extra-territorial citizens is not only the “right thing” to do, but according
to recent public statements, also the “self-interested” one (Cook, 2002, Hancock, 2007, Sparke, 2007). A
central question is whether this scalar construction of state morality, responsibility and geopolitical interests – laced with utopian
visions of a world society built upon universal values, shared rules and mutual gains – amounts to anything more than empty
rhetoric. Certainly, liberal visions of an ethically-motivated, post-sovereign state identity sit rather
uncomfortably with (neo-)realist accounts, which portray states as selfish actors, primarily
concerned with the defence of national interests of economy and security. One area where these
disparate models of state action are likely to come to the fore is arms transfers. As part of their
ethical commitments, many Western governments have pledged to consider human rights and
(to a lesser extent) democratic conditions in deciding whether to sanction weapons exports from
their territories. Yet implementing these obligations to protect universal rights at the
international level might plausibly conflict with self-help, materialist national interests of
economy and security. Have states reformed and rescaled their national interests and normative concerns such that they are
willing to privilege the interests of distant strangers over conventional commercial and security imperatives?

US nuclear superiority is only a response to the global redistribution of material

capabilities
Fehl 14 (Caroline Fehl, previously ESRC post-doctoral research fellow at the Department of
Politics and International Relations at Oxford University, studied Political Science at the Albert-
Ludwigs-Universitat Frieburg, Freie Universitat Berlin and Columbia University in New York,
holds a DPhil in International Relations from Oxford University, lecturer and research fellow at
the Cluster of Excellence ‘Normative’ Orders, Goethe- Universitat, Frankfurt, “Unequal power
and the institutional design of global governance: the case of arms control”, Review of
International Studies, 40 (3))//vl
The first key moment of institutional change that warrants explanation was the institutionalisation of a hierarchy in the 1968 NPT.
The external trigger for this early institutionalisation of inequality of nuclear rights in the global
arms control regime was a shift in the global distribution of material capabilities, namely, the
end of US nuclear superiority. With the Soviet Union, the UK, France, and China
successively acquiring nuclear weapons and others having embarked on their own programmes,
it became increasingly 'clear that the "non-proliferation line" could not be held just through the
exercise of American power and persuasion'.65Its loss of coercive capabilities thus led the US to
press for an institutionalisation of inequality - a move of substituting coercion with authority
that is well captured by a 'rational exchange' model of hierarchy .66 Equally in line with
rationalist expectations, many non-nuclear states shared the analysis of nuclear powers that the
spread of nuclear weapons constituted a grave threat to international peace and therefore
supported the introduction of institutional constraints on their acquisition by further states . Some
non-nuclear countries even spearheaded the NPT initiative, as is illustrated by the 'Irish Resolution'. Yet, accounts of the NPT
negotiations suggest that many non-nuclear states also had major normative reservations with regard to the explicit
institutionalisation of unequal rights and privileges in the new regime.67 As predicted by the article's theoretical approach,
changing material conditions prompted a demand for the institutionalisation of an unequal
nuclear regime, which clashed with prevalent justice conceptions on the part of weaker state s.
How was this conflict between effectiveness and justice resolved in the case of the NPT? How was it possible to institutionalise a
hierarchical order over the normative objections of many states? A realist perspective that explains institutional inequality as the
product of coercion fails to illuminate this puzzle. First, the NPT initiative was a response to the perceived loss of
US coercive power in the nuclear realm. Second, while both superpowers were key drivers of the negotiating process,
they had to make major concessions to non-nuclear states to win their agreement to the draft, as is detailed below. Alternatively, the
successful adoption of the treaty might be interpreted as indicating that effectiveness concerns eventually won out over moral
objections on the part of weaker states, and that the constructivist argument about the moral basis of institutional legitimacy is after
all irrelevant to the NPT case. Yet, such an explanation is betrayed by the centrality of justice and equality concerns throughout the
negotiations. The comprehensive compromise package that settled the conflict between nuclear and
non-nuclear states and enabled the adoption of the hierarchical treaty contained important
concessions in the direction of institutional equality. A hierarchical distribution of rights was
institutionalised, but so were important compensatory measures . Apart from prohibiting non-nuclear states
from acquiring nuclear weapons, the NPT offered them the side-payment of guaranteed access to civilian uses of nuclear energy (Art.
IV) and obliged nuclear states to engage in 'good faith' disarmament negotiation in the long run (Art. VI), thus introducing a - still
vague - time limit on substantive inequality. In addition, the adoption of the NPT's hierarchy of substantive rights was conditional
upon an equalisation of procedural rules at various levels. The NPT was negotiated in the ENDC, a body that was perceived by
contemporaries as enhancing the representativeness of global arms control negotiations due to its inclusion of NAM states. The
consent of this large grouping of states to the institutionalisation of the nuclear hierarchy would have been impossible to obtain
without giving some of its representatives a say in the negotiations, so the introduction of substantive inequality in the NPT was
conditional on the equalisation of negotiating procedures. Their inclusion in the negotiations, in turn, empowered the NAM to
articulate their interests more forcefully and to negotiate not only the above-cited compromises but also a strengthening of
procedural equality in the NPT's internal decision-making structures. It was due to their insistence that a system of Review
Conferences, based on equal voting rights of all NPT member states, was created to oversee the treaty's implementation and
evolution.68 Thus, the key to the successful institutionalisation of hierarchy in the NPT lay in a negotiated compromise that
balanced effectiveness and justice by increasing equality in other parts of the treaty and in the global negotiating machinery on arms
control matters. The NPT case thus illustrates well the simultaneous influence of material and normative environmental pressures
on the evolution of institutional inequality. Rationalist and constructivist arguments about the legitimacy of
unequal institutions are both partly confirmed by the case, but neither perspective can
alone explain the outcome. At the same time, the case also supports the historical institutionalist
propositions that a negotiated compromise between effectiveness and justice concerns is
facilitated by a scarcity of pre-existing institutional constraints (H6), and that the emergence of
hierarchy as a form of institutional inequality is favoured by the existence of few institutional
veto points (H3). Prior to the NPT, the possession of nuclear weapons had not yet been subject to
any multilateral regulation. Furthermore, the existing structure for arms control negotiations still
offered relatively few veto points to countries opposing the institutionalisation of a nuclear
hierarchy. Although the creation of the ENDC empowered the NAM to articulate their preferences more forcefully, the number
of veto players in this forum was still relatively small, enabling the nuclear powers to seek individual compensatory deals - on
economic as well as security terms - with particularly obstinate treaty sceptics, such as Germany.69 In summary, material and
normative environmental pressures interacted to produce both the hierarchical structure of the
NPT and a simultaneous equalisation of global arms control negotiations, as well as concessions
to equality and justice within the unequal treaty. While this negotiated compromise is in line with the article's
theoretical explanations, the limits of the nuclear consensus are also evident. Neither threats and pressure nor compensatory
equalising moves were strong enough to convince the remaining NPT hold-outs to buy into the institutional compromise.
Unpersuaded that the NPT offered them sufficient security benefits or went far enough to allay their misgivings about the treaty's
perceived injustice, they continued to pursue their own nuclear programmes. Furthermore, while the NPT was invented
to compensate for the United States' declining ability to unilaterally halt the spread of nuclear
weapons, it did not spell the end of coercive counter-proliferation . Both the US and Israel, a key NPT
holdout, continued to resort to the threat and use of force to thwart the nuclear ambitions of regional and global opponents.