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1		-2016-10-17 10:39:46.762
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	1	+China threat discourse is constructed to justify US military and economic expansionism - their impacts aren't objective facts but rather subjective determinations by people in power. Turner 14
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	3	+Turner 14 - Oliver Turner, Research Associate at the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester, 2014 (“American Images of China: Identity, Power, Policy” Rutledge, Available online via Google Books, Accessed 6-22-2016)
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	5	+US China policy has always been active in the production and reproduction of imagery and in the reaffirmation of the identities of both China and the United States. Chapter I shows that the key literatures have often neglected to show how US China policy itself is active within the dissemination of imagery. As already established, material forces are always attributed particular meanings and so acts of US China policy inevitably work to reproduce those meanings. Ultimately, they reaffirm the identities of both China and the United States. This was evident during the Cold War, for example, when Washington's containment policy continually reinforced understandings of Uncivilized (and Threatening) China in relation to the more civilized United States. The texts of Washington's containment strategy functioned within the production of imagery and in the reconfirmation of China's foreignness, as the PRC was marginalized beyond the limits of the 'free' and 'civilized' world. The argument, then, is that US China policies reproduce the discourses which make China foreign and which operate to enable them in the first place.13 The cycle of separation and difference is perpetuated and American images of China and US China policy are exposed not merely as inextricable, but also as mutually reinforcing The Cold War containment of the PRC is an example of an episode which exposes a second, but interrelated, function of US China policy: the protection of American identity when threatened by that of China. This book shows that at moments when the identity of the United States has appeared most in danger. American foreign policy has worked to shield its most intrinsic values.” China's Cold War containment was designed primarily in response to the expansion of communism into Asia. However - and to reiterate - communism alone does not represent a physical threat. To a significant extent it was the representation of communist China as an immediate danger which meant that the identity of the United States itself had to be defended. Ultimately, US Cold War policies reproduced imagery of China as a 'Red' communist threat in order to secure the core values of the United States.
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	7	+Apocalyptic warming framing creates backlash and worse policy solutions - it overlooks that warming is a systemic problem in favor of vague, alienating future visions. Barrett 12
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	9	+Barrett and Gilles 12 (Mathew Barrett served as the Director of Internet Communications for Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign. Mel Gilles is the Director of Sol Kula Healing, “How Apocalyptic Thinking Prevents Us from Taking Political Action,” 4/23/12, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/04/how-apocalyptic-thinking-prevents-us-from-taking-political-action/255758/) Gangeezy
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	11	+This over-reliance on the apocalyptic narrative causes us to fear the wrong things and to mistakenly equate potential future events with current and observable trends. How to discern the difference between so many apocalyptic options? If we ask ourselves three basic questions about the many threats portrayed apocalyptically in the media, we are able to separate the apocalyptic wheat from the chaff. Which scenarios are probable? Which are preventable? And what is the likely impact of the worst-case model of any given threat? In answering these questions, it becomes clear that much of what the media portrays as apocalyptic is not. The apocalyptic scenarios involving global disaster ~-~- from meteor impacts to supervolcanic eruptions ~-~- are extraordinarily rare. An asteroid could hit the Earth and lead to the extinction of all mammals, including us, but the geologic record tells us that such massive strikes are unlikely, and logic tells us that there is little we can do to prevent one. Nor are terrorist attacks or an outbreak of avian flu likely to destroy humanity; their impact is relatively small and usually localized, because we can be prepared for such threats and can contain and mitigate their effects. The apocalyptic storyline tells us that most of these events are probable, largely unpreventable, and destined to be catastrophic. But none of this is true ~-~- their probability is either low or can be made lower through preventive means, or their impact is containable. The danger of the media's conflation of apocalyptic scenarios is that it leads us to believe that our existential threats come exclusively from events that are beyond our control and that await us in the future ~-~- and that a moment of universal recognition of such threats will be obvious to everyone when they arrive. No one, after all, would ever confuse a meteor barreling toward Earth as anything other than apocalyptic. Yet tangled up in such Hollywood scenarios and sci-fi nightmares are actual threats like global warming that aren't arriving in an instant of universal recognition; instead, they are arriving amid much denial and continued partisan debate. For example, annual climate-related disasters such as droughts, storms, and floods rose dramatically during the last decade, increasing an average 75 percent compared to the 1990s ~-~- just as many climate models predicted they would if global warming were left unchecked. Yet this rise in natural disasters hasn't produced a moment of universal recognition of the dangers of climate change; instead, belief in climate change is actually on the decline as we adjust to the "new normal" of ever-weirder weather or convince ourselves that our perception of this increased frequency is a magnifying trick of more readily available cable and Internet coverage. To understand why fewer people believe in climate change even as evidence mounts, we must look beyond the industry-funded movement to deny the reality and effects of climate change. Perhaps equally important ~-~- if not quite equally culpable ~-~- has been the extent to which both the proponents and opponents of human-made climate change have led us down a cul-de-sac of conversation by exploiting the apocalyptic metaphor to make their case. Whether by design or by accident, the initial warnings of environmentalists ~-~- of oceans rising to engulf our most beloved metropolises, of amber waves of grain scorched into a desert landscape ~-~- activated the apocalyptic impulse. The focus on disastrous repercussions for our behavior at some point in the future echoed the warnings of the Israelite priests to wayward Jews in Babylon or, later, to those who submitted too willingly to Alexander's process of Hellenization. It was a familiar story: change, and change radically, or face hell on earth. Perhaps there was no other way to sound the alarm about the devastating threat presented by global climate change, but that echo of apocalyptic warning was quickly seized upon by the naysayers to dismiss the evidence out of hand. We've heard this story before, the deniers insisted, and throughout history those who have declared the end of the world was near have always been proven wrong. As early as 1989, the industry front man Patrick Michaels, a climatologist and global warming skeptic, was warning in the op-ed pages of the Washington Post of this new brand of "apocalyptic environmentalism," which represented "the most popular new religion to come along since Marxism." That the solutions to global warming (a less carbon-intensive economy, a more localized trade system, a greater respect for nature's power) parallel so perfectly the dream of environmentalists, and that the causes of global warming (an unrestrained industrial capitalism reliant on the continued and accelerating consumption of fossil fuels) parallel the economic dream of conservatives, has simply exacerbated the fact that global warming has now become just another front in the culture wars. By seizing upon and mocking the apocalyptic imagery and rhetoric of those sounding the alarm, the industry front groups succeeded in framing the debate about global warming into a question about what one believes. Thus, entangled with the myth of apocalypse ~-~- and its attendant hold on our own sense of belief and self-identity ~-~- the debate about anthropogenic climate change has reached an impasse. You believe in the Rapture; I believe in global warming ~-~- and so the conversation stops. But global climate change is not an apocalyptic event that will take place in the future; it is a human-caused trend that is occurring now. And as we expend more time either fearfully imagining or vehemently denying whether that trend will bring about a future apocalypse, scientists tell us that the trend is accelerating. Talking about climate change or peak oil through the rhetoric of apocalypse may make for good television and attention-grabbing editorials, but such apocalyptic framing hasn't mobilized the world into action. Most of us are familiar with the platitude "When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." In a similar way, our over-reliance on the apocalyptic storyline stands between us and our ability to properly assess the problems before us. Some see the looming crises of global warming and resource and energy depletion and conclude that inaction will bring about the end of civilization: only through a radical shift toward clean energy and conservation, those on the Left argue, can we continue the way of life that we have known. Those on the Right dismiss the apocalyptic threats altogether, because the proposed solutions to peak oil, global warming, and overpopulation conflict with core conservative beliefs about deregulation and the free-market economy, or with a religious worldview that believes humanity is not powerful enough to alter something as large as our climate. Still others dismiss the catalog of doom and gloom as mere apocalypticism itself. Surely, we convince ourselves, all the dire warnings about the effects of global warming aren't that different from the world-ending expectations of the Rapturists? The result is that the energy we could expend addressing the problems before us is instead consumed by our efforts to either dismiss the threat of apocalypse or to prove it real. Ultimately, the question becomes not what to do about the threats before us but whether you believe in the threats before us. By allowing the challenges of the 21st century to be hijacked by the apocalyptic storyline, we find ourselves awaiting a moment of clarity when the problems we must confront will become apparent to all ~-~- or when those challenges will magically disappear, like other failed prophecies about the end of the world. Yet the real challenges we must face are not future events that we imagine or dismiss through apocalyptic scenarios of collapse ~-~- they are existing trends. The evidence suggests that much of what we fear in the future ~-~- the collapse of the economy, the arrival of peak oil and global warming and resource wars ~-~- has already begun. We can wait forever, while the world unravels before our very eyes, for an apocalypse that won't come. The apocalyptic storyline becomes a form of daydreaming escape: the threat of global warming becomes a fantasy to one day live off the grid, or buy a farm, or grow our own food; economic collapse becomes like a prison break from the drudgery of meaningless and increasingly underpaid work in a soul-crushing cubicle; peak oil promises the chance to finally form a community with the neighbors to whom you've never spoken. Yet despite the fantasia peddled by Hollywood and numerous writers, a world battered by natural disasters and global warming, facing declining natural resources and civic unrest, without adequate water or energy or food, with gross inequalities between the rich and the poor, is not a setting for a picaresque adventure, nor is it the ideal place to start living in accord with your dreams. The deeper we entangle the challenges of the 21st century with apocalyptic fantasy, the more likely we are to paralyze ourselves with inaction ~-~- or with the wrong course of action. We react to the idea of the apocalypse ~-~- rather than to the underlying issues activating the apocalyptic storyline to begin with ~-~- by either denying its reality ("global warming isn't real") or by despairing at its inevitability ("why bother recycling when the whole world is burning up?"). We react to apocalyptic threats by either partying (assuaging our apocalyptic anxiety through increased consumerism, reasoning that if it all may be gone tomorrow, we might as well enjoy it today), praying (in hopes that divine intervention or mere time will allow us to avoid confronting the challenges before us), or preparing (packing "bugout" packs for a quick escape or stocking up on gold, guns, and canned food, as though the transformative moment we anticipate will be but a brief interlude, a bad winter storm that might trap us indoors for a few days or weeks but that will eventually melt away). None of these responses avert, nor even mitigate, the very threats that have elicited our apocalyptic anxiety in the first place. Buying an electric car doesn't solve the problem of a culture dependent on endless growth in a finite world; building a bunker to defend against the zombie hordes doesn't solve the growing inequities between the rich and poor; praying for deliverance from the trials of history doesn't change that we must live in the times in which we were born. Indeed, neither partying, nor preparing, nor praying achieves what should be the natural goal when we perceive a threat on the horizon: we should not seek to ignore it, or simply brace for it, but to avert it.
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	13	+Russian threat constructions are rooted in western racism. Jaeger 2k
	14	+(Øyvind, Peace and Conflict Studies 7.2, “Securitizing Russia: Discoursive Practice of the Baltic States,” http://shss.nova.edu/pcs/journalsPDF/V7N2.pdf#page=18)
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	16	+The Russian war on Chechnya is one event that was widely interpreted in the Baltic as a ominous sign of what Russia has in store for the Baltic states (see Rebas 1996: 27; Nekrasas 1996: 58; Tarand 1996: 24; cf. Haab 1997). The constitutional ban in all three states on any kind of association with post-Soviet political structures is indicative of a threat perception that confuses Soviet and post- Soviet, conflating Russia with the USSR and casting everything Russian as a threat through what Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) call a discursive "chain of equivalence". In this the value of one side in a binary opposition is reiterated in other denotations of the same binary opposition. Thus, the value "Russia" in a Russia/Europe-opposition is also denoted by "instability", "Asia", "invasion", "chaos", "incitement of ethnic minorities", "unpredictability", "imperialism", "slander campaign", "migration", and so forth. The opposite value of these markers ("stability", "Europe", "defence", "order", and so on) would then denote the Self and thus conjure up an identity. When identity is precarious, this discursive practice intensifies by shifting onto a security mode, treating the oppositions as if they were questions of political existence, sovereignty, and survival. Identity is (re)produced more effectively when the oppositions are employed in a discourse of in-security and danger, that is, made into questions of national security and thus securitised in the Wæverian sense. In the Baltic cases, especially the Lithuanian National Security Concept is knitting a chain of equivalence in a ferocious discourse of danger. Not only does it establish "that the defence of Lithuania is total and unconditional," and that "should there be no higher command, self-controlled combat actions of armed units and citizens shall be considered legal." (National Security Concept, Lithuania, Ch. 7, Sc. 1, 2) It also posits that the power of civic resistance is constituted of the Nation's Will and self-determination to fight for own freedom, of everyone citizen's resolution to resist to an assailant or invader by all possible ways, despite citizen's age and or profession, of taking part in Lithuania's defence (National Security Concept, Lithuania, Ch. 7, Sc. 4). When this is added to the identifying of the objects of national security as "human and citizen rights, fundamental freedoms and personal security; state sovereignty; rights of the nation, prerequisites for a free development; the state independence; the constitutional order; state territory and its integrity, and; cultural heritage," and the subjects as "the state, the armed forces and other institutions thereof; the citizens and their associations, and; non governmental organisations,"(National Security Concept, Lithuania, Ch. 2, Sc. 1, 2) one approaches a conception of security in which the distinction between state and nation has disappeared in all-encompassing securitisation. Everyone is expected to defend everything with every possible means. And when the list of identified threats to national security that follows range from "overt (military) aggression", via "personal insecurity", to "ignoring of national values,"(National Security Concept, Lithuania, Ch. 10) the National Security Concept of Lithuania has become a totalising one taking everything to be a question of national security. The chain of equivalence is established when the very introduction of the National Security Concept is devoted to a denotation of Lithuania's century-old sameness to "Europe" and resistance to "occupation and subjugation" (see quotation below), whereby Russia is depicted and installed as the first link in the discursive chain that follows. In much the same way the "enemy within" came about in Estonia and Latvia. As the independence-memory was ritualised and added to the sense of insecurity - already fed by confusion in state administration, legislation and government policy grappling not only with what to do but also how to do it given the inexperience of state institutions or their absence - unity behind the overarching objective of independence receded for partial politics and the construction of the enemy within. This is what David Campbell (1992) points out when he sees the practices of security as being about securing a precarious state identity. One way of going about it is to cast elements on the state inside resisting the privileged identity as the subversive errand boys of the prime external enemy.
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	18	+Security is an ontological condition based on the desire to control and manage states of being - this makes endless violence inevitable and destroys value to life. Burke 07
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	20	+Burke 7 - Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations in the University of New South Wales (Anthony, Theory and Event, Volume 10, Issue 2, 2007, “Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason,” Project MUSE)
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	22	+This essay develops a theory about the causes of war ~-~- and thus aims to generate lines of action and critique for peace ~-~- that cuts beneath analyses based either on a given sequence of events, threats, insecurities and political manipulation, or the play of institutional, economic or political interests (the 'military-industrial complex'). Such factors are important to be sure, and should not be discounted, but they flow over a deeper bedrock of modern reason that has not only come to form a powerful structure of common sense but the apparently solid ground of the real itself. In this light, the two 'existential' and 'rationalist' discourses of war-making and justification mobilised in the Lebanon war are more than merely arguments, rhetorics or even discourses. Certainly they mobilise forms of knowledge and power together; providing political leaderships, media, citizens, bureaucracies and military forces with organising systems of belief, action, analysis and rationale. But they run deeper than that. They are truth-systems of the most powerful and fundamental kind that we have in modernity: ontologies, statements about truth and being which claim a rarefied privilege to state what is and how it must be maintained as it is. I am thinking of ontology in both its senses: ontology as both a statement about the nature and ideality of being (in this case political being, that of the nation-state), and as a statement of epistemological truth and certainty, of methods and processes of arriving at certainty (in this case, the development and application of strategic knowledge for the use of armed force, and the creation and maintenance of geopolitical order, security and national survival). These derive from the classical idea of ontology as a speculative or positivistic inquiry into the fundamental nature of truth, of being, or of some phenomenon; the desire for a solid metaphysical account of things inaugurated by Aristotle, an account of 'being qua being and its essential attributes'.17 In contrast, drawing on Foucauldian theorising about truth and power, I see ontology as a particularly powerful claim to truth itself: a claim to the status of an underlying systemic foundation for truth, identity, existence and action; one that is not essential or timeless, but is thoroughly historical and contingent, that is deployed and mobilised in a fraught and conflictual socio-political context of some kind. In short, ontology is the 'politics of truth'18 in its most sweeping and powerful form. I see such a drive for ontological certainty and completion as particularly problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, when it takes the form of the existential and rationalist ontologies of war, it amounts to a hard and exclusivist claim: a drive for ideational hegemony and closure that limits debate and questioning, that confines it within the boundaries of a particular, closed system of logic, one that is grounded in the truth of being, in the truth of truth as such. The second is its intimate relation with violence: the dual ontologies represent a simultaneously social and conceptual structure that generates violence. Here we are witness to an epistemology of violence (strategy) joined to an ontology of violence (the national security state). When we consider their relation to war, the two ontologies are especially dangerous because each alone (and doubly in combination) tends both to quicken the resort to war and to lead to its escalation either in scale and duration, or in unintended effects. In such a context violence is not so much a tool that can be picked up and used on occasion, at limited cost and with limited impact ~-~- it permeates being. This essay describes firstly the ontology of the national security state (by way of the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt and G. W. F. Hegel) and secondly the rationalist ontology of strategy (by way of the geopolitical thought of Henry Kissinger), showing how they crystallise into a mutually reinforcing system of support and justification, especially in the thought of Clausewitz. This creates both a profound ethical and pragmatic problem. The ethical problem arises because of their militaristic force ~-~- they embody and reinforce a norm of war ~-~- and because they enact what Martin Heidegger calls an 'enframing' image of technology and being in which humans are merely utilitarian instruments for use, control and destruction, and force ~-~- in the words of one famous Cold War strategist ~-~- can be thought of as a 'power to hurt'.19 The pragmatic problem arises because force so often produces neither the linear system of effects imagined in strategic theory nor anything we could meaningfully call security, but rather turns in upon itself in a nihilistic spiral of pain and destruction. In the era of a 'war on terror' dominantly conceived in Schmittian and Clausewitzian terms,20 the arguments of Hannah Arendt (that violence collapses ends into means) and Emmanuel Levinas (that 'every war employs arms that turn against those that wield them') take on added significance. Neither, however, explored what occurs when war and being are made to coincide, other than Levinas' intriguing comment that in war persons 'play roles in which they no longer recognises themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance'. 21 What I am trying to describe in this essay is a complex relation between, and interweaving of, epistemology and ontology. But it is not my view that these are distinct modes of knowledge or levels of truth, because in the social field named by security, statecraft and violence they are made to blur together, continually referring back on each other, like charges darting between electrodes. Rather they are related systems of knowledge with particular systemic roles and intensities of claim about truth, political being and political necessity. Positivistic or scientific claims to epistemological truth supply an air of predictability and reliability to policy and political action, which in turn support larger ontological claims to national being and purpose, drawing them into a common horizon of certainty that is one of the central features of past-Cartesian modernity. Here it may be useful to see ontology as a more totalising and metaphysical set of claims about truth, and epistemology as more pragmatic and instrumental; but while a distinction between epistemology (knowledge as technique) and ontology (knowledge as being) has analytical value, it tends to break down in action. The epistemology of violence I describe here (strategic science and foreign policy doctrine) claims positivistic clarity about techniques of military and geopolitical action which use force and coercion to achieve a desired end, an end that is supplied by the ontological claim to national existence, security, or order. However in practice, technique quickly passes into ontology. This it does in two ways. First, instrumental violence is married to an ontology of insecure national existence which itself admits no questioning. The nation and its identity are known and essential, prior to any conflict, and the resort to violence becomes an equally essential predicate of its perpetuation. In this way knowledge-as-strategy claims, in a positivistic fashion, to achieve a calculability of effects (power) for an ultimate purpose (securing being) that it must always assume. Second, strategy as a technique not merely becomes an instrument of state power but ontologises itself in a technological image of 'man' as a maker and user of things, including other humans, which have no essence or integrity outside their value as objects. In Heidegger's terms, technology becomes being; epistemology immediately becomes technique, immediately being. This combination could be seen in the aftermath of the 2006 Lebanon war, whose obvious strategic failure for Israelis generated fierce attacks on the army and political leadership and forced the resignation of the IDF chief of staff. Yet in its wake neither ontology was rethought. Consider how a reserve soldier, while on brigade-sized manoeuvres in the Golan Heights in early 2007, was quoted as saying: 'we are ready for the next war'. Uri Avnery quoted Israeli commentators explaining the rationale for such a war as being to 'eradicate the shame and restore to the army the "deterrent power" that was lost on the battlefields of that unfortunate war'. In 'Israeli public discourse', he remarked, 'the next war is seen as a natural phenomenon, like tomorrow's sunrise.' 22 The danger obviously raised here is that these dual ontologies of war link being, means, events and decisions into a single, unbroken chain whose very process of construction cannot be examined. As is clear in the work of Carl Schmitt, being implies action, the action that is war. This chain is also obviously at work in the U.S. neoconservative doctrine that argues, as Bush did in his 2002 West Point speech, that 'the only path to safety is the path of action', which begs the question of whether strategic practice and theory can be detached from strong ontologies of the insecure nation-state.23 This is the direction taken by much realist analysis critical of Israel and the Bush administration's 'war on terror'.24 Reframing such concerns in Foucauldian terms, we could argue that obsessive ontological commitments have led to especially disturbing 'problematizations' of truth.25 However such rationalist critiques rely on a one-sided interpretation of Clausewitz that seeks to disentangle strategic from existential reason, and to open up choice in that way. However without interrogating more deeply how they form a conceptual harmony in Clausewitz's thought ~-~- and thus in our dominant understandings of politics and war ~-~- tragically violent 'choices' will continue to be made. The essay concludes by pondering a normative problem that arises out of its analysis: if the divisive ontology of the national security state and the violent and instrumental vision of 'enframing' have, as Heidegger suggests, come to define being and drive 'out every other possibility of revealing being', how can they be escaped?26 How can other choices and alternatives be found and enacted? How is there any scope for agency and resistance in the face of them? Their social and discursive power ~-~- one that aims to take up the entire space of the political ~-~- needs to be respected and understood. However, we are far from powerless in the face of them. The need is to critique dominant images of political being and dominant ways of securing that being at the same time, and to act and choose such that we bring into the world a more sustainable, peaceful and non-violent global rule of the political. Friend and Enemy: Violent Ontologies of the Nation-State In his Politics Among Nations Hans Morgenthau stated that 'the national interest of a peace-loving nation can only be defined in terms of national security, which is the irreducible minimum that diplomacy must defend with adequate power and without compromise'. While Morgenthau defined security relatively narrowly ~-~- as the 'integrity of the national territory and its institutions' ~-~- in a context where security was in practice defined expansively, as synonymous with a state's broadest geopolitical and economic 'interests', what was revealing about his formulation was not merely the ontological centrality it had, but the sense of urgency and priority he accorded to it: it must be defended 'without compromise'.27 Morgenthau was a thoughtful and complex thinker, and understood well the complexities and dangers of using armed force. However his formulation reflected an influential view about the significance of the political good termed 'security'. When this is combined with the way in which security was conceived in modern political thought as an existential condition ~-~- a sine qua non of life and sovereign political existence ~-~- and then married to war and instrumental action, it provides a basic underpinning for either the limitless resort to strategic violence without effective constraint, or the perseverance of limited war (with its inherent tendencies to escalation) as a permanent feature of politics. While he was no militarist, Morgenthau did say elsewhere (in, of all places, a far-reaching critique of nuclear strategy) that the 'quantitative and qualitative competition for conventional weapons is a rational instrument of international politics'.28 The conceptual template for such an image of national security state can be found in the work of Thomas Hobbes, with his influential conception of the political community as a tight unity of sovereign and people in which their bodies meld with his own to form a 'Leviathan', and which must be defended from enemies within and without. His image of effective security and sovereignty was one that was intolerant of internal difference and dissent, legitimating a strong state with coercive and exceptional powers to preserve order and sameness. This was a vision not merely of political order but of existential identity, set off against a range of existential others who were sources of threat, backwardness, instability or incongruity.29 It also, in a way set out with frightening clarity by the theorist Carl Schmitt and the philosopher Georg Hegel, exchanged internal unity, identity and harmony for permanent alienation from other such communities (states). Hegel presaged Schmitt's thought with his argument that individuality and the state are single moments of 'mind in its freedom' which 'has an infinitely negative relation to itself, and hence its essential character from its own point of view is its singleness': Individuality is awareness of one's existence as a unit in sharp distinction from others. It manifests itself here in the state as a relation to other states, each of which is autonomous vis-a-vis the others...this negative relation of the state to itself is embodied in the world as the relation of one state to another and as if the negative were something external.30 Schmitt is important both for understanding the way in which such alienation is seen as a definitive way of imagining and limiting political communities, and for understanding how such a rigid delineation is linked to the inevitability and perpetuation of war. Schmitt argued that the existence of a state 'presupposes the political', which must be understood through 'the specific political distinction...between friend and enemy'. The enemy is 'the other, the stranger; and it sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in an extreme case conflicts with him are possible'.31 The figure of the enemy is constitutive of the state as 'the specific entity of a people'.32 Without it society is not political and a people cannot be said to exist: Only the actual participants can correctly recognise, understand and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict...to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent's way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one's own form of existence.33 Schmitt links this stark ontology to war when he states that the political is only authentic 'when a fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to the whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship...in its entirety the state as an organised political entity decides for itself the friend-enemy distinction'.34 War, in short, is an existential condition: the entire life of a human being is a struggle and every human being is symbolically a combatant. The friend, enemy and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy.35 Schmitt claims that his theory is not biased towards war as a choice ('It is by no means as though the political signifies nothing but devastating war and every political deed a military action...it neither favours war nor militarism, neither imperialism nor pacifism') but it is hard to accept his caveat at face value.36 When such a theory takes the form of a social discourse (which it does in a general form) such an ontology can only support, as a kind of originary ground, the basic Clausewitzian assumption that war can be a rational way of resolving political conflicts ~-~- because the import of Schmitt's argument is that such 'political' conflicts are ultimately expressed through the possibility of war. As he says: 'to the enemy concept belongs the ever-present possibility of combat'.37 Where Schmitt meets Clausewitz, as I explain further below, the existential and rationalistic ontologies of war join into a closed circle of mutual support and justification. This closed circle of existential and strategic reason generates a number of dangers. Firstly, the emergence of conflict can generate military action almost automatically simply because the world is conceived in terms of the distinction between friend and enemy; because the very existence of the other constitutes an unacceptable threat, rather than a chain of actions, judgements and decisions. (As the Israelis insisted of Hezbollah, they 'deny our right to exist'.) This effaces agency, causality and responsibility from policy and political discourse: our actions can be conceived as independent of the conflict or quarantined from critical enquiry, as necessities that achieve an instrumental purpose but do not contribute to a new and unpredictable causal chain. Similarly the Clausewitzian idea of force ~-~- which, by transporting a Newtonian category from the natural into the social sciences, assumes the very effect it seeks ~-~- further encourages the resort to military violence. We ignore the complex history of a conflict, and thus the alternative paths to its resolution that such historical analysis might provide, by portraying conflict as fundamental and existential in nature; as possibly containable or exploitable, but always irresolvable. Dominant portrayals of the war on terror, and the Israeli-Arab conflict, are arguably examples of such ontologies in action. Secondly, the militaristic force of such an ontology is visible, in Schmitt, in the absolute sense of vulnerability whereby a people can judge whether their 'adversary intends to negate his opponent's way of life'.38 Evoking the kind of thinking that would become controversial in the Bush doctrine, Hegel similarly argues thAT: ...a state may regard its infinity and honour as at stake in each of its concerns, however minute, and it is all the more inclined to susceptibility to injury the more its strong individuality is impelled as a result of long domestic peace to seek and create a sphere of activity abroad. ....the state is in essence mind and therefore cannot be prepared to stop at just taking notice of an injury after it has actually occurred. On the contrary, there arises in addition as a cause of strife the idea of such an injury...39 Identity, even more than physical security or autonomy, is put at stake in such thinking and can be defended and redeemed through warfare (or, when taken to a further extreme of an absolute demonisation and dehumanisation of the other, by mass killing, 'ethnic cleansing' or genocide). However anathema to a classical realist like Morgenthau, for whom prudence was a core political virtue, these have been influential ways of defining national security and defence during the twentieth century and persists into the twenty-first. They infused Cold War strategy in the United States (with the key policy document NSC68 stating that 'the Soviet-led assault on free institutions is worldwide now, and ... a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere')40 and frames dominant Western responses to the threat posed by Al Qaeda and like groups (as Tony Blair admitted in 2006, 'We could have chosen security as the battleground. But we didn't. We chose values.')41 It has also become influential, in a particularly tragic and destructive way, in Israel, where memories of the Holocaust and (all too common) statements by Muslim and Arab leaders rejecting Israel's existence are mobilised by conservatives to justify military adventurism and a rejectionist policy towards the Palestinians. On the reverse side of such ontologies of national insecurity we find pride and hubris, the belief that martial preparedness and action are vital or healthy for the existence of a people. Clausewitz's thought is thoroughly imbued with this conviction. For example, his definition of war as an act of policy does not refer merely to the policy of cabinets, but expresses the objectives and will of peoples: When whole communities go to war ~-~- whole peoples, and especially civilized peoples ~-~- the reason always lies in some political situation and the occasion is always due to some political object. War, therefore, is an act of policy.42 Such a perspective prefigures Schmitt's definition of the 'political' (an earlier translation reads 'war, therefore, is a political act'), and thus creates an inherent tension between its tendency to fuel the escalation of conflict and Clausewitz's declared aim, in defining war as policy, to prevent war becoming 'a complete, untrammelled, absolute manifestation of violence'.43 Likewise his argument that war is a 'trinity' of people (the source of 'primordial violence, hatred and enmity'), the military (who manage the 'play of chance and probability') and government (which achieve war's 'subordination as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone') merges the existential and rationalistic conceptions of war into a theoretical unity.44 The idea that national identities could be built and redeemed through war derived from the 'romantic counter-revolution' in philosophy which opposed the cosmopolitanism of Kant with an emphasis on the absolute state ~-~- as expressed by Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Bismarkian Realpolitik and politicians like Wilhelm Von Humbolt. Humbolt, a Prussian minister of Education, wrote that war 'is one of the most wholesome manifestations that plays a role in the education of the human race', and urged the formation of a national army 'to inspire the citizen with the spirit of true war'. He stated that war 'alone gives the total structure the strength and the diversity without which facility would be weakness and unity would be void'.45 In the Phenomenology of Mind Hegel made similar arguments that to for individuals to find their essence 'Government has from time to time to shake them to the very centre by war'.46 The historian Azar Gat points to the similarity of Clausewitz's arguments that 'a people and a nation can hope for a strong position in the world only if national character and familiarity with war fortify each other by continual interaction' to Hegel's vision of the ethical good of war in his Philosophy of Right.47 Likewise Michael Shapiro sees Clausewitz and Hegel as alike in seeing war 'as an ontological investment in both individual and national completion...Clausewitz figures war as passionate ontological commitment rather than cool political reason...war is a major aspect of being.'48 Hegel's text argues that war is 'a work of freedom' in which 'the individual's substantive duty' merges with the 'independence and sovereignty of the state'.49 Through war, he argues, the ethical health of peoples is preserved in their indifference to the stabilization of finite institutions; just as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea from the foulness which would be the result of a prolonged calm, so the corruption in nations would be the product of a prolonged, let alone 'perpetual' peace.50 Hegel indeed argues that 'sacrifice on behalf of the individuality of the state is a substantial tie between the state and all its members and so is a universal duty...if the state as such, if its autonomy, is in jeopardy, all its citizens are duty bound to answer the summons to its defence'.51 Furthermore, this is not simply a duty, but a form of self-realisation in which the individual dissolves into the higher unity of the state: The intrinsic worth of courage as a disposition of mind is to be found in the genuine, absolute, final end, the sovereignty of the state. The work of courage is to actualise this end, and the means to this end is the sacrifice of personal actuality. This form of experience thus contains the harshness of extreme contradictions: a self-sacrifice which yet is the real existence of one's freedom; the maximum self-subsistence of individuality, yet only a cog playing its part in the mechanism of an external organisation; absolute obedience, renunciation of personal opinions and reasonings, in fact complete absence of mind, coupled with the most intense and comprehensive presence of mind and decision in the moment of acting; the most hostile and so most personal action against individuals, coupled with an attitude of complete indifference or even liking towards them as individuals.52 A more frank statement of the potentially lethal consequences of patriotism ~-~- and its simultaneously physical and conceptual annihilation of the individual human being ~-~- is rarely to be found, one that is repeated today in countless national discourses and the strategic world-view in general. (In contrast, one of Kant's fundamental objections to war was that it involved using men 'as mere machines or instruments'.53) Yet however bizarre and contradictory Hegel's argument, it constitutes a powerful social ontology: an apparently irrefutable discourse of being. It actualises the convergence of war and the social contract in the form of the national security state. Strategic Reason and Scientific Truth By itself, such an account of the nationalist ontology of war and security provides only a general insight into the perseverance of military violence as a core element of politics. It does not explain why so many policymakers think military violence works. As I argued earlier, such an ontology is married to a more rationalistic form of strategic thought that claims to link violent means to political ends predictably and controllably, and which, by doing so, combines military action and national purposes into a common ~-~- and thoroughly modern ~-~- horizon of certainty. Given Hegel's desire to decisively distil and control the dynamic potentials of modernity in thought, it is helpful to focus on the modernity of this ontology ~-~- one that is modern in its adherence to modern scientific models of truth, reality and technological progress, and in its insistence on imposing images of scientific truth from the physical sciences (such as mathematics and physics) onto human behaviour, politics and society. For example, the military theorist and historian Martin van Creveld has argued that one of the reasons Clausewitz was so influential was that his 'ideas seemed to have chimed in with the rationalistic, scientific, and technological outlook associated with the industrial revolution'.54 Set into this epistemological matrix, modern politics and government engages in a sweeping project of mastery and control in which all of the world's resources ~-~- mineral, animal, physical, human ~-~- are made part of a machinic process of which war and violence are viewed as normal features. These are the deeper claims and implications of Clausewitzian strategic reason. One of the most revealing contemporary examples comes from the writings (and actions) of Henry Kissinger, a Harvard professor and later U.S. National Security Adviser and Secretary of State. He wrote during the Vietnam war that after 1945 U.S. foreign policy was based 'on the assumption that technology plus managerial skills gave us the ability to reshape the international system and to bring about domestic transformations in emerging countries'. This 'scientific revolution' had 'for all practical purposes, removed technical limits from the exercise of power in foreign policy'.55 Kissinger's conviction was based not merely in his pride in the vast military and bureaucratic apparatus of the United States, but in a particular epistemology (theory of knowledge). Kissinger asserted that the West is 'deeply committed to the notion that the real world is external to the observer, that knowledge consists of recording and classifying data ~-~- the more accurately the better'. This, he claimed, has since the Renaissance set the West apart from an 'undeveloped' world that contains 'cultures that have escaped the early impact of Newtonian thinking' and remain wedded to the 'essentially pre-Newtonian view that the real world is almost entirely internal to the observer'.56 At the same time, Kissinger's hubris and hunger for control was beset by a corrosive anxiety: that, in an era of nuclear weapons proliferation and constant military modernisation, of geopolitical stalemate in Vietnam, and the emergence and militancy of new post-colonial states, order and mastery were harder to define and impose. He worried over the way 'military bipolarity' between the superpowers had 'encouraged political multipolarity', which 'does not guarantee stability. Rigidity is diminished, but so is manageability...equilibrium is difficult to achieve among states widely divergent in values, goals, expectations and previous experience' (emphasis added). He mourned that 'the greatest need of the contemporary international system is an agreed concept of order'.57 Here were the driving obsessions of the modern rational statesman based around a hunger for stasis and certainty that would entrench U.S. hegemony: For the two decades after 1945, our international activities were based on the assumption that technology plus managerial skills gave us the ability to reshape the international system and to bring about domestic transformations in "emerging countries". This direct "operational" concept of international order has proved too simple. Political multipolarity makes it impossible to impose an American design. Our deepest challenge will be to evoke the creativity of a pluralistic world, to base order on political multipolarity even though overwhelming military strength will remain with the two superpowers.58 Kissinger's statement revealed that such cravings for order and certainty continually confront chaos, resistance and uncertainty: clay that won't be worked, flesh that will not yield, enemies that refuse to surrender. This is one of the most powerful lessons of the Indochina wars, which were to continue in a phenomenally destructive fashion for six years after Kissinger wrote these words. Yet as his sinister, Orwellian exhortation to 'evoke the creativity of a pluralistic world' demonstrated, Kissinger's hubris was undiminished. This is a vicious, historic irony: a desire to control nature, technology, society and human beings that is continually frustrated, but never abandoned or rethought. By 1968 U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the rationalist policymaker par excellence, had already decided that U.S. power and technology could not prevail in Vietnam; Nixon and Kissinger's refusal to accept this conclusion, to abandon their Cartesian illusions, was to condemn hundreds of thousands more to die in Indochina and the people of Cambodia to two more decades of horror and misery.59 In 2003 there would be a powerful sense of déja vu as another Republican Administration crowned more than decade of failed and destructive policy on Iraq with a deeply controversial and divisive war to remove Saddam Hussein from power. In this struggle with the lessons of Vietnam, revolutionary resistance, and rapid geopolitical transformation, we are witness to an enduring political and cultural theme: of a craving for order, control and certainty in the face of continual uncertainty. Closely related to this anxiety was the way that Kissinger's thinking ~-~- and that of McNamara and earlier imperialists like the British Governor of Egypt Cromer ~-~- was embedded in instrumental images of technology and the machine: the machine as both a tool of power and an image of social and political order. In his essay 'The Government of Subject Races' Cromer envisaged effective imperial rule ~-~- over numerous societies and billions of human beings ~-~- as best achieved by a central authority working 'to ensure the harmonious working of the different parts of the machine'.60 Kissinger analogously invoked the virtues of 'equilibrium', 'manageability' and 'stability' yet, writing some six decades later, was anxious that technological progress no longer brought untroubled control: the Westernising 'spread of technology and its associated rationality...does not inevitably produce a similar concept of reality'.61 We sense the rational policymaker's frustrated desire: the world is supposed to work like a machine, ordered by a form of power and governmental reason which deploys machines and whose desires and processes are meant to run along ordered, rational lines like a machine. Kissinger's desire was little different from that of Cromer who, wrote Edward Said: ...envisions a seat of power in the West and radiating out from it towards the East a great embracing machine, sustaining the central authority yet commanded by it. What the machine's branches feed into it from the East ~-~- human material, material wealth, knowledge, what have you ~-~- is processed by the machine, then converted into more power...the immediate translation of mere Oriental matter into useful substance.62 This desire for order in the shadow of chaos and uncertainty ~-~- the constant war with an intractable and volatile matter ~-~- has deep roots in modern thought, and was a major impetus to the development of technological reason and its supporting theories of knowledge. As Kissinger's claims about the West's Newtonian desire for the 'accurate' gathering and classification of 'data' suggest, modern strategy, foreign policy and Realpolitik have been thrust deep into the apparently stable soil of natural science, in the hope of finding immovable and unchallengeable roots there. While this process has origins in ancient Judaic and Greek thought, it crystallised in philosophical terms most powerfully during and after the Renaissance. The key figures in this process were Francis Bacon, Galileo, Isaac Newton, and René Descartes, who all combined a hunger for political and ontological certainty, a positivist epistemology and a naïve faith in the goodness of invention. Bacon sought to create certainty and order, and with it a new human power over the world, through a new empirical methodology based on a harmonious combination of experiment, the senses and the understanding. With this method, he argued, we can 'derive hope from a purer alliance of the faculties (the experimental and rational) than has yet been attempted'.63 In a similar move, Descartes sought to conjure certainty from uncertainty through the application of a new method that moved progressively out from a few basic certainties (the existence of God, the certitude of individual consciousness and a divinely granted faculty of judgement) in a search for pure fixed truths. Mathematics formed the ideal image of this method, with its strict logical reasoning, its quantifiable results and its uncanny insights into the hidden structure of the cosmos.64 Earlier, Galileo had argued that scientists should privilege 'objective', quantifiable qualities over 'merely perceptible' ones; that 'only by means of an exclusively quantitative analysis could science attain certain knowledge of the world'.65 Such doctrines of mathematically verifiable truth were to have powerful echoes in the 20th Century, in the ascendancy of systems analysis, game theory, cybernetics and computing in defense policy and strategic decisions, and in the awesome scientific breakthroughs of nuclear physics, which unlocked the innermost secrets of matter and energy and applied the most advanced applications of mathematics and computing to create the atomic bomb. Yet this new scientific power was marked by a terrible irony: as even Morgenthau understood, the control over matter afforded by the science could never be translated into the control of the weapons themselves, into political utility and rational strategy.66 Bacon thought of the new scientific method not merely as way of achieving a purer access to truth and epistemological certainty, but as liberating a new power that would enable the creation of a new kind of Man. He opened the Novum Organum with the statement that 'knowledge and human power are synonymous', and later wrote of his 'determination...to lay a firmer foundation, and extend to a greater distance the boundaries of human power and dignity'.67 In a revealing and highly negative comparison between 'men's lives in the most polished countries of Europe and in any wild and barbarous region of the new Indies' ~-~- one that echoes in advance Kissinger's distinction between post-and pre-Newtonian cultures ~-~- Bacon set out what was at stake in the advancement of empirical science: anyone making this comparison, he remarked, 'will think it so great, that man may be said to be a god unto man'.68 We may be forgiven for blinking, but in Bacon's thought 'man' was indeed in the process of stealing a new fire from the heavens and seizing God's power over the world for itself. Not only would the new empirical science lead to 'an improvement of mankind's estate, and an increase in their power over nature', but would reverse the primordial humiliation of the Fall of Adam: For man, by the fall, lost at once his state of innocence, and his empire over creation, both of which can be partially recovered even in this life, the first by religion and faith, the second by the arts and sciences. For creation did not become entirely and utterly rebellious by the curse, but in consequence of the Divine decree, 'in the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread'; she is now compelled by our labours (not assuredly by our disputes or magical ceremonies) at length to afford mankind in some degree his bread...69 There is a breathtaking, world-creating hubris in this statement ~-~- one that, in many ways, came to characterise western modernity itself, and which is easily recognisable in a generation of modern technocrats like Kissinger. The Fall of Adam was the Judeo-Christian West's primal creation myth, one that marked humankind as flawed and humbled before God, condemned to hardship and ambivalence. Bacon forecast here a return to Eden, but one of man's own making. This truly was the death of God, of putting man into God's place, and no pious appeals to the continuity or guidance of faith could disguise the awesome epistemological violence which now subordinated creation to man. Bacon indeed argued that inventions are 'new creations and imitations of divine works'. As such, there is nothing but good in science: 'the introduction of great inventions is the most distinguished of human actions...inventions are a blessing and a benefit without injuring or afflicting any'.70 And what would be mankind's 'bread', the rewards of its new 'empire over creation'? If the new method and invention brought modern medicine, social welfare, sanitation, communications, education and comfort, it also enabled the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust and two world wars; napalm, the B52, the hydrogen bomb, the Kalashnikov rifle and military strategy. Indeed some of the 20th Century's most far-reaching inventions ~-~- radar, television, rocketry, computing, communications, jet aircraft, the Internet ~-~- would be the product of drives for national security and militarisation. Even the inventions Bacon thought so marvellous and transformative ~-~- printing, gunpowder and the compass ~-~- brought in their wake upheaval and tragedy: printing, dogma and bureaucracy; gunpowder, the rifle and the artillery battery; navigation, slavery and the genocide of indigenous peoples. In short, the legacy of the new empirical science would be ambivalence as much as certainty; degradation as much as enlightenment; the destruction of nature as much as its utilisation. Doubts and Fears: Technology as Ontology If Bacon could not reasonably be expected to foresee many of these developments, the idea that scientific and technological progress could be destructive did occur to him. However it was an anxiety he summarily dismissed: ...let none be alarmed at the objection of the arts and sciences becoming depraved to malevolent or luxurious purposes and the like, for the same can be said of every worldly good; talent, courage, strength, beauty, riches, light itself...Only let mankind regain their rights over nature, assigned to them by the gift of God, and obtain that power, whose exercise will be governed by right reason and true religion.71 By the mid-Twentieth Century, after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, such fears could no longer be so easily wished away, as the physicist and scientific director of the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer recognised. He said in a 1947 lecture: We felt a particularly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting and in the end in large measure achieving the realization of atomic weapons...In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no over-statement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge they cannot lose.72 Adam had fallen once more, but into a world which refused to acknowledge its renewed intimacy with contingency and evil. Man's empire over creation ~-~- his discovery of the innermost secrets of matter and energy, of the fires that fuelled the stars ~-~- had not 'enhanced human power and dignity' as Bacon claimed, but instead brought destruction and horror. Scientific powers that had been consciously applied in the defence of life and in the hope of its betterment now threatened its total and absolute destruction. This would not prevent a legion of scientists, soldiers and national security policymakers later attempting to apply Bacon's faith in invention and Descartes' faith in mathematics to make of the Bomb a rational weapon. Oppenheimer ~-~- who resolutely opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb ~-~- understood what the strategists could not: that the weapons resisted control, resisted utility, that 'with the release of atomic energy quite revolutionary changes had occurred in the techniques of warfare'.73 Yet Bacon's legacy, one deeply imprinted on the strategists, was his view that truth and utility are 'perfectly identical'.74 In 1947 Oppenheimer had clung to the hope that 'knowledge is good...it seems hard to live any other way than thinking it was better to know something than not to know it; and the more you know, the better'; by 1960 he felt that 'terror attaches to new knowledge. It has an unmooring quality; it finds men unprepared to deal with it.'75 Martin Heidegger questioned this mapping of natural science onto the social world in his essays on technology ~-~- which, as 'machine', has been so crucial to modern strategic and geopolitical thought as an image of perfect function and order and a powerful tool of intervention. He commented that, given that modern technology 'employs exact physical science...the deceptive illusion arises that modern technology is applied physical science'.76 Yet as the essays and speeches of Oppenheimer attest, technology and its relation to science, society and war cannot be reduced to a noiseless series of translations of science for politics, knowledge for force, or force for good. Instead, Oppenheimer saw a process frustrated by roadblocks and ruptured by irony; in his view there was no smooth, unproblematic translation of scientific truth into social truth, and technology was not its vehicle. Rather his comments raise profound and painful ethical questions that resonate with terror and uncertainty. Yet this has not prevented technology becoming a potent object of desire, not merely as an instrument of power but as a promise and conduit of certainty itself. In the minds of too many rational soldiers, strategists and policymakers, technology brings with it the truth of its enabling science and spreads it over the world. It turns epistemological certainty into political certainty; it turns control over 'facts' into control over the earth. Heidegger's insights into this phenomena I find especially telling and disturbing ~-~- because they underline the ontological force of the instrumental view of politics. In The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger's striking argument was that in the modernising West technology is not merely a tool, a 'means to an end'. Rather technology has become a governing image of the modern universe, one that has come to order, limit and define human existence as a 'calculable coherence of forces' and a 'standing reserve' of energy. Heidegger wrote: 'the threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already affected man in his essence.'77 This process Heidegger calls 'Enframing' and through it the scientific mind demands that 'nature reports itself in some way or other that is identifiable through calculation and remains orderable as a system of information'. Man is not a being who makes and uses machines as means, choosing and limiting their impact on the world for his ends; rather man has imagined the world as a machine and humanity everywhere becomes trapped within its logic. Man, he writes, 'comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall...where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile Man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth.'78 Technological man not only becomes the name for a project of lordship and mastery over the earth, but incorporates humanity within this project as a calculable resource. In strategy, warfare and geopolitics human bodies, actions and aspirations are caught, transformed and perverted by such calculating, enframing reason: human lives are reduced to tools, obstacles, useful or obstinate matter. This tells us much about the enduring power of crude instrumental versions of strategic thought, which relate not merely to the actual use of force but to broader geopolitical strategies that see, as limited war theorists like Robert Osgood did, force as an 'instrument of policy short of war'. It was from within this strategic ontology that figures like the Nobel prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling theorised the strategic role of threats and coercive diplomacy, and spoke of strategy as 'the power to hurt'.79 In the 2006 Lebanon war we can see such thinking in the remark of a U.S. analyst, a former Ambassador to Israel and Syria, who speculated that by targeting civilians and infrastructure Israel aimed 'to create enough pain on the ground so there would be a local political reaction to Hezbollah's adventurism'.80 Similarly a retired Israeli army colonel told the Washington Post that 'Israel is attempting to create a rift between the Lebanese population and Hezbollah supporters by exacting a heavy price from the elite in Beirut. The message is: If you want your air conditioning to work and if you want to be able to fly to Paris for shopping, you must pull your head out of the sand and take action toward shutting down Hezbollah-land.'81 Conclusion: Violent Ontologies or Peaceful Choices? I was motivated to begin the larger project from which this essay derives by a number of concerns. I felt that the available critical, interpretive or performative languages of war ~-~- realist and liberal international relations theories, just war theories, and various Clausewitzian derivations of strategy ~-~- failed us, because they either perform or refuse to place under suspicion the underlying political ontologies that I have sought to unmask and question here. Many realists have quite nuanced and critical attitudes to the use of force, but ultimately affirm strategic thought and remain embedded within the existential framework of the nation-state. Both liberal internationalist and just war doctrines seek mainly to improve the accountability of decision-making in security affairs and to limit some of the worst moral enormities of war, but (apart from the more radical versions of cosmopolitanism) they fail to question the ontological claims of political community or strategic theory.82 In the case of a theorist like Jean Bethke Elshtain, just war doctrine is in fact allied to a softer, liberalised form of the Hegelian-Schmittian ontology. She dismisses Kant's Perpetual Peace as 'a fantasy of at-oneness...a world in which differences have all been rubbed off' and in which 'politics, which is the way human beings have devised for dealing with their differences, gets eliminated.'83 She remains a committed liberal democrat and espouses a moral community that stretches beyond the nation-state, which strongly contrasts with Schmitt's hostility to liberalism and his claustrophobic distinction between friend and enemy. However her image of politics ~-~- which at its limits, she implies, requires the resort to war as the only existentially satisfying way of resolving deep-seated conflicts ~-~- reflects much of Schmitt's idea of the political and Hegel's ontology of a fundamentally alienated world of nation-states, in which war is a performance of being. She categorically states that any effort to dismantle security dilemmas 'also requires the dismantling of human beings as we know them'.84 Whilst this would not be true of all just war advocates, I suspect that even as they are so concerned with the ought, moral theories of violence grant too much unquestioned power to the is. The problem here lies with the confidence in being ~-~- of 'human beings as we know them' ~-~- which ultimately fails to escape a Schmittian architecture and thus eternally exacerbates (indeed reifies) antagonisms. Yet we know from the work of Deleuze and especially William Connolly that exchanging an ontology of being for one of becoming, where the boundaries and nature of the self contain new possibilities through agonistic relation to others, provides a less destructive and violent way of acknowledging and dealing with conflict and difference.85 My argument here, whilst normatively sympathetic to Kant's moral demand for the eventual abolition of war, militates against excessive optimism.86 Even as I am arguing that war is not an enduring historical or anthropological feature, or a neutral and rational instrument of policy ~-~- that it is rather the product of hegemonic forms of knowledge about political action and community ~-~- my analysis does suggest some sobering conclusions about its power as an idea and formation. Neither the progressive flow of history nor the pacific tendencies of an international society of republican states will save us. The violent ontologies I have described here in fact dominate the conceptual and policy frameworks of modern republican states and have come, against everything Kant hoped for, to stand in for progress, modernity and reason. Indeed what Heidegger argues, I think with some credibility, is that the enframing world view has come to stand in for being itself. Enframing, argues Heidegger, 'does not simply endanger man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is...it drives out every other possibility of revealing...the rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.'87 What I take from Heidegger's argument ~-~- one that I have sought to extend by analysing the militaristic power of modern ontologies of political existence and security ~-~- is a view that the challenge is posed not merely by a few varieties of weapon, government, technology or policy, but by an overarching system of thinking and understanding that lays claim to our entire space of truth and existence. Many of the most destructive features of contemporary modernity ~-~- militarism, repression, coercive diplomacy, covert intervention, geopolitics, economic exploitation and ecological destruction ~-~- derive not merely from particular choices by policymakers based on their particular interests, but from calculative, 'empirical' discourses of scientific and political truth rooted in powerful enlightenment images of being. Confined within such an epistemological and cultural universe, policymakers' choices become necessities, their actions become inevitabilities, and humans suffer and die. Viewed in this light, 'rationality' is the name we give the chain of reasoning which builds one structure of truth on another until a course of action, however violent or dangerous, becomes preordained through that reasoning's very operation and existence. It creates both discursive constraints ~-~- available choices may simply not be seen as credible or legitimate ~-~- and material constraints that derive from the mutually reinforcing cascade of discourses and events which then preordain militarism and violence as necessary policy responses, however ineffective, dysfunctional or chaotic. The force of my own and Heidegger's analysis does, admittedly, tend towards a deterministic fatalism. On my part this is quite deliberate; it is important to allow this possible conclusion to weigh on us. Large sections of modern societies ~-~- especially parts of the media, political leaderships and national security institutions ~-~- are utterly trapped within the Clausewitzian paradigm, within the instrumental utilitarianism of 'enframing' and the stark ontology of the friend and enemy. They are certainly tremendously aggressive and energetic in continually stating and reinstating its force. But is there a way out? Is there no possibility of agency and choice? Is this not the key normative problem I raised at the outset, of how the modern ontologies of war efface agency, causality and responsibility from decision making; the responsibility that comes with having choices and making decisions, with exercising power? (In this I am much closer to Connolly than Foucault, in Connolly's insistence that, even in the face of the anonymous power of discourse to produce and limit subjects, selves remain capable of agency and thus incur responsibilities.88) There seems no point in following Heidegger in seeking a more 'primal truth' of being ~-~- that is to reinstate ontology and obscure its worldly manifestations and consequences from critique. However we can, while refusing Heidegger's unworldly89 nostalgia, appreciate that he was searching for a way out of the modern system of calculation; that he was searching for a 'questioning', 'free relationship' to technology that would not be immediately recaptured by the strategic, calculating vision of enframing. Yet his path out is somewhat chimerical ~-~- his faith in 'art' and the older Greek attitudes of 'responsibility and indebtedness' offer us valuable clues to the kind of sensibility needed, but little more. When we consider the problem of policy, the force of this analysis suggests that choice and agency can be all too often limited; they can remain confined (sometimes quite wilfully) within the overarching strategic and security paradigms. Or, more hopefully, policy choices could aim to bring into being a more enduringly inclusive, cosmopolitan and peaceful logic of the political. But this cannot be done without seizing alternatives from outside the space of enframing and utilitarian strategic thought, by being aware of its presence and weight and activating a very different concept of existence, security and action.90 This would seem to hinge upon 'questioning' as such ~-~- on the questions we put to the real and our efforts to create and act into it. Do security and strategic policies seek to exploit and direct humans as material, as energy, or do they seek to protect and enlarge human dignity and autonomy? Do they seek to impose by force an unjust status quo (as in Palestine), or to remove one injustice only to replace it with others (the U.S. in Iraq or Afghanistan), or do so at an unacceptable human, economic, and environmental price? Do we see our actions within an instrumental, amoral framework (of 'interests') and a linear chain of causes and effects (the idea of force), or do we see them as folding into a complex interplay of languages, norms, events and consequences which are less predictable and controllable?91 And most fundamentally: Are we seeking to coerce or persuade? Are less violent and more sustainable choices available? Will our actions perpetuate or help to end the global rule of insecurity and violence? Will our thought?
	23	+
	24	+Controls the internal link to your extinction scenarios since violence becomes inevitable and outweighs them because no value to life means death has no impact.
	25	+
	26	+The alternative is to reject the AFF's security representations as a critical intellectual labor that makes imagination of a more peaceful future possible. Neocleous 08
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	28	+Neocleous 8 - Prof of Government @ Brunel University; London (Mark, Critique of Security, pg. 184-5)
	29	+
	30	+Anyone well versed in history or with experience of university life will know about the shameful ways in which large numbers of academics have elevated venality into the cardinal academic virtue, complying with the demands of those in power and the wishes of those with money: witness the political scientists, historians, anthropologists, geographers, cartographers, sociologists, linguists and many others who reworked their disciplines according to the principles and myths, and the principle myths, of fascism.' 'Academic life under fascism', notes Christopher Hutton, 'is a dismal ... episode in an unedifying story of relations between the modem academic and the state, and between academics and power both within and outside the university. But this part of the history of fascism is merely the worst moment in the wider and equally unedifying story of relations between academics and the state more generally, merely one way m which intellectuals have kowtowed to the principles and myths, and the principle myths, concerning security and the state. Spouting the jargon of security and enthralled by the trappings of power, their intellectual labour consists of nothing less than attempts to write hand-books for the princes of the new security state. The death of countless numbers in a more 'efficient' bombing of a city, the stationing of troops halfway around the World in order to bring to an end any attempt at collective self-determination, the use of military machines against civilians, the training of police forces in counter-insurgency practices, but more than anything the key concepts and categories used to explain and justify these things - all defended, supported and even 'improved” by security intellectuals for whom, ultimately, intelIecua1 labour boils down to little more than the question of the most efficient manner. In which to achieve the security demanded by the state and bourgeois order. In rationalizing the political and corporate logic of security, the security intellectual conceals the utter irrationality of the system as a whole. The security intellectual then is nothing less than the security ideologue, peddling the fetish of our time. The only way out of such a dilemma, to escape the fetish, is perhaps to eschew the logic of security altogether - to reject it as so ideologically loaded in favour of the state that any real political thought other than the authoritarian and reactionary should be pressed to give it up, That is clearly something that can not be achieved within the limits of bourgeois thought and thus could never even begin to be imagined by the security intellectual. It is also something that the constant iteration of the refrain 'this is an insecure world' and reiteration of one fear, anxiety and insecurity after another will also make it hard to do, but it is something that the critique of security suggests we may have to consider if we want a political way out of the impasse of security. This impasse exists because security has now become so all-encompassing that it marginalizes all else, most notably the constructive conflicts, debates and discussions that animate political life. The constant prioritizing of a mythical security as a political end - as the political end - constitutes a rejection of politics in any meaningful sense of the term. That is, as a mode of action in which differences can be articulated, in which the conflicts and struggles that arise from such differences can be fought for and negotiated, in which people might come to believe that another world is possible - that they might transform the world and in turn be transformed. Security politics simply removes this; worse, it removes it while purportedly addressing it. In so doing it suppresses all issues of power and turns political questions into debates about the most efficient way to achieve 'security', despite the fact that we are never quite told - never could be told - what might count as having achieved it. Security politics is, in this sense, an anti-politics,” dominating political discourse in much the same manner as the security state tries to dominate human beings, reinforcing security fetishism and the monopolistic character of security on the political imagination. We therefore need to get beyond security politics, not add yet more 'sectors to it in a way that simply expands the scope of the state, and legitimizes state intervention in yet more and more areas of our lives. Simon Dalby reports a personal communication with Michael Williams, co-editor of the important text Critical Security Studies, in which the latter asks: if you take away security, what do you put in the hole that's left behind? But I'm inclined to agree with Dalby: maybe there is no hole. The mistake has been to think that there is a hole and that this hole needs to be filled with a new vision or revision of security in which it is re-mapped or civilised or gendered or humanised or expanded or whatever. All of these ultimately remain within the statist political imaginary, and consequently end up re-affirming the state as the terrain of modem politics, the grounds of security. The real task is not to fill the supposed hole with yet another vision of security, but to fight for an alternative political language which takes us beyond the narrow horizon of bourgeois security and which therefore does not constantly throw us into the arms of the state. That's the point of critical politics: to develop a new political language more adequate to the kind of society we want. Thus while much of what I have said here has been of a negative order, part of the tradition of critical theory is that the negative may be as significant as the positive in setting thought on new paths. For if security really is the supreme concept of bourgeois society and the fundamental thematic of liberalism, then to keep harping on about insecurity and to keep demanding 'more security' (while meekly hoping that this increased security doesn't damage our liberty) is to blind ourselves to the possibility of building real alternatives to the authoritarian tendencies in contemporary politics. To situate ourselves against security politics would allow us to circumvent the debilitating effect achieved through the constant securitizing of social and political issues, debilitating in the sense that 'security' helps consolidate the power of the existing forms of social domination and justifies the short-circuiting of even the most democratic forms. It would also allow us to forge another kind of politics centered on a different conception of the good. We need a new way of thinking and talking about social being and politics that moves us beyond security. This would perhaps be emancipatory in the true sense of the word. What this might mean, precisely, must be open to debate. But it certainly requires recognizing that security is an illusion that has forgotten it is an illusion; it requires recognising that security is not the same as solidarity; it requires accepting that insecurity is part of the human condition, and thus giving up the search for the certainty of security and instead learning to tolerate the uncertainties, ambiguities and 'insecurities' that come with being human; it requires accepting that securitizing an issue does not mean dealing with it politically, but bracketing it out and handing it to the state; it requires us to be brave enough to return the gift.
	31	+
	32	+The role of the judge is to be a critical educator who tests the representations of the 1AC. Fiat is illusory so they do not get to the case.
	33	+
	34	+Representations must precede policy discussion - they determine what is politically thinkable. Crawford 02
	35	+
	36	+Crawford 02 - Neta, PhD MA MIT, BA Brown, Prof. of poli sci at boston univ. Argument and Change in World Politics, p. 19-21
	37	+
	38	+Coherent arguments are unlikely to take place unless and until actors, at least on some level, agree on what they are arguing about. The at least temporary resolution of meta-arguments- regarding the nature of the good (the content of prescriptive norms); what is out there, the way we know the world, how we decide between competing beliefs (ontology and epistemology); and the nature of the situation at hand( the proper frame or representation)- must occur before specific arguments that could lead to decision and action may take place. Meta-arguments over epistemology and ontology, relatively rare, occur in instances where there is a fundamental clash between belief systems and not simply a debate within a belief system. Such arguments over the nature of the world and how we come to know it are particularly rare in politics though they are more frequent in religion and science. Meta-arguments over the “good” are contests over what it is good and right to do, and even how we know the good and the right. They are about the nature of the good, specifically, defining the qualities of “good” so that we know good when we see it and do it. Ethical arguments are about how to do good in a particular situation. More common are meta-arguments over representations or frames- about how we out to understand a particular situation. Sometimes actors agree on how they see a situation. More often there are different possible interpretations. Thomas Homer-Dixon and Roger karapin suggest, “Argument and debate occur when people try to gain acceptance for their interpretation of the world”. For example, “is the war defensive or aggressive?”. Defining and controlling representations and images, or the frame, affects whether one thinks there is an issue at stake and whether a particular argument applies to the case. An actor fighting a defensive war is within international law; an aggressor may legitimately be subject to sanctions. Framing and reframing involve mimesis or putting forward representations of what is going on. In mimetic meta-arguments, actors who are struggling to characterize or frame the situation accomplish their ends by drawing vivid pictures of the “reality” through exaggeration, analogy, or differentiation. Representations of a situation do not re-produce accurately so much as they creatively re-present situations in a way that makes sense. “mimesis is a metaphoric or 'iconic argumentation of the real.' Imitating not the effectivity of events but their logical structure and meaning.” Certain features are emphasized and others de-emphasized or completely ignored as their situation is recharacterized or reframed. Representation thus becomes a “constraint on reasoning in that it limits understanding to a specific organization of conceptual knowledge.” The dominant representation delimits which arguments will be considered legitimate, framing how actors see possibities. As Roxanne Doty argues, “the possibility of practices presupposes the ability of an agent to imagine certain courses of action. Certain background meanings, kinds of social actors and relationships, must already be in place.” If, as Donald Sylvan and Stuart Thorson argue, “politics involves the selective privileging of representations, “it may not matter whether one representation or another is true or not. Emphasizing whether frames articulate accurate or inaccurate perceptions misses the rhetorical import of representation- how frames affect what is seen or not seen, and subsequent choices. Meta-arguments over representation are thus crucial elements of political argument because an actor's arguments about what to do will be more persuasive if their characterization or framing of the situation holds sway. But, as Rodger Payne suggests, “No frame is an omnipotent persuasive tool that can be decisively wielded by norm entrepreneurs without serious political wrangling.” Hence framing is a meta-argument.

EntryDate

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	1	+2016-10-17 10:39:53.754

Judge

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	1	+Otoghile and Powell

Opponent

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	1	+Cypress Woods LC

ParentRound

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	1	+36

Round

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	1	+6

Team

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	1	+Harvard Westlake Enge Neg

Title

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	1	+Sept-Oct - K - Security

Tournament

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	1	+Greenhill RR