Changes for page Sunset bhat Neg

Last modified by Administrator on 2017/08/29 03:41

From version < 307.1
edited by Administrator
on 2017/08/29 03:41
To version < 262.1 >
edited by Ashwin Bhat
on 2017/02/16 05:46
<
Change comment: There is no comment for this version

Summary

Details

Page properties
Author
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,1 @@
1 -xwiki:XWiki.Admin
1 +XWiki.ashbhat10@gmailcom
Caselist.CitesClass[38]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,6 +1,0 @@
1 -Rejecting oppression must be prioritized – everyday instances of oppression is the largest proximate cause of psychological and physical warfare against the excluded.
2 -Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois ‘4: (Nancy and Philippe, Prof of Anthropology @ Cal-Berkeley; Prof of Anthropology @ UPenn, Introduction: Making Sense of Violence, in Violence in War and Peace, pg. 19-22)
3 -This large and at first sight “messy” Part VII is central to this anthology’s thesis. It encompasses everything from the routinized, bureaucratized, and utterly banal violence of children dying of hunger and maternal despair in Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33) to elderly African Americans dying of heat stroke in Mayor Daly’s version of US apartheid in Chicago’s South Side (Klinenberg, Chapter 38) to the racialized class hatred expressed by British Victorians in their olfactory disgust of the “smelly” working classes (Orwell, Chapter 36). In these readings violence is located in the symbolic and social structures that overdetermine and allow the criminalized drug addictions, interpersonal bloodshed, and racially patterned incarcerations that characterize the US “inner city” to be normalized (Bourgois, Chapter 37 and Wacquant, Chapter 39 Violence also takes the form of class, racial, political self-hatred and adolescent self-destruction (Quesada, Chapter 35), as well as of useless (i.e. preventable), rawly embodied physical suffering, and death (Farmer, Chapter 34). Absolutely central to our approach is a blurring of categories and distinctions between wartime and peacetime violence. Close attention to the “little” violences produced in the structures, habituses, and mentalites of everyday life shifts our attention to pathologies of class, race, and gender inequalities. More important, it interrupts the voyeuristic tendencies of “violence studies” that risk publicly humiliating the powerless who are often forced into complicity with social and individual pathologies of power because suffering is often a solvent of human integrity and dignity. Thus, in this anthology we are positing a violence continuum comprised of a multitude of “small wars and invisible genocides” (see also Scheper- Hughes 1996; 1997; 2000b) conducted in the normative social spaces of public schools, clinics, emergency rooms, hospital wards, nursing homes, courtrooms, public registry offices, prisons, detention centers, and public morgues. The violence continuum also refers to the ease with which humans are capable of reducing the socially vulnerable into expendable nonpersons and assuming the license - even the duty - to kill, maim, or soul-murder. We realize that in referring to a violence and a genocide continuum we are flying in the face of a tradition of genocide studies that argues for the absolute uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust and for vigilance with respect to restricted purist use of the term genocide itself (see Kuper 1985; Chaulk 1999; Fein 1990; Chorbajian 1999). But we hold an opposing and alternative view that, to the contrary, it is absolutely necessary to make just such existential leaps in purposefully linking violent acts in normal times to those of abnormal times. Hence the title of our volume: Violence in War and in Peace. If (as we concede) there is a moral risk in overextending the concept of “genocide” into spaces and corners of everyday life where we might not ordinarily think to find it (and there is), an even greater risk lies in failing to sensitize ourselves, in misrecognizing protogenocidal practices and sentiments daily enacted as normative behavior by “ordinary” good-enough citizens. Peacetime crimes, such as prison construction sold as economic development to impoverished communities in the mountains and deserts of California, or the evolution of the criminal industrial complex into the latest peculiar institution for managing race relations in the United States (Waquant, Chapter 39), constitute the “small wars and invisible genocides” to which we refer. This applies to African American and Latino youth mortality statistics in Oakland, California, Baltimore, Washington DC, and New York City. These are “invisible” genocides not because they are secreted away or hidden from view, but quite the opposite. As Wittgenstein observed, the things that are hardest to perceive are those which are right before our eyes and therefore taken for granted. In this regard, Bourdieu’s partial and unfinished theory of violence (see Chapters 32 and 42) as well as his concept of misrecognition is crucial to our task. By including the normative everyday forms of violence hidden in the minutiae of “normal” social practices - in the architecture of homes, in gender relations, in communal work, in the exchange of gifts, and so forth - Bourdieu forces us to reconsider the broader meanings and status of violence, especially the links between the violence of everyday life and explicit political terror and state repression, Similarly, Basaglia’s notion of “peacetime crimes” - crimini di pace - imagines a direct relationship between wartime and peacetime violence. Peacetime crimes suggests the possibility that war crimes are merely ordinary, everyday crimes of public consent applied systematic- ally and dramatically in the extreme context of war. Consider the parallel uses of rape during peacetime and wartime, or the family resemblances between the legalized violence of US immigration and naturalization border raids on “illegal aliens” versus the US government- engineered genocide in 1938, known as the Cherokee “Trail of Tears.” Peacetime crimes suggests that everyday forms of state violence make a certain kind of domestic peace possible. Internal “stability” is purchased with the currency of peacetime crimes, many of which take the form of professionally applied “strangle-holds.” Everyday forms of state violence during peacetime make a certain kind of domestic “peace” possible. It is an easy-to-identify peacetime crime that is usually maintained as a public secret by the government and by a scared or apathetic populace. Most subtly, but no less politically or structurally, the phenomenal growth in the United States of a new military, postindustrial prison industrial complex has taken place in the absence of broad-based opposition, let alone collective acts of civil disobedience. The public consensus is based primarily on a new mobilization of an old fear of the mob, the mugger, the rapist, the Black man, the undeserving poor. How many public executions of mentally deficient prisoners in the United States are needed to make life feel more secure for the affluent? What can it possibly mean when incarceration becomes the “normative” socializing experience for ethnic minority youth in a society, i.e., over 33 percent of young African American men (Prison Watch 2002). In the end it is essential that we recognize the existence of a genocidal capacity among otherwise good-enough humans and that we need to exercise a defensive hyper vigilance to the less dramatic, permitted, and even rewarded everyday acts of violence that render participation in genocidal acts and policies possible (under adverse political or economic conditions), perhaps more easily than we would like to recognize. Under the violence continuum we include, therefore, all expressions of radical social exclusion, dehumanization, depersonalization, pseudo speciation, and reification which normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward others. A constant self-mobilization for alarm, a state of constant hyper arousal is, perhaps, a reasonable response to Benjamin’s view of late modern history as a chronic “state of emergency” (Taussig, Chapter 31). We are trying to recover here the classic anagogic thinking that enabled Erving Goffman, Jules Henry, C. Wright Mills, and Franco Basaglia among other mid-twentieth-century radically critical thinkers, to perceive the symbolic and structural relations, i.e., between inmates and patients, between concentration camps, prisons, mental hospitals, nursing homes, and other “total institutions.” Making that decisive move to recognize the continuum of violence allows us to see the capacity and the willingness - if not enthusiasm - of ordinary people, the practical technicians of the social consensus, to enforce genocidal-like crimes against categories of rubbish people. There is no primary impulse out of which mass violence and genocide are born, it is ingrained in the common sense of everyday social life. The mad, the differently abled, the mentally vulnerable have often fallen into this category of the unworthy living, as have the very old and infirm, the sick-poor, and, of course, the despised racial, religious, sexual, and ethnic groups of the moment. Erik Erikson referred to “pseudo- speciation” as the human tendency to classify some individuals or social groups as less than fully human - a prerequisite to genocide and one that is carefully honed during the unremarkable peacetimes that precede the sudden, “seemingly unintelligible” outbreaks of mass violence. Collective denial and misrecognition are prerequisites for mass violence and genocide. But so are formal bureaucratic structures and professional roles. The practical technicians of everyday violence in the backlands of Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33), for example, include the clinic doctors who prescribe powerful tranquilizers to fretful and frightfully hungry babies, the Catholic priests who celebrate the death of “angel-babies,” and the municipal bureaucrats who dispense free baby coffins but no food to hungry families. Everyday violence encompasses the implicit, legitimate, and routinized forms of violence inherent in particular social, economic, and political formations. It is close to what Bourdieu (1977, 1996) means by “symbolic violence,” the violence that is often “nus-recognized” for something else, usually something good. Everyday violence is similar to what Taussig (1989) calls “terror as usual.” All these terms are meant to reveal a public secret - the hidden links between violence in war and violence in peace, and between war crimes and “peace-time crimes.” Bourdieu (1977) finds domination and violence in the least likely places - in courtship and marriage, in the exchange of gifts, in systems of classification, in style, art, and culinary taste- the various uses of culture. Violence, Bourdieu insists, is everywhere in social practice. It is misrecognized because its very everydayness and its familiarity render it invisible. Lacan identifies “rneconnaissance” as the prerequisite of the social. The exploitation of bachelor sons, robbing them of autonomy, independence, and progeny, within the structures of family farming in the European countryside that Bourdieu escaped is a case in point (Bourdieu, Chapter 42; see also Scheper-Hughes, 2000b; Favret-Saada, 1989). Following Gramsci, Foucault, Sartre, Arendt, and other modern theorists of power-vio- lence, Bourdieu treats direct aggression and physical violence as a crude, uneconomical mode of domination; it is less efficient and, according to Arendt (1969), it is certainly less legitimate. While power and symbolic domination are not to be equated with violence - and Arendt argues persuasively that violence is to be understood as a failure of power - violence, as we are presenting it here, is more than simply the expression of illegitimate physical force against a person or group of persons. Rather, we need to understand violence as encompassing all forms of “controlling processes” (Nader 1997b) that assault basic human freedoms and individual or collective survival. Our task is to recognize these gray zones of violence which are, by definition, not obvious. Once again, the point of bringing into the discourses on genocide everyday, normative experiences of reification, depersonalization, institutional confinement, and acceptable death is to help answer the question: What makes mass violence and genocide possible? In this volume we are suggesting that mass violence is part of a continuum, and that it is socially incremental and often experienced by perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders - and even by victims themselves - as expected, routine, even justified. The preparations for mass killing can be found in social sentiments and institutions from the family, to schools, churches, hospitals, and the military. They harbor the early “warning signs” (Charney 1991), the “priming” (as Hinton, ed., 2002 calls it), or the “genocidal continuum” (as we call it) that push social consensus toward devaluing certain forms of human life and lifeways from the refusal of social support and humane care to vulnerable “social parasites” (the nursing home elderly, “welfare queens,” undocumented immigrants, drug addicts) to the militarization of everyday life (super-maximum-security prisons, capital punishment; the technologies of heightened personal security, including the house gun and gated communities; and reversed feelings of victimization).
4 -Theory absent real solutions is as useless as action divorced from theory.
5 -Giroux ‘14: Henry A. Giroux American scholar and cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, “Neoliberalism’s War on Democracy”, Truthout, 26 Apr 2014 BE
6 -In this instance, understanding must be linked to the practice of social responsibility and the willingness to fashion a politics that addresses real problems and enacts concrete solutions. As Heather Gautney points out, ¶ We need to start thinking seriously about what kind of political system we really want. And we need to start pressing for things that our politicians did NOT discuss at the conventions. Real solutions—like universal education, debt forgiveness, wealth redistribution, and participatory political structures—that would empower us to decide together what’s best. Not who’s best.75¶ Critical thinking divorced from action is often as sterile as action divorced from critical theory. Given the urgency of the historical moment, we need a politics and a public pedagogy that make knowledge meaningful in order to make it critical and transformative. Or, as Stuart Hall argues, we need to produce modes of analysis and knowledge in which "people can invest something of themselves . . . something that they recognize is of them or speaks to their condition."76 A notion of higher education as a democratic public sphere is crucial to this project, especially at a time in which the apostles of neoliberalism and other forms of political and religious fundamentalism are ushering in a new age of conformity, cruelty, and disposability. But as public intellectuals, academics can do more.
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -2017-02-16 05:46:58.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
ParentRound
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -32
Round
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -1
Team
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Sunset bhat Neg
Title
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -JF - Structural Violence FW
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Stanford
Caselist.CitesClass[39]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,9 +1,0 @@
1 -Lack of regulation leads to ad hoc restrictions that chill speech – creates hostile environment
2 -Juhan ‘12: S. Cagle Juhan (Judicial Law Clerk, Western District of Virginia; JD University
of Virginia School of Law). “Free Speech, Hate Speech, and the Hostile Speech Environ-
ment.” Virginia Law Review. November 2012. http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/23333530.pdf
3 -Iota Xi Chapter of Sigma Chi Fraternity v. George Mason University) 70 illustrates the problem with a discretionary system: government bureaucrats serve as roving commissioners, picking and choosing which speech to regulate, often on the grounds that cer-tain groups object to it.‘The danger is threefold. First, the absence of a written policy leaves a vacuum. By their very nature, decisions made on a case-by-case basis lack debated, agreed-upon, and disseminated principles that can guide action.’ Thus, one cannot ex ante abide by guidelines that are unknowable until after one speaks. The result is the commonly cited “chilling effect”: speakers will say less, even if their speech would be constitutionally pro-tected, because they cannot be assured that they will not be punished for it.‘ Second, informal, standardless decision-making processes about what speech should be allowed are viewed with particular skepticism in First Amend- ment doctrine because they both contribute to the chilling effect and enhance the risk of discriminatory or arbi-trary regulation.’ Ad hoc judgments allow universities to sanc- tion speech because they disapprove of it, which is precisely the out-come that the First Amendment was designed to prevent.‘The third and related concern is that administrators are easily captured by campus constituencies that mobilize against hateful or mer:ely unpopular speech.’ The Iota Xi case offers a clear example of this problem. Students objecting to the fraternity’s speech con-vinced an administrator that the speech created a hostile educa-tional environment and conflicted with the university’s mission; administrators subsequently imposed sanctions, despite not having done so in an initial meeting with the fraternity that occurred the same day as the one with the offended students. ‘The risk of “captured” administrators is especially high when hate speech is at issue.’ Hate speech frequently targets minorities or historically disfavored groups. These constituencies, in addition to understandably disagreeing with hate speech that disparages them, are some of the most vocal proponents and defenders of the equal- ity, diversity, and tolerance norms that have gained incredible purchase in the realm of higher education.‘Accusations or percep-tions that a university or its administrators are not sympathetic enough to these norms or to the groups invoking them can have ad- verse consequences for a university’s prestige and an administra- tor’s career.’ Therefore, there are strong personal and institutional incentives to err on the side of equal- ity, diversity, and tolerance ideals and against constitutionally protected speech.‘One observer has aptly termed ad hoc decision-making proc-esses “implicit speech codes.” ’ Ultimately, however, whether ex-plicit or implicit, speech codes increase (1) the chilling effect on speech, (2) the danger of viewpoint discrimination, and (3) the op-portunity for constituencies to suppress opponents by capturing administrators.’
4 -Hostile campuses lead to lower graduation rates, perpetuating exclusion and hate speech– empirically proven.
5 -Perry ‘15: Andre M. Perry, 11-11-2015, "Campus racism makes minority students likelier to drop out of college. Mizzou students had to act.," https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/11/11/campus-racism-makes-minority-students-likelier-to-drop-out-of-college/?tid=a_inl
6 -By now you know the story: Three days ago, University of Missouri footballers offered administrators an ultimatum: University system President Tim Wolfe had to go or the team wouldn’t play. Monday morning, Wolfe resigned. Credit players and protesters, led by hunger-striking grad student Jonathan Butler, for drawing attention to Wolfe’s failure to address campus racism. But beyond applauding the activism of students, it’s important to understand what’s at stake at Missouri and other campuses — like Yale University, where students at the Silliman residential college have taken on their live-in faculty advisers over competing views about the impact of racially insensitive Halloween costumes — is college survival itself: In hostile environments, students of color graduate at lower rates, jeopardizing not only their academic careers but also future success. In one sense, given the controversies at Mizzou — where a hostile campus climate serves as a mechanism by which students of color remain outsiders — the students didn’t have a choice. It would be illogical, and self-defeating, if they didn’t use the power they had at their disposal. Campus racial climate has been linked to academic success. And research has long shown that academic preparedness is only one of many factors that determine why students do or don’t graduate. The psychological attitudes between and among groups, as well as intergroup relations on campuses, influences how well students of color perform and whether they stay on track toward graduation. Graduation rates lag when schools don’t provide an environment that fosters the scholastic pursuits of minority students, particularly black men. Researcher Sylvia Hurtado explains that “Just as a campus that embraces diversity provides substantial positive benefits, a hostile or discriminatory climate has substantial negative consequences.” Her research found that “Students who reported negative or hostile encounters with members of other racial groups scored lower on the majority of outcomes.” A study of students at the University of Washington found that black students there were the only campus group to suffer a clear statistical GPA disadvantage from a nasty campus climate: “Results indicate that campus climate is significantly related to academic achievement of African American students, as represented by GPA, accounting for about 11 percent of the variance.” That means black students facing adverse conditions are likelier to leave college early — and would, presumably, be likelier to stay in what they felt to be a safe space. In “Interactional Diversity and the Role of a Supportive Racial Climate” the University of Maryland’s Leah Kendra Cox found much the same thing: “In unhealthy climates, students — both majority and minority — are less likely to thrive academically or socially.” She found that a supportive racial climate had more impact than any other factor on the strength of diversity on campus. Perhaps not coincidentally, a Gallup survey last month illustrated that students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, or HBCUs — where the climate, by design, nurtures students of color — were far more likely to “strongly agree that their colleges prepared them for life after graduation (55) than black graduates of other institutions (29).” In that context, consider the reports of what’s taken place in the Mizzou community. In September, Missouri Students Association President Payton Head, who is black, took to Facebook to report being called the n-word by a driver in a passing car as he walked down a street near campus. In early October, the Legion of Black Collegians tweeted that intoxicated white students had shouted the n-word at them during a campus protest. Later that month, tensions flared when someone smeared feces in the form a swastika in a campus bathroom — creating the kind of climate that alienates and marginalizes minority students, who have just as much right to pursue their education on the Missouri campus, free from harassment, as anyone else. Students still remember the 2010 incident in which two Missouri students were suspended for dropping cotton balls in front of the campus’ Black Culture Center. Wolfe’s inaction, in the face of repeated demands to better address students’ frustration with the charged campus environment, precipitated his ouster. Though he later apologized, many cite his failure to engage with students — remaining cloistered in his car — when approached by the campus group ConcernedStudent1950 at a homecoming parade, as one of the last straws that ended his administration. And while commentators like Rush Limbaugh say Wolfe resigned for “committing the crime of being a white male,” their argument, beyond the hyperbole, is the wrong way to evaluate the relationship of the university to its students. Wolfe’s job was to use the resources at his disposal to build a campus community where all students feel they can pursue their academic careers in an environment where they’re respected and taken seriously. But as Butler told The Post: When you localize it to the hunger strike it really is about the environment that is on campus. We have reactionary, negligent individuals on all levels at the university level on our campus and at the university system level, and so their job descriptions explicitly say that they’re supposed to provide a safe and inclusive environment for all students … but when we have issues of sexual assault, when we have issues of racism, when we have issues of homophobia, the campus climate continues to deteriorate because we don’t have strong leadership, willing to actually make change. So, for me, I’m fighting for a better tomorrow. As much as the experiences on campus have not been that great for me — I had people call me the n-word, I had someone write the n-word on the a door in my residence hall — for me it really is about a call for justice. I’m fighting for the black community on campus, because justice is worth fighting for. And justice is worth starving for. So is education. The U.S. Department of Education found markedly lower graduation rates for blacks and Latino men (33.2 percent and 44.8 percent, respectively, graduate from college within six years) compared with their white and Asian peers (57.1 percent and 64.2 percent, respectively). These disparities have been depressingly constant in recent years. One factor contributing to these disparities is that universities frequently place a premium on meeting the (short-term) needs of black athletes in revenue generating sports while paying lip service to the needs of other students of color. From the disciplines faculty teach in to the traditions they uphold, predominantly white institutions haven’t fully dealt with the changing demographics of collegians. For many students, especially first-generation collegians, these institutions often place the burden on students to adapt to an unwelcoming environment. But the Missouri case illustrates the imperative for colleges to transform what they are and who they serve if they are to fulfill their mission of addressing societal problems, training the workforce and educating the public. And black student-athletes, who are overrepresented in the major-revenue sports — football and basketball — may be uniquely empowered to move university leaders who, in the case of the University of Missouri, at least, didn’t demonstrate they were otherwise compelled by the data. If colleges can prioritize the needs of students of color in their athletic programs, they also can prioritize the development of scientists, historians and teachers of color. In order to do this, postsecondary institutions must change at a structural level. One approach would be to transition their merit-based scholarships into need- or place-based scholarships. First-generation collegians should have access to living-learning communities in which dormitories provide wrap-around supports. Colleges must attract and retain black and brown faculty at much higher levels. Faculty must embrace their role as counselors, not just instructors or researchers. Academic support for first-generation collegians shouldn’t be treated as remediation. Finally, faculty and administrators should be held accountable for graduation rates. Success isn’t just on students’ shoulders.
7 -Hate speech creates academic and discursive exclusion, kills minority education, turns case.
8 -Garrett ‘2: Deanna M. Garrett, Deanna M. Garrett graduated from the University of Virginia in 1997 with a bachelor's degree in Religious Studies and a minor in Biology. She is a second-year HESA student and a Graduate Assistant in the Department of Residential Life, “Silenced Voices: Hate Speech Codes on Campus”, University of Vermont, 07/29/2002, https://www.uvm.edu/~vtconn/?Page=v20/garrett.html
9 -Advocates of hate speech codes contend that the inclusion of racist, sexist, and homophobic speech serves only to silence others’ voices. "Such speech not only interferes with equal educational opportunities, but also deters the exercise of other freedoms, including those secured by the First Amendment" (Strossen, 1994, p. 193). Faced with hate speech, many individuals are silenced or forced to flee, rather than engaging in dialogue (Lawrence, 1993). In higher education, dialogue is key to learning and gaining new knowledge. Students engage in dialogue with one another, challenge each other, and propose new ideas. However, racist speech does not invite this exchange but seeks to silence non-dominant individuals. Post (1994) outlines three ways in which minority groups are silenced by hateful speech: (1) Victim groups are silenced because their perspectives are systematically excluded from the dominant discourse; (2) victim groups are silenced because the pervasive stigma of racism systematically undermines and devalues their speech; and (3) victim groups are silenced because the visceral "fear, rage, and shock" of racist speech systematically preempts response. (p. 143)
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -2017-02-16 05:46:59.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
ParentRound
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -32
Round
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -1
Team
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Sunset bhat Neg
Title
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -JF - Hostile Campus DA
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Stanford
Caselist.CitesClass[40]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,9 +1,0 @@
1 -The term "prison industrial complex" is dangerously misleading – rather than a means of 'industry', prisons are an expensive tool of maintaining social control.
2 -MIM(Prisons) ’12: (MIM stands for Maoist International Movement, and the (prisons) part refers to the fact that it's written by current and former prisoners. Website description: 'MIM(Prisons) is a cell of revolutionaries serving the oppressed masses inside U.$. prisons, guided by the communist ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism' (this is obviously amazing) "The Myth of the 'Prison Industrial Complex'," July 2012 ~https://www.prisoncensorship.info/article/the-myth-of-the-prison-industrial-complex/~~)
3 -Many people are caught up in the line that millions are enslaved in this country, and that the main motivating factor behind the prison boom of recent decades is to put prisoners to work to make money for corporations or the government. MIM(Prisons) has clearly shown that U.S. prisons are not primarily (or even significantly) used to exploit labor, and that they are a great cost financially to the imperialists, not a source of profit.(1) "Indeed, at peak use around 2002, fewer than 5,000 inmates were employed by private firms, amounting to one-quarter of one per cent of the carceral population. As for the roughly 8 of convicts who toil for state and federal industries under lock, they are 'employed' at a loss to correctional authorities in spite of massive subsidies, guaranteed sales to a captive market of public administrations, and exceedingly low wages (averaging well under a dollar an hour)."(2) Instead, we argue that there is a system of population control (including all the elements of the international definition of genocide) that utilizes methods of torture on mostly New Afrikan and Latino men, with a hugely disproportionate representation of First Nation men as well, across this country on a daily basis. As the new prison movement grows and gains attention in the mainstream, it is of utmost importance that we maintain the focus on this truth and not let the white nationalists define what is ultimately a struggle of the oppressed nations. To analyze why the term "prison industrial complex" ("PIC") is inaccurate and misleading, let's look at some common slogans of the social democrats, who dominate the white nationalist left. First let's address the slogan "Welfare not Warfare." This slogan is a false dichotomy, where the sloganeer lacks an understanding of imperialism and militarism. It is no coincidence that the biggest "welfare states" in the world today are imperialist countries. Imperialism brings home more profits by going to war to steal resources, discipline labor, and force economic policies and business contracts on other nations. And militarism is the cultural and political product of that fact. The "military industrial complex" was created when private industry teamed up with the U.$. government to meet their mutual interests as imperialists. Industry got the contracts from the government, with guaranteed profits built in, and the government got the weapons they needed to keep money flowing into the United $tates by oppressing other nations. This concentration of wealth produces the high wages and advanced infrastructure that the Amerikan people benefit from, not to mention the tax money that is made available for welfare programs. So it is ignorant for activists to claim that they are being impoverished by the imperialists' wars as is implied by the false dichotomy of welfare vs. warfare. Another slogan of the social democrats which speaks to why they are so eager to condemn the "PIC" is "Schools not Jails." This slogan highlights that there is only so much tax money in a state available to fund either schools, jails, or something else. There is a limited amount of money because extracting more taxes would increase class conflict between the state and the labor aristocracy. This battle is real, and it is a battle between different public service unions of the labor aristocracy. The "Schools not Jails" slogan is the rallying cry of one side of that battle among the labor aristocrats. Unlike militarism, there is not an imperialist profit interest behind favoring jails over schools. This is precisely why the concept of a "PIC" is a fantasy. While the U.$. economy would likely collapse without the spending that goes into weapons-related industries, Loïc Wacquant points out that the soft drink industry in the United $tates is almost twice as big as prison industries, and prison industries are a mere 0.5 of the gross domestic product.(2) Compared to the military industrial complex, which is 10 of U.$. GDP, the prison system is obviously not a "complex" combining state and private interests that cannot be dismantled without dire consequences to imperialism.(3) And of course, even those pushing the "PIC" line must admit that over 95 of prisons in this country are publicly owned and run.(4) Federal agencies using the prison system to control social elements that they see as a threat to imperialism is the motivating factor for the injustice system, not an imperialist drive for profits. Yet the system is largely decentralized and built on the interests of the majority of Amerikans at the local level, and not just the labor unions and small businesses that benefit directly from spending on prisons. We would likely not have the imprisonment rates that we have today without pressure from the so-called "middle class."
4 -It suggests analogy with the 'military industrial complex', which obscures the decentralized character of imprisonment – this directly limits activist imagination.
5 -Wacquant ‘10: (Loic, Professor of Sociology and Research Associate at the Earl Warren Legal Institute, University of California, Berkeley, where he is also affiliated with the Program in Medical Anthropology and the Center for Urban Ethnography, and Researcher at the 'Centre de sociologie européenne' in Paris, member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, a MacArthur Prize Fellow, has won numerous grants including the Fletcher Foundation Fellowship and the Lewis Coser Award of the American Sociological Association, also gets cited by Wilderson, Rodriguez, and Sexton a lot, "Prisoner reentry as myth and ceremony," Dialect Anthropol (2010) 34:605–620 ~DOI 10.1007/s10624-010-9215-5~)
6 -1.1. PIC is based on a loose analogy with MIC, the ‘‘Military Industrial Complex’’ alleged to have driven the expansion of America’s warfare economy during the Cold War era (e.g., Gilmore 2009). Aside from the dubious analytic validity of a notion coined by a speechwriter for a despondent President Eisenhower on the occasion of his farewell address,2 the claim that PIC parallels MIC in handling security on the home front for the benefit of corporations founders on the fact that there is no justice equivalent for the Pentagon. Whereas the federal Department of Defense is a single decision-making center that manages a single budget and implements military policy through hierarchical command, there exists no bureaucratic lever to direct crime control and submit it uniformly to private interests. Legal punishment in America is meted out through a highly decentralized, disjointed, and multilayered patchwork of agencies. The police, courts, and corrections are separate government institutions, subjected to disparate political, funding, and bureaucratic imperatives, that are poorly coordinated and whose relations are riven with tension and conflicts (Neubauer 2005: 6–7)—to say nothing of probation, parole, halfway houses, drug treatment facilities, and assorted outfits entrusted with handling convicts after their release. In addition to being weakly connected to each other, each of the three components of the penal chain is deeply fragmented across geographic space and political scale. Over 18,000 local and state law-enforcement agencies decide their policing strategies at ground level; some 2,341 distinct prosecutors’ offices set their judicial priorities; thousands of counties run their own jail while the fifty states and the federal government each run their separate prison system (and release programs) with little regard for what other administrative units are doing. Moreover, because they are located at the back-end of the penal chain, prisons depend for their key operational inputs on measures and processes set in motion by the police and the courts, over whom they have virtually no influence. The incipient ‘‘federalization of crime’’ (Waisman 1994), which provides a measure of coordination, has been largely undermined by the diversification of prosecution and corrections philosophies across jurisdictions after the abandonment of indeterminate sentencing (Tonry 2000). In organizational and political terms, then, the government function of punishment is decentralized, fragmented, and horizontal, that is, the polar opposite of the military. The connection between MIC and PIC is purely rhetorical; it pertains to metaphor and not to analogy. Even if some malevolent alliance of politicians, corporate owners, and correctional officials wished to harness carceral institutions to the pecuniary aims of ‘‘multinational globalization’’ and foster ‘‘a project in racialization and macro injustice’’ (Brewer and Heitzeg 2008: 625), they would lack the bureaucratic means to do so. Rather than explaining it, PIC precludes posing the crucial question of how and why a de facto national policy of penal expansion has emerged out of the organizational hodge-podge formed by criminal justice institutions.
7 -Reject the aff – better analytical grammar is crucial to radical politics.
8 -MIM(Prisons) ’12: (MIM stands for Maoist International Movement, and the (prisons) part refers to the fact that it's written by current and former prisoners. Website description: 'MIM(Prisons) is a cell of revolutionaries serving the oppressed masses inside U.$. prisons, guided by the communist ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism' (this is obviously amazing) "The Myth of the 'Prison Industrial Complex'," July 2012 ~https://www.prisoncensorship.info/article/the-myth-of-the-prison-industrial-complex/~~)
9 -This unfortunate term has been popularized in the Amerikan left by a number of pseudo-Marxist theorists who are behind some of the popular prison activist groups on the outside. By explicitly rejecting this term, we are drawing a clear line between us and the organizations these activists are behind, many of whom we've worked with in one way or another. For the most part, the organizations themselves do not claim any Marxist influence or even a particular class analysis, but the leaders of these groups are very aware of where they disagree with MIM Thought. It is important that the masses are aware of this disagreement as well. It is for these reasons that MIM(Prisons) passed the following policy at our 2012 congress: The term "Prison Industrial Complex (PIC)" will not generally be used in Under Lock and Key because the term conflicts with MIM(Prisons)'s line on the economic and national make up of the U.$. prison system. It will only be printed in a context where the meaning of the term is stated by the author, and either criticized by them or by us.
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -2017-02-16 05:47:00.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
ParentRound
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -32
Round
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -1
Team
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Sunset bhat Neg
Title
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -JF - Prison Industrial Complex PIK
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Stanford
Caselist.CitesClass[41]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,4 +1,0 @@
1 -CP Text: The United States Federal Government should withdraw the entirety of the armed forces.
2 -The military sustains imperialism and militarism – abolishing it solves the aff while avoiding all the disads and turns to the aff.
3 -Shupak ‘15: Greg Shupak writes in “Abolish the Military: On Veterans Day, we should honor those killed and injured in past US wars by stopping future ones.” Jacobin Magazine. Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. The print magazine is released quarterly and reaches over 20,000 subscribers, in addition to a web audience of 1,000,000 a month. Greg Shupak teaches media studies at the University of Guelph in Canada. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/11/veterans-day-american-military-iraq-war-libya-vietnam/; AB
4 -Lisa Simpson had the right idea. In a 2002 episode of The Simpsons, the elementary school student tries to impress two college kids by putting a sticker on her bike that says “US Out of Everywhere.” It is a slogan that should be ubiquitous on the Left. With the string of disastrous military interventions across the world in recent years, it’s even more apparent that US crimes aren’t isolated — there’s an underlying structure that produces them. Tackling that underlying structure, though daunting, also fosters opportunities for unity. Because of the sheer destructiveness of US militarism, and its vital role in maintaining global capitalism, a reinvigorated antiwar movement could bring together leftists with a broad range of concerns. So on Veterans Day, here’s how US militarism stands in the way of a just world — and why the Left should come together to bring it to its knees. 1. US imperialism breeds racism. For starters, the main victims of the US military have been people of color. Just since World War II, there are the millions slaughtered in Korea and Indochina, the over one million killed in Iraq, and the tens of thousands in Afghanistan — all of which have then been affixed with dehumanizing labels to rationalize the murdering sprees. The bigotry doesn’t stay overseas. Using racist language to legitimize attacking Arabs or Southeast Asians contributes to the dissemination of racism against minorities in the United States. There’s also the long-running presence of Klansmen and Neo-Nazis in the American forces and the tacit acceptance of their presence by officials. As Reuters’ Daniel Trotta reported in 2012, white supremacist groups encourage their followers who join the Army and Marine Corps to acquire the skills to overthrow the “Zionist Occupation Government” that they think is running America and to prepare for the race war that they see as imminent. Former service members such as Wade Page and James Burmeister have carried out racist murders on US soil, and a 2008 report commissioned by the Justice Department found that half of all right-wing extremists in the United States had military experience. 2. The military is anti-feminist. US military actions also need to be thought of as exercises in mass violence against women. Millions of women in the Global South have been killed, maimed, assaulted, or traumatized by the United States military. In just one horrifying example, a set of documents declassified in 2006 shows recurrent attacks on ordinary Vietnamese — families in their homes, farmers in rice paddies, teenagers out fishing. Hundreds of soldiers, in interviews with investigators and letters to commanders, described a violent minority who murdered, raped and tortured with impunity. Abuses were not confined to a few rogue units . . . They were uncovered in every Army division that operated in Vietnam. Similarly, activist and scholar Kozue Akibayashi notes that in Okinawa, Japan a “problem caused by the US military presence is sexual or gender-based violence by US soldiers,” including “hundreds of cases of sexual assaults against women and children of all ages.” The same problem exists in Colombia where, according to an April 2015 report, US military soldiers and contractors sexually abused at least fifty-four children between 2003 and 2007 — and were never held accountable because American military personnel are protected by diplomatic immunity agreements between the two countries. Still more women around the world have been widowed and left to raise children, or have been burdened by physically or mentally scarred spouses and family members. Sexual assault is also widespread within the military’s own ranks. The Journal of International Affairs recently reported that, “according to the US government, in 2012, there were 26,000 sexual assaults in the US military.” But “only 3,374 were reported” because a “culture of impunity” prevails. In the US military, it is overwhelmingly women who are subject to sexual violence. A 2010 examination of veterans of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and of Operation Iraqi Freedom found that “of 125,729 veterans who received Veterans Health Administration primary care or mental health services, 15.1 percent of the women and 0.7 percent of the men reported military sexual trauma when screened” — though these are likely conservative estimates because sexual violence tends to be underreported. Many male soldiers, moreover, return from the trauma of war to abuse their families. Veterans are responsible for nearly 21 percent of domestic violence in the United States, and these instances are statistically more likely to result in death than those perpetrated by non-veterans. Their ability to function is also compromised, which often forces their wives to provide for the family and take on a greater share of household tasks. 3. US militarism is bad for American workers and for the planet. US imperialism should be a major concern for labor organizers if for no other reason than that it’s the US poor and working class whose lives, bodies, and minds are usually put on the line by and for capitalists. Yet there are further ways in which the US war machine harms American workers. Extraordinary amounts of resources that could be used to improve people’s lives in the US and elsewhere are instead diverted to the military. In 2013, the total US military expenditure was $640 billion, over $400 billion more than second-place China. During the Cold War, overly optimistic liberals and social democrats looked forward to a “peace dividend” that the American population could enjoy in the event of a permanent thaw in relations with the Soviet Union or its dissolution. Their mistake was to assume that the existence of the USSR was the main reason for the US’s obscenely large military budget. However, the US military doesn’t consume the volume of resources it does because of external threats, but because it is a co-dependent of American capitalism. The US military is itself a site of accumulation and a force for the protection and expansion of American capital’s interests worldwide. At times, organized labor has supported weapons manufacturing on the grounds that it provides Americans with a source of employment that cannot easily be outsourced. It is better, however, to understand the demilitarization of US society as an opportunity for workers. Productive capacities could be shifted from bomb-making to the creation of socially necessary goods. Rather than building instruments of death and environmental degradation, resources could be used to construct the infrastructure needed to save the planet and provide badly needed social services. America’s wars also defoliate, pollute bodies of water, corrupt soil, destroy ecosystems, and kill huge numbers of animals. The Iraq War alone “added more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than 60 percent of the world’s nations,” scholar Bruce Johansen reports. An antiwar movement that advocates redirecting resources from the military toward serving human and ecological needs can be a site at which organized labor and environmentalists forge alliances. 4. The US military is global capitalism’s police. Some ostensibly concerned with class politics contend that the military provides workers’ families with decent jobs and opportunities for personal advancement. But this is incredibly myopic. Building movements that confront capital is far more effective at improving the lot of the working class. And challenging capitalism necessitates challenging US imperialism. Capitalism needs certain political conditions in order to operate, such as stable, enforceable property rights across national borders. Yet, as Perry Anderson points out, international legal regimes for ensuring these are weak, and “the general task of coordination” of the capitalist system “can be satisfactorily resolved only by the existence of a superordinate power, capable of imposing discipline on the system as a whole.” That superordinate power is the United States, and its military is global capitalism’s police force. As Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin argue, in managing global capitalism, the American state rules through other states, and turning them all into “effective” states for global capitalism is no easy matter. It is the attempt by the American state to address these problems, especially vis-à-vis what it calls “rogue states” in the third world, that leads American imperialism today to present itself in an increasingly unconcealed manner. To be sure, the military is not the only way that the US oversees global capitalism. But because US imperialism is an essential feature of contemporary global capitalism, any blow to one is a blow to the other. Anticapitalists of all stripes are doomed to failure if they do not treat building a new antiwar movement as a foremost concern. 5. The military is no humanitarian force. In the post-Cold War era, few matters have caused as much friction on the Euro-Atlantic left as the question of whether American military might should be used in the name of human rights across the world. Despite its horrific record, some progressives persist in believing that the US military can be used to liberate women, build democracy, and protect human rights. NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya is just another example of the misguided tendency to view the United States military as the armed wing of Amnesty International. In Slouching Towards Sirte, Maximilian Forte writes of the US’s frustration at Qaddafi’s attempt to obstruct the building of Africa Command (AFRICOM) bases in Africa, which the US had hoped would help it extract resources throughout Africa. In 2008, American Vice Admiral Robert Moeller said that one of AFRICOM’s aims was to ensure “the free flow of resources from Africa to the global market,” and in 2010 he said that one of AFRICOM’s purposes is “to promote American interests.” Similarly, Horace Campbell’s examination of Wikileaks cables finds that in 2007–08, Western oil companies such as the American firm Occidental were “compelled to sign new deals with Libya’s National Oil Company, on significantly less favorable terms than they had previously enjoyed.” A January 2010 cable shows that oil companies and the American government were frightened by the Qaddafi government’s “rhetoric in early 2009 involving the possible nationalization of the oil sector.” There is no doubt that Qaddafi’s government violated human rights, but the professed humanitarian concerns were only a pretext for American involvement. We must resist the misconception that the American armed forces can play a neutral role on the world stage to protect victims of rights violations or to end tyranny. The US military’s purpose is to pursue and protect the interests of the American ruling class. As Doug Stokes explains, since the end of World War II American foreign policy has been focused on “the maintenance and defense of an economically open international system conducive to capital penetration and circulation” — and a global strategy to halt any social or political force that challenges, even mildly, this system. We’ve seen this in in the US military assaults on Cuba, Vietnam, and Grenada, to say nothing of the innumerable covert or proxy attacks carried out against left-leaning forces around the world for nearly a century. The US maintains eight hundred military bases outside of its borders — an example of the kind of geopolitical posturing that allows for US political and economic hegemony across the globe. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Middle East, where the United States is able to safeguard its commercial interests and enhance its economic opportunities by threatening to quash any social disturbance that may disrupt the flow of oil or the circulation of petrodollars. Even partially weakening the US war machine would afford the socialist initiatives outside the US — particularly those in the Global South — the room to flourish. And if the Left can peel back the humanitarian veneer of American intervention, it will be harder for imperialism to sell its wars to the domestic population. As distant as it may seem, we can construct real bonds of internationalism rooted in solidarity. Immobilizing the US war machine would be immensely beneficial to virtually every cause with which leftists are concerned. A reinvigorated anti-imperialist, antiwar movement is thus an ideal site for leftists with disparate priorities to converge in ways that can strengthen us all. We overlook this opportunity at our own peril.
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -2017-02-16 05:47:01.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
ParentRound
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -32
Round
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -1
Team
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Sunset bhat Neg
Title
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -JF - Withdraw All Troops CP
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Stanford
Caselist.CitesClass[42]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,20 +1,0 @@
1 -Capitalism is the root cause of identity and race division—it’s rooted in underlying structures of power found in capitalist modes of production and their ideological elements—that means discussion of class is a prerequisite to solvency.
2 -McLauren et al ‘3:: V. and Peter McLaren, “The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of ‘Race’ and ‘Difference’”, UCLA, 2003, http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren20and20valerie.pdf
3 -However, it is still important to move beyond the discursive and cultural realms. It is necessary to understand the history of such cultural developments and their connection to class analysis. It is necessary to grasp the 'totalizing... power and function of capital' (153). In this sense, '"culture" is not the "other" of class but rather constitute part of a more comprehensive theorization of class relations' (153). Difference arises from social contradictions themselves stemming from domination and oppression in particular contexts. In this sense, separating class from culture is a misleading abstraction. What is needed is to understand why particular differences become important in particular circumstances. In some circumstances, culture is treated as if it were separate and autonomous, hence analyses can take that for granted as an abstract this is an example of the classic Marxian critique of the methods of political economy and abstract philosophy. A politics of difference often means little more than a demand for inclusion 'into the metropolitan salons of bourgeois representation' (154). This is nothing more than a demand for access to the cultural market place, and did assumes that difference is based on some essential cultural qualities and not constructed. Excessive attention to difference simply 'averts our gaze from relations of production' (154). Celebrations of difference can also 'mesh quite nicely with contemporary corporate interests precisely because they revere lifestyle' (154). The dangers of such uncritical celebrations life in their advocates' inability to distinguish between good and bad differences ~-~- why not celebrate different fascist parties for example? Class differences are not celebrated either. An empty liberal pluralism seems to inform the discussion. However, categories of difference can be ideological. In particular, different kinds of identity are 'central to the exploitative production/reproduction dialectic of capital' (155), especially those differences stressing race and gender. It is clear that 'people of colour' find themselves in the most exploited groups: as with women, these groups 'provide capital with its superexploited labour pools ~-~- a phenomenon that is on the rise all over the world' (156). The concept of superexploitation presumably refers to the need to exploit people even more than would be required on the basis of the production of surplus value alone? It is a way of generating super profits, characteristic of monopoly capital? There may also be a political issue ~-~- that some groups need to be exploited even more than would be required to make them conform to capitalist economic forms? I am most familiar with this argument when it is applied to women ~-~- women need to be superexploited in order to produce free domestic labour as well as paid wage labour. I'm not sure I grasped the point in connection with 'race': it may be necessary to superexploit black people in order to pursue a specific strategy of 'neo-colonialism'?. Class is not just another dimension of difference. It is necessarily related to capitalism, not just a 'subject position', but the source of value itself lots to discuss here of course. It is universal, and the only one which will require revolutionary change to abolish it. Other categories have their importance ~-~- gender is perhaps the most long-standing form of oppression, while racial identity can be the most immediate existentially, as in brutally racist societies ~-~- but class relations are fundamental to the whole capitalist system, including the state. It is also one of the more recent and therefore most open to doubt ~-~- 'a world without class is preeminently imaginable ~-~- indeed, such was the human world for the great majority of our species' time on earth' (quoting Kovel, page 157). For marxists, ending class is a prior necessity to ending all other forms of oppression. Recent marxist analysis has focused on the relations between class and other forms of division. All social constructs gain their force from the reproduction of capitalism. These social forms 'constitute the ways in which oppression is lived/experienced within a class-based system' (158), and they help to reproduce it. Class is thus central to exploitative relations of all kinds. Personal experiences, and the categories they generate, are valid, but should not be seen as completely self-explanatory. They must be transcended and traced back to a social and historical context. Many recent perspectives fail to explain how particular kinds of different have emerged ~-~- in particular, '"race" is not an adequate explanatory category on its own' (159), and focusing on it can obscure 'the actual structure of power and privilege' (159). 'Race' is not a scientific category anyway, although it persists in popular discourses and even in 'mainstream social sciences' (160). Gilroy is right to renounce it, even though it may weaken historical movements for liberation based on 'race struggles' (160). Instead, race needs to be seen as a construct rooted in underlying structures of power, especially those found in capitalist modes of production and their ideological elements. In this way, specific forms of racism will become more apparent. Race cannot be subsumed into class, but racism is only explicable with the development of capitalism ~-~- for example, 'Capitalism once relied on slave labour and needed an ideological legitimation' (161). Contemporary race-relations are still best understood as arising from the dynamics of capitalism, and challenging racism must therefore involve challenging capitalism. This would be much more threatening than a politics based on difference alone. Class differences have sharpened, deepened and become fundamental in recent years: it makes even more sense to see capitalism as 'an overarching totality... more universal, more ruthless and more deadly' (163) The connections can also be seen if we realise that 'the vast majority of the working class consists of women and people of colour' (quoting Foster, page 162). It does not make sense to ignore the class dimension in their experiences and struggles. Indeed, 'a good deal of post-marxist critique is subtly racist (not to mention essentialist) in so far as it implies that "people of colour" could not possibly be concerned with issues beyond those related to their racial, ethnic, cultural "difference"' (163). It also assumes that 'working class' means 'white'. Radicals may be posturing based on discourses of difference which simply reflect academic politics and a disinterest in economic exploitation outside. As Marx said about the young Hegelians, their battle seems to be about phrases and counterphrases, reflecting their own class positions, while capitalism itself remains uncriticised. Really radical positions have been marginalised by the academic left who celebrate differences while capitalism increasingly imposes a universality. Marxism should be revived if 'the triumph of globalised capitalism and its political bedfellow, neo-liberalism' are to be challenged (165). Inequalities of wealth and power exceed those in Marx's day. Exploitation and oppression need to be understood in modern context, applying marxism rather than rejecting it, and proceeding on both theoretical and a more politically engaged basis. It is common experience of exploitation rather than apparent differences that needs investigation. Of course, the struggles of black people against racism must not be ignored, but it should be traced to class relations. Notions of class may seem outdated, but those found in post-marxist analyses are even more so ~-~- '"experience of multiple oppressions no longer requires multiple theories of oppression because corporations multiply oppress (Starr, 2000)' (167). A common enemy is emerging on a global basis, as seen in globalised protest movements. A new socialist struggle is required.
4 -The determinism of capital causes life instrumentalism — it is this logic that mobilizes and allows for the oppressions they isolate.
5 -Dyer-Witherford ‘99: Professor of Library and Info. Sciences @ the Univ. of Western Ontarion, Nick. Cyber Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism.
6 -For capitalism, the use of machines as organs of “will over nature” is an imperative. The great insight of the Frankfurt School—an insight subsequently improved and amplified by feminists and ecologists—was that capital’s dual project of dominating both humanity and nature was intimately tied to the cultivation of “instrumental reason” that systematically objectifies, reduces, quantifies and fragments the world for the purposes of technological control. Business’s systemic need to cheapen labor, cut the costs of raw materials, and expand consumer markets gives it an inherent bias toward the piling-up of technological power. This priority—enshrined in phrases such as “progress,” “efficiency,” “productivity,” “modernization,” and “growth”—assumes an automatism that is used to override any objection or alternative, regardless of the environmental and social consequences. Today, we witness global vistas of toxification, deforestation, desertification, dying oceans, disappearing ozone layers, and disintegrating immune systems, all interacting in ways that perhaps threaten the very existence of humanity and are undeniably inflicting social collapse, disease, and immiseration across the planet. The degree to which this project of mastery has backfired is all too obvious.
7 -AND, cap causes extinction and endless structural violence – it is a try or die for the alt.
8 -Farbod ‘15: (Faramarz Farbod , PhD Candidate @ Rutgers, Prof @ Moravian College, Monthly Review, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/farbod020615.html, 6-2)
9 -Global capitalism is the 800-pound gorilla. The twin ecological and economic crises, militarism, the rise of the surveillance state, and a dysfunctional political system can all be traced to its normal operations. We need a transformative politics from below that can challenge the fundamentals of capitalism instead of today's politics that is content to treat its symptoms. The problems we face are linked to each other and to the way a capitalist society operates. We must make an effort to understand its real character. The fundamental question of our time is whether we can go beyond a system that is ravaging the Earth and secure a future with dignity for life and respect for the planet. What has capitalism done to us lately? The best science tells us that this is a do-or-die moment. We are now in the midst of the 6th mass extinction in the planetary history with 150 to 200 species going extinct every day, a pace 1,000 times greater than the 'natural' extinction rate.1 The Earth has been warming rapidly since the 1970s with the 10 warmest years on record all occurring since 1998.2 The planet has already warmed by 0.85 degree Celsius since the industrial revolution 150 years ago. An increase of 2° Celsius is the limit of what the planet can take before major catastrophic consequences. Limiting global warming to 2°C requires reducing global emissions by 6 per year. However, global carbon emissions from fossil fuels increased by about 1.5 times between 1990 and 2008.3 Capitalism has also led to explosive social inequalities The global economic landscape is littered with rising concentration of wealth, debt, distress, and immiseration caused by the austerity-pushing elites. Take the US. The richest 20 persons have as much wealth as the bottom 150 million.4 Since 1973, the hourly wages of workers have lagged behind worker productivity rates by more than 800.5 It now takes the average family 47 years to make what a hedge fund manager makes in one hour.6 Just about a quarter of children under the age of 5 live in poverty.7 A majority of public school students are low-income.8 85 of workers feel stress on the job.9 Soon the only thing left of the American Dream will be a culture of hustling to survive. Take the global society. The world's billionaires control $7 trillion, a sum 77 times the debt owed by Greece to the European banks.10 The richest 80 possess more than the combined wealth of the bottom 50 of the global population (3.5 billion people).11 By 2016 the richest 1 will own a greater share of the global wealth than the rest of us combined.12 The top 200 global corporations wield twice the economic power of the bottom 80 of the global population.13 Instead of a global society capitalism is creating a global apartheid. What's the nature of the beast? Firstly, the "egotistical calculation" of commerce wins the day every time. Capital seeks maximum profitability as a matter of first priority. Evermore "accumulation of capital" is the system's bill of health; it is slowdowns or reversals that usher in crises and set off panic. Cancer-like hunger for endless growth is in the system's DNA and is what has set it on a tragic collision course with Nature, a finite category. Secondly, capitalism treats human labor as a cost. It therefore opposes labor capturing a fair share of the total economic value that it creates. Since labor stands for the majority and capital for a tiny minority, it follows that classism and class warfare are built into its DNA, which explains why the "middle class" is shrinking and its gains are never secure. Thirdly, private interests determine massive investments and make key decisions at the point of production guided by maximization of profits. That's why in the US the truck freight replaced the railroad freight, chemicals were used extensively in agriculture, public transport was gutted in favor of private cars, and big cars replaced small ones. What should political action aim for today? The political class has no good ideas about how to address the crises. One may even wonder whether it has a serious understanding of the system, or at least of ways to ameliorate its consequences. The range of solutions offered tends to be of a technical, legislative, or regulatory nature, promising at best temporary management of the deepening crises. The trajectory of the system, at any rate, precludes a return to its post-WWII regulatory phase. It's left to us as a society to think about what the real character of the system is, where we are going, and how we are going to deal with the trajectory of the system ~-~- and act accordingly. The critical task ahead is to build a transformative politics capable of steering the system away from its destructive path. Given the system's DNA, such a politics from below must include efforts to challenge the system's fundamentals, namely, its private mode of decision-making about investments and about what and how to produce. Furthermore, it behooves us to heed the late environmentalist Barry Commoner's insistence on the efficacy of a strategy of prevention over a failed one of control or capture of pollutants. At a lecture in 1991, Commoner remarked: "Environmental pollution is an incurable disease; it can only be prevented"; and he proceeded to refer to "a law," namely: "if you don't put a pollutant in the environment it won't be there." What is nearly certain now is that without democratic control of wealth and social governance of the means of production, we will all be condemned to the labor of Sisyphus. Only we won't have to suffer for all eternity, as the degradation of life-enhancing natural and social systems will soon reach a point of no return.
10 -This debate is about competing methodologies – the question of the ballot is whose ethical orientation best catalyzes political organization against Capitalism. Vote negative to accept the Communist Hypothesis, which is a recognition of socialism’s necessity and a historical analysis of cap. This is, in other words, a genealogical investigation and a representations alt.
11 -Walker 14: (Gavin, Assistant Professor of History and East Asian Studies at McGill University, “The Reinvention of Communism: Politics, History, Globality,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 113:4, Fall 2014)
12 -S in c e the turn of the twenty-first century, the term communism has returned to the theoretical and historical agenda with a striking force and a surprising novelty. 1 In a wide range of fields of knowledge, the questions of the actuality and the history of the world communist movement, the theoretical tendencies of communist thought, and the current political possibilities of new developments of communism have been revisited and addressed anew. In the social movements that have sprung up in nations around the world—from Spain to Greece to Quebec, throughout Latin America, Asia, Africa, and beyond—-the word communism has again acquired a critical force, not a force of nostalgia or simple retrospection, but a new and creative force. We can only be struck by the degree to which it now seems that communism, far from the dead end of the twentieth century it was long assumed to be, may be something profoundly of the twenty-first century, an idea and field of concepts whose time has come. When Antonio Negri emphasizes that the communists today are “alone and potent,” he alerts us to a crucial point that I want to highlight, from two divergent directions, in the following essay. Rather than see the contemporary communist moment simply as a “return,” implying a transposition of the same forces, forms, and contents, this moment indicates instead an open field for the reinvention of communism. The earlier modality of twentieth-century communism, linked above all to the existence and continuity established by the Soviet Union, no longer exists. No longer is there a national form or federated space that would serve as a “bulwark” of the communist project. In this sense, the communists today are alone. Yet Negri insists that the communists are alone and potent. This potency is derived, not as in the previous arrangement, from a site of institutional force that could be treated as a model of explanation, but from this fact of being alone, untethered, unguaranteed, not beholden to a specific historical telos. In this sense, the communists today are potent because they are alone. What does this new political solitude mean for the concepts and contents of communism in our contemporary moment? Two distinct trends emerge in this development of communism in our global present. One is the great historic movement that has transferred the center of gravity of a reinvented communist politics to the exterior of the West, taken in the broadest sense. This globality of communism is in essence a fulfillment of a promise rather than a historical accident, the fulfillment of a politics that from the outset sought a new theoretical and political destiny beyond the horizon of the national and local. The second is the striking link between this return—and reinvention—of communism and its site of return, one of which is without doubt the field of “critical theory.” What makes this site peculiar is that it too, like the political potential of communism itself, has been in a long retreat since the 1980s in the fields of knowledge production around the world. Theory’s originary impulse toward the politicization of knowledge, the immanent critique of the university, and its globality, the fact that theory has long provided a common language beyond the regime of national language, has been the target of an intense revanchist attack by institutional neoliberalism, conservative politics, and positivist knowledge work. But new experiences have emerged in recent years to produce a situation in which these two developments—one linked to the practical social movements and reinventions of political organization and the other linked to the crystallization of a new trend in theory—are experiencing complex and volatile articulations and points of contact. What we are seeing today is perhaps the first emergence of a new direction and politicization of theory itself, the first stirrings of a communist critical theory. P o litics: P e rs is te n c e a n d S cissio n One distinguishing feature of the current discussions of the “communist hypothesis” (Badiou), the “actuality of communism” (Bosteels), and “the communist horizon” (Dean) is a renewal of an insistence on the primacy of politics over the mere presupposition of a politics derived from the structural analysis of global capitalism’s current tendencies, level of technical composition, and scale of development of the productive forces. These thinkers maintain a conception of politics that upholds its rarity, its intermittent or hazardous quality. Rather than accept the given character of politics, in which it would become a figure of ubiquity or immanence (the banal argument that “everything is political”), the rethinking of the question of communism has also insisted on a divergent genealogy of what is and what is not political. Rather than a constantly presupposed undercurrent, this figure of politics would instead be, for instance, in Alain Badiou (2001), the rare event that grounds a political sequence and convokes a subject through a fidelity, or in Jacques Ranciere’s (1999) terms, the egalitarian proposal that suspends the representations possible in the dominant order (“the police”).2 This concept of politics is, above all, linked to new attempts to think the place of the subject of politics, and it is this point that provides an entry into the critical dimensions of this “communist hypothesis” within the theoretical field. The rethinking of communism today has distinguished itself as a trend in insisting on antagonism, contradiction, the subject, politics, and organization; it refuses gestures of diffusion, multiplicity as such, focusing on the dialectical conditions of the possible rather than the immanent conditions of the impossible. There is here a reaction to the monopoly held by a very specific register—the Derridean register of defeat and withdrawal, the Deleuzian register of immanence and multiplicity—within the broadly left trends of thought and knowledge production. Metapolitically speaking, we can observe within the works associated with this “communist hypothesis” a rebirth of simple, seemingly “obvious” concepts: truth, justice, fidelity, struggle, honor, courage, and so forth, concepts largely derided in the postdeconstruction trends of thought and relegated to the realm of the “popular,” avoided as vulgarities too “earnest” for the field of so-called theory. Instead, detachment, irony, withdrawal, defeat, finitude, the impossibility of presence, the impossibility of naming, the impossibility of an affirmative creation, and the impossibility of an interventionist politics proper often constitute the typical terms of theoretical work. There is thus in the recent communist current a refusal to accept this by-now rigid division of labor, one that has decisive consequences for both politics and critical theory itself. What lies behind this new vocabulary and new set of gestures? Above all, it is the insistence on a link between the internal dynamics of theory and the external situation, in particular, on the question of organization. Let us consider a few short texts that might be taken as a “pre-history” of this notion, a polemical period of Badiou’s work that expresses the essence of the overall problem: how to develop and conceptualize a theory of politics that is not simply a reflection or proof of a structural or given feature of the situation in which we find ourselves, a theory of politics that is not beholden to concepts of historical necessity. Behind this thesis lies a resistance to the notion that politics is involved in a flattening of phenomena, a fear of antagonism, the preference for holism over division, the emphasis on consensus, on “friendship,” against contestation. In 1977 Badiou launched a frontal attack against Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s work for its implied political pitfalls. This attack on their “fascism of the potato” is excessive, dogmatic, beyond the demands of the political conjuncture (going so far as to identify them as “prefascist ideologues”). But it also contains an extremely important point for the paradox of organization within politics, perhaps the key kernel of the new trend inaugurated in theoretical work by the hypothesis of communism. In this text, Badiou (2012:199-200) reacts against Deleuze and Guattari’s celebration of multiplicity, appeals to escape, to flight, to becoming-multiple, becomingschizophrenic, becoming-minor, and so forth,3 by intersecting this theoretical work with the concrete terms of the political situation: We have seen this in May ’68: If you have the mass revolt, but not the proletarian antagonism, you obtain the victory of the bourgeois antagonism (of bourgeois politics). If you have ideas that are just, but not Marxism, you obtain the return to power of the bourgeois reformists of the Parti Socialiste. If you have the objective forces, but neither the programme nor the party, you obtain the revenge of Pompidou’s parliamentarianism, you obtain the return to the scene of the PCF and the unions. Badiou argues that Deleuze and Guattari fail to carry through the very ideas that found their major theoretical concepts. They support the mass revolt, but lack the antagonism between “friends” and “enemies” of the people; they have “just ideas”—freedom, the overturning of injustice, the defense of the workers, the poor, the targets of a vicious imperialism in and out of the metropole—but no structural features link the situation of domination with an affirmative politics of inversion; they include the objective forces of the masses in social motion, but lack direction, a concrete framework within which the mass movement can orient itself. Badiou argues that these elements finally invert into their opposites: the victory of bourgeois politics, reformism, parliamentarism, and so forth. But what is behind this charge, this accusation? Two elements subtend this polemic whose compositional elements are returning today to the theoretical scene through the return to the communist hypothesis, namely, persistence and scission. Badiou charges Deleuze and Guattari with the production of a theoretical system that is itself in a constant process of diverting, redirecting, and moving sideways to avoid “capture.” Such a politics cannot sustain the forces it unleashes; it can initiate moments of dissensus within the dominant order, but it cannot persist in a full overturning of their foundations or proceed from this moment of dissensus to a new hegemony over the situation. Such a mode of thought poses questions, identifies structural injustices, and marks points of rupture, but it nevertheless chooses, at the final moment, to refuse to uphold a strong division, a strong break, an insistence on one side over another, one line over another. Badiou (2012:199-200) puts this point in a dense and powerful formulation: “To think the multiple outside the two, outside scission, amounts to practicing in exteriority the dictatorship of the One.” If you think the multiple, you can expose the One to its internal disunity, the false impression of substantiality. But merely pointing to the multiple character of a social and political situation is not in itself a bridge to a politics. Remarking on the multivocal character of what appears as a unity is in no way a critique, much less an intervention, within this situation. Instead, the multivocal reality of the unitary image can always be recuperated precisely in the service of the One. In a circumstance of social struggle, it is never enough to point to the heterogeneous composition of all positions—“the police are also drawn from the lower stratum of society,” “their pensions are also being cut back by the state,” “within the ranks of the workers are some with terrible ideas,” “the activists are not as upstanding as they say they are,” and so on—and thereby to end in the original abstentionist position: “It’s all so complicated, it’s not just one thing and another.” This type of analysis, which always underscores the hybridity and mutual complicity of political scenarios, itself participates in the naive fantasy of imagining that exposing this multiplicity allows one out of the practice of partisanship. In such an optic, you can go on multiplying the options, always finding yet another option, always finding a “third way,” always insisting on escape from the binary, escape from the pressure of limited choices, always demanding an evacuation of responsibility, of having to uphold the consequences of a choice. To force a cut in the situation is to assert that the One is forever split, that there is a two-line struggle in every social and political scenario, that politics proper consists in this scission itself: the formation of an antagonism where previously there was only a semblance of unity. This is why Badiou emphasizes the Two—when you choose to say, “I don’t want either side, they’re all bad, we don’t have to make a choice, we don’t have to have just one thing,” what is installed in theory and in practice is not a splitting or splintering of the One into its infinitely heterogeneous elements (the thesis of multiplicity) but a withdrawal that allows the One to remain intact. This is precisely what Badiou calls, in the above formulation, “practicing in exteriority the dictatorship of the One.” By choosing flight or escape, the status quo (i.e., the One) reasserts itself, this time stronger than before, bolstered by the experience of finding in its own image of multiplicity a renewed unity. What remains a true politics is the courage to choose, to insist on the Two, to not fear division, separation, scission. To accept the responsibility of the choice, to accept that there is no way to opt out—that the act of a supposed withdrawal is in fact a refusal to countenance real movement, real overturning of the situation, a break that has to be sustained—is to accept the responsibility to uphold the choice despite the fact that there is no going back. What does this argument contain for the current rethinking of communism? Above all, it holds that politics is contained not in overturning the system of social binaries, or in finding a “third way,” or in escapism, defeatism, or abstention. A common thread today, in all the thinkers reinventing the term communism, is a long and arduous struggle for hegemony in the world of thought, a world devoted to concepts of the “death of the subject,” the refusal of binaries, the emphasis on incessant multiplicity, and so forth. This struggle for a new politics recognizes the dead end of these “philosophies of defeat,” in Bruno Bosteels’s terms. It recognizes that a new communist development will come, not from the endless work of withdrawal and negation as such, but from the affirmative and interventionist declaration that politics is possible and the status quo can be permanently fractured. And this fracture produces the need for a persistence, the ability to carry through the full consequences of the initial break.
13 -Cap is an inertial system—any vestige left remaining by the perm will inevitably spin back up. Like a many-headed hydra, it will regenerate with every attempt that attacks the instruments as opposed to the system itself – the perm fails.
14 -Kovel ‘2: Joel, The Enemy of Nature, Zed Books, p. 142-3
15 -The value-term that subsumes everything into the spell of capital sets going a kind of wheel of accumulation, from production to consumption and back, spinning ever more rapidly as the inertial mass of capital grows, and generating its force field as a spinning magnet generates an electrical field. This phenomenon has important implications for the reformability of the system. Because capital is so spectral, and succeeds so well in ideologically mystifying its real nature, attention is constantly deflected from the actual source of eco-destabilization to the instruments by which that source acts. The real problem, however, is the whole mass of globally accumulated capital, along with the speed of its circulation and the class structures sustaining this. That is what generates the force field, in proportion to its own scale; and it is this force field, acting across the numberless points of insertion that constitute the ecosphere, that creates ever larger agglomerations of capital, sets the ecological crisis going, and keeps it from being resolved. For one fact may be taken as certain — that to resolve the ecological crisis as a whole, as against tidying up one corner or another, is radically incompatible with the existence of gigantic pools of capital, the force field these induce, the criminal underworld with which they connect, and, by extension, the elites who comprise the transnational bourgeoisie. And by not resolving the crisis as a whole, we open ourselves to the spectre of another mythical creature, the many-headed hydra, that regenerated itself the more its individual tentacles were chopped away. To realize this is to recognize that there is no compromising with capital, no schema of reformism that will clean up its act by making it act more greenly or efficiently We shall explore the practical implications of this thesis in Part III, and here need simply to restate the conclusion in blunt terms: green capital, or non-polluting capital, is preferable to the immediately ecodestructive breed on its immediate terms. But this is the lesser point, and diminishes with its very success. For green capital (or ‘socially/ecologically responsible investing’) exists, by its very capital-nature, essentially to create more value, and this leaches away from the concretely green location to join the great pool, and follows its force field into zones of greater concentration, expanded profitability — and greater ecodestruction
16 -AND the role of the judge is to be a critical analyst testing whether the underlying assumptions of the AFF are valid. This is a question of the whether the AFF scholarship is good – not the passage of the plan.
17 -The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who best pushes radical politics to challenge the state’s power. The judge as a critical educator has an obligation to question state sovereign-hood for any hope of sustainable change in institutional society.
18 -Newman ‘11: (Saul, associate professor in the Department of Government in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, DC, “Postanarchism: a politics of anti-politics” (October 2011), Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 16 no. 3)
19 -At the same time, this aporetic moment of tension central to classical anarchism generates new and productive articulations of politics and ethics. The disjunction between politics and anti-politics is what might be called an ‘inclusive’ disjunction: a compound in which one proposition is true only if its opposing proposition is also true. Politics, at least in a radical, emancipatory sense, has only a consistent identity if an anti-political, indeed utopian, dimension is also present—otherwise it remains caught within existing political frameworks and imaginaries. Conversely, anti-politics only makes sense if it takes seriously the tasks of politics—building, constructing, organizing, fighting, making collective decisions and so on—where questions of power and exclusion inevitably emerge. However, this proximity to power does not invalidate anarchism; rather, it leads to a greater sensitivity to the dangers of power and the need to invent, as mentioned before, new micro-political practices of freedom through which power is subjected to an ongoing ethical interrogation. Where the political pole imposes certain limits, the anti-political pole, by contrast, invokes an outside, a movement beyond limits. It is the signification of the infinite, of the limitless horizon of possibilities. This is both the moment of utopia and, in a different sense, the moment of ethics. Anarchism has an important utopian dimension, even if the classical anarchists themselves claimed not to be utopians but materialists and rationalists. Indeed, some utopian element—whether acknowledged or not—is an essential part of any form of radical politics; to oppose the current order, one inevitably invokes an alternative, utopian imagination. However, we should try to formulate a different approach to utopianism here: the importance of imagining an alternative to the current order is not to lay down a precise programme for the future, but rather to provide a point of exteriority as a way of interrogating the limits of this order. As Miguel Abensour puts it: ‘Is it not proper to utopia to propose a new way of proceeding to a displacement of what is and what seems to go without saying in the crushing name of “reality”?’37 We are crushed under the weight of the current order, which tells us that this is our reality, that what we have now is all there is and all there ever will be. Utopia provides an escape from this stifling reality by imagining an alternative to it; it opens up different possibilities, new ‘lines of flight’. Here, we should think about utopia in terms of action in the immediate sense, of creating alternatives within the present, at localized points, rather than waiting for the revolution. Utopia is something that emerges in political struggles themselves.38 Ethics also implies an outside to the existing order, but in a different sense. Ethics, as I understand it here, involves the opening up of the existing political identities, practices, institutions and discourses to an Other which is beyond their terms. Ethics is more than the application of moral and rational norms. It is rather the continual disturbance of the sovereignty of these norms, and the identities and institutions that draw their legitimacy from them, in the name of something that exceeds their grasp. Importantly, then, ethics is what disturbs politics from the outside. This might be understood in the Levinasian sense of ‘anarchy’: ‘Anarchy cannot be sovereign like an arche. It can only disturb the State—but in a radical way, making possible moments of negation without any affirmation.’39 The point is, however, that politics cannot do without anti-politics, and vice versa. The two must go together. There must always be an anti-political outside, a utopian moment of rupture and excess that disturbs the limits of politics. The ethical moment cannot be eclipsed by the political dimension; nor can it be separated from it, as someone like Carl Schmitt maintained.40 If there is to be a concept of the political, it can only be thought through a certain constitutive tension with ethics. At the same time, anti-politics needs to be politically articulated; it needs to be put into action through actual struggles and engagements with different forms of domination. There must be some way of politically measuring the anti-political imaginery, through victories, defeats, and strategic gains and reversals. So while anti-politics points to a transcendence of the current order, it cannot be an escape from it; it must involve an encounter with its limits, and this is where politics comes in. The transcendence of power involves an active engagement with power, not an avoidance of it; the realization of freedom requires an ongoing elaboration of new practices of freedom within the context of power relations.
20 -AND, the knowledge claims of the AC are the starting points for the debate – our framework provides a more reasonable neg burden. When a student turns in an F paper, no teacher has an obligation to write an entirely new paper to show it was bad – pointing out major academic deficiencies would justify failing the paper – the ballot asks who did the better debating, so if their diagnosis of the issue is wrong, you must drop them.
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -2017-02-16 05:47:01.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
ParentRound
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -32
Round
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -1
Team
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Sunset bhat Neg
Title
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -JF - Cap K
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Stanford
Caselist.CitesClass[43]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,16 +1,0 @@
1 -Extinction is inevitable—the will to survival embodied by the aff strips value from life and freezes becoming, which outweighs on magnitude — vote neg to comport our ethics towards the world-to-come—this can include endorsing their extinction discourse while still doing the plan—it’s a mutually exclusive strategy of joyous ethics that doesn’t affirm all death but undercuts the metaphysical justifications for all modes of oppression
2 -Mitchell ‘16: Wilfrid Laurier University (Audra, “Is IR going extinct?,” European Journal of International Relations 1–23, dml)
3 -Perhaps most profoundly, taking extinction seriously would involve relinquishing the fetishism of survival as it relates to dominant conceptions of the human rather than simply adapting these conceptions to new sources and registers of threat.6 In other words, it would be necessary to dispense with the imperative to ensure at all costs the survival of currently existing norms and modes of human life. However, why should emancipation from this imperative be desirable? Simply put, the imperative to preserve dominant, existing modes of human life monopolizes human energy, dominates frameworks of value and imposes stasis on extant life forms. This imperative imposes a kind of death (in the Heideggerian sense) on life forms: it prevents them from unfolding into their indeterminate, virtual possibilities, entrapping them in the mode of rigid metaphysical categories. The severing of possibilities of becoming can already be intuited within the biopolitical discourses of extinction discussed earlier. These discourses simultaneously frame the survival of ‘humanity-as-it-is’ as the dominant principle of being and highest value, while presenting it as imminently and irreversibly threatened (see Evans and Reid, 2014). Within this stark opposition, the political possibilities of becoming are precluded by the imperative to survive ‘as we are’ at all costs. What if, instead, it were possible to refuse the demand to survive — without embracing an extinction-wish or desiring the elimination of any species? In the context of IR, this would entail resisting the powerful discourses of biopolitical discipline, catastrophism, resilience and mitigation discussed earlier and becoming open to the possibilities of extinction, in two senses: in the sense that extinction may occur; and in the sense of the new modes of ethico-political action and forms of life it might enable. Being open to the possibility of extinction does not involve relinquishing all claims to continued existence or the desire to pursue them. Instead, by removing the imperative to secure the indefinite survival of dominant forms of life at all costs, it might free these energies to develop modes of being-otherwise. As Colebrook (2014a: 58) puts it: As long as we calculate the future as one of sustaining, maintaining, adapting and rendering ourselves viable … there would be no future for us other than an eventual, barely lived petering out. If, however, we entertained the erasure of the human … then there might be a future. (Colebrook, 2014a: 58) What visions, logics and inputs might IR contribute to this new future, and how might it be transformed as a result? Cosmopolitics and the possibilities of extinction Extinction is not only about endings; it can also be understood as a force that engenders ethico-political creativity in and with the conditions of finitude (Mitchell, 2016). Viewing (mass) extinction in this way consists of ‘a confrontation with perishing, finitude, and fragility but one that fills us with at least as much wonder as dread, more political energy than resignation, and takes seriously that apocalypses are not ends but irreversible transitions’ (Grove, 2015). This, in turn, involves reframing nihilism not as an apolitical collapse into apathy and submission to visions of the inevitable, but rather as a ‘speculative opportunity’ that opens up new futures (Brassier, 2007: xi). In other words, rather than promoting (only) a ‘will to nothingness’, let alone a malevolent extinction-wish, engaging with the possibilities of non-being can make it possible to embrace the indeterminacy of the universe and its creative forces. I shall now argue that it demands and enables a politics attuned to the biological, geological and cosmological forces of the universe: a cosmopolitics. According to Isabelle Stengers (2005), ‘cosmopolitics’ is politics rooted in the acknowledgement of the multiple, diverse and constantly transforming beings that constitute the cosmos. It hinges on the belief that all beings make interventions that shape, disrupt and transform political processes. Importantly, participation in these processes does not require representation in terms of human interests or even the ability to act or speak in a human-oriented sense. Indeed, Stengers (2005: 996) asserts that ‘the political arena is peopled with shadows of that which does not have, cannot have or does not want to have a political voice’. A range of beings — whether they are considered human and nonhuman, living and non-living, organic and inorganic — can intervene in politics by ‘forcing thought’ through their effects, properties, presence or absence. For instance, water can make its force felt politically by destroying human habitations and ecosystems in the form of floods, by withdrawing and creating droughts, or by sustaining and nurturing multiple life forms. For Stengers, these issues are not made political by humans: to the extent that they have an effect in the world, they are always-already political. According to Stengers, the interventions of multiple beings help to slow down processes of universalization central to traditional modes of cosmopolitanism. Indeed, the presence of other beings with conflicting interests and needs makes universalization, and political decisionmaking, ‘as difficult as possible’ (Stengers, 2005: 1003). Cosmopolitics is conflictual and agonistic: the insurgence of awkward subjects and the obstructions, disruptions and disjunctures they create can nurture pluralism and generate creative politics. Crucially, cosmopolitics is not simply an intensification or variant of cosmopolitanism. Whereas cosmopolitanism stresses the suffix -politan, cosmopolitics shifts emphasis to the prefix cosmo-, that is, it takes the cosmos, rather than human communities, as the basis and locus of political action. Cosmopolitanism, as Colebrook contends, is based on the extrapolation and expansion of a polity that, while it may be expanded to include other beings, is centrifugal to the figure of humanity. In other words, the cosmos of cosmopolitanism ‘is always an extension of the composed polity, an abstraction or idealization of man englobed in his world of human others’ (Colebrook, 2014a: 110). Even the most radical contemporary reframings of cosmopolitanism, in contrast, involve stretching the scope of the human-dominated polity to include all humans and (certain) nonhumans (see Linklater, 2011). Anthony Burke (2013, 2015) has attempted to radically rethink cosmopolitanism in terms of the intermeshing of complex processes, material conditions and (human and nonhuman) actors across planetary space-time. However, I want to argue that this project is better understood in the context of cosmopolitics, insofar as it seeks to render the cosmos the ontological basis of politics. I want to argue that a modified form of cosmopolitics — one attuned to the inhuman — is demanded by, and can ground meaningful responses to, (mass) extinction. Specifically, Stengers’s cosmopolitics acknowledges the role of the weak, marginalized and ‘shadowy’ subjects; it focuses largely on presence, that is, on the positive beings that interrupt human activities. In order to respond to mass extinction, cosmopolitics must place more focus on absence, negation and non-being. Colebrook hints at this in her call to ‘destroy cosmopolitanism for the sake of the cosmos’ (Colebrook, 2014a: 96) She claims that arguing that: if the crises of the twenty-first century were to prompt us to think at all it may be in a cosmic and inhuman mode, asking … what the elements of this earth are, what force they bear, how we are composed in relation to those forces. (Colebrook, 2014a: 114) If we consider (mass) extinction as one of these forces, a different kind of cosmopolitics emerges — one that responds to extinction and considerably adds to the conceptual mass of IR. This mode of cosmopolitics makes it possible to generate new forms of solidarity based not on the fear of collective annihilation, but rather on a sense of shared vulnerability that is the condition of earthly coexistence. For Rosi Braidotti (2013), such solidarities emerge from the defamiliarization of dominant norms of ‘humanity’, which, she argues, is best achieved by thinking as if ‘humanity’ were already extinct. This, she contends, compels humans to ‘think critically about who we are and what we are actually in the process of becoming’ (Braidotti, 2013: 49–50). From this perspective, attention to the inhuman, and to the possible extinction of humans, can produce an ‘enlarged sense of inter-connection between self and others, including the non-human or “earth” others’ (Braidotti, 2013: 49–50). The same processes of defamiliarization, Colebrook (2014a: 58) suggests, would make possible a radical new form of feminism that, in embracing ‘a thought of life beyond the human’, would place neither man nor woman at its centre (Colebrook, 2014b: 16). By unsettling the foundations of ‘humanity’ itself, she contends, thinking the inhuman makes it possible to transcend boundaries such as gender and race that essentialize characteristics as ‘essentially’ human. This would have profound importance for feminist, queer and decolonial international politics: it would undercut the metaphysical foundations of sources of exclusion and oppression against which they struggle. In short, contemplating the extinction of ‘the human’ makes it possible to imagine alternative, future life forms that bear resemblances to, but are not restricted by, existing norms of ‘humanity’. Moreover, a cosmopolitics attuned to the inhuman could profoundly transform global ethics by grounding it not in a politics of ressentiment, but rather one of gratitude. The geographer Nigel Clark (2011) argues that humans should embrace the finite, deeply contingent and potentially meaningless (in a transcendent, metaphysical sense) existence furnished by an indifferent Earth. Specifically, he claims that human existence is contingent upon conditions created by previous (largely extinct) life forms and by inhuman forces, both contemporary and temporally distant. From this perspective, existence is a gift given to humans (among others) but it is not given-for-us in the correlationist sense. Instead, humans are indebted to a chain of interlocking forces that are ultimately indifferent to their existence. Clark argues that humans should embrace this gift with the knowledge that it can, and eventually will, be withdrawn. This means accepting and honouring it without treating it as an entitlement or devaluing it on account of its finitude. His account contrasts sharply with the discourses of catastrophe, resilience and biopolitics discussed earlier, which devalue any mode of life that cannot be indefinitely sustained through human intervention. Clark finds an ethico-political alternative to these logics in an ethos of gratitude and reciprocation. For Clark, the latter is epitomized by the actions of the government of Kiribati — the small island state perhaps most imminently threatened by rising sea levels — in creating one of the world’s largest marine parks in 2006 (the Phoenix Islands Protected Area). In so doing, Clark contends, this community expressed unconditional gratitude for the gift of existence rather than resentment of its endangerment. Moreover, by seeking to protect and preserve the watery medium that threatens to destroy it, Kiribatians embodied a mode of meaningful response to disaster that was not constrained to sustaining survival-as-we-know-it. Moreover, a cosmopolitics attuned to extinction and to the inhuman would foster a new mode of future-oriented politics based not on the continuity of the present, but rather on the creative possibilities of discontinuity and unpredictable difference. For Evans and Reid (2014: 164), biopolitical responses to extinction reflect a ‘cult of mourning’ for the coming death of existing species life that ‘manages to turn the wondrous phenomenon of the emergence of new forms of life … into a problematic of security and threat’. Indeed, in popular literature on extinction, there is a marked tone of mourning and fear about what might ‘replace’ humans as Earth’s dominant species, and the readers’ focus is trained on monstrous figures such as robots, microbes or giant rats (see Zalasiewicz, 2008). In contrast, cosmopolitics attuned to extinction and the inhuman would be open to the new forms of being that might emerge from, or even in place of, humans. For instance, it might involve overcoming fear and revulsion of the hybrid or mutant creatures that are emerging, at least in part from human scientific interventions, treating them with love and care instead of abjection (see Haraway, 2011; Latour, 2012). Crucially, it would also involve embracing the defamiliarized modalities of currently existing humanity discussed earlier. This includes beings so transformed through technological and evolutionary change as to be almost unrecognizable to ‘us’ (currently existing humans), and the ‘defamiliarized’ beings no longer essentialized in terms of race, sex or gender. The cosmopolitics I am outlining here would embrace these beings-to-come instead of fearing and resenting them. This amounts to a kind of futural gratitude that mirrors the Kiribatian marine park — an ethics of comportment towards the unknowable other that might displace ‘us’. However, how can currently existing humans adopt such an ethics? Emmanuel Levinas (1998: 50) terms this mode of ethics ‘being-forbeyond-my-death’, that is, being ‘for a time that would be without me … in order to be for that which is after me’. Although Levinas is referring to human individuals and their comportment towards future generations of humans, this principle can be translated across species boundaries and to a collective register. It profoundly shifts the emphasis of human action — instead of attempting to secure existing conditions, it encourages ‘action for a world to come’, and responsiveness to the ethical demands of the (remote, unknowable) Other (Levinas, 1998: 51). Clark, writing in a Levinasian vein, agrees that embracing future life forms is not passive. Instead, it requires the ability to see ‘the intolerability of the world as it is presently imagined and demands the seemingly impossible; the creation of a new one’ (Clark, 2011: 195). Crucially, this ethos is not a replacement for security or the pursuit of indefinite survival, but rather a qualitatively different kind of politics. It cannot guarantee the survival of humanity-as-it-is — the goal to which all existing strategies and responses to extinction are oriented. It entails an ‘eschatology without hope for oneself’ (Levinas, 1998: 51): welcoming new worlds makes, and demands, no promises. While this ethos engenders cautious hope for undetermined futures, it cannot be made conditional on the survival of existing forms of life. Instead, it must be pursued ‘for the hell of it and for love of the world’ (Braidotti, 2010: 17). This shifts the logic of responsiveness to extinction from one of mastery and control to one of gratitude and hopeful, creative experimentation. As Clark (2011: 217, paraphrasing Allan Stoekl) puts it: we might have a better chance of prising the planet out of its downward ecological spiral accidentally, not as the goal of a grand, visionary project but as the unintended consequence of more joyous and generous living right here and now. In other words, adopting an attitude of hospitality and generosity towards other beings might help to open up a future of long-term flourishing for humans and other beings. However, as Clark argues, this kind of action needs to have the character of Derridean hospitality, that is, it needs to be undertaken without conditionality, or, in this case, the demand for security. Adopting this ethico-political orientation does not involve capitulation to extinction, and even less an extinction-wish. Instead, it widens the range of human responsiveness far beyond the spectrum of pre-emptive trauma, loss and tragedy, and a future of rapidly diminishing life lived in survival mode.
4 -Their appeal to catastrophe is nothing but an emotive training ground to fit the catastrophe within familiar modes of politics and lull the population into fear-laden productivity. Our frantic attempts to resolve such problems merely institutionalize the most horrendous homicidal violence and push us to the brink of war. The only political task left is that of the philosopher who interrupts the absorption of the resonance of fear that greases the wheels of modern power.
5 -Scranton ‘15: Jeremy Scranton, acclaimed journalist, activist and author, PhD in English from Princeton, currently teaching at Notre Dame, New York Times contributor, Iraq War veteran, Learning To Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of Civilization, City Lights Books, 2015, online
6 -“When it comes to global warming, differing visions of the human future are already hardening into conflict. Coal and oil companies and their government proxies have made their willingness to use military force to defend themselves and advance their interests spectacularly obvious. The labor wars of the 19th and 20th centuries show this clearly. The brutal decades-long war waged by the Nigerian government against its own people, undertaken with the outright support of Shell and Chevron, is another example, well documented in books such as A Year and a Day and Genocide in Nigeria by Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was executed for his activism. You’ve heard the call: We have to do something. We need to fight. We need to identify the enemy and go after them. Some respond, march, and chant. Some look away, deny what’s happening, and search out escape routes into imaginary tomorrows: a life off the grid, space colonies, immortality in paradise, explicit denial, or consumer satiety in a wireless, robot-staffed, 3D-printed techno-utopia. Meanwhile, the rich take shelter in their fortresses, trusting to their air conditioning, private schools, and well-paid guards. Fight. Flight. Flight. Fight. The threat of death activates our deepest animal drives. The aggression and fear that arise in response to perceived threats are some of the most intense emotions we ever experience. For human society to function at all, these instinctive reactions have to be carefully managed and channeled. Outbreaks of panic and hate are dangerous, but lower levels of aggression and fear help keep a population controllable and productive. Restrained aggression keeps people suspicious of collective action and working hard to overcome their fellows, while constant, generalized anxiety keeps people servile, unwilling to take risks, and yearning for comfort from whatever quarter, whether the dulling sameness of herd thought or the dumb security of consumer goods. Since at least September 11, 2001, people in the United States have been subject to an unprecedented terror campaign—not from Al Qaeda, but from the United States government. National domestic policy transformed “security” into constant fear, threatening its citizens at every turn: first with alarms of explosions and anthrax, then with prison, austerity-produced structural unemployment, and harassment, and finally with torture, SWAT tanks, snipers, drones, and total surveillance. Owing to the racial logic of US politics, in which white/black is the definitive semiotic distinction structuring American society, most of the government’s violence against its own citizens is directed against those with darker skin, but in subtler ways its terror campaign targets every single person who flies coach, watches the news, or uses the Internet. Fear comes to us every day in our encounters with increasingly militarized police and our humiliating interactions at metal detectors and ” “body-scan machines. Fear comes to us in the absence of job security, in our want of appeal when confronted by institutionalized inequality, and in our mistrust of corrupt institutions. Fear comes to us in widespread surveillance, in the form of a homeless woman or a hospitalized friend without adequate financial support, and in the constant nagging worry that we’re not working hard enough, not happy enough, never going to “make it.” Fear comes to us in weather porn, unpredictable shifts in formerly stable climate dynamics, and massive storms. More than in any other way, fear comes to us in images and messages, as social media vibrations, products of cultural technologies that we have interpolated into our lives. Going about our daily business, we receive constant messages of apprehension and danger, ubiquitous warnings, insistent needling jabs to the deep lizard brain. Somebody died. Something blew up. Something might blow up. Somebody attacked somebody. Somebody killed somebody. Guns. Crime. Immigrants. Terrorists. Arabs. Mexicans. White supremacists. Killer cops. Demonic thugs. Rape. ” “Murder. Global warming. Ebola. ISIS. Death. Death. Death. Sociologist Tom Pyszczynski writes: “People will do almost anything to avoid being afraid. When, despite the best efforts, fear and anxiety do break through, people go to incredible lengths to shut them down.”88 Sometimes when these vibrations shake us, we discharge them by passing them on, retweeting the story, reposting the video, hoping that others will validate our reaction, thus assuaging our fear by assuring ourselves that collective attention has been alerted to the threat. Other times we react with aversion, working to dampen the vibrations by searching out positive reinforcements, pleasurable images and videos, something funny, something—anything—to ease the fear. We buy something. We eat food. We pop a pill. We fuck. In either passing on the vibration or reacting against it, we let the fear short circuit our own autonomous desires, diverting us from our goals and loading ever more emotional static into our daily cognitive processing. We become increasingly distracted from our ambitions and increasingly susceptible to such distraction. And whether we retransmit or react, we reinforce channels of thought, perception, behavior, and emotion that, over time, come to shape our habits and our personality. As we train ourselves to resonate fear and aggression, we reinforce patterns of thought and feeling that shape a society that breeds the same. Fight-or-flight is compelling because it serves essential evolutionary purposes. It increases alertness and adrenaline flow, and generally works to keep the human animal alive. As we proceed into the Anthropocene, though, capitalism’s cultural machinery for balancing fear and aggression against desire and pleasure is grinding and sputtering sparks. What cultural theorist Lauren Berlant has identified as the “cruel optimism” of a system sustained by hopes that can never be fulfilled mixes dangerously with an atmosphere of beleaguered anxiety, increasing frustration with working-class and middle-class economic stagnation, and a pervasive sadistic voyeurism that grows by what it feeds on.89 While America’s fraying social infrastructure holds together, our fear and aggression can be channeled into labor, consumption, and economic competition, with professional sports, hyperviolent television, and occasional protests to let off steam. Once the social fabric begins to tear, though, we risk unleashing not only rioting, rebellion, and civil war, but homicidal politics the likes of which should make our blood run cold.” “Consider: Once among the most modern, Westernized nations in the Middle East, with a robust, highly educated middle class, Iraq has been blighted for decades by imperialist aggression, criminal gangs, interference in its domestic politics, economic liberalization, and sectarian feuding. Today it is being torn apart between a corrupt petrocracy, a breakaway Kurdish enclave, and a self-declared Islamic fundamentalist caliphate, while a civil war in neighboring Syria spills across its borders. These conflicts have likely been caused in part and exacerbated by the worst drought the Middle East has seen in modern history. Since 2006, Syria has been suffering ” “crippling water shortages that have, in some areas, caused 75 percent crop failure and wiped out 85 percent of livestock, left more than 800,000 Syrians without a livelihood, and sent hundreds of thousands of impoverished young men streaming into Syria’s cities.90 This drought is part of long-term warming and drying trends that are transforming the Middle East.91 Not just water but oil, too, is elemental to these conflicts. Iraq sits on the fifth-largest proven oil reserves in the world. Meanwhile, the Islamic State has been able to survive only because it has taken control of most of Syria’s oil and gas production. We tend to think of climate change and violent religious fundamentalism as isolated phenomena, but as Retired Navy Rear Admiral David Titley argues, “you can draw a very credible climate connection to this disaster we call ISIS right now.”92 A few hundred miles away, Israeli soldiers spent the summer of 2014 killing Palestinians in Gaza. Israel has also been suffering drought, while Gaza has been in the midst of a critical water crisis exacerbated by Israel’s military ” “aggression. The International Committee for the Red Cross reported that during summer 2014, Israeli bombers targeted Palestinian wells and water infrastructure.93 It’s not water and oil this time, but water and gas: some observers argue that Israel’s “Operation Protective Edge” was intended to establish firmer control over the massive Leviathan natural gas field, discovered off the coast of Gaza in the eastern Mediterranean in 2010.94 Meanwhile, thousands of miles to the north, Russian-backed separatists fought fascist paramilitary forces defending the elected government of Ukraine, which was also suffering drought.95 Russia’s role as an oil and gas exporter in the region and the natural gas pipelines running through Ukraine from Russia to Europe cannot but be key issues in the conflict. Elsewhere, droughts in 2014 sent refugees from Guatemala and Honduras north to the US border, devastated crops in California and Australia, and threatened millions of lives in Eritrea, Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda, Afghanistan, India, Morocco, Pakistan, and parts of China. Across the world, massive protests and riots have swept Bosnia and Herzegovina, Venezuela, Brazil, Turkey, Egypt, and Thailand, while conflicts rage on in Colombia, Libya, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Nigeria, Yemen, and India. And while the world burns, the United States has been playing chicken with Russia over control of Eastern Europe and the melting Arctic, and with China over control of Southeast Asia and the South China Sea, threatening global war on a scale not seen in seventy years. This is our present and future: droughts and hurricanes, refugees and border guards, war for oil, water, gas, and food. We experience this world of strife today in one of two modes: either it is our environment, and we are in it, or it comes to us as images, social excitation, retransmitted fear. People are fighting and dying in ruined cities all over the planet. Neighbors are killing each other. Old women are bleeding to death in bombed rubble and children are being murdered, probably as you read this sentence. To live in that world is horrific. Constant danger strains every nerve. The only things that matter are survival, killing the enemy, ” “reputation, and having a safe place to sleep. The experience of being human narrows to a cutting edge. I remember living in that world many years ago in occupied Baghdad. Today that world seems impossibly distant, yet every day it presses in on me in a never-ending stream of words, images, appeals, and reports. I see videos. I read stories. I see pictures of this or that suffering or injustice and I am moved. To act, perhaps, but more accurately to emote. To react. To feel. To perform. We do not usually ask where these feelings come from or who they serve, but we all know that the cultural technologies transmitting these affective vibrations are not neutral: news outlets shape information to fit their owners’ prejudices, while Facebook, Twitter, and Google shape our perceptions through hidden algorithms. The specialization and demographic targeting of contemporary media tend to narrow the channels of perception to the point that we receive only those images and vibrations which already harmonize with our own prejudices, our own pre-existing desires, thus intensifying our particular emotional reac” “tions along an increasingly limited band, impelling us to discharge our emotions within the same field of ready listeners, for which we are rewarded with “Likes” and “Favorites.” Our consciousness is shaped daily through feedback systems where some post or headline provokes a feeling and we discharge that feeling by provoking it in others. Social media like Facebook crowdsource catharsis, creating self-contained wave pools of aggression and fear, pity and terror, stagnant flows that go nowhere and do nothing. Pictures of children killed by bombs or police, or pictures of the devastation left in the wake of a tropical storm may move me to sadness and horror. Retransmitting such images will pass along that sadness and horror. My act of transmission will mark me as someone who has feelings about these things and who condemns them. I can rationalize my retransmission by saying that I am “raising awareness” or trying to influence public policy: I want my fellow citizens to be as horrified as I am, so they’ll think like I do, or so they’ll vote for a representative who works to prevent such horrors from happening, or maybe so that if ” “enough of us all think the same way and feel the same way, the organs and institutions of power will be forced to hear us and align themselves along our vibrations, the way a honeybee colony will pick a site for a new hive through the dance of its advance guard scouts. These are perfectly reasonable human assumptions, because that is how physical human collectives function. Anyone who has been in a crowd, a basketball team, a nightclub, a choir, or a protest knows how bodies resonate together. But politics is the energetic distribution of bodies in systems, and we live in a system of carbon-fueled capitalism that we shouldn’t expect to work in physical human ways for several reasons, especially when it comes to responding to the threat of global warming. First, our political and social media technologies are not neutral, but have been developed to serve particular interests, most notably targeted advertising, concentration of wealth, and ideological control, and the vibrations that seem to resonate most strongly along these channels are envy, adulation, outrage, fear, hatred, and mindless pleasure. Second, the more we pass on or react to social vibrations, the more we strengthen our habits of channeling and the less we practice autonomous reflection or independent critical thought. With every protest chant, retweet, and Facebook post, we become stronger resonators and weaker thinkers. Third, however intense our social vibrations grow, they remain locked within machinery that offers no political leverage: they do not translate into political action, because they do not connect to the flows of power. Finally, while the typical collective human response to threat is to identify an enemy, pick sides, and mobilize to fight, global warming offers no apprehensible foe. That hasn’t stopped people from trying to find one. The Flood Wall Street protesters say the enemy is American corporations. Tanzania’s Jakaya Kikwete and Nauru’s Baron Waqa say the problem is the United States and Great Britain. Shell Oil and the Environmental Defense Fund seem to think that it’s intractable UN bureaucracy that’s holding us up. Barack Obama has implied that it’s China. Tea Party Republicans prod us to ever more intense levels of manic despair? One way we might begin to answer these questions is by considering the problem of global warming in terms of Peter Sloterdijk’s idea of the philosopher as an interrupter: We live constantly in collective fields of excitation; this cannot be changed so long as we are social beings. The input of stress inevitably enters me; thoughts are not free, each of us can divine them. They come from the newspaper and wind up returning to the newspaper. My sovereignty, if it exists, can only appear by my letting the integrated impulsion die in me or, should this fail, by my retransmitting it in a totally metamorphosed, verified, filtered, or recoded form. It serves nothing to contest it: I am free only to the extent that I interrupt escalations and that I am able to immunize myself against infections of opinion. Precisely this continues to be the philosopher’s mission in society, if I may express myself in such pathetic terms. His mission is to show that a subject can be an interrupter, not merely a channel that allows thematic epidemics and waves of excitation to flow through it. The classics express this with the term ‘pondering.’ With this concept, ethics and energetics enter into contact: as a bearer of a philosophical function, I have neither the right nor the desire to be either a conductor in a stress-semantic chain or the automaton of an ethical imperative.97 Sloterdijk compares the conception of political function as collective vibration to a philosophical function of interruption. As opposed to disruption, which shocks a system and breaks wholes into pieces, interruption suspends continuous processes. It’s not smashing, but sitting with. Not blockage, but reflection. Sloterdijk sees the role of the philosopher in the human swarm as that of an aberrant anti-drone slow-dancing to its own rhythm, neither attuned to the collective beat nor operating mechanically, dogmatically, deontologically, but ” “continually self-immunizing against the waves of social energy we live in and amongst by perpetually interrupting its own connection to collective life. So long as one allows oneself to be “a conductor in a stress-semantic chain,” one is strengthening channels of retransmission regardless of content, thickening the reflexive connective tissues of mass society, making all of us more susceptible to such viral phenomena as nationalism, scapegoating, panic, and war fever. Interrupting the flows of social production is anarchic and counterproductive, like all good philosophy: if it works, it helps us stop and see our world in new ways. If it fails, as it often and even usually does, the interrupter is integrated, driven mad, ignored, or destroyed. What Sloterdijk helps us see is that responding autonomously to social excitation means not reacting to it, not passing it on, but interrupting it, then either letting the excitation die or transforming it completely. Responding freely to constant images of fear and violence, responding freely to the perpetual media circuits of pleasure and terror, responding freely to the ongoing ” “alarms of war, environmental catastrophe, and global destruction demands a reorientation of feeling so that every new impulse is held at a distance until it fades or can be changed. While life beats its red rhythms and human swarms dance to the compulsion of strife, the interrupter practices dying.”
7 -AND the aff causes endless structural violence with their death bad rhetoric. The invocation of “survival” as the basis of the plan makes all atrocities possible and removes the value of survival itself – in an attempt to save our world, they have destroyed it. Vote neg on impact.
8 -Callahan ‘73: Daniel Callahan, Fellow at the Institute of Society and Ethics, 1973, The Tyranny of Survival, Pages 91-93)
9 -The value of survival could not be so readily abused were it not for its evocative power. But abused it has been. In the name of survival, all manner of social and political evils have been committed against the rights of individuals, including the right to life. The purported threat of Communist domination has for over two decades fueled the drive of militarists for ever-larger defense budgets, no matter what the cost to other social needs. During World War II, native Japanese-Americans were herded, without due process of law, to detention camps. This policy was later upheld by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States (1944) in the general context that a threat to national security can justify acts otherwise blatantly unjustifiable. The survival of the Aryan race was one of the official legitimations of Nazism. Under the banner of survival, the government of South Africa imposes a ruthless apartheid, heedless of the most elementary human rights. The Vietnamese war has seen one of the greatest of the many absurdities tolerated in the name of survival: the destruction of villages in order to save them. But it is not only in a political setting that survival has been evoked as a final and unarguable value. The main rationale B. F. Skinner offers in Beyond Freedom and Dignity for the controlled and conditioned society is the need for survival. For Jacques Monod, in Chance and Necessity, survival requires that we overthrow almost every known religious, ethical and political system. In genetics, the survival of the gene pool has been put forward as sufficient grounds for a forceful prohibition of bearers of offensive genetic traits from marrying and bearing children. Some have even suggested that we do the cause of survival no good by our misguided medical efforts to find means by which those suffering from such common genetically based diseases as diabetes can live a normal life, and thus procreate even more diabetics. In the field of population and environment, one can do no better than to cite Paul Ehrlich, whose works have shown a high dedication to survival, and in its holy name a willingness to contemplate governmentally enforced abortions and a denial of food to surviving populations of nations which have not enacted population-control policies. For all these reasons it is possible to counterpoise over against the need for survival a "tyranny of survival." There seems to be no imaginable evil which some group is not willing to inflict on another for sake of survival, no rights, liberties or dignities which it is not ready to suppress. It is easy, of course, to recognize the danger when survival is falsely and manipulatively invoked. Dictators never talk about their aggressions, but only about the need to defend the fatherland to save it from destruction at the hands of its enemies. But my point goes deeper than that. It is directed even at a legitimate concern for survival, when that concern is allowed to reach an intensity which would ignore, suppress or destroy other fundamental human rights and values. The potential tyranny survival as value is that it is capable, if not treated sanely, of wiping out all other values. Survival can become an obsession and a disease, provoking a destructive singlemindedness that will stop at nothing. We come here to the fundamental moral dilemma. If, both biologically and psychologically, the need for survival is basic to man, and if survival is the precondition for any and all human achievements, and if no other rights make much sense without the premise of a right to life—then how will it be possible to honor and act upon the need for survival without, in the process, destroying everything in human beings which makes them worthy of survival. To put it more strongly, if the price of survival is human degradation, then there is no moral reason why an effort should be made to ensure that survival. It would be the Pyrrhic victory to end all Pyrrhic victories.
10 -The alternative is to vote negative as a method of rejecting the aff’s survivalist justification and freeing ourselves from the fear of death. Death is a neutral mechanism of nature - this is an independent avenue that necessitates the alternative.
11 -Epicurus 311 BCE: Letter to Meneocues, translated by Professor Robert Drew Hicks, http://classics.mit.edu/Epicurus/menoec.html, BRACKETED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE
12 -Accustom yourself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply awareness, and death is the privation of all awareness; therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life an unlimited time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terror; for those who thoroughly apprehend that there are no terrors for them in ceasing to live. Foolish, therefore, is the person who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer. But in the world, at one time people shun death as the greatest of all evils, and at another time choose it as a respite from the evils in life. The wise person does not deprecate life nor do does they he fear the cessation of life. The thought of life is no offense to them him, nor is the cessation of life regarded as an evil. And even as people choose of food not merely and simply the larger portion, but the more pleasant, so the wise seek to enjoy the time which is most pleasant and not merely that which is longest. And he who admonishes the young to live well and the old to make a good end speaks foolishly, not merely because of the desirability of life, but because the same exercise at once teaches to live well and to die well. Much worse is he who says that it were good not to be born, but when once one is born to pass with all speed through the gates of Hades. For if he truly believes this, why does he not depart from life? It were easy for him to do so, if once he were firmly convinced. If he speaks only in mockery, his words are foolishness, for those who hear believe him not.
13 -AND discourse shapes reality – the way we come to our conclusions define the way we orient ourselves towards all problems in society. Since the discourse of the aff is independently bad, it is an independent reason to reject the aff, regardless of what benefits renewables or anything else supposedly good the aff advocates for. Discourse spills over to all decision-making in society, the 1AC plan is only relevant to this one hyper-specific policy, thus neg discourse is key.
14 -Doty ‘97: Roxanne Lynn Doty, assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Arizona State University, Imperial Encounters, 1997, p. 169-171
15 -This study begins with the premise that representation is an inherent and important aspect of global political life and therefore a critical and legitimate area of inquiry. International relations are inextricably bound up with discursive practices-that put into circulation representations that are taken as "truth." The goal-of-analyzing these practices is not to reveal essential truths that have been obscured, but rather to examine bow certain representations underlie the production of knowledge and, identities and how these representations make various courses of action possible. AS Said (1979: 21) notes, Mere is no such thing as a delivered presence, but there is a re-presence, or representation. Such an assertion does not deny the existence of the material world, but rather suggests that material objects and subjects are constituted as such within discourse. SO, for example, when U.S. troops march into Grenada, this is certainly "real: though the march of troops across a piece of geographic space is in itself singularly uninteresting and socially irrelevant outside of the representations that produce meaning. It is only when "American" is attached to the troops and "Grenada” to the geographic space that meaning is created. What the physical behavior itself is, though, is still far from certain until discursive practices constitute it as an "invasion; a 'show of force," "training exercise, “a "rescue, “and SO on. What is "really" going on in such a situation is inextricably linked to the discourse within which it is located. To attempt a neat separation between discursive and nondiscursive practices, understanding the former as purely linguistic, assumes a series of Dichotomies – thought/reality appearance essence, mind matter, word/world, subjective/objective - that a critical genealogy calls into Question. Against this, the perspective taken here affirms the material and performative character of discourse. 'In suggesting that global politics, and specifically the aspect that has to do with relations between the North and the South, is linked to representational practices 1 am suggesting that the issues and concerns that constitute these relations occur within a 'reality' whose content has for the most part been defined by the representational practices of the ‘first world'. Focusing on discursive practices enables one to examine how the processes that produce "truth" and "knowledge" work and how they are articulated with the exercise of political, military, and economic power.
16 -The plan was already proposed in the context of the advantages and discourse of the 1AC meaning that any hypothetical implementation would be influenced by that rhetoric – it cannot be undone… this means no access to a perm.
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -2017-02-16 05:47:02.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
ParentRound
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -32
Round
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -1
Team
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Sunset bhat Neg
Title
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -JF - Death Rhetoric K
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Stanford
Caselist.CitesClass[44]
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,1 @@
1 -2017-02-16 05:47:03.0
1 +2017-02-15 19:46:54.0
ParentRound
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,1 @@
1 -32
1 +30
Caselist.CitesClass[45]
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,1 @@
1 -2017-02-16 05:47:04.0
1 +2017-02-15 19:46:55.0
ParentRound
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,1 @@
1 -32
1 +30
Caselist.CitesClass[46]
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,1 @@
1 -2017-02-16 05:47:05.0
1 +2017-02-15 19:46:58.0
ParentRound
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,1 @@
1 -32
1 +30
Caselist.CitesClass[47]
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,1 @@
1 -2017-02-16 05:47:06.0
1 +2017-02-15 19:46:59.0
ParentRound
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,1 @@
1 -32
1 +30
Caselist.CitesClass[48]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,38 +1,0 @@
1 -First is Framing
2 -The role of the judge is to be a critical analyst testing whether the underlying assumptions of the AFF are valid. This is a question of the whether the AFF scholarship is good – not the passage of the plan.
3 -First, the aff advocacy takes the wrong approach – our role as intellectuals is not to offer prescriptive solutions, rather it is to offer analyses that expose harmful powers and expose them to light, this is a pre-req to policy making
4 -Jones 99 ~Richard Wyn Jones, Professor International Politics @ Aberystwyth University, '99 (Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory, p. 155-163)~
5 -The central political task of the intellectuals is to aid in the construction of a
6 -AND
7 -as both an inspiration and a challenge to critical security studies.
8 -
9 -
10 -Second, the knowledge claims of the AC are the jumping off point for the debate – our framework provides a more reasonable neg burden. When a student turns in an F paper, no teacher has an obligation to write an entirely new paper to show it was bad – pointing out major academic deficiencies would justify failing the paper – the ballot asks who did the better debating, so if their analysis is wrong, they haven't.
11 -
12 -
13 -Second is the Substance
14 -These environmental justice movements only re-entrench neoliberalism because of the interests for transnational capital and therefore causes more structural violence
15 -Cleere 16 (Cleere, Rickie. "Environmental Racism and the Movement for Black Lives: Grassroots Power in the 21st Century." Pomona College, 2016. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1153andcontext=pomona_theses.)
16 -Opal Tometi, BLM co-founder, has said that environmental issues are "
17 -AND
18 -justice movements. CX is binding and this a direct link to neoliberalism.
19 -
20 -And, this turns case because the neoliberal violence of the state further entrenches violence through co-optation and causes a struggle for black communities on a global scale
21 -Cleere 16 (Cleere, Rickie. "Environmental Racism and the Movement for Black Lives: Grassroots Power in the 21st Century." Pomona College, 2016. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1153andcontext=pomona_theses.)
22 -Through my research and investigation I have come to the conclusion that environmental justice movement
23 -AND
24 -doing something to contribute to a new era of revolutionary struggle.
25 -
26 -
27 -And, Cap causes extinction and endless structural violence – it is a try or die for the alt.
28 -Farbod 15 ( Faramarz Farbod , PhD Candidate @ Rutgers, Prof @ Moravian College, Monthly Review, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/farbod020615.html, 6-2)
29 -Global capitalism is the 800-pound gorilla. The twin ecological and economic crises
30 -AND
31 -and social systems will soon reach a point of no return.
32 -
33 -
34 -The debate is about starting points - the AFF begins with prohibiting nuclear power which puts the cart before the horse. The alternative is a cultural, anti-neoliberal critique to expand our understanding of state violence which is a necessary pre requisite and this means the neolib is not inevitable.
35 -Cleere 16 (Cleere, Rickie. "Environmental Racism and the Movement for Black Lives: Grassroots Power in the 21st Century." Pomona College, 2016. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1153andcontext=pomona_theses.)
36 -I was first introduced to the concept of environmental racism in college courses, but
37 -AND
38 -many lives as possible must challenge the root of the problem: neoliberalism.
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -2017-03-04 22:48:24.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Arjun Tambe
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Lake Highland
ParentRound
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -34
Round
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -1
Team
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Sunset bhat Neg
Title
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -SO - Neoliberalism K
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Greenhill
Caselist.CitesClass[49]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,18 +1,0 @@
1 -First is Framing
2 -The role of the judge is to be a critical analyst testing whether the underlying assumptions of the AFF are valid. This is a question of the whether the AFF scholarship is good – not the passage of the plan.
3 -First, the aff advocacy takes the wrong approach – our role as intellectuals is not to offer prescriptive solutions, rather it is to offer analyses that expose harmful powers and expose them to light, this is a pre-req to policy making
4 -Jones ‘99: Richard Wyn Jones, Professor International Politics @ Aberystwyth University, ‘99 (Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory, p. 155-163)
5 -The central political task of the intellectuals is to aid in the construction of a counterhegemony and thus undermine the prevailing patterns of discourse and interaction that make up the currently dominant hegemony. This task is accomplished through educational activity, because, as Gramsci argues, “every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350). Discussing the relationship of the “philosophy of praxis” to political practice, Gramsci claims: It the theory does not tend to leave the “simple” in their primitive philosophy of common sense, but rather to lead them to a higher conception of life. If it affirms the need for contact between intellectuals and “simple” it is not in order to restrict scientific activity and preserve unity at the low level of the masses, but precisely in order to construct an intellectual-moral bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small intellectual groups. (Gramsci 1971: 332-333). According to Gramsci, this attempt to construct an alternative “intellectual-moral bloc” should take place under the auspices of the Communist Party – a body he described as the “modern prince.” Just as Niccolo Machiavelli hoped to see a prince unite Italy, rid the country of foreign barbarians, and create a virtu-ous state, Gramsci believed that the modern price could lead the working class on its journey toward its revolutionary destiny of an emancipated society (Gramsci 1971: 125-205). Gramsci’s relative optimism about the possibility of progressive theorists playing a constructive role in emancipatory political practice was predicated on his belief in the existence of a universal class (a class whose emancipation would inevitably presage the emancipation of humanity itself) with revolutionary potential. It was a gradual loss of faith in this axiom that led Horkheimer and Adorno to their extremely pessimistic prognosis about the possibilities of progressive social change. But does a loss of faith in the revolutionary vocation of the proletariat necessarily lead to the kind of quietism ultimately embraced by the first generation of the Frankfurt School? The conflict that erupted in the 1960s between them and their more radical students suggests not. Indeed, contemporary critical theorists claim that the deprivileging of the role of the proletariat in the struggle for emancipation is actually a positive move. Class remains a very important axis of domination in society, but it is not the only such axis (Fraser 1995). Nor is it valid to reduce all other forms of domination – for example, in the case of gender – to class relations, as orthodox Marxists tend to do. To recognize these points is not only a first step toward the development of an analysis of forms of exploitation and exclusion within society that is more attuned to social reality; it is also a realization that there are other forms of emancipatory politics than those associated with class conflict.1 This in turn suggests new possibilities and problems for emancipatory theory. Furthermore, the abandonment of faith in revolutionary parties is also a positive development. The history of the European left during the twentieth century provides myriad examples of the ways in which the fetishization of party organizations has led to bureaucratic immobility and the confusion of means with ends (see, for example, Salvadori 1990). The failure of the Bolshevik experiment illustrates how disciplined, vanguard parties are an ideal vehicle for totalitarian domination (Serge 1984). Faith in the “infallible party” has obviously been the source of strength and comfort to many in this period and, as the experience of the southern Wales coalfield demonstrates, has inspired brave and progressive behavior (see, for example, the account of support for the Spanish Republic in Francis 1984). But such parties have so often been the enemies of emancipation that they should be treated with the utmost caution. Parties are necessary, but their fetishization is potentially disastrous. History furnishes examples of progressive developments that have been positively influenced by organic intellectuals operating outside the bounds of a particular party structure (G. Williams 1984). Some of these developments have occurred in the particularly intractable realm of security. These examples may be considered as “resources of hope” for critical security studies (R. Williams 1989). They illustrate that ideas are important or, more correctly, that change is the product of the dialectical interaction of ideas and material reality. One clear security-related example of the role of critical thinking and critical thinkers in aiding and abetting progressive social change is the experience of the peace movement of the 1980s. At that time the ideas of dissident defense intellectuals (the “alternative defense” school) encouraged and drew strength from peace activism. Together they had an effect not only on short-term policy but on the dominant discourses of strategy and security, a far more important result in the long run. The synergy between critical security intellectuals and critical social movements and the potential influence of both working in tandem can be witnessed particularly clearly in the fate of common security. As Thomas Risse-Kappen points out, the term “common security” originated in the contribution of peace researchers to the German security debate of the 1970s (Risse-Kappen 1994: 186ff.); it was subsequently popularized by the Palme Commission report (Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues 1982). Initially, mainstream defense intellectuals dismissed the concept as hopelessly idealistic; it certainly had no place in their allegedly hardheaded and realist view of the world. However, notions of common security were taken up by a number of different intellectuals communities, including the liberal arms control community in the United States, Western European peace researchers, security specialists in the center-left political parties of Western Europe, and Soviet “institutchiks” – members of the influential policy institutes in the Soviet Union such as the United States of America and Canada Institute (Landau 1996: 52-54; Risse-Kappen 1994: 196-200; Kaldor 1995; Spencer 1995). These communities were subsequently able to take advantage of public pressure exerted through social movements in order to gain broader acceptance for common security. In Germany, for example, “in response to social movement pressure, German social organizations such as churches and trade unions quickly supported the ideas promoted by peace researchers and the SPD” (Risse-Kappen 1994: 207). Similar pressures even had an effect on the Reagan administration. As Risse-Kappen notes: When the Reagan administration brought hard-liners into power, the US arms control community was removed from policy influence. It was the American peace movement and what became known as the “freeze campaign” that revived the arms control process together with pressure from the European allies. (Risse-Kappen 1994: 205; also Cortright 1993: 90-110). Although it would be difficult to sustain a claim that the combination of critical movements and intellectuals persuaded the Reagan government to adopt the rhetoric and substance of common security in its entirety, it is clear that it did at least have a substantial impact on ameliorating U.S. behavior. The most dramatic and certainly the most unexpected impact of alternative defense ideas was felt in the Soviet Union. Through various East-West links, which included arms control institutions, Pugwash conferences, interparty contacts, and even direct personal links, a coterie of Soviet policy analysts and advisers were drawn toward common security and such attendant notions as “nonoffensive defense” (these links are detailed in Evangelista 1995; Kaldor 1995; Checkel 1993; Risse-Kappen 1994; Landau 1996 and Spencer 1995 concentrate on the role of the Pugwash conferences). This group, including Palme Commission member Georgii Arbatov, Pugwash attendee Andrei Kokoshin , and Sergei Karaganov, a senior adviser who was in regular contact with the Western peace researchers Anders Boserup and Lutz Unterseher (Risse-Kappen 1994: 203), then influenced Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s subsequent championing of common security may be attributed to several factors. It is clear, for example, that new Soviet leadership had a strong interest in alleviating tensions in East-West relations in order to facilitate much-needed domestic reforms (“the interaction of ideas and material reality”). But what is significant is that the Soviets’ commitment to common security led to significant changes in force sizes and postures. These in turn aided in the winding down of the Cold War, the end of Soviet domination over Eastern Europe, and even the collapse of Russian control over much of the territory of the former Soviet Union. At the present time, in marked contrast to the situation in the early 1980s, common security is part of the common sense of security discourse. As MccGwire points out, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (a common defense pact) is using the rhetoric of common security in order to justify its expansion into Eastern Europe (MccGwire 1997). This points to an interesting and potentially important aspect of the impact of ideas on politics. As concepts such as common security, and collective security before it (Claude 1984: 223-260), are adopted by governments and military services, they inevitably become somewhat debased. The hope is that enough of the residual meaning can survive to shift the parameters of the debate in a potentially progressive direction. Moreover, the adoption of the concept of common security by official circles provides critics with a useful tool for (immanently) critiquing aspects of security policy (as MccGwire 1997 demonsrates in relation to NATO expansion). The example of common security is highly instructive. First, it indicates that critical intellectuals can be politically engaged and play a role – a significant one at that – in making the world a better and safer place. Second, it points to potential future addressees for critical international theory in general, and critical security studies in particular. Third, it also underlines the role of ideas in the evolution in society. CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES AND THE THEORY-PRACTICE NEXUS Although most proponents of critical security studies reject aspects of Gramsci’s theory of organic intellectuals, in particular his exclusive concentration on class and his emphasis on the guiding role of the party, the desire for engagement and relevance must remain at the heart of their project. The example of the peace movement suggests that critical theorists can still play the role of organic intellectuals and that this organic relationship need not confine itself to a single class; it can involve alignment with different coalitions of social movements that campaign on an issue or a series of issues pertinent to the struggle for emancipation (Shaw 1994b; R. Walker 1994). Edward Said captures this broader orientation when he suggests that critical intellectuals “are always tied to and ought to remain an organic part of an ongoing experience in society: of the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless” (Said 1994: 84). In the specific case of critical security studies, this means placing the experience of those men and women and communities for whom the present world order is a cause of insecurity rather than security at the center of the agenda and making suffering humanity rather than raison d’etat the prism through which problems are viewed. Here the project stands full-square within the critical theory tradition. If “all theory is for someone and for some purpose,” then critical security studies is for “the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless,” and its purpose is their emancipation. The theoretical implications of this orientation have already been discussed in the previous chapters. They involve a fundamental reconceptualization of security with a shift in referent object and a broadening of the range of issues considered as a legitimate part of the discourse. They also involve a reconceptualization of strategy within this expanded notion of security. But the question remains at the conceptual level of how these alternative types of theorizing – even if they are self-consciously aligned to the practices of critical or new social movements, such as peace activism, the struggle for human rights, and the survival of minority cultures – can become “a force for the direction of action.” Again, Gramsci’s work is insightful. In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci advances a sophisticated analysis of how dominant discourses play a vital role in upholding particular political and economic orders, or, in Gramsci’s terminology, “historic blocs” (Gramsci 1971: 323-377). Gramsci adopted Machiavelli’s view of power as a centaur, ahlf man, half beast: a mixture of consent and coercion. Consent is produced and reproduced by a ruling hegemony that holds sway through civil society and takes on the status of common sense; it becomes subconsciously accepted and even regarded as beyond question. Obviously, for Gramsci, there is nothing immutable about the values that permeate society; they can and do change. In the social realm, ideas and institutions that were once seen as natural and beyond question (i.e., commonsensical) in the West, such as feudalism and slavery, are now seen as anachronistic, unjust, and unacceptable. In Marx’s well-worn phrase, “All that is solid melts into the air.” Gramsci’s intention is to harness this potential for change and ensure that it moves in the direction of emancipation. To do this he suggests a strategy of a “war of position” (Gramsci 1971: 229-239). Gramsci argues that in states with developed civil societies, such as those in Western liberal democracies, any successful attempt at progressive social change requires a slow, incremental, even molecular, struggle to break down the prevailing hegemony and construct an alternative counterhegemony to take its place. Organic intellectuals have a crucial role to play in this process by helping to undermine the “natural,” “commonsense,” internalized nature of the status quo. This in turn helps create political space within which alternative conceptions of politics can be developed and new historic blocs created. I contend that Gramsci’s strategy of a war of position suggests an appropriate model for proponents of critical security studies to adopt in relating their theorizing to political practice. THE TASKS OF CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES If the project of critical security studies is conceived in terms of war of position, then the main task of those intellectuals who align themselves with the enterprise is to attempt to undermine the prevailing hegemonic security discourse. This may be accomplished by utilizing specialist information and expertise to engage in an immanent critique of the prevailing security regimes, that is, comparing the justifications of those regimes with actual outcomes. When this is attempted in the security field, the prevailing structures and regimes are found to fail grievously on their own terms. Such an approach also involves challenging the pronouncements of those intellectuals, traditional or organic, whose views serve to legitimate, and hence reproduce, the prevailing world order. This challenge entails teasing out the often subconscious and certainly unexamined assumptions that underlie their arguments while drawing attention to the normative viewpoints that are smuggled into mainstream thinking about security behind its positivist façade. In this sense, proponents of critical security studies approximate to Foucault’s notion of “specific intellectuals” who use their expert knowledge to challenge the prevailing “regime of truth” (Foucault 1980: 132). However, critical theorists might wish to reformulate this sentiment along more familiar Quaker lines of “speaking truth to power” (this sentiment is also central to Said 1994) or even along the eisteddfod lines of speaking “truth against the world.” Of course, traditional strategists can, and indeed do, sometimes claim a similar role. Colin S. Gray, for example, states that “strategists must be prepared to ‘speak truth to power’” (Gray 1982a: 193). But the difference between Gray and proponents of critical security studies is that, whereas the former seeks to influence policymakers in particular directions without questioning the basis of their power, the latter aim at a thoroughgoing critique of all that traditional security studies has taken for granted. Furthermore, critical theorists base their critique on the presupposition, elegantly stated by Adorno, that “the need to lend suffering a voice is the precondition of all truth” (cited in Jameson 1990: 66). The aim of critical security studies in attempting to undermine the prevailing orthodoxy is ultimately educational. As Gramsci notes, “every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350; see also the discussion of critical pedagogy in Neufeld 1995: 116-121). Thus, by criticizing the hegemonic discourse and advancing alternative conceptions of security based on different understandings of human potentialities, the approach is simultaneously playing apart in eroding the legitimacy of the ruling historic bloc and contributing to the development of a counterhegemonic position. There are a number of avenues of avenues open to critical security specialists in pursuing this educational strategy. As teachers, they can try to foster and encourage skepticism toward accepted wisdom and open minds to other possibilities. They can also take advantage of the seemingly unquenchable thirst of the media for instant pundistry to forward alternative views onto a broader stage. Nancy Fraser argues: “As teachers, we try to foster an emergent pedagogical counterculture …. As critical public intellectuals we try to inject our perspectives into whatever cultural or political public spheres we have access to” (Fraser 1989: 11). Perhaps significantly, support for this type of emancipatory strategy can even be found in the work of the ultrapessimistic Adorno, who argues: In the history of civilization there have been not a few instances when delusions were healed not by focused propaganda, but, in the final analysis, because scholars, with their unobtrusive yet insistent work habits, studied what lay at the root of the delusion. (cited in Kellner 1992: vii) Such “unobtrusive yet insistent work” does not in itself create the social change to which Adorno alludes. The conceptual and the practical dangers of collapsing practice into theory must be guarded against. Rather, through their educational activities, proponent of critical security studies should aim to provide support for those social movements that promote emancipatory social change. By providing a critique of the prevailing order and legitimating alternative views, critical theorists can perform a valuable role in supporting the struggles of social movements. That said, the role of theorists is not to direct and instruct those movements with which they are aligned; instead, the relationship is reciprocal. The experience of the European, North American, and Antipodean peace movements of the 1980s shows how influential social movements can become when their efforts are harnessed to the intellectual and educational activity of critical thinkers. For example, in his account of New Zealand’s antinuclear stance in the 1980s, Michael C. Pugh cites the importance of the visits of critical intellectuals such as Helen Caldicott and Richard Falk in changing the country’s political climate and encouraging the growth of the antinuclear movement (Pugh 1989: 108; see also COrtright 1993: 5-13). In the 1980s peace movements and critical intellectuals interested in issues of security and strategy drew strength and succor from each other’s efforts. If such critical social movements do not exist, then this creates obvious difficulties for the critical theorist. But even under these circumstances, the theorist need not abandon all hope of an eventual orientation toward practice. Once again, the peace movement of the 1980s provides evidence of the possibilities. At that time, the movement benefited from the intellectual work undertaken in the lean years of the peace movement in the late 1970s. Some of the theories and concepts developed then, such as common security and nonoffensive defense, were eventually taken up even in the Kremlin and played a significant role in defusing the second Cold War. Those ideas developed in the 1970s can be seen in Adornian terms of the a “message in a bottle,” but in this case, contra Adorno’s expectations, they were picked up and used to support a program of emancipatory political practice. Obviously, one would be naïve to understate the difficulties facing those attempting to develop alternative critical approaches within academia. Some of these problems have been alluded to already and involve the structural constraints of academic life itself. Said argues that many problems are caused by what he describes as the growing “professionalisation” of academic life (Said 1994: 49-62). Academics are now so constrained by the requirements of job security and marketability that they are extremely risk-averse. It pays – in all senses – to stick with the crowd and avoid the exposed limb by following the prevalent disciplinary preoccupations, publish in certain prescribed journals, and so on. The result is the navel gazing so prevalent in the study of international relations and the seeming inability of security specialists to deal with the changes brought about by the end of the Cold War (Kristensen 1997 highlights the search of U.S. nuclear planners for “new targets for old weapons”). And, of course, the pressures for conformism are heightened in the field of security studies when governments have a very real interest in marginalizing dissent. Nevertheless, opportunities for critical thinking do exist, and this thinking can connect with the practices of social movements and become a “force for the direction of action.” The experience of the 1980s, when, in the depths of the second Cold War, critical thinkers risked demonization and in some countries far worse in order to challenge received wisdom, thus arguably playing a crucial role in the very survival of the human race, should act as both an inspiration and a challenge to critical security studies.
6 -
7 -Second, the knowledge claims of the AC are the jumping off point for the debate – our framework provides a more reasonable neg burden. When a student turns in an F paper, no teacher has an obligation to write an entirely new paper to show it was bad – pointing out major academic deficiencies would justify failing the paper – the ballot asks who did the better debating, so if their analysis is wrong, they haven’t.
8 -
9 -Second is the Substance
10 -The aff’s use of civil suits focuses on punishing individual perpetrators of violence – this obscures the endemic violence of police forces
11 -Feldman 15 (Leonard Feldman, Hunter College, CUNY) “Police Violence and the Legal Temporalities of Immunity” LADI
12 -On the same day the Department of Justice declined to prosecute Ferguson Missouri Officer Darren Wilson for civil rights violations in the shooting death of Michael Brown, it issued a scathing report as part of a “Pattern and Practice” investigation of the entire police force. Concerning the former—the decision not to prosecute—while this paper has focused on the legal grey hole of civil litigation for civil rights violations, it is possible to detect similar forms of legal immunity in the high thresholds for prosecution established by 18 U.S.C. § 242. The legal reasoning overlaps 25 with that in civil litigation because in the criminal cases the courts use the same standard of “objective reasonableness” developed in the civil cases (Graham, Garner, and Scott) to establish that a rights violation occurred. While there is no qualified immunity defense (according to the Supreme Court in Pearson) there is a higher willfulness standard (and “specific intent” requirement) for proving a violation that similarly works to shield police.55 (Campaign Zero, discussed below, recommends eliminating the willfulness standard for Federal Civil Rights prosecutions of police officers.56) Perhaps the Court felt less compelled to erect barriers to criminal prosecutions (as opposed to civil litigation) since it assumed that federal prosecutors’ discretion would accomplish the very same objective. Concerning the latter—the Department of Justice’s report on the entire police force of Ferguson, as well as the complicity of judges and city officials—it offers the promise of constraining police use of force by using the threat of litigation to address broader and deeper policies and practices. As Coates argues, “the focus on the deeds of alleged individual perpetrators, on perceived bad actors, obscures the broad systemic corruption which is really at the root.”57 Similarly, Madar writes, “far more useful are the DOJ Civil Rights Division’s root-and-branch interventions into violently dysfunctional police forces, triggered by ‘patterns and practices’ of systematic rights violations rather than any one particular incident.”58 Moving beyond both law and sovereignty narrowly construed, enables attention to what Harmon describes as the “problem of regulation” and the role of “other institutions and sources of law in regulating the police.”59 As Harmon shows, police use of force is embedded in a dense but also permissive regulatory environment running the gamut from administrative rules to employment and collective 26 bargaining law to state level licensing regulations. Consent decrees, Memoranda of Understanding and Collaborative Agreements all emerge out of or in the shadow of Department of Justice “pattern or practice” investigations, aiming to change policies and practices at the department level. Furthermore, even tools such as quantitative benchmarking can be deployed in the service of structural reform: A DOJ study cited by Rushin of the Washington D.C. police force contrasted what they discovered to be 15 rate of excessive force incidents as compared to a benchmark “‘well-managed and supervised police department’ that should only expect about 1 or 2 percent of all incidents to involve excessive use of force.”60 And in Cincinnati, Shatmeier describes successful police department reform in the wake of a Department of Justice “pattern or practice” investigation through consent agreements that relied on “experimentalist regulation.”61
13 -Using the law to solve the law is contradictory. The aff assumes the police violence can be addressed by bringing it under the control of law – in fact, the law is the apparatus legitimating police violence. Civil suits only identify “operational errors” committed by the police, fail to convict police, and excuse and reinforce the violence of the policing apparatus itself.
14 -Simon Behrman 11 (Simon Behrman, ) Police killings and the law – International Socialism, 1-4-2011 LADI
15 -Ever since the late 1970s some on the left have declared that Britain is either in or on the cusp of a police state.5 Yet even after the miners’ strike, various pieces of draconian anti-terrorist legislation and other attacks on civil liberties, the British state remains very much a capitalist democracy. Nevertheless, during this period the use of firearms has become ever more widespread in the police force. It was little noticed, for example, that during the 1990s police forces up and down the country began regularly deploying Armed Response Vehicles (ARV), equipped with a huge stock of firepower.6 The impetus for this began when the IRA bombing campaign came to the mainland. Indeed, the weaponry introduced including live firearms, plastic bullets and CS gas were all road-tested first in Northern Ireland. The point is that just as these developments in police practice have outlived the Irish “emergency”, so too a state of emergency appears to be becoming a more permanent feature of policing policy which has in turn led to a justification for retaining and expanding the right of the police to use lethal force. Examples where “unprecedented” circumstances have been claimed as justification for the use of police-state tactics are mass detentions of anti-capitalist protesters and the threat of suicide bombers. It is very likely that as social instability caused by the economic crisis develops this too will be claimed as justification for the continued use of “emergency” powers. Of course, Marx and Engels argued that capitalist democracy was a major advance over feudalism and offered to the working class a far better terrain on which to fight than other, more authoritarian, forms of capitalist rule. Yet throughout his writings, from “On the Jewish Question” in 1843 right through to the Critique of the Gotha Programme over 30 years later, Marx highlighted two crucial aspects of capitalist democracy. First, democracy and equality in the political sphere mask the massive inequalities that exist in the economic domain where capital operates a dictatorship over labour. Second, as Lenin put it, capitalist democracy provided “the best possible political shell of capitalism”.7 Because the working class poses such a potentially powerful threat to the dictatorship of capital, relying on rule by consent rather than by violence is always the preferred tactic of bourgeois rule. But, and this is the key point, the monopoly on the use of violence that the dictatorship of capital exercises through its state means that killings by the police, along with other forms of state terror, can be accommodated without violating the norms of capitalist democracy. This is achieved via the rule of law, specifically the legal form that, as the Soviet jurist Evgeny Pashukanis argued, shares the same structure as the commodity form. My argument here is that certain police-state tactics such as extra-judicial killings have become possible without the loss of legitimacy and rule by consent conferred by governing under the rule of law. Instead law itself has become a perfect vehicle for such tactics. In short, police violence must be understood not as a departure from capitalist democracy but as a function of it. From policing by terror to policing by consent In spite of the shocking nature of recent killings by the police, it is important to recognise that throughout their history the police have frequently used extreme violence against suspects, bystanders, demonstrators and workers on strike. The violence deployed by the modern police is in fact far less than that of their predecessors of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Douglas Hay has described how the British ruling class of that period imposed their authority through state terror.8 From 1688 until 1820 the death penalty was extended from about 50 offences to over 200, most involving crimes against property.9 Executions were bloody public spectacles intended to instil fear into the lower classes. An additional element of this strategy involved armed members of the local gentry, the yeomanry and special constables. If those ad hoc forces failed to keep order they were reinforced by the deployment of the military around the country. This became increasingly necessary with the intensification of riots in the countryside as the effects of the birth of modern capitalism began to bite. Following in the wake of this brute force, judges would be sent into the affected areas to dispense summary justice. The causes of the riots and the need for the ruling class to impose terror on the populace were rooted in a massive transformation of economic relations during the 18th century. This represented a concerted shift from the remnants of feudalism towards capitalism. Brutal methods were necessary for the ruling class during a period that saw a massive theft from the poor in a process described by Marx as the “primitive accumulation of capital”.10 The new bourgeoisie seized common lands through successive Enclosure Acts, thus impoverishing and starving the local peasantry who relied on these to support and feed themselves. Enclosure had two effects—forcing the rural poor to resort to poaching and scavenging on the estates of the rich, and pushing increased numbers of them from the land into the cities to seek work. The uprooting of communities in the countryside and the chaos of expanding cities with a lack of housing and work for the new arrivals led to social instability fed by anger and desperation from those who had been dispossessed. This period of transition saw the ruling class deploy a combination of forms of rule inherited from the feudal period, and new forms that better suited a capitalist society. An inheritance from feudalism was the use of terror tempered by mercy. The huge increase in crimes punishable by the death penalty was in fact accompanied by a comparative reduction in its actual use. More often those sentenced to death were encouraged to seek clemency from either the king or the property owner against whom they had committed the offence. Assuming they demonstrated a suitable amount of humility, they would be shown mercy and their sentence commuted. Note that in this arrangement law and socio-economic relations appear in one and the same guise. The same person who held a higher social position to you could also at their discretion prosecute you. Following conviction they could accept or reduce the punishment. Sometimes the property owner would negotiate with the convict terms for doing work on their land in exchange for dropping the prosecution. In effect, this was not the rule of law but instead naked class power adorned with some of the rituals of law. In like manner, the application of physical force was not governed by law, but rather by expediency. Once a riot broke out the armed forces of the state were permitted to use whatever force was necessary to restore the king’s peace. This worked up to a point when dealing with the rural poor. For the landed gentry, the debilitating injuries and killing of the local peasants did not disturb their lives or livelihoods on their increasingly large estates. Moreover, the only weapon the peasantry could deploy against the force of the state was their own ability to organise and fight. But face to face against a much better armed and organised military force, they were invariably beaten. With the growth of the working class in the cities the balance of class forces changed. The urban working class living closer together in built up areas were better able to organise and defend themselves. At the 1819 “Peterloo” massacre in Manchester, for example, the crowd numbered possibly up to 150,000, larger than any riot or uprising since the English Revolution almost two centuries earlier. In addition, many of the protesters had been carrying out practice drills for weeks in advance. With just 1,000 troops and 400 constables, the authorities would only be able to break up the protest through the use of extreme violence, and so it was. Men, women and children were stampeded by horses, sabred and whipped relentlessly through the streets of Manchester. The attack that began shortly before 2pm lasted well into the evening, at the end of which at least 11 were dead and about 500 injured. Peterloo exposed the limits of the strategy of terror deployed against the working class. Such concentrated violence caused a major scandal that shocked even sections of the middle classes and the establishment. Moreover, the violence failed to subdue the emerging movement for political and civil rights. Instead it led to a growing number of demonstrations, riots and strikes culminating in the great Chartist movement for manhood suffrage. The Chartists were responsible for, among other things, organising in 1842 the first general strike in history. This new form of resistance was not as easy to deal with as a riot. After all one cannot literally beat a mass of workers back to work. Also, if too many are incapacitated by police and military violence, the capitalists will suffer in the immediate term through fewer workers being able to work. Indeed, the level of violence was far less than in previous uprisings such as Peterloo and at Merthyr in previous decades. The sentences handed out to Chartists were minimal compared with earlier reckonings by the ruling class. No one was sentenced to death and most convictions for rioting or other crimes were punished with terms of imprisonment of a few months up to a few years, although the leading agitators were treated more harshly, many of them sentenced to transportation or much longer jail terms. The fear of the power of the working class also led the government to concede a number of reforms such as the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, which led initially to lower food prices, and the Factory Act 1847 limiting working hours. This was in contrast to the pattern during the 18th century where the ruling class was able to steal wealth from the poor at an ever increasing rate. It was also during this period that the military began to be replaced by the police as the primary tool for enforcing public order. The Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 established the force in the capital. In response to the first Chartist agitation, the 1839 County Police Act was enacted allowing the formation of regional police forces. The fear of disorder from demobilised soldiers returning from the Crimean War led to the 1856 County and Borough Act which established police forces across the whole of the country. This period during the mid-19th century represents British capitalism maturing from the more brutalist primitive accumulation of capital into a settled capitalist democracy. Central to this process was the development of the rule of law as the primary method of enforcing order. Legally regulated state violence was replacing naked class terror. The police force was founded on the principle of “citizens in uniform”. In other words, they were bound by the same laws as anyone else. They were also made structurally independent from the control of either politicians or individual members of the ruling class. Thus they were also bound by law in a manner unlike that of the yeomanry or other military forces, whose authority came directly from the Crown and the socio-economic power exercised in localities by the landed gentry and aristocracy. The establishment of the police was part and parcel of a move away from a form of class rule which saw little separation between economic and juridical power. Within decades the state assumed a monopoly on the application of criminal law and, with the police, a monopoly over the use of violence. This accruing of power by the state at first alarmed sections of the ruling class, which is why many of them initially opposed the setting up of a police force. But it quickly became clear that the use of physical force by the capitalist state would not be deployed against property rights, but against labour and the poor. In his classic work on the birth of the prison, Michel Foucault shows convincingly how the move from the application of the power of the king to the power of law provided a more efficient and less risky form of social control. The messy system in force during the later feudal period could lead to: the fear of the uproar, shouting and cheering that the people usually indulge in, the fear that there would be disorder, violence, and outbursts against the parties, or even against the judges… Before the justice of the sovereign, all voices must be still.11 The final word uttered by an apparently neutral and rational law was far more effective in silencing the oppressed. The police became legitimised as “embodiments of impersonal, rational authority”, as opposed to the naked class power of the yeomanry.12 What Foucault glosses over is the fact that this change was a direct result of a set of new economic relationships. The feudal order rested on an ideology of a class born to rule; thus their authority and their right to dispense “justice” was unquestionable. The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, rule on the basis of a series of contractual relations. Economic exploitation is rooted in the payment of wages for labour power. This has the effect of normalising exploitative relations such as in the expression: “A fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.” Equally, the rule of law is predicated on notions of fairness, reasonableness and equivalence. Phrases such a “paying the price” for committing a crime, or “let the punishment fit the crime” illuminate this aspect of law. This is quite distinct from feudalism when punishment was a demonstration of the “majesty” and power of the monarch, the nobility or the church. The contractual nature specific to capitalist exploitation finds its equivalent in legal relations. Phil Cohen identifies the police as the first branch of the British state to develop an ideological as well as a purely repressive function…to protect the institutions of private property, and to enforce statutory norms of public order primarily designed to ensure the free circulation of commodities, including the commodity of labour power.13 At first the urban working class had to be disciplined into accepting these norms. Violence between police and local working class communities, defending what they considered as their own territory, was a common feature right up to World War One. But over time there was a “gradual ideological penetration of ‘The Law’ into the basic conditions of working class life”.14 Cohen explains this as a result of social changes in the composition of the working class. While there may be some truth in that, referring to the police as “The Law” also illustrates something else. Unlike their predecessors, the police were not just deployed to put down riots and other major disturbances, but also assigned to manage everyday order in the community. Criminologists sometimes describe this as a dual role involving “parking tickets and class repression”.15 As a result the law and “The Law” gradually came to be seen as indispensable to a well-ordered society, irrespective of class, politics or economics. In short, an ideology of “police fetishism” developed.16 I would argue that this is a direct result of two other fetishes closely linked together—that of law and commodities. Pashukanis In his 1924 book, Law and Marxism, Pashukanis developed what has become known as the “commodity form” theory of law. In it he sought to explain the legal form as one inherently tied to the commodity form. He begins his analysis using the same methodology as Marx does in Capital: “In as much as the wealth of capitalist society appears as ‘an immense collection of commodities’, so this society itself appears as an endless chain of legal relations”.17 What these two sets of relationships—commodity exchange and legal relations—have in common is the notion of the autonomous egoistic individual. When commodity owners go to market to engage in trade, they must each recognise in the others their exclusive right of ownership over their commodities; otherwise they cannot expect their own rights to be so recognised. Thus the basic principle of commodity exchange, the freedom of every seller freely to dispose of their property, gives rise to the concept of universal and equal rights, which is an ideological misrepresentation of capitalist relations as a whole, but one that accurately reflects the actual material conditions in which subjects under capitalism find themselves. The claim of one commodity owner on all others to recognise his own rights as such creates a subjective, and thus seemingly natural, desire to recognise those same rights in others. From this starting point Pashukanis is able to make the following analogy with law: “The legal subject as representative and addressee of every possible claim, the succession of subjects linked together by claims on each other, is the fundamental legal fabric which corresponds to the economic fabric”.18 Thus just as we have the market in which every buyer and seller comes metaphorically brandishing their commodities to exchange, so the law is a regulated market of legal subjects haggling over their respective bundles of rights. The rule of capital is thus also necessarily the rule of law. In “On the Jewish Question” Marx argued that the bourgeoisie emancipated the state from economics and religion by placing it (the state) above society, and thus giving it the appearance of being independent and above the classes.19 As Pashukanis expresses it: By appearing as a guarantor, authority becomes social and public, an authority representing the impersonal interest of the system… Thus there arises, besides direct unmediated class rule, indirect reflected rule in the shape of official state power as a distinct authority, detached from society.20 This provides a theoretical underpinning for the transition from naked class rule to rule by law that I discussed earlier. Commodities and legal relations did, of course, exist in many pre-capitalist societies. But in the same way that a society where free alienation of property raises the commodity to its highest and most generalised level, where exploitation becomes mediated via the legal contract, ie where the exploited worker “figures as a legal subject disposing of his labour power as a commodity”, so also legal relations reach their highest form under conditions of generalised commodity exchange: “The legal form attains universal significance, legal ideology becomes the ideology par excellence, and defending the class interest of the exploiters appears with ever increasing success as the defence of the abstract principle of legal subjectivity”.21 The crucial import of Pashukanis’s analysis is that he is able to reveal how the specific form of social regulation under capitalism, that is rights-based law, is able successfully to transform the subjective needs of the ruling class into an objective set of relationships for society as a whole, by means of which the coercive role of law is then in turn subjectivised (internalised) by the rest of us. The dispersal of responsibilities At first blush it may seem counter-intuitive to apply a theory of law that identifies the logic of equivalence and autonomous egoistic individualism to the application of lethal force by the state against unarmed individuals. However, if we take at look at how the police are able to justify their actions in law, the relevance of Pashukanis will become apparent. There was no disputing the fact that de Menezes was neither armed when he was shot, nor was he a terrorist. How could this wilful and unnecessary taking of life not result in any legal sanction? Crucially, the failure to bring any individual or group of police officers to justice over the de Menezes killing was a result of the dispersal of responsibilities created by law.22 This process rests upon the principle of the autonomous egoistic individual who functions as the commodity owner and legal subject par excellence. In much the same way that the market economy appears as an impersonal and naturalistic process involving an endless chain of buyers and sellers, so law functions in a similar way as each individual stands in relation to all others owing certain duties and possessing certain rights. One of the aspects of the operation which was highlighted in the inquest into de Menezes’s death was the police’s bronze, silver, gold structure used for firearms, and other emergency operations. This structure was developed by the Metropolitan Police in order to develop clear command, following the, from their point of view, catastrophic failure of organisation during the Broadwater Farm riots in 1985.23 One aspect of this system highlighted in the de Menezes inquest was that it removed many crucial strategic and tactical decisions from the officers on the ground and placed them instead in the hands of commanding officers situated miles away in a room in New Scotland Yard. This led to several crucial mistakes in the operation that meant that police officers on the ground missed several opportunities safely to stop de Menezes before he entered the Tube. But it also reinforced the dispersal of responsibilities in such a way that none of the commanding officers, nor any of the officers on the ground could be held criminally liable for the decisions made. This is one reason why the Metropolitan Police as a corporate entity could be successfully prosecuted under health and safety legislation, but that no individual officer was answerable in law for the mistakes made and the decisions taken. A similar conclusion was reached in the Police Ombudsman’s report into the 2003 killing of Neil McConville, a teenage joy-rider in Northern Ireland.24 According to the Ombudsman, the failure to appoint a Bronze Commander in charge on the ground was a critical factor leading to the death of McConville. Thus the officers who carried out the operation were exonerated from blame. On the other hand the senior officers who held the positions of Silver and Gold Commander respectively were merely reprimanded for bad management. Because they were not on the ground and did not fire any shots they were not culpable either. Several senior police officers testified during the de Menezes inquest that one of the concerns the Metropolitan Police had when developing the Kratos policy was that the armed police officer on the ground would be very hesitant in executing a suspect without warning without legal safeguards to protect themselves. During Kratos training members of the specialist firearms unit SO19, who would be assigned to carry out the executions, expressed fears that they would be held both morally and legally responsible, particularly should anything go wrong. It was for this reason that the role of the Designated Senior Officer (DSO) was created within the Kratos policy. The idea was that in a situation where police officers found themselves confronted by a suspected suicide bomber, the DSO, situated in New Scotland Yard, would be responsible for giving the order to shoot. This would take the pressure off the police officers who would actually have to carry out such an extreme and violent act. But surely this then places full legal responsibility on the DSO? Not so, according to the evidence presented to the de Menezes inquest. For the DSO, Commander Cressida Dick, did not give any such order; indeed, her last order to the SO19 officers before they descended into the Tube was ambiguous. The SO19 officers ended up using deliberately lethal force, due to what they claimed was a reasonable judgement based on de Menezes’s behaviour, and coupled with the reports they had received from surveillance officers, senior officers and the DSO during their briefings that morning and throughout the tracking of de Menezes. The responsibility for the killing was thus dispersed amongst the dozens of police officers involved in the operation. Not only does this dispersal of responsibilities create almost insurmountable problems in holding the police accountable, but it also reinforces the logic of capitalism in which bad things result from the market—unemployment, starvation, recessions etc—not because any individual capitalists are responsible but because that is just the way the system involving countless autonomous egoistic individuals operates. The Metropolitan Police declared eight months after the killing of de Menezes that Kratos remained “fit for purpose”; the Stockwell shooting had merely been a result of some operational errors.25 Equally, in the case of McConville, the Ombudsman’s recommendations stressed the importance of clear policies, training and command for operations involving potentially lethal force.26 The report reserved its concluding comment for criticising commanding officers for a lack of effective management.27 In both these cases the issue under consideration was not posed as one of an agent of the state walking up to a member of the public and, without warning, shooting them in the head, or one of a police officer using a semi-automatic rifle to deal with an alleged juvenile delinquent. Rather the issue was considered to be a lack of efficient organisation. It was to this logic of managing barbaric acts through law that Hannah Arendt was referring in her description of the “banality of evil”.28 The “reasonableness” of police killings Ever since the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE) the police have been recognised in law as possessing certain special powers, which the rest of us do not have, such as the right to stop and search and detain individuals. However, in terms of the use of force, in the eye of the law they remain neither more nor less than “citizens in uniform”. In other words legally they are to be held to account for taking another person’s life in much the same way as you or me. The law offers us two main defences for killing someone. The first is the common law of self-defence. The second is contained in Section 3 of the Criminal Law Act 1967, which states that “a person may use such force as is reasonable in the circumstances in the prevention of crime, or in effecting or assisting in the lawful arrest of offenders or suspected offenders or of persons unlawfully at large”. This obviously refers mainly to the police, but it also applies to any one of us confronted by someone committing a criminal act, eg a burglar in our home. The key term common to both this statutory provision and the defence of self-defence is “reasonableness”. In order to uphold a defence to a charge of murder or manslaughter, one needs to prove two things—that the force used was both necessary and proportionate. If someone attempts to grab my wallet, it will be necessary for me to use physical force to stop them. If someone merely threatens to steal my wallet tomorrow, it would not be necessary for me physically to attack or restrain them. Assuming that I am actually being mugged, the question then arises as to the level of force I can legitimately apply. If in this scenario I push the thief to the ground then that would probably be considered a proportionate degree of force. If I took out a knife and stabbed them in the chest, then that would almost certainly be considered disproportionate. However, if the thief produces a gun when robbing me, the use of a knife might be considered proportionate and legitimate. A key principle evident in the law here is that of balance and rational calculation. I may only do to you something that can be measured as equivalent to the danger posed by you. In each and every case where the police shoot a suspect dead, they always claim that they feared deadly and imminent danger from the victim. So the police officers who shot de Menezes “honestly believed” that he was an armed suicide bomber, and therefore shooting him in the head was a reasonable and proportionate response. In law, the fact that they were subsequently shown to be mistaken does not vitiate their claim as to what their subjective fear was at the time they shot him. It was on the same basis that the case against members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) charged with one of the shoot to kill incidents in 1982 was dismissed. The judge in that case, Lord Justice Gibson, argued that the police had reacted reasonably given the potential danger they faced from known members of the IRA. Indeed, notoriously, he went a step too far by commending the defendants for bringing the murdered IRA suspects to the “final court of justice”. Although, in an unprecedented move, he subsequently had to retract his remarks from the bench, the logic expressed fits perfectly the way in which the devaluation of the lives of suspects allows the police to justify the use of extreme violence against them. The jurisprudence has tended to judge what is reasonable from the subjective standpoint of the police officer who has applied lethal force.29 This then places a disproportionate emphasis on the testimony of the police officer concerned. Again Lord Justice Gibson makes the point crystal clear: The question whether there was the necessary criminal intention is not to be judged…by the standard of what one thinks one would have done or should have done had one been in that situation. The question is: has the Crown proved beyond any reasonable doubt what was the actual state of mind, belief and understanding of the accused police officers in the heat and anxiety of the moment, faced, as they understood it, with but a fleeting second to decide and to act…30 This justification was repeated in almost exactly the same terms more than two decades later to justify the murder of de Menezes morally and legally. When placed in the context of the potential threat from terrorists the criteria of what might be considered reasonable are widened considerably. Instead of the law acting as a restraint upon the police officer, the yardstick by which to measure the legitimate extent of lethal force applied by the police has instead been judged on the basis of the extent of the potential violence committed by the terrorist. The hyperbole that surrounds the “war on terror”, a war whose end cannot be envisaged in a world racked by imperialism, is largely responsible for investing in the concept of a reasonable use of force, a pre-emptive dimension based on quasi-apocalyptic expectations of what terrorists are capable of carrying out. An academic writing on the experience in Northern Ireland points out how the concept of proportionality became so fluid that it facilitated the use of lethal force by law enforcement agents for almost any crime even if it was only a vague notion of a terrorist crime… This has had the profound subsidiary effect that security forces were enabled to engage with supposed terrorists in situations that would enable them the full protec-tion of the law due to the elasticity and elusiveness of the concept of “reasonableness”. 31 It has sometimes been argued that the problem is simply one of English law being out of step with the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), which applies a more rigorous or objective test in judging the “honest belief” of the police officer.32 However, in a case from 2001 concerning yet another lethal shooting of an unarmed suspect by the police the same court held that “it is not for the court to substitute its own opinion of the situation for that of a police officer who was required to react in the heat of the moment”.33 As Clair de Than points out, this judgment has the effect of placing even greater emphasis on the subjective testimony of the police officer: “It does not have to be a reasonable mistake, merely an honest one”.34 The vague concepts of reasonableness and proportionality, which are integral to law, are given detail and weight by reference to the perceived enormity of the crime that may take place, in order to justify an extra-judicial policy of shoot to kill. In this way the context of what is considered reasonable is shifted towards more brutal policing methods. This paradigm shift, of which Kratos is a part, is born of an increased use of exceptional measures. This leads many to claim that what is needed is a return to a firmer rule of law in order to resist the tendency to resort to states of emergency to fight the “war on terror”. But this is a category mistake, for states of emergency are not departures from law, but are rooted within it. In a footnote, Pashukanis says that when it comes to times of heightened revolutionary struggle, we can observe how the official machinery of the bourgeois state apparatus retires into the background as compared with the volunteer corps of the fascists and others. This further substantiates the fact that, when the balance of society is upset, it seeks salvation not in the creation of a power standing above society, but in the maximal harnessing of all forces of the classes in conflict.35 This passage is problematic as it suggests that the ruling class can simply and consciously put aside the law for its own preservation. If this were so, then it would seem to negate his central point about law’s roots in the objective relations of capital, relations in which they themselves dominate. Mark Cowling identifies the problem as that of “the idea of equivalence and the idea of class terror coming into conflict with one another”.36 Pashukanis is right that at the most acute phases of class struggle, such as existed in Russia in 1917 or Italy a few years later, the ruling class does act in the way he describes. But in order to understand the ever closer and more permanent relationship between law and the state of exception, we must look beyond Pashukanis. What has become increasingly evident over the last century has been the fact that in most cases the ruling class is able to manage its way through crises not by abandoning law, but rather by extending its reach. The “state of exception” Giorgio Agamben argues that the “state of exception”, which has with increasing frequency been used to justify extreme departures from the liberal norms of the rule of law, is in fact a function of law itself.37 Here Agamben is drawing on the work of two critics of capitalist democracy; from the right Carl Schmitt who argued that the state of exception is the necessary foundation of sovereign power38 and from the left Walter Benjamin who posited that “’the state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule”.39 Indeed, as long ago as 1851 Marx identified the apparent anomaly of states of exception being written into law in his critique of the liberal-democratic French Constitution of November 1848.40 There are many problems in Agamben’s work, particularly his ahistorical attempt to explain the state of exception as a feature of all human civilisations stretching back to antiquity and beyond. Indeed, in this he departs from all his key influences—Schmitt, Benjamin, Arendt, Foucault—by ignoring the specificity of how power is exercised in modernity. Nonetheless, his work offers some very useful insights by developing the relationship between law and the state of exception that is merely hinted at in Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History”. In doing this Agamben provides a necessary corrective to the idealised celebration of the rule of law that exists amongst the liberal left and indeed among a significant portion of the Marxist left.41 It has become a feature of modern capitalist democracies to call in aid tactics which violate the norms of the rule of law, yet which are justified on the basis of defending the rule of law against existential threats, real or imagined. After almost a decade of the “war on terror” examples are familiar and numerous—Guantanamo Bay, extraordinary rendition, water-boarding, control orders, etc. This argument has, of course, also been used by the police when they claim that they are facing “unprecedented circumstances” which necessitate the deployment of more brutal tactics. The danger in this approach was recognised more than 30 years ago by the ECtHR, when the court ruled that there were limits to the use of national security in justifying extreme methods, even, or perhaps especially, legal ones: The Court, being aware of the danger such a law poses of undermining or even destroying democracy on the ground of defending it, affirms that the Contracting States may not, in the name of the struggle against terrorism, adopt whatever measures they deem appropriate.42 And, in words that brought a cheer from every civil libertarian, Lord Hoffman famously declared in a case which struck down New Labour’s policy of detention without trial of terrorist suspects that “the real threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of a people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these”.43 However, the decision of the House of Lords in that case was not that it was illegal for the government to detain without trial per se, but that the policy was discriminatory, as it did not apply to British citizens, thus breaching the principle of equivalence. The government responded with control orders, which to date stand in law. In mainstream discussions of the problem of the state of exception, it is presented as a contradiction which exposes the gap between the self-identity of liberal democratic societies and the abuses committed by certain governments or state agencies. For Agamben, on the other hand, the state of exception is in fact a latent yet integral function of sovereignty, embodied as much in capitalist democracy as in fascist and other authoritarian political systems. Agamben argues that the claim by the state of the need to protect itself, and wider society, against perceived threats requires it to regularly impose sanctions which fall outside the rule of law. The contradiction thus emerges in that the rule of law can only be protected by regularly going outside the rule of law. Agamben gives as an example the Nazi state, which throughout its existence did not abolish the liberal Weimar constitution, but merely suspended it at regular intervals.44 Thus, legally, the “lawlessness” of the Nazis was in fact rooted in the liberal constitutional Weimar Republic. And in a perverse piece of legal formality, just prior to being sent to the death camps German Jews were stripped of their citizenship, precisely so that they would not be covered by the normal legal rights of other citizens.45 In a like manner, although at a far lower level of barbarism, in Britian shoot to kill has evolved from an unofficial and ad hoc tactic into a policy of extra-judicial killing in the form of the Kratos policy. The ability of the police to act beyond the bounds of the rule of law has, paradoxically, become written into law. This creates a space around the suspected suicide bomber, where the norms of criminal law and police practice are suspended. Yet its status as an official policy, implemented without violating the norms of governmental procedure, grounds this extra-legal policy within the framework of the law. One police officer has attempted to justify Kratos on the basis that it authorises not shoot to kill but the right to take action which, “in order to save life, may have to take life”.46 Echoes here of the infamous comment made by a senior US Army officer during the Vietnam War: “It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.” This barbaric contradiction in terms recurs throughout the arguments used to justify draconian anti-terrorist measures. The rule of law must be suspended in order to preserve the rule of law. The situations in which the police adopt lethal force are often described as “unprecedented”, with suspects as “dangerous”, “desperate”, “won’t be taken alive”, etc. In striking the balance between the reasonable use of force and the perceived danger posed by the suspect, the mean point gets moved to an extremity. A senior member of the security forces explained how the language of necessity was used to justify lethal force in Northern Ireland: “Was it a decision to kill those people? I don’t think it would have been phrased like that. Somebody would have said, ‘How far do we go to remove this group of terrorists?’ and the answer would have been, ‘As far as necessary’.”47 Similar arguments were used by the Nazis and other totalitarian regimes in the cause of maintaining stability and the security of the state. Indeed, it was this logic that led Schmitt from a critical defender of the Weimar Republic into a supporter and theorist for the Nazis. In the conflict between human rights and security, the latter must always trump the former, for without security there cannot be a social framework strong enough to support human rights. This is but a concrete expression of Agamben’s point that It is as if the judicial order contained an essential fracture between the position of the norm and its application, which, in extreme situations, can be filled only by means of the state of exception, that is, by creating a zone in which application is suspended, but the law, as such, remains in force.48 Agamben allows us to grasp the interrelationship between law and the state of exception, and thus fill the gap left in Pashukanis’s formulation. In attempting to answer the question as to why the evolution of an official shoot to kill policy has met with relatively little outcry compared to the scandal that followed the killings by the RUC in the early 1980s, Agamben’s work illuminates the essential role of law in grounding and thus normalising exceptional and brutal police tactics. The retreat of the organised working class and the concomitant decay in politics have left a gap that has been occupied by law. Benjamin’s injunction that we confront “states of emergency” with a real state of emergency is a call to reject the confines of the rule of law when faced with state violence. The failure to do so leads one into accepting the legal form on which the legitimacy of state violence rests. This is precisely the mistake made by EP Thompson and his followers who argue that the rule of law is a “universal good” which supposedly transcends capitalism.49 A crucial aspect missing from Agamben’s analysis is an understanding of what grounds law and the state of exception, as well as what makes these concepts evolve over time. Instead he points to a highly obscure figure in early Roman law, homo sacer (sacred man), as a recurring figure in Western societies.50 The homo sacer refers to someone who “may be killed, but not sacrificed.” In other words, this person has no value—their life may be taken away without legal sanction. Thus, Agamben argues, the homo sacer is representative of those targeted by the law under a state of exception as being beyond the protection of the law. But Agamben is not able to explain why certain groups or individuals are capable of becoming homo sacer and others not. Indeed, he goes so far at one point as to suggest that today we may all be homines sacri.51 He appears to argue (Agamben is obscure at the best of times) that anyone who poses a threat to the state, or whom the state merely perceives as a threat is liable to become the homo sacer. If this is so it raises the question of why the working class as a whole or even significant sections of it have not been subjected to this process. The reason why this is so is because the always present, if hidden, power of the working class cannot be legislated or terrorised away. Working class organisation can be smashed, but the latent power of the working class is impossible to eliminate. To place any powerful group in society within the category of the homo sacer would fundamentally destabilise the rule of capital. Thus Nazi terror on the streets was necessary politically to break the power of the organised left and the trade unions before those sections of the working class could be made the homo sacer. Nonetheless, even under fascism capital cannot escape the logic of the legal form that, as Pashukanis convincingly argues, is the necessary guarantor of commodity exchange. Thus the fetish of legal formalities that pervaded Nazi rule is not the anomaly it at first appears. The racist content of Nazi law was, of course, qualitatively different than that which exists under capitalist democracy, and all the gains achieved by the working class such as collective bargaining rights were abolished. Yet the basic legal form remained because the economic base of capitalism remained. Not only did the Nazis keep to the legal niceties of the constitutional state, but the working class continued to sell their labour power on the basis of a contractual exchange with employers. For this reason when the demand for labour exceeded supply during the late 1930s, particularly in the construction industry, wages went up in some cases by 30 percent.52 So while the homo sacer is flawed as an analysis of the generalised form of capitalist rule, as a metaphor it does provide a very useful way of understanding how the police, in the example under discussion here, are able to kill without being legally culpable. Indeed, it would seem to reinforce Pashukanis’s theory by identifying the extent to which legal rights are co-determinate with the measuring of value. Subjects who are from the point of view of the state expendable or individually dangerous can be made into homines sacri, at the mercy of the state’s monopoly of violence. This can certainly apply to, for example, refugees, terrorist suspects or other “subversives”. The process by which such lives are devalued, and the way in which the law colludes in this is discussed next. Suspect Communities Contrary to the claims made by the Metropolitan Police following the killing of de Menezes that terrorist attacks on the Tube were unprecedented, the very first bombing of the London Underground took place more than a century earlier in 1883. At first the Irish were blamed, although later it transpired that the bomb had been the work of anarchists. As a result, the police and the press began targeting the Jewish community, which was identified as a hotbed of anarchist refugees from Eastern Europe. The barrister Richard Harvey has drawn the obvious analogy with Harry Stanley, Diarmuid O’Neill, Neil McConville and Jean Charles de Menezes. What all had in common was membership, or perceived membership, of communities which had been viewed as and thus targeted as suspect. Once it was Jewish communities who were perceived as a breeding ground for anarchist violence, followed by the Irish community harbouring Republican terrorists; today it is Muslim communities supposedly encompassing Al Qaida sympathisers that fulfil the role of a suspect community.53 In this demonisation of minority communities lie the origins of the elite police squads tasked with the use of lethal force. The Special Irish Branch was set up to fight the Irish Republican Fenian movement in the 1880s. This has since changed its name to the less offensive sounding, though no less offensive in deed, Special Branch. It was officers from SO19 of the Special Branch that carried out the killings of O’Neill, Stanley and de Menezes. Paddy Hillyard coined the term “suspect community” to describe a sub-group of the population that is singled out for state attention as being “problematic”. Specifically in terms of policing, individuals may be targeted, not necessarily as a result of suspected wrong doing, but simply because of their presumed membership of that sub-group. Race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, language, accent, dress, political ideology or any combination of these factors may serve to delineate the sub-group.54 Muslims, as a suspect community, are often portrayed as anti-Enlightenment and thus anti human rights, threatening a “civilised” way of life.55 But, as the authors of a recent study at London Metropolitan University argue, it is also symptomatic of a discourse of “anti-rationality” of the suspect community as fanatical and immune to reason or argument.56 In the case of Neil McConville, shot dead in April 2003 by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), the justification for his death was created after the event, by suggestions fed by the PSNI that he was variously linked to paramilitaries or drug gangs. In the days following the killing of McConville headlines in the press included allegations of involvement in these criminal activities, all of which were completely untrue. The same thing happened with Harry Stanley, when a list of his previous, spent criminal convictions was read out to the inquest into his death despite their complete irrelevance to the circumstances surrounding the shooting. Again, with de Menezes, the police circulated smears in the media about alleged drug use and his immigration status. Of course none of these allegations were intended to justify the police’s actions per se; their aim was to associate the victims with certain groups who would be considered of lesser value—criminals, drug dealers/users, illegal immigrants—thus devaluing their claim to a legal right not to be murdered by the state. As Hillyard points out: Once dehumanised, people can be viewed with ethical indifference and moral questions are of no concern to the police carrying out their tasks. The police are only doing their job. As violence has become increasingly concentrated under state control, moral responsibility is replaced by a technical responsibility.57 De Menezes was neither Muslim nor from the Middle East. What set off the chain of events which led to his death was the misidentification of him by the police surveillance team as a “North African male”. Likewise, Harry Stanley was shot dead by armed police to whom it had been reported that he had an Irish accent when in fact he was Scottish. What these two examples show is the way in which the suspect community is defined by appearances, by superficial attributes.58 This reverses the normal modus operandi of policing whereby evidence or hard intelligence is the prerequisite for the use of force. Moreover, the fact that in both these cases the victim was misidentified simply points up the extent to which perceived membership of the suspect community is sufficient to give rise to an “honest belief” by police that lethal use of force is necessary and proportionate. Had Stanley not had an “Irish” accent or de Menezes a darkish skin, both would probably still be alive today. And as we saw above, “honest belief” forms the basis for the legal defence of police officers who kill unarmed or innocent suspects. In this insidious manner racist and cultural stereotypes become legal justifications for the taking of life by state agents. Hillyard has pointed out how the Prevention of Terrorism Act 1974 (PTA) effectively introduced a “dual system of criminal justice”, one system operating under the PTA and the other under ordinary criminal law. As a result a dichotomy developed between terrorist suspects and “ordinary decent criminals”.59 Today we face a similar separation between those subjected to recent anti-terrorist legislation as distinct from regular criminal law.60 This distinction functions within both law and a broader social context, with one reinforcing the other. The threat from terrorists is exaggerated by politicians and media alike. This in turn creates a greater sense of fear of violence about the suspect community in general, and that small minority seeking to use violence in particular. This dynamic then provides a platform for the introduction of ever more draconian laws, and brutal police methods. The argument from the police and others is that the threat from Al Qaida is wholly Muslim just as the threat from the IRA was mostly Irish, and thus it is reasonable to target those communities. Yet we must not forget that this “dual system” is not one of completely distinct and hermetically sealed areas of law. The foundational principles of the rule of law do not permit such a thing. Norms, legal tests and police practice are constantly migrating between the two. Think, for example, of how anti-terror legislation has been used to detain protesters or to stop and search individuals suspected of petty crimes. The state of exception and its associated policing strategies become the norm. Hillyard’s detailed study on how violence targeted the Irish community comes to this conclusion: It is commonplace to counter-pose the rule of law to the abuse of power or acts of violence. Law, from this perspective, is seen as the antithesis of violence… But this dichotomy is false… Law is…an integral part of the repression and organisation of state violence.61 Conclusion In hindsight, the period lasting from the later half of the 19th century through to the 1960s saw the proliferation of various mechanisms that in a thousand strands bound the working class ideologically to capitalism. In Gramscian terms, hegemony was manifested in aspects of civil society such as education, culture, community identity, civic projects, etc. The police were successfully woven into this apparatus as a necessary, if not necessarily benign, method of preserving social cohesion. But, as Reiner puts it, “when neoliberalism unravelled this complex of subtle, hidden controls, the thin blue line turned out to be a Maginot line”.62 Thus, on the one hand, the role of the police in maintaining order within capitalist democracy has not altered fundamentally in the last 150 years or so. Yet, on the other hand, the retreat of the organised working class in the face of neoliberalism has revealed the violence that exists at the heart of policing and the rule of law. The problem has been that throughout this period the ideology of the rule of law has become ever stronger, and indeed has been taken up by sections of the left as the solution to the problem of police violence. My aim here has been to demonstrate, using Pashukanis’s commodity-form theory of law, Agamben’s work on the state of exception and Hillyard’s description of suspect communities, how the law as such (not merely particular laws or legal systems) is complicit in legitimising police violence, even at the extreme end involving the deliberate killing of innocent people.
16 -The debate is about starting points - the AFF limits qualified immunity, which is simply a tool of the state from which it comes. THE AFF puts the cart before the horse. This requires re-orienting our methodological starting point. The alternative is to create spaces beyond the grasp of bureaucratic institutions – our utopian ethic is key to breaking out of normative legal thought in the present. This is a cultural critique to expand our understanding of state violence which is a necessary pre requisite and this means that state violence is not inevitable.
17 -Newman 11 (Saul, associate professor in the Department of Government in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, DC, “Postanarchism: a politics of anti-politics” (October 2011), Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 16 no. 3)
18 -At the same time, this aporetic moment of tension central to classical anarchism generates new and productive articulations of politics and ethics. The disjunction between politics and anti-politics is what might be called an ‘inclusive’ disjunction: a compound in which one proposition is true only if its opposing proposition is also true. Politics, at least in a radical, emancipatory sense, has only a consistent identity if an anti-political, indeed utopian, dimension is also present—otherwise it remains caught within existing political frameworks and imaginaries. Conversely, anti-politics only makes sense if it takes seriously the tasks of politics—building, constructing, organizing, fighting, making collective decisions and so on—where questions of power and exclusion inevitably emerge. However, this proximity to power does not invalidate anarchism; rather, it leads to a greater sensitivity to the dangers of power and the need to invent, as mentioned before, new micro-political practices of freedom through which power is subjected to an ongoing ethical interrogation. Where the political pole imposes certain limits, the anti-political pole, by contrast, invokes an outside, a movement beyond limits. It is the signification of the infinite, of the limitless horizon of possibilities. This is both the moment of utopia and, in a different sense, the moment of ethics. Anarchism has an important utopian dimension, even if the classical anarchists themselves claimed not to be utopians but materialists and rationalists. Indeed, some utopian element—whether acknowledged or not—is an essential part of any form of radical politics; to oppose the current order, one inevitably invokes an alternative, utopian imagination. However, we should try to formulate a different approach to utopianism here: the importance of imagining an alternative to the current order is not to lay down a precise programme for the future, but rather to provide a point of exteriority as a way of interrogating the limits of this order. As Miguel Abensour puts it: ‘Is it not proper to utopia to propose a new way of proceeding to a displacement of what is and what seems to go without saying in the crushing name of “reality”?’37 We are crushed under the weight of the current order, which tells us that this is our reality, that what we have now is all there is and all there ever will be. Utopia provides an escape from this stifling reality by imagining an alternative to it; it opens up different possibilities, new ‘lines of flight’. Here, we should think about utopia in terms of action in the immediate sense, of creating alternatives within the present, at localized points, rather than waiting for the revolution. Utopia is something that emerges in political struggles themselves.38 Ethics also implies an outside to the existing order, but in a different sense. Ethics, as I understand it here, involves the opening up of the existing political identities, practices, institutions and discourses to an Other which is beyond their terms. Ethics is more than the application of moral and rational norms. It is rather the continual disturbance of the sovereignty of these norms, and the identities and institutions that draw their legitimacy from them, in the name of something that exceeds their grasp. Importantly, then, ethics is what disturbs politics from the outside. This might be understood in the Levinasian sense of ‘anarchy’: ‘Anarchy cannot be sovereign like an arche. It can only disturb the State—but in a radical way, making possible moments of negation without any affirmation.’39 The point is, however, that politics cannot do without anti-politics, and vice versa. The two must go together. There must always be an anti-political outside, a utopian moment of rupture and excess that disturbs the limits of politics. The ethical moment cannot be eclipsed by the political dimension; nor can it be separated from it, as someone like Carl Schmitt maintained.40 If there is to be a concept of the political, it can only be thought through a certain constitutive tension with ethics. At the same time, anti-politics needs to be politically articulated; it needs to be put into action through actual struggles and engagements with different forms of domination. There must be some way of politically measuring the anti-political imaginery, through victories, defeats, and strategic gains and reversals. So while anti-politics points to a transcendence of the current order, it cannot be an escape from it; it must involve an encounter with its limits, and this is where politics comes in. The transcendence of power involves an active engagement with power, not an avoidance of it; the realization of freedom requires an ongoing elaboration of new practices of freedom within the context of power relations.
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -2017-03-04 22:49:02.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
ParentRound
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -35
Round
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -1
Team
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Sunset bhat Neg
Title
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -ND - Neoliberal Scapegoating K - derp version
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Central Valley
Caselist.CitesClass[50]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,18 +1,0 @@
1 -Banning nuclear power is a form of imperial paternalism – it just re-inscribes colonialism by creating blanket policy decisions without case-by-case consent. Natives have their own energy and economic infrastructure to be concerned about.
2 -Jefferies ‘8: Sierra M. Jefferies, J.D. candidate, “ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AND THE SKULL VALLEY GOSHUTE INDIANS' PROPOSAL TO STORE NUCLEAR WASTE,” Journal of Land, Resources and Environmental Law, 2008
3 -Second, opposition to the Band’s attempt to make use of its land seems to imply that the Band does not have the ability to make to make informed decisions regarding the use of its land. In response to similar environmental opposition to tribal attempts at commercial waste development, Native American attorneys Keven Gover and Jana Walker criticized the paternalistic undertones of opposition, "Much of the environmental community seems to assume that, if an Indian community decides to accept such a project, it either does not understand the potential consequences or has been bamboozled by an unprincipled waste company. In either case, the clear implication is that Indians lack the intelligence to balance and protect adequately their own economic and environmental resources. 03 For the Skull Valley Goshutes, this was a rare opportunity to benefit financially from the undesirable land they have been granted. The surrounding toxic land uses, barren desert nature of the land and lack of other resources undoubtedly weighed heavily in their decision to move forward with the project. Leon Bear, tribal leader has stated, "We don’t have an energy source like oil or gas or coal, we feel that we're being prejudiced against as far as gaming."94 Interestingly, tribes that were not similarly restricted in land use options also participated in the federal selection process for the MRS and pursued private storage facilities. Among them was the Mescalero Apache tribe of New Mexico. Unlike the Goshutes, the Mescalero were not limited in opportunities to develop their land for profit. By contrast, at the time of the federally proposed MRS, the Mescalero were already operating several multi-million dollar businesses. 95 The Mescalero were not compelled by limited available uses for their land. Grace Thorpe, "a member of the Sac and Fox Tribe, an opponent of the MRS program, and President of the National Environmental Coalition of Native Americans" stated "Ithe Mescalero don't need this nuclear waste ... they have a five star resort, a casino, two ski lifts, forestry resources and a sawmill m98
4 -Media and other outlets keeps distorting Native needs – assumptions need to STOP
5 -Gover and Walker ‘92: (Kevin, Prof of Law ASU, Jana L, ESCAPING ENVIRONMENTAL PATERNALISM: ONE TRIBE'S APPROACH TO DEVELOPING A COMMERCIAL WASTE DISPOSAL PROJECT IN INDIAN COUNTRY http://faculty.virginia.edu/ejus/ESCAPE.htm)
6 -We have been asked to address the issue of environmental racism in the context of commercial solid and hazardous waste projects on Indian reservations. Let us say at the outset that we have no quarrel with those who believe that undesirable facilities-such as waste disposal facilities more likely to be found in a poor minority community than in a wealthy white one.' However, the environmental community must come to understand that not all such facilities are unwanted by the host community and that, in those cases where a community wishes to have such a facility, its decision is to be respected. As an example of such a host community located in Indian country, we will use our experience in helping the Campo Band of Mission Indians of California develop a solid waste project on its reservation. With respect to waste disposal, there are two issues facing Indian tribes today. First, how do tribes dispose of the solid waste generated on their reservations, and second, does a tribe want to use its land as a site for a commercial waste project as a form of economic development? Almost without exception, over the last year the media has focused its entire attention on the issue of commercial projects. We cannot count the number of articles in magazines and newspapers titled "Dances with Garbage."2 The media has created a steady drumbeat of stories about tribes all over the country building landfills and taking in hazardous waste, implying that the waste industry is marauding unchecked in Indian country, immune from any environmental regulation whatsoever. Is it true? In our experience over the last few years, this is just not the case, and we believe that much of the media attention has been misguided and uninformed. Even if we assume that some waste companies are targeting Indian country, tribes have almost always repelled these so-called attacks.3 In most cases, tribes are not even giving these companies an interview. Of the dozens of proposals that apparently have been made to tribes, only a small number remain under serious consideration.4 Tribal governments quite clearly have demonstrated that they are fully capable of deciding whether or not a project will serve their best interests. To set the record straight, the bigger problem is not that the waste industry is beating a path to the tribal door. Rather, it is the unauthorized and illegal dumping occurring on reservations. For most Indian communities the problem of open dumping on tribal lands is of much greater concern than the remote prospect that a commercial waste disposal facility may be sited on a reservation. Until 1986, Congress had left tribal governments completely out of the federal environmental scheme. In 1986, Congress enacted the first tribal amendments to federal environmental laws. Those amendments allowed tribes to be treated as states for program enforcement and grants under the Safe Drinking Water Act.5 Congress enacted similar amendments to Superfund in 1986,6 the Clean Water Act in 1987,7 and the Clean Air Act in 1990. 8 Unfortunately, Congress has not yet enacted tribal amendments to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA)9 authorizing tribes to assume primary enforcement authority for solid and hazardous waste programs.
7 -American imperialism dominates society to destroy indigenous culture – turns case and outweighs.
8 -Galeota ‘4: Julia Galeota placed first in the thirteen-to-seventeen-year-old age category of the 2004 Humanist Essay Contest for Young Women and Men of North America. “Cultural Imperialism: An American Tradition.” 2004 Humanist Essay Contest Winner. Getrun.info. The Humanist. 2004. http://www.getrun.info/pdf/tradition/5.pdf
9 -Travel almost anywhere in the world today and, whether you suffer from habitual Big Mac cravings or cringe at the thought of missing the newest episode of MTV’s The Real World, your American tastes can be satisfied practically everywhere. This proliferation of American products across the globe is more than mere accident. As a byproduct of globalization, it is part of a larger trend in the conscious dissemination of American attitudes and values that is often referred to as cultural imperialism. In his 1976 work Communication and Cultural Domination, Herbert Schiller defines cultural imperialism as: the sum of the processes by which a society is brought into the modern world system, and how its dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced, and sometimes bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even to promote, the values and structures of the dominant center of the system. Thus, cultural imperialism involves much more than simple consumer goods; it involves the dissemination of ostensibly American principles, such as freedom and democracy. Though this process might sound appealing on the surface, it masks a frightening truth: many cultures around the world are gradually disappearing due to the overwhelming influence of corporate and cultural America. The motivations behind American cultural imperialism parallel the justifications for U.S. imperialism throughout history: the desire for access to foreign markets and the belief in the superiority of American culture. Though the United States does boast the world’s largest, most powerful economy, no business is completely satisfied with controlling only the American market; American corporations want to control the other 95 percent of the world’s consumers as well. Many industries are incredibly successful in that venture. According to the Guardian, American films accounted for approximately 80 percent of global box office revenue in January 2003. And who can forget good old Micky D’s? With over 30,000 restaurants in over one hundred countries, the ubiquitous golden arches of McDonald’s are now, according to Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, “more widely recognized than the Christian cross.” Such American domination inevitably hurts local markets, as the majority of foreign industries are unable to compete with the economic strength of U.S. industry. Because it serves American economic interests, corporations conveniently ignore the detrimental impact of American control of foreign markets. Corporations don’t harbor qualms about the detrimental effects of “Americanization” of foreign cultures, as most corporations have ostensibly convinced themselves that American culture is superior and therefore its influence is beneficial to other, “lesser” cultures. Unfortunately, this American belief in the superiority of U.S. culture is anything but new; it is as old as the culture itself. This attitude was manifest in the actions of settlers when they first arrived on this continent and massacred or assimilated essentially the entire “savage” Native American population. This attitude also reflects that of the late nineteenth-century age of imperialism, during which the jingoists attempted to fulfill what they believed to be the divinely ordained “manifest destiny” of American expansion. Jingoists strongly believe in the concept of social Darwinism: the stronger, “superior” cultures will overtake the weaker, “inferior” cultures in a “survival of the fittest.” It is this arrogant belief in the incomparability of American culture that characterizes many of our economic and political strategies today.
10 -The alternative is to allow indigenous communities to decide whether or not they want the use of nuclear power through a case-by-case basis; this means no blanket prohibition.
11 -Claiming that Natives generally don’t want nuclear power is still a blanket assumption which re-inscribes oppressive colonialism because some tribes still may want nuclear.
12 -Gover and Walker ‘92: Kevin, and Jana L. Walker (Native American Attorneys at Gover, Stetson and Williams). "Escaping Environmental Paternalism: One Tribe's Approach to Developing a Commercial Waste Disposal Project in Indian Country." University of Colorado Law Review 63 (1992): 933.
13 -The second and more controversial issue facing tribes involves the use of reservation lands as sites for commercial solid and hazardous waste disposal facilities. Looking at the waste industry as a form of economic development, in many respects it can be a good match for tribal communities. The industry is usually willing to pay the costs of developing new projects without requiring a tribe to put any cash up front. Since most tribes just do not have the money to independently fund large-scale economic development, this makes the industry attractive to Indian communities desperate for development. The waste industry needs isolation and an abundance of land, and, again, because of the overall lack of tribal economic development, undeveloped land is a resource that many tribes have. The waste industry also provides numerous opportunities for unskilled and semi-skilled workers, including training in the construction and environmental compliance fields. On most reservations, unemployment is extremely high and opportunities for training Indians very limited. Finally, the waste industry is and must be recognized as an indispensable and legitimate part of the services sector of the economy, and as such, can be an extremely profitable form of development for tribes. All of this means that, under certain circumstances, a solid or hazardous waste disposal project may represent a viable and appropriate form of industrial development for some tribes and can provide extraordinary opportunities for economic development on some reservations. It is not appropriate for every community, and we certainly are not urging tribes to site waste facilities on their reservations. Each tribe must decide for itself if it is interested in such development. Our intent is merely to put things in a more honest perspective and to describe one process that, when and if a tribe seriously considers a commercial waste proposal, it can use to evaluate the proposal effectively and, if it's feasible, plan for its development.
14 -The alt best addresses historical injustice by allowing natives to control their own destinies and decide how to move forward – nuclear jurisdiction is a fundamental step.
15 -
16 -Segal ‘12: (Alice, URANIUM MINING AND THE NAVAJO NATION - LEGAL INJUSTICE Southern California Review of Law and Social Justice 21 S. Cal. Rev. L. and Social Justice 355)
17 -As a result of this one-way relationship, courts were able to strip away Navajo children from their families. This injustice was not corrected until Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act, which provided the Navajo with greater authority. n281 To compensate for historical injustices such as this, as well as to allow them to define for themselves their own people groups, the Navajo Nation should be granted greater authority over its land as a sovereign tribe. However, Congress has resisted efforts to increase Navajo authority because this would reduce the federal government's power. An optimal solution that would satisfy the interests of both Congress and the Navajo Nation would be to give the Navajo authority over uranium mining. Under the NRC's lax oversight, federal agencies have proven inept at regulating uranium mining and cleanup. Courts have deferred to the agencies' poor decisions, perpetuating inefficient and reckless mining. On the other hand, the Navajo government has both the interest and organizational capacity to regulate uranium mining because the Nation has a personal stake in protecting its people from further exposure to radioactive material. The interests of the Navajo suggest that, with congressional help, the Navajo government would work to resolve the unfair treatment of its people through careful management of uranium mining.
18 -Mutually exclusive with the aff since tribes that want nuclear power can continue to use it.
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -2017-03-04 22:49:28.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
ParentRound
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -36
Round
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -1
Team
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Sunset bhat Neg
Title
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -SO - Native Paternalism K
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -St Marks
Caselist.CitesClass[51]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,12 +1,0 @@
1 -CP: Public colleges and Universities in the United States ought to restrict denial of the Armenian genocide of 1915.
2 -Kyrou ‘15: Alexandros K. Kyrou writes in “Erasing Memory, Erasing People: Armenian Genocide Remembrance and Denial at Harvard” in November 2015. https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/november-2015/erasing-memory-erasing-people-armenian-genocide-remembrance-and-denial-at-harvard; AB
3 -In the case of students who engage in organized genocide-denial efforts, administrations should make it absolutely clear that while they support free speech, the commitment to free speech must be accompanied by a commitment to respect for procedure and organized events. Universities should reiterate that supporting free speech does not endorse a policy of genocide denial. Conversely, by ignoring and not applying any consequences to such actions, universities are emboldening apologists of genocide. The centennial of the Armenian Genocide affords an opportunity for university administrations to develop such policies where none currently exist for dealing with this issue. To be clear, I am not making an argument for silencing genocide deniers, however morally reprehensible, politically insidious, or intellectually dishonest they may be. What I am arguing is that genocide deniers, such as those students at Harvard's Kennedy School, by their very acts of denial in the face of overwhelming and incontrovertible empirical evidence of genocide, continue to perpetrate that crime against humanity with their efforts to deny and silence scholarly research and pubic remembrance. I am also arguing that universities have a responsibility to avoid becoming the unwitting accomplices of genocide deniers, whether by caving in to their demands and pressures to cancel or prevent events such as the one detailed in this article, or by failing to make clear to disrupters who would seek to silence others that there are consequences for their failures to play by the rules of free speech and norms of respect that are the hallmarks of "the university."
4 -Armenian genocide denial dishonors the victims.
5 -Stanton 2k: Dr. Gregory Stanton writes in “The Cost of Denial” President, International Association of Genocide Scholars, President, Genocide Watch. 1 Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, Taderon Press, 2000, p. 222. http://www.genocidewatch.org/aboutus/thecostofdenial.html; AB
6 -Congressman Pallone, Congressman Knollenberg, Archbishop Aykazian, Archbishop Choloyan, Senator Menendez, Ambassador Markarian, Members of Congress, and Honored Guests: Today, we honor the memory of Congressman Tom Lantos, who left us this year. One of his final acts in Congress was to support House Resolution 106, commemorating the Armenian genocide, and to send it for a vote in the House. But last year, as every year, it never reached a vote in the full House. Again the United States surrendered to the ninety year campaign of denial by the government of Turkey. The State Department and the White House have continued the cowardly policies of every Secretary of State since Lansing who have considered it more important to placate the Turkish government than to be truthful about history. The tactics of genocide denial are predictable, and the Turkish government has used them all. Question and minimize the statistics. Attack the motivations of the truth-teller. Blame “out of control” forces for committing the killings. Claim that the massacres don’t fit the legal definition of genocide, even if over a million people were killed. The Turkish government has three favorites: Blame the victims. Claim that the killings were in self-defense against people who were disloyal to the Ottoman Empire during a World War. In fact, very few Armenians joined the Ottoman Empire’s enemies, and certainly none of the women and children could have. But they were murdered nevertheless. Claim that Muslim Turks also suffered many deaths. The problem with this argument is that the deaths were in battles with European troops, not at the hands of the Armenians, who were deported like sheep into the desert. Finally, claim that the deaths were inadvertent, due to lack of food and water, not due to intentional destruction. The falsehood of this claim is amply proven by the thousands of pages of eye-witness reports from Armenian survivors, American consular officers, missionaries, and most tellingly, in the archives of the Ottoman Empire’s allies, Germany and Austria-Hungary, as well as by the records of the Ottoman Corts-Martial of 1918-1920. This was intentional mass murder by starvation. It wasn’t an unfortunate by-product of a deportation. So why can’t a resolution telling the truth about the Armenian genocide pass Congress? Here we run into two more tactics of denial: Claim that current peace and reconciliation are more important than blaming past perpetrators for genocide. The latest version of this tactic is the Turkish government’s proposal to set up an “historian’s commission” with half of the members appointed by the Turkish government and half by the government of the Republic of Armenia to “study” the facts of what occurred in 1915 – 1923. The problem with this proposal is that the Armenian genocide has been thoroughly documented and studied by genocide scholars, many of whom are not Armenian, and the historical record is unambiguous. In 1997, The International Association of Genocide Scholars declared unanimously that the Turkish massacres of over one million Armenians was a crime of genocide. A “commission of historians” would only serve the interests of Turkish genocide deniers. There is no more “another side” to the truth about the Armenian genocide than there is about the Holocaust. Most importantly, don’t tell the truth because to do so would not be in current US political, economic, and military interests. The US has a huge airbase in Turkey that we need for our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Turks have threatened to close that base, cancel purchases of American military equipment, boycott American goods, and even pass their own resolution condemning nineteenth century US government massacres of Native Americans. (A number of US Congressmen and Senators have beaten them to it and already introduced such resolutions, and those resolutions should also be passed.) The Cost of Denial In my studies of genocide, I have discovered that the process of every genocide has predictable stages. They aren’t linear, because they usually operate simultaneously. But there is a logical order to them, because a “later” stage cannot occur without a logically “prior” stage. It is also useful to distinguish them, because they can help us see when genocide is coming and what governments can do to prevent it. The first is Classification, when we classify the world into us versus them. The second is Symbolization, when we give names to those classifications like Jew and Aryan, Hutu and Tutsi, Turk and Armenian. Sometimes the symbols are physical, like the Nazi yellow star. The third is Dehumanization, when perpetrators call their victims rats, or cockroaches, cancer, or disease; so eliminating them is actually seen as “cleansing” the society, rather than murder. The fourth is Organization, when hate groups, armies, and militias organize. The fifth is Polarization, when moderates are targeted who could stop the process, especially moderates from the perpetrators’ group. The sixth stage is Preparation, when the perpetrators are trained and armed, victims are identified, transported and concentrated. The seventh stage is Extermination, what we legally define as genocide, the intentional destruction, in whole or in part, of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. When I first outlined these stages in a memo I wrote in the State Department in 1996, I thought these seven stages are all there are. Then I realized there is an eighth stage in every genocide: Denial. It is actually a continuation of the genocide, because it is a continuing attempt to destroy the victim group psychologically and culturally, to deny its members even the memory of the murders of their relatives. Denial has a profoundly negative impact on everyone concerned. Denial harms the victims and their survivors. That is what the Turkish government today is doing to Armenians around the world. Elie Wiesel has repeatedly called Turkey’s denial a double killing, as it strives to kill the memory of the event. We believe the US government should not be party to efforts to kill the memory of a historical fact as profound and important as the genocide of the Armenians, which Hitler used as an example in his plan to exterminate the Jews. Around the world, victims of genocide ask first for recognition of the crime committed against them. It is as essential to healing as closing an open wound. Without such healing, scars harden into hatred that cripples the victim and cries out for revenge. Denial harms the perpetrators and their successors. After the Ottoman Courts-Martial of 1918-1920, there were no further trials. The killers literally got away with mass murder. With blood on their hands, they returned to their work. But out of that denial grew a Turkish state that denied the existence of all non-Turks within Turkey. Kurds became “mountain Turks,” Kurdish schools were closed, and people speaking Kurdish had their tongues cut out. Studies by genocide scholars prove that the single best predictor of future genocide is denial of a past genocide coupled with impunity for its perpetrators. Genocide Deniers are three times more likely to commit genocide again than other governments. We should be on guard for Turkish attempts to suppress Kurds, which continue to this day, and recently resulted in an invasion of Iraq. Turkish school children are taught that the Armenian genocide is a myth. Turkish writers who write the truth are prosecuted for “insulting Turkishness,” even if they have won the Nobel Prize. Publishers like Hrant Dink who dare publish the truth are murdered, and their murderers are celebrated as national heroes. These are the remnants of racist ultranationalism, of fascism, and do not belong in a member of NATO that hopes to join the European community. The next step that Turkey must take to become a real democracy is to acknowledge its own past. Like an alcoholic drunk on the liquor of ultranationalism, it must first admit its own problem before it can leave its addiction. Why should this be so hard? Germany has done it, and has become one of the strongest democracies on earth. The current Turkish government did not commit the Armenian genocide. Why should it not face the truth about the crimes the Ottoman Empire committed over ninety years ago? Denial harms the bystanders Countries that recognize the truth about the Armenian Genocide are considered enemies by Turkish successor regimes. The parliaments of many countries have affirmed the fact of the Armenian Genocide in unequivocal terms, and proposed congressional resolutions like H. Res. 106 are commemorative and non-binding. Yet the resolution faced opposition from those who fear it would undermine US relations with Turkey. It is worth noting that, notwithstanding France’s Armenian Genocide legislation, France and Turkey are engaged in more bilateral trade than ever before. We would not expect the US government to be intimidated by an unreliable ally with a deeply disturbing human rights record, graphically documented in the State Department’s 2007 International Religious Freedom Report on Turkey. We would expect the United States to express its moral and intellectual views, not to compromise its own principles. In fact, telling the truth would ultimately be good for US-Turkish relations, because they would no longer be based on diplomatic lies. The Joint Congressional Resolution recognizing and commemorating the Armenian Genocide will honor America’s extraordinary Foreign Service Officers (among them Leslie A. Davis, Jesse B. Jackson, and Oscar Heizer) who often risked their lives rescuing Armenian citizens in 1915. They and others left behind some forty thousand pages of reports, now in the National Archives, that document that what happened to the Armenianpeople was government-planned, systematic extermination.—what Raphael Lemkin (the man who coined the word genocide) used in creating the definition. By passing the resolution, the U.S. Congress would also pay tribute to America’s first international human rights movement. The Foreign Service Officers and prominent individuals such as Theodore Roosevelt, Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, and Cleveland Dodge, who did so much to help the Armenians, exemplify America’s legacy of moral leadership. Of course, the State Department did not want Ambassador Morgenthau to tell the truth, and after he returned to the United States he never got another diplomatic assignment. But he inspired his son, Henry Morgenthau, Junior, who became FDR.’s Secretary of the Treasury and was a tireless advocate for rescuing Jews during the Holocaust. Let us today commemorate those who died in the Armenian Genocide, but also Ambassador Henry Morgenthau and others who had the courage to tell the truth about it. Let us remember Ambassador Morgenthau’s words when he met with Talaat Pasha, who asked him: “Why are you so interested in the Armenians anyway? You are a Jew, these people are Christians..” Morgenthau replied: “You don’t seem to realize that I am not here as a Jew but as the American Ambassador.….I do not appeal to you in the name of any race or religion, but merely as a human being..”1
7 -Awareness is key – 1.5 million Armenian people were killed and their experiences have been erased by ignorance.
8 -Asbarez ‘16: Asbarez journal writes in “All-Armenian Student Association to Coordinate Silent Protest Against Armenian Genocide Denial” on February 1st, 2016 http://asbarez.com/145352/all-armenian-student-association-to-coordinate-silent-protest-against-armenian-genocide-denial/; AB
9 -The All-ASA released a statement preceding the protest, reading: “The Armenian Genocide claimed the lives of 1.5 million people and forced the dispersion of Armenians throughout the world. The Republic of Turkey, a descendant regime of the Ottoman Empire, has led a denial campaign since its founding to stave off responsibility for necessary reparations, setting a cyclical precedent for the repression of justice. The United States, under political pressure from Turkey, has also refused to acknowledge the genocide by its rightful classification. As Armenian-Americans, we believe that politics and humanity need to be held in separate realms. The Stain of Denial is a tool to educate each campus’ community about the Armenian experience and the cycle of genocide.”
10 -Everyday struggle for Armenian students.
11 -Ghazanchyan ‘17: Siranush Ghazanchyan writes in “Students accross US and Canada stage silent protest against Armenian Genocide denial” for PUBLIC RADIO OF ARMENIA” on 10 Feb 2017. http://www.armradio.am/en/2017/02/10/students-accross-us-canada-stage-silent-protest-against-armenian-genocide-denial/; AB
12 -On Thursday, February 9th, the All-Armenian Student Association (All-ASA) coordinated the annual “Stain of Denial” silent protest against the continuous denial of the Armenian Genocide. The protests were simultaneously held by ASA chapters and affiliated organizations on their respective college and university campuses. “Stain of Denial” was initiated in 2011 as a silent protest in order to raise awareness of the ongoing denial of the Armenian Genocide and the need for recognition and reparations. The students, faculty, and community members who participated on Thursday stressed that the Armenian Genocide is not an issue only reserved for the month of April, but it has a profound effect on Armenians every day. Whereas April 24th is traditionally the day that the world commemorates the Armenian Genocide, the memory of the genocide and its ensuing denial continues to be a daily struggle. The All-ASA prioritizes this campaign because Armenian students in college, where the free interchange of ideas and perspectives is encouraged, continuously find that the denial of their history is an injustice that they are blatantly faced with. The participating ASA’s have continuously increased throughout the years. This year, Armenian students from various schools in the West coast, East coast, and Canada organized on their respective campuses. The participating schools in this years protests were: UC San Diego, UC Riverside, UC Los Angeles, UC Santa Barbara, UC Irvine, Glendale Community College, Pasadena Community College, Occidental College, University of Southern California, Cal Poly Pomona, Cal State Northridge, Woodbury University, Massachussets College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, Wentworth Institute of Technology, Emmanel College, Boston University, Northeastern University, Tufts University, Suffolk University, Yale University, and Princeton University. For the first time, the protests reached an international scope, with participation from the following Canadian universities: University of Ottawa, Carleton University, and the University of Montreal. Members from the following organization also participated: ARF Shant Student Association, Armenian Youth Federation, Alpha Gamma Alpha, and Alpha Epsilon Omega. Thousands of Armenian students, community members, and faculty, both Armenian and non-Armenian, took a stand and reiterated that the Armenian Genocide is not just a “day in April,” but a year-round struggle for justice. The campaign also included an online component, as those who were not able to attend raised awareness through social media, by incorporating the hashtags #StainofDenial, #ArmenianGenocide, and #DivestTurkey into their online posts. While the protests highlighted the history of the Armenian Genocide and the consequences that still continue, it also raised awareness of the #DivestTurkey initiative. This included education about resolutions that ASAs have passed through their student government councils, including both Armenian Genocide recognition and divestment bills, the latter of which targets over $70 million of University of California funds allocated toward the Turkish government.
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -2017-03-05 21:37:59.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
ParentRound
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -37
Round
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Finals
Team
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Sunset bhat Neg
Title
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -JF - Armenian Genocide CP
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Caselist.CitesClass[52]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,4 +1,0 @@
1 -CP: Public colleges and universities in the United States ought to remove restrictions on constitutionally protected speech except for holocaust denial.
2 -Holocaust denial is a politically charged attack, often fueled by hatred against Israel. Separate politics from Jewish student safety in the classroom.
3 -Berrett ‘10: Dan Berrett writes in “Academic Freedom and Holocaust Denial” on October 26th, 2010. Insider Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/10/26/Siddique; AB
4 -The first talk was at Purchase College in Westchester County, New York. I had been invited as part of my college speaking tour on the Middle East which brought me to many universities in the Northeast, i.e. Harvard, Cornell, Brown, SUNY Oneonta SUNY Binghamton and more. The first scheduled speaking date was postponed because of a snowstorm. Coincidentally, a week before the rescheduled talk, the campus was defaced with anti-Semitic and racist graffiti including swastikas and a noose. There is a rash of anti-Semitism now sweeping college campuses. I know this because my organization, Middle East Political and Information Network (MEPIN), is continually being asked to sign letters to college presidents throughout the country responding to the growing number of anti-Semitic incidents, insisting that universities maintain a safe environment for Jewish students. I was told that even before this anti-Semitic incident, the topic of my speech had created a controversy on campus, especially among a growing anti-Israel movement, and that I should be prepared to receive a hostile reception. The anti-Israel group did ask some provocative questions during my talk, but to their credit they choose not to interrupt the talk or intimidate Jewish students as other anti-Israel groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine have done. Perhaps the police presence had something to do with it. Hillel of Westchester, and the Westchester pro-Israel community, responded to the display of anti-Semitism by publicizing my talk to the local Jewish community and rallying support for the students by coming out in large numbers. Purchase College is not known as a hotbed of political activism, but nowadays anti-Israel activists of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement are targeting almost every college, and the anti-Israel activity often turns into simple, ugly anti-Semitism. The State Department’s working definition of anti-Semitism says that if you deny the Jewish State of Israel the right to exist, or hold it to a standard not asked of any other nations, that is anti-Semitism. Advocates of BDS against Israel fit that definition when they have nothing to say about the current major violators of human rights around the world, denying basic rights to women, committing mass genocides, and abrogating the rule of law to punish their political opponents. Later in the week I was invited to speak at a non-denominational Protestant Church of primarily African American New Yorkers. I cannot remember a more engaged audience, eager to learn what is really going on in the Middle East. What impressed me most was that they were totally aware of the way many mainstream media outlets editorialize the news, as they report it in their supposedly non-editorial pages, fitted to their own opinions. I only wish the Progressive readers of The New York Times were as astute as this audience. They were passionate about Israel, frustrated with the administration’s pressure on Israel and its readiness to capitulate to the Iranians. Members of the audience asked me how they could become active in advocating for Israel. Both groups, college kids under attack for their pro-Israel activism and church groups willing to advocate for Israel, present challenges and opportunities for the pro-Israel American Jewish community. America is a Christian majority nation. There are many Christians in America, both Protestant and Catholic, who would like to support Israel based not only on religious teachings but because they see in Israel a liberal humane nation and a strategic asset to America. But pro-Israel groups, both Jewish and Gentile, liberal and conservative, need to work to coordinate their resources to educate religious communities. If pro-Israel advocates fail to connect with America’s churches of all denominations, the vacuum will be filled by anti-Israel groups who have already hoodwinked some denominations into joining forces with those groups pushing for BDS, convincing them that Israel is the schoolyard bully, picking on an innocent underdog. On the college campus, our kids are besieged by a growing plague of anti-Zionism in the name of political correctness and anti-colonialism. As Phyllis Chesler, a leading voice of the feminist movement, says, the “new anti-Semitism” is nearly inseparable from anti-Zionism. According to a recent survey by Trinity College, the majority of secular and religious Jewish students on American college have experienced or witnessed anti-Semitism during their college careers. We must support our college students and provide them with an environment that isn’t poisoned by anti-Semitism. That means fighting the BDS movement, not rationalizing it, legitimizing it, and providing Jewish forums to demonize the Jewish state. Are you listening, New Israel Fund and J Street? As Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish organizations said, “It is the BDS movement that is the 21st century form of 20th century anti-Semitism...
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -2017-03-05 21:38:00.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
ParentRound
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -37
Round
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Finals
Team
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Sunset bhat Neg
Title
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -JF - Holocaust Denial PIC
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Caselist.CitesClass[53]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,9 +1,0 @@
1 -CP: Public colleges and universities in the United States ought not restrict any constitutionally protected speech except for anti-Semitic journalism.
2 -Foxman and Firestone ‘10: “Fighting Holocaust Denial in Campus Newspaper Advertisements” on May 2010. Abraham H. Foxman National Director Anti-Defamation League, Wayne L. Firestone President Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life. http://archive.adl.org/education/fighting-holocaust-denial-on-campus.pdf; AB
3 -Holocaust denial is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory which claims that the well-documented destruction of six million Jews during World War II is actually a myth created by Jews to serve their own self-interested purposes. On college campuses, Holocaust denial is most often encountered in the form of advertisements submitted to student newspapers by Bradley Smith and his Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH). These ads are an affront to truth and an insult to the memory of those who were murdered by the Nazis. They create a divisive atmosphere for Jews on campus and foster conflict among students, faculty, administrators and the local community.
4 -Holocaust denial is a politically charged attack, often fueled by hatred against Israel. Separate politics from Jewish student safety in the classroom.
5 -Berrett ‘10: Dan Berrett writes in “Academic Freedom and Holocaust Denial” on October 26th, 2010. Insider Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/10/26/Siddique; AB
6 -The first talk was at Purchase College in Westchester County, New York. I had been invited as part of my college speaking tour on the Middle East which brought me to many universities in the Northeast, i.e. Harvard, Cornell, Brown, SUNY Oneonta SUNY Binghamton and more. The first scheduled speaking date was postponed because of a snowstorm. Coincidentally, a week before the rescheduled talk, the campus was defaced with anti-Semitic and racist graffiti including swastikas and a noose. There is a rash of anti-Semitism now sweeping college campuses. I know this because my organization, Middle East Political and Information Network (MEPIN), is continually being asked to sign letters to college presidents throughout the country responding to the growing number of anti-Semitic incidents, insisting that universities maintain a safe environment for Jewish students. I was told that even before this anti-Semitic incident, the topic of my speech had created a controversy on campus, especially among a growing anti-Israel movement, and that I should be prepared to receive a hostile reception. The anti-Israel group did ask some provocative questions during my talk, but to their credit they choose not to interrupt the talk or intimidate Jewish students as other anti-Israel groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine have done. Perhaps the police presence had something to do with it. Hillel of Westchester, and the Westchester pro-Israel community, responded to the display of anti-Semitism by publicizing my talk to the local Jewish community and rallying support for the students by coming out in large numbers. Purchase College is not known as a hotbed of political activism, but nowadays anti-Israel activists of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement are targeting almost every college, and the anti-Israel activity often turns into simple, ugly anti-Semitism. The State Department’s working definition of anti-Semitism says that if you deny the Jewish State of Israel the right to exist, or hold it to a standard not asked of any other nations, that is anti-Semitism. Advocates of BDS against Israel fit that definition when they have nothing to say about the current major violators of human rights around the world, denying basic rights to women, committing mass genocides, and abrogating the rule of law to punish their political opponents. Later in the week I was invited to speak at a non-denominational Protestant Church of primarily African American New Yorkers. I cannot remember a more engaged audience, eager to learn what is really going on in the Middle East. What impressed me most was that they were totally aware of the way many mainstream media outlets editorialize the news, as they report it in their supposedly non-editorial pages, fitted to their own opinions. I only wish the Progressive readers of The New York Times were as astute as this audience. They were passionate about Israel, frustrated with the administration’s pressure on Israel and its readiness to capitulate to the Iranians. Members of the audience asked me how they could become active in advocating for Israel. Both groups, college kids under attack for their pro-Israel activism and church groups willing to advocate for Israel, present challenges and opportunities for the pro-Israel American Jewish community. America is a Christian majority nation. There are many Christians in America, both Protestant and Catholic, who would like to support Israel based not only on religious teachings but because they see in Israel a liberal humane nation and a strategic asset to America. But pro-Israel groups, both Jewish and Gentile, liberal and conservative, need to work to coordinate their resources to educate religious communities. If pro-Israel advocates fail to connect with America’s churches of all denominations, the vacuum will be filled by anti-Israel groups who have already hoodwinked some denominations into joining forces with those groups pushing for BDS, convincing them that Israel is the schoolyard bully, picking on an innocent underdog. On the college campus, our kids are besieged by a growing plague of anti-Zionism in the name of political correctness and anti-colonialism. As Phyllis Chesler, a leading voice of the feminist movement, says, the “new anti-Semitism” is nearly inseparable from anti-Zionism. According to a recent survey by Trinity College, the majority of secular and religious Jewish students on American college have experienced or witnessed anti-Semitism during their college careers. We must support our college students and provide them with an environment that isn’t poisoned by anti-Semitism. That means fighting the BDS movement, not rationalizing it, legitimizing it, and providing Jewish forums to demonize the Jewish state. Are you listening, New Israel Fund and J Street? As Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish organizations said, “It is the BDS movement that is the 21st century form of 20th century anti-Semitism...
7 -Hate speech does real violence to the oppressed and locks in relationships of domination – causes psychological warfare.
8 -Delgado and Stefacic ‘09: Richard Delgado - University Professor, Seattle University School of Law; J.D., 1974, University of California, Berkeley. Jean Stefancic – Research Professor, Seattle University School of Law; M.A., 1989, University of San Francisco. “FOUR OBSERVATIONS ABOUT HATE SPEECH.” WAKE FOREST LAW REVIEW. 2009. http://wakeforestlawreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Delgado_LawReview_01.09.pdf
9 -II. OBSERVATION NUMBER TWO: THE EVALUATION OF HARMS HAS BEEN INCOMPLETE One way, of course, to end the current standoff is for one of the parties to defer to the other’s point of view. Indeed, by pursuing an aggressive campaign of litigation, the free-speech camp has been implicitly urging that the other side do just that.58 One could also argue that a host of campus administrators, by enacting successive versions of hate-speech codes, are attempting to do the same thing, namely, wear the other side down.59 Ordinarily, though, it is the free-speech faction, with a string of lower-court victories to its credit, who urge the other side to “get over it” and toughen its collective hide.60 Yet, a careful weighing of the costs and benefits of speech regulation suggests that the case for it is closer than the ACLU and some courts seem ready to acknowledge. Before addressing the costs of hate-speech regulation versus the opposite, it is advisable to arrive at an understanding of what hate speech is. A Types of Hate Speech Hate speech, including the campus variety, can take a number of forms—direct (sometimes called “specific”) or indirect; veiled or overt; single or repeated; backed by power, authority, or threat, or not.61 One can also distinguish it in terms of the characteristic— such as race, religion, sexual orientation, immigration status, or gender—of the person or group it targets.62 It can isolate a single individual (“Jones, you goddamned X.”) or group (“The goddamned Xs are destroying this country.”). It can be delivered orally, in writing, on the Internet, or in the form of a tangible thing, such as a Confederate flag, football mascot, or monument.63 It can be anonymous, as with graffiti or a leaflet surreptitiously placed on a bulletin board or under a dormitory door, or its author can be plainly identified.64 The object of the speech may be free to leave, or trapped, as in a classroom or workplace.65 B. The Harms of Hate Speech The various forms of hate speech present different kinds and degrees of harm. The face-to-face kind is the most immediately problematic, especially if the target is not in a position to leave and the one delivering it possesses the power to harm. 1. Direct or Face-to-Face Hate Speech Although some courts and commentators describe the injury of hate speech as mere offense,66 the harm associated with the face-toface kind, at least, is often far greater than that and includes flinching, tightening of muscles, adrenaline rushes, and inability to sleep.67 Some victims may suffer psychosocial harms, including depression, repressed anger, diminished self-concept, and impairment of work or school performance.68 Some may take refuge in drugs, alcohol, or other forms of addiction, compounding their misery.69 2. Hate Speech and Children With children, the harms of hate speech may be even more worrisome. A child victimized by racial taunts or browbeating may respond aggressively, with the result that he or she is labeled as assaultive.70 Or, the child can respond by internalizing the harm and pretending to ignore it. Robbed of self-confidence and a sense of ease, such a child can easily become introspective and morose.71 If the child’s parents suffer the same fate at work, they may bring these problems home so that the parents retain even less energy for their families than before.72 Recent scholarship points out how the pathologies associated with social subordination may be transgenerational, lasting for centuries, if not millennia, and include pain, fear, shame, anger, and despair.73 3. General Hate Speech With general hate speech, such as anonymously circulated flyers or speeches to a crowd, the harms, while diffuse, may be just as serious.74 Recent scholarship shows how practically every instance of genocide came on the heels of a wave of hate speech depicting the victims in belittling terms.75 For example, before launching their wave of deadly attacks on the Tutsis in Rwanda, Hutus in government and the media disseminated a drumbeat of messages casting their ethnic rivals as despicable.76 The Third Reich did much the same with the Jews during the period leading up to the Holocaust.77 When the United States enslaved African Americans and killed or removed the Indians, it rationalized that these were simple folk who needed discipline and tutelage, or else bloodthirsty savages who resisted the blessings of civilization.78 When, a little later, the nation marched westward in pursuit of manifest destiny, it justified taking over the rich lands of California and the Southwest on the ground that the indolent Mexicans living on them did not deserve their good fortune.79 Before interning the Japanese during World War II, propagandists depicted the group as sneaky, suspicious, and despotic.80 It is possible that the connection between general hate speech and instances of mass oppression may not be merely statistical and contingent, but conceptual and necessary.81 Concerted action requires an intelligible intention or rationale capable of being understood by others. One cannot mistreat another group without first articulating a reason why one is doing it—otherwise, no one but a sadist would join in.82 Without a softening-up period, early steps toward genocide, such as removing Jews to a ghetto, would strike others as gratuitous and command little support. Discriminatory action of any kind presupposes a group that labors under a stigma of some kind.83 The prime mechanism for the creation of such stigma is hate speech.84 Without it, genocide, imperialism, Indian removal, and Jim Crow could gain little purchase.85 C. The Harms of Speech Regulation If the harms of hate speech are sobering, what lies on the other side? What happens to the hate speaker forced to hold things in? Will he or she suffer psychological injury, depression, nightmares, drug addiction, and a blunted self image?86 Diminished pecuniary and personal prospects?87 Will hate-speech regulation set up the speaker’s group for extermination, seizure of ancestral lands, or anything comparable?88 The very possibility seems far-fetched. And, indeed, regimes, such as Europe’s and Canada’s, that criminalize hate speech exhibit none of these ills.89 Speech and inquiry there seem as free and uninhibited as in the United States, and their press just as feisty as our own.90 What about harm to the hate speaker? The individual who holds his or her tongue for fear of official sanction may be momentarily irritated. But “bottling it up” seems not to inflict serious psychological or emotional damage.91 Early in the debate about hate speech, some posited that a prejudiced individual forced to keep his impulses in check might become more dangerous as a result.92 By analogy to a pressure valve, he or she might explode in a more serious form of hate speech or even a physical attack on a member of the target group.93 But studies examining this possibility discount it.94 Indeed, the bigot who expresses his sentiment aloud is apt to be more dangerous, not less, as a result. The incident “revs him up” for the next one, while giving onlookers the impression that baiting minorities is socially acceptable, so that they may follow suit.95 A recently developed social science instrument, the Implicit Association Test (“IAT”), shows that many Americans harbor measurable animus toward racial minorities.96 Might it be that hearing hate speech, in person or on the radio, contributes to that result?97 III. OBSERVATION NUMBER THREE: INTEREST BALANCING MUST TAKE ACCOUNT OF RELEVANT FEATURES OF HATE SPEECH If all types of hate speech are apt to impose costs,98 large or small, how should courts and policymakers weigh them? Not every victim of hate speech will respond in one of the ways described above. Some will shrug it off or lash back at the aggressor, giving as good as they got.99 The harm of hate speech is variable, changing from victim to victim and setting to setting.100 By the same token, it is impossible to say with assurance that the cost of hate-speech regulation will always be negligible. Some speakers who might wish to address sensitive topics, such as affirmative action or racial differences in response to medical treatments, might shy away from them.101 The interplay of voices that society relies on to regulate itself may deteriorate. In balancing hate speech versus regulation, two benchmarks may be helpful: a review of current freespeech “exceptions” and attention to the role of incessancy. A. Current Free-Speech Exceptions Not all speech is free. The current legal landscape contains many exceptions and special doctrines corresponding to speech that society has decided it may legitimately punish. Some of these are: words of conspiracy; libel and defamation; copyright violation; words of threat; misleading advertising; disrespectful words uttered to a judge, police officer, or other authority figure; obscenity; and words that create a risk of imminent violence.102 If speech is not a seamless web, the issue is whether the case for prohibiting hate speech is as compelling as that underlying existing exceptions. First Amendment defenders often assert that coining a new exception raises the specter of additional ones, culminating, potentially, in official censorship and Big Brother.103 But our tolerance for a wide array of special doctrines suggests that this fear may be exaggerated and that a case-by-case approach may be quite feasible. How important is it to protect a black undergraduate walking home late at night from the campus library?104 As important as a truthful label on a can of dog food or safeguarding the dignity of a minor state official?105 Neither free-speech advocates nor courts have addressed matters like these, but a rational approach to the issue of hate-speech regulation suggests that they should.106 B. Incessancy and Compounding Two final aspects of hate speech are incessancy—the tendency to recur repeatedly in the life of a victim—and compounding.107 A victim of a racist or similar insult is likely to have heard it more than once. In this respect, a racial epithet differs from an insult such as “You damn idiot driver” or “Watch where you’re going, you klutz” that the listener is apt to hear only occasionally. Like water dripping on stone, racist speech impinges on one who has heard similar remarks many times before.108 Each episode builds on the last, reopening a wound likely still to be raw. The legal system, in a number of settings, recognizes the harm of an act known to inflict a cumulative harm. Ranging from eggshell plaintiffs to the physician who fails to secure fully informed consent, we commonly judge the blameworthiness of an action in light of the victim’s vulnerability.109 When free-speech absolutists trivialize the injury of hate speech as simple offense, they ignore how it targets the victim because of a condition he or she cannot change and that is part of the victim’s very identity. Hate speakers “pile on,” injuring in a way in which the victim has been injured several times before. The would-be hate speaker forced to keep his thoughts to himself suffers no comparable harm. A comparison of the harms to the speaker and the victim of hate speech, then, suggests that a regime of unregulated hate speech is costly, both individually and socially. Yet, even if the harms on both sides were similar, one of the parties is more disadvantaged than the other, so that Rawls’s difference principle suggests that, as a moral matter, we break the tie in the victim’s favor.110 Moreover, the magnitude of error can easily be greater, even in First Amendment terms, on the side of nonregulation. Hate speech warps the dialogic community by depriving its victims of credibility. Who would listen to one who appears, in a thousand scripts, cartoons, stories, and narratives as a buffoon, lazy desperado, or wanton criminal? Because one consequence of hate speech is to diminish the status of one group vis-à-vis all the rest, it deprives the singled-out group of credibility and an audience, a result surely at odds with the underlying rationales of a system of free expression.111
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -2017-03-05 21:38:01.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
ParentRound
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -37
Round
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Finals
Team
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Sunset bhat Neg
Title
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -JF - Anti-Semitic Journalism PIC
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Caselist.CitesClass[54]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,13 +1,0 @@
1 -The specter haunting politics is power – we must transcend the current power structures of the state through the anarchy of the self.
2 -Newman ‘10: (Saul Newman, Professor of Political Theory at the University of London at Goldsmiths, 2010, “The Politics of Postanarchism,” pub. Edinburgh University Press, pp. 104-107); AB
3 -We observe a similar silence about anarchism in more recent radical political thought, that which comes in the wake of poststructuralism. Indeed, in much contemporary continental theory we fi nd a series of themes, preoccupations and debates which bear a strong resemblance to those of anarchism. Amid the ruins of Marxism – or at least of a certain institutionalised and statist form of it – there is a desire among many thinkers today to develop new categories and directions for radical politics. There is the attempt, fi st, to find new forms of radical political subjectivity no longer based on the Marxist notion of the proletariat. There is a recognition that such a category is too narrow to express the different forms of oppression, modes of politicisation and ways of relating to one’s own work and existence that make up the contemporary world. However, there is also the recognition of the inadequacy of the ultimately liberal notion of ‘identity politics’ that characterised much new social movement theory. What is called for is new way of thinking about how, and by what processes, a subject becomes politicised – how does the subject become an egalitarian and collective subject? Secondly, there is, among many thinkers today, a rejection of authoritarian modes of political organisation – for instance, the centrally organised Marxist–Leninist vanguard party which would lead the proletariat to revolution, or the Communist and socialist parties in capitalist countries which sought to play the parliamentary game, thus abandoning any hope of emancipation from the state. There is a need, then, as Badiou would put it, for a politics without a party3 – new forms of political organisation that are no longer structured around the model of the party, as the party always has as its aim the reproduction of state power. Related to this, therefore, is the question of the state itself: the immovability of state power, despite the revolutionary programmes which promised its ‘withering away’, and, moreover, the increasingly authoritarian character of the so- called liberal democratic state, show us that the state remains perhaps the central problem in radical politics. Radical thought, therefore, sees politics increasingly as being situated beyond the state – there is a desire to find a space for politics outside the framework of state power, a space from which the hegemony of the state would be challenged. It seems to me that these themes and questions – political subjectivity beyond class, political organisation beyond the party and political action beyond the state – relate directly to anarchism. If these are the new directions that radical politics is moving in, then this would seem to suggest an increasingly anarchistic orientation. Indeed, this is a tendency that is being borne out in many radical movements and forms of resistance today. The emergence of the global anti- capitalist movement in recent times suggests a new form of politics, one that is much closer to anarchism in its aspirations and tactics, and in its decentralised, democratic modes of organisation. Also, the insurrections in Greece in December 2008 – which had an explicitly anarchist identification – are indicative of this libertarian moment in radical politics. It would seem that the prevailing form taken by radical politics today is anti- statist, anti- authoritarian and decentralised, and emphasises direct action rather than representative party politics and lobbying. Furthermore, is it not evident that there is a massive disengagement of ordinary people from normal political processes, an overwhelming scepticism – especially in the wake of the current economic crisis – about the political elites who supposedly govern in their interests? Is there not, at the same time, an obvious consternation on the part of these elites at this growing distance, signifying a crisis in their symbolic legitimacy? As a defensive or pre- emptive measure,4 the state becomes more draconian and predatory, increasingly obsessed with surveillance and control, defining itself through war and security, seeking to authorise itself through a politics of fear and exception. How should radical political thought respond to this situation, lagging behind – as it so often does – reality ‘on the ground’? My contention is that anarchism – or more precisely postanarchism – can provide some answers here. Indeed, anarchism might be seen as the hidden referent for radical political thought today: while its importance is scarcely acknowledged amongst the thinkers referred to above, anarchism can nevertheless offer critical resources for radical political theory, allowing it to transcend many of its current limitations and, indeed, providing it with a more consistent ethical and political framework.
4 -Politics that does not begin with the creation of the self is doomed to reactivity and ressentiment. This inscribes hatred into the place of power and reaffirms existing structures of domination.
5 -Newman 2k: (Saul Newman, Professor of Political Theory at the University of London at Goldsmiths, 2000, “Anarchism and the Politics of Ressentiment,” Theory and Event, 4:3); AB
6 -Ressentiment is diagnosed by Nietzsche as our modern condition. In order to understand ressentiment, however, it is nec-essary to understand the relationship between master morality and slave morality in which ressentiment is generated. Nietzsche’s work On the Genealogy of Morality is a study of the origins of morality. For Nietzsche, the way we interpret and impose values on the world has a history — its origins are often brutal and far removed from the values they produce. The value of ‘good’, for instance, was invented by the noble and high-placed to apply to themselves, in contrast to common, low-placed and plebeian.3 It was the value of the master — ‘good’ — as opposed to that of the slave — ‘bad’. Thus, according to Nietzsche, it was in this pathos of distance, between the high-born and the low-born, this absolute sense of superiority, that values were created.4 However, this equation of good and aristocratic began to be undermined by a slave revolt in values. This slave revolt, according to Nietzsche, began with the Jews who instigated a revaluation of values: It was the Jews who, rejecting the aristocratic value equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = blessed) ventured with awe-inspiring consistency, to bring about a reversal and held it in the teeth of their unfathomable hatred (the hatred of the powerless), saying, ‘Only those who suffer are good, only the poor, the powerless, the lowly are good; the suffering, the deprived, the sick, the ugly, are the only pious people, the only ones, salvation is for them alone, whereas you rich, the noble, the powerful, you are eternally wicked, cruel, lustful, insatiate, godless, you will also be eternally wretched, cursed and damned!’…5 In this way the slave revolt in morality inverted the noble system of values and began to equate good with the lowly, the powerless — the slave. This inversion introduced the pernicious spirit of revenge and hatred into the creation of values. There- will to power. It would be, in other words, an anarchism without ressentiment. The question of community is central to radical politics, including anarchism. One cannot talk about collective action without at least posing the question of community. For Nietzsche, most modern radical aspirations towards community were a manifestation of the ‘herd’ mentality. However it may be possible to construct a ressentiment-free notion of community from Nietzsche’s own concept of power. For Nietzsche, active power is the individual’s instinctive discharge of his forces and capacities which produces in him an enhanced sensation of power, while reactive power, as we have seen, needs an external object to act on and define itself in opposition to.66 Perhaps one could imagine a form of community based on active power. For Nietzsche this enhanced feeling of power may be derived from assistance and benevolence towards others, from enhancing the feeling of power of others.67 Like the ethics of mutual aid, a community based on will to power may be composed of a series of inter-subjective relations that involve helping and caring for people without dominating them and denying difference. This openness to difference and self-transformation, and the ethic of care, may be the defining characteristics of the post-anarchist democratic community. This would be a community of active power — a community of ‘masters’ rather than ‘slaves’.68 It would be a community that sought to overcome itself — continually transforming itself and revelling in the knowledge of its power to do so. Post-anarchism may be seen, then, as a series of politicoethical strategies against domination, without essentialist guarantees and Manichean structures that condition and restrict classical anarchism. It would affirm the contingency of values and identities, including its own, and affirm, rather than deny, fore morality, as we understand it, had its roots in this vengeful will to power of the powerless over the powerful — the revolt of the slave against the master. It was from this imperceptible, subterranean hatred that grew the values subsequently associated with the good — pity, altruism, meekness, etc. Political values also grew from this poisonous root. For Nietzsche, values of equality and democracy, which form the cornerstone of radical political theory, arose out of the slave revolt in morality. They are generated by the same spirit of revenge and hatred of the powerful. Nietzsche therefore condemns political movements like liberal democracy, socialism, and indeed anarchism. He sees the democratic movement as an expression of the herd-animal morality derived from the Judeo-Christian revaluation of values.6 Anarchism is for Nietzsche the most extreme heir to democratic values — the most rabid expression of the herd instinct. It seeks to level the differences between individuals, to abolish class distinctions, to raze hierarchies to the ground, and to equalize the powerful and the powerless, the rich and the poor, the master and the slave. To Nietzsche this is bringing everything down to level of the lowest common denominator — to erase the pathos of distance between the master and slave, the sense of difference and superiority through which great values are created. Nietzsche sees this as the worst excess of European nihilism — the death of values and creativity. Slave morality is characterized by the attitude of ressentiment — the resentment and hatred of the powerless for the powerful. Nietzsche sees ressentiment as an entirely negative sentiment — the attitude of denying what is life-affirming, saying ‘no’ to what is different, what is ‘outside’ or ‘other’. Ressentiment is characterized by an orientation to the outside, rather than the focus of noble morality, which is on the self.7 While the master says ‘I am good’ and adds as an afterthought, ‘therefore he is bad’; the slave says the opposite — ‘He (the master) is bad, therefore I am good’. Thus the invention of values comes from a comparison or opposition to that which is outside, other, different. Nietzsche says: “… in order to come about, slave morality first has to have an opposing, external world, it needs, psychologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act all, — its action is basically a reaction.”8 This reactive stance, this inability to define anything except in opposition to something else, is the attitude of ressentiment. It is the reactive stance of the weak who define themselves in opposition to the strong.
7 -The role of the judge is to evaluate critical discussion above fiated policy-making analysis – Debate should focus on creating a new generation of citizens that are critical thinkers educated about social problems. AND, fiated discussion is counter-productive and exclusionary. The legal language of the state is not easily accessible to those disenfranchised from the law. You as the judge should prioritize pre-fiat discourse as the first layer of the substantive debate.
8 -The norm of blind adherence to fiat and poor political representation as a community has drained debate of meaning. There is no connection between what we do here and the political, only the refusal to participate in the fiat game can bring us closer to meaning.
9 -Baudrillard ‘81: Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulation.” Published 1984, in English in 1994; AB
10 -I am a nihilist. I observe, I accept, I assume the immense process of the destruction of appearances (and of the seduction of appearances) in the service of meaning (representation, history, criticism, etc.) that is the fundamental fact of the nineteenth century. The true revolution of the nineteenth century, of modernity, is the radical destruction of appearances, the disenchantment of the world and its abandonment to the violence of interpretation and of history. I observe, I accept, I assume, I analyze the second revolution, that of the twentieth century, that of postmodernity, which is the immense process of the destruction of meaning, equal to the earlier destruction of appearances. Those who strikes with meaning are killed by meaning. The dialectic stage, the critical stage is empty. There is no more stage. There is no therapy of meaning or therapy through meaning: therapy itself is part of the generalized process of indifferentiation. The stage of analysis itself has become uncertain, aleatory: theories float (in fact, nihilism is impossible, because it is still a desperate but determined theory, an imaginary of the end, a weltanschauung of catastrophe).*1 Analysis is itself perhaps the decisive element of the immense process of the freezing over of meaning. The surplus of meaning that theories bring, their competition at the level of meaning is completely secondary in relation to their coalition in the glacial and four-tiered operation of dissection and transparency. One must be conscious that, no matter how the analysis proceeds, it proceeds toward the freezing over of meaning, it assists in the precession of simulacra and of indifferent forms. The desert grows. Implosion of meaning in the media. Implosion of the social in the masses. Infinite growth of the masses as a function of the acceleration of the system. Energetic impasse. Point of inertia. A destiny of inertia for a saturated world. The phenomena of inertia are accelerating (if one can say that). The arrested forms proliferate, and growth is immobilized in excrescence. Such is also the secret of the hypertelie, of what goes further than its own end. It would be our own mode of destroying finalities: going further, too far in the same direction - destruction of meaning through simulation, hypersimulation, hypertelie. Denying its own end through hyperfinality (the crustacean, the statues of Easter Island) - is this not also the obscene secret of cancer? Revenge of excrescence on growth, revenge of speed on inertia. The masses themselves are caught up in a gigantic process of inertia through acceleration. They are this excrescent, devouring, process that annihilates all growth and all surplus meaning. They are this circuit short-circuited by a monstrous finality. It is this point of inertia and what happens outside this point of inertia that today is fascinating, enthralling (gone, therefore, the discreet charm of the dialectic). If it is nihilistic to privilege this point of inertia and the analysis of this irreversibility of systems up to the point of no return, then I am a nihilist. If it is nihilistic to be obsessed by the mode of disappearance, and no longer by the mode of production, then I am a nihilist. Disappearance, aphanisis, implosion, Fury of Verschwindens. Transpolitics is the elective sphere of the mode of disappearance (of the real, of meaning, of the stage, of history, of the social, of the individual). To tell the truth, it is no longer so much a question of nihilism: in disappearance, in the desertlike, aleatory, and indifferent form, there is no longer even pathos, the pathetic of nihilism - that mythical energy that is still the force of nihilism, of radicality, mythic denial, dramatic anticipation. It is no longer even disenchantment, with the seductive and nostalgic, itself enchanted, tonality of disenchantment. It is simply disappearance. The trace of this radicality of the mode of disappearance is already found in Adorno and Benjamin, parallel to a nostalgic exercise of the dialectic. Because there is a nostalgia of the dialectic, and without a doubt the most subtle dialectic is nostalgic to begin with. But more deeply, there is in Benjamin and Adorno another tonality, that of a melancholy attached to the system itself, one that is incurable and beyond any dialectic. It is this melancholia of systems that today takes the upper hand through the ironically transparent forms that surround us. It is this melancholia that is becoming our fundamental passion. It is no longer the spleen or the vague yearnings of the fin-de-siecle soul. It is no longer nihilism either, which in some sense aims at normalizing everything through destruction, the passion of resentment (ressentiment).*2 No, melancholia is the fundamental tonality of functional systems, of current systems of simulation, of programming and information. Melancholia is the inherent quality of the mode of the disappearance of meaning, of the mode of the volatilization of meaning in operational systems. And we are all melancholic. Melancholia is the brutal disaffection that characterizes our saturated systems. Once the hope of balancing good and evil, true and false, indeed of confronting some values of the same order, once the more general hope of a relation of forces and a stake has vanished. Everywhere, always, the system is too strong: hegemonic. Against this hegemony of the system, one can exalt the ruses of desire, practice revolutionary micrology of the quotidian, exalt the molecular drift or even defend cooking. This does not resolve the imperious necessity of checking the system in broad daylight. This, only terrorism can do. It is the trait of reversion that effaces the remainder, just as a single ironic smile effaces a whole discourse, just as a single flash of denial in a slave effaces all the power and pleasure of the master. The more hegemonic the system, the more the imagination is struck by the smallest of its reversals. The challenge, even infinitesimal, is the image of a chain failure. Only this reversibility without a counterpart is an event today, on the nihilistic and disaffected stage of the political. Only it mobilizes the imaginary.If being a nihilist, is carrying, to the unbearable limit of hegemonic systems, this radical trait of derision and of violence, this challenge that the system is summoned to answer through its own death, then I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us. But such a sentiment is Utopian. Because it would be beautiful to be a nihilist, if there were still a radicality - as it would be nice to be a terrorist, if death, including that of the terrorist, still had meaning. But it is at this point that things become insoluble. Because to this active nihilism of radicality, the system opposes its own, the nihilism of neutralization. The system is itself also nihilistic, in the sense that it has the power to pour everything, including what denies it, into indifference. In this system, death itself shines by virtue of its absence. (The Bologna train station, the Oktoberfest in Munich: the dead are annulled by indifference, that is where terrorism is the involuntary accomplice of the whole system, not politically, but in the accelerated form of indifference that it contributes to imposing.) Death no longer has a stage, neither phantasmatic nor political, on which to represent itself, to play itself out, either a ceremonial or a violent one. And this is the victory of the other nihilism, of the other terrorism, that of the system. There is no longer a stage, not even the minimal illusion that makes events capable of adopting the force of reality-no more stage either of mental or political solidarity: what do Chile, Biafra, the boat people, Bologna, or Poland matter? All of that comes to be annihilated on the television screen. We are in the era of events without consequences (and of theories without consequences). There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. But that on which it has imposed its ephemeral reign, what it hoped to liquidate in order to impose the reign of the Enlightenment, that is, appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism of meaning or of non-meaning itself. This is where seduction begins.
11 -The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who best pushes radical politics to challenge the state’s power. The judge as a critical educator has an obligation to question state sovereign-hood for any hope of sustainable change in institutional society.
12 -Newman ‘11: (Saul, associate professor in the Department of Government in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, DC, “Postanarchism: a politics of anti-politics” (October 2011), Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 16 no. 3)
13 -At the same time, this aporetic moment of tension central to classical anarchism generates new and productive articulations of politics and ethics. The disjunction between politics and anti-politics is what might be called an ‘inclusive’ disjunction: a compound in which one proposition is true only if its opposing proposition is also true. Politics, at least in a radical, emancipatory sense, has only a consistent identity if an anti-political, indeed utopian, dimension is also present—otherwise it remains caught within existing political frameworks and imaginaries. Conversely, anti-politics only makes sense if it takes seriously the tasks of politics—building, constructing, organizing, fighting, making collective decisions and so on—where questions of power and exclusion inevitably emerge. However, this proximity to power does not invalidate anarchism; rather, it leads to a greater sensitivity to the dangers of power and the need to invent, as mentioned before, new micro-political practices of freedom through which power is subjected to an ongoing ethical interrogation. Where the political pole imposes certain limits, the anti-political pole, by contrast, invokes an outside, a movement beyond limits. It is the signification of the infinite, of the limitless horizon of possibilities. This is both the moment of utopia and, in a different sense, the moment of ethics. Anarchism has an important utopian dimension, even if the classical anarchists themselves claimed not to be utopians but materialists and rationalists. Indeed, some utopian element—whether acknowledged or not—is an essential part of any form of radical politics; to oppose the current order, one inevitably invokes an alternative, utopian imagination. However, we should try to formulate a different approach to utopianism here: the importance of imagining an alternative to the current order is not to lay down a precise programme for the future, but rather to provide a point of exteriority as a way of interrogating the limits of this order. As Miguel Abensour puts it: ‘Is it not proper to utopia to propose a new way of proceeding to a displacement of what is and what seems to go without saying in the crushing name of “reality”?’37 We are crushed under the weight of the current order, which tells us that this is our reality, that what we have now is all there is and all there ever will be. Utopia provides an escape from this stifling reality by imagining an alternative to it; it opens up different possibilities, new ‘lines of flight’. Here, we should think about utopia in terms of action in the immediate sense, of creating alternatives within the present, at localized points, rather than waiting for the revolution. Utopia is something that emerges in political struggles themselves.38 Ethics also implies an outside to the existing order, but in a different sense. Ethics, as I understand it here, involves the opening up of the existing political identities, practices, institutions and discourses to an Other which is beyond their terms. Ethics is more than the application of moral and rational norms. It is rather the continual disturbance of the sovereignty of these norms, and the identities and institutions that draw their legitimacy from them, in the name of something that exceeds their grasp. Importantly, then, ethics is what disturbs politics from the outside. This might be understood in the Levinasian sense of ‘anarchy’: ‘Anarchy cannot be sovereign like an arche. It can only disturb the State—but in a radical way, making possible moments of negation without any affirmation.’39 The point is, however, that politics cannot do without anti-politics, and vice versa. The two must go together. There must always be an anti-political outside, a utopian moment of rupture and excess that disturbs the limits of politics. The ethical moment cannot be eclipsed by the political dimension; nor can it be separated from it, as someone like Carl Schmitt maintained.40 If there is to be a concept of the political, it can only be thought through a certain constitutive tension with ethics. At the same time, anti-politics needs to be politically articulated; it needs to be put into action through actual struggles and engagements with different forms of domination. There must be some way of politically measuring the anti-political imaginery, through victories, defeats, and strategic gains and reversals. So while anti-politics points to a transcendence of the current order, it cannot be an escape from it; it must involve an encounter with its limits, and this is where politics comes in. The transcendence of power involves an active engagement with power, not an avoidance of it; the realization of freedom requires an ongoing elaboration of new practices of freedom within the context of power relations.
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -2017-03-05 21:38:02.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
ParentRound
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -37
Round
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Finals
Team
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Sunset bhat Neg
Title
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -JF - Anarchism K
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Caselist.CitesClass[55]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,9 +1,0 @@
1 -Their suffering reps are consumed by the West creating an insatiable need for more suffering which turns the case. It’s exacerbated by their call for a competitive ballot under the ruse of solving oppression.
2 -Baudrillard ‘94: (Jean Baudrillard, French philosopher, former professor emeritus at the University de Paris X, The Illusion of The End, pg. 66-70)
3 -We have long denounced the capitalistic, economic exploitation of the poverty of the 'other half of the world' 'autre monde. We must today denounce the moral and sentimental exploitation of that poverty - charity cannibalism being worse than oppressive violence. The extraction and humanitarian reprocessing of a destitution which has become the equivalent of oil deposits and gold mines. The extortion of the spectacle of poverty and, at the same time, of our charitable condescension: a worldwide appreciated surplus of fine sentiments and bad conscience. We should, in fact, see this not as the extraction of raw materials, but as a waste-reprocessing enterprise. Their destitution and our bad conscience are, in effect, all part of the waste-products of history- the main thing is to recycle them to produce a new energy source. We have here an escalation in the psychological balance of terror. World capitalist oppression is now merely the vehicle and alibi for this other, much more ferocious, form of moral predation. One might almost say, contrary to the Marxist analysis, that material exploitation is only there to extract that spiritual raw material that is the misery of peoples, which serves as psychological nourishment for the rich countries and media nourishment for our daily lives. The 'Fourth World' (we are no longer dealing with a 'developing' Third World) is once again beleaguered, this time as a catastrophe-bearing stratum. The West is whitewashed in the reprocessing of the rest of the world as waste and residue. And the white world repents and seeks absolution - it, too, the waste-product of its own history. The South is a natural producer of raw materials, the latest of which is catastrophe. The North, for its part, specializes in the reprocessing of raw materials and hence also in the reprocessing of catastrophe. Bloodsucking protection, humanitarian interference, Medecins sans frontieres, international solidarity, etc. The last phase of colonialism: the New Sentimental Order is merely the latest form of the New World Order. Other people's destitution becomes our adventure playground. Thus, the humanitarian offensive aimed at the Kurds - a show of repentance on the part of the Western powers after allowing Saddam Hussein to crush them - is in reality merely the second phase of the war, a phase in which charitable intervention finishes off the work of extermination. We are the consumers of the ever delightful spectacle of poverty and catastrophe, and of the moving spectacle of our own efforts to alleviate it (which, in fact, merely function to secure the conditions of reproduction of the catastrophe market); there, at least, in the order of moral profits, the Marxist analysis is wholly applicable: we see to it that extreme poverty is reproduced as a symbolic deposit, as a fuel essential to the moral and sentimental equilibrium of the West. In our defence, it might be said that this extreme poverty was largely of our own making and it is therefore normal that we should profit by it. There can be no finer proof that the distress of the rest of the world is at the root of Western power and that the spectacle of that distress is its crowning glory than the inauguration, on the roof of the Arche de la Defense, with a sumptuous buffet laid on by the Fondation des Droits de l'homme, of an exhibition of the finest photos of world poverty. Should we be surprised that spaces are set aside in the Arche d' Alliance. for universal suffering hallowed by caviar and champagne? Just as the economic crisis of the West will not be complete so long as it can still exploit the resources of the rest of the world, so the symbolic crisis will be complete only when it is no longer able to feed on the other half's human and natural catastrophes (Eastern Europe, the Gulf, the Kurds, Bangladesh, etc.). We need this drug, which serves us as an aphrodisiac and hallucinogen. And the poor countries are the best suppliers - as, indeed, they are of other drugs. We provide them, through our media, with the means to exploit this paradoxical resource, just as we give them the means to exhaust their natural resources with our technologies. Our whole culture lives off this catastrophic cannibalism, relayed in cynical mode by the news media, and carried forward in moral mode by our humanitarian aid, which is a way of encouraging it and ensuring its continuity, just as economic aid is a strategy for perpetuating under-development. Up to now, the financial sacrifice has been compensated a hundredfold by the moral gain. But when the catastrophe market itself reaches crisis point, in accordance with the implacable logic of the market, when distress becomes scarce or the marginal returns on it fall from overexploitation, when we run out of disasters from elsewhere or when they can no longer be traded like coffee or other commodities, the West will be forced to produce its own catastrophe for itself, in order to meet its need for spectacle and that voracious appetite for symbols which characterizes it even more than its voracious appetite for food. It will reach the point where it devours itself. When we have finished sucking out the destiny of others, we shall have to invent one for ourselves. The Great Crash, the symbolic crash, will come in the end from us Westerners, but only when we are no longer able to feed on the hallucinogenic misery which comes to us from the other half of the world. Yet they do not seem keen to give up their monopoly. The Middle East, Bangladesh, black Africa and Latin America are really going flat out in the distress and catastrophe stakes, and thus in providing symbolic nourishment for the rich world. They might be said to be overdoing it: heaping earthquakes, floods, famines and ecological disasters one upon another, and finding the means to massacre each other most of the time. The 'disaster show' goes on without any let-up and our sacrificial debt to them far exceeds their economic debt. The misery with which they generously overwhelm us is something we shall never be able to repay. The sacrifices we offer in return are laughable (a tornado or two, a few tiny holocausts on the roads, the odd financial sacrifice) and, moreover, by some infernal logic, these work out as much greater gains for us, whereas our kindnesses have merely added to the natural catastrophes another one immeasurably worse: the demographic catastrophe, a veritable epidemic which we deplore each day in pictures. In short, there is such distortion between North and South, to the symbolic advantage of the South (a hundred thousand Iraqi dead against casualties numbered in tens on our side: in every case we are the losers), that one day everything will break down. One day, the West will break down if we are not soon washed clean of this shame, if an international congress of the poor countries does not very quickly decide to share out this symbolic privilege of misery and catastrophe. It is of course normal, since we refuse to allow the spread of nuclear weapons, that they should refuse to allow the spread of the catastrophe weapon. But it is not right that they should exert that monopoly indefinitely. In any case, the under-developed are only so by comparison with the Western system and its presumed success. In the light of its assumed failure, they are not under-developed at all. They are only so in terms of a dominant evolutionism which has always been the worst of colonial ideologies. The argument here is that there is a line of objective progress and everyone is supposed to pass through its various stages (we find the same eyewash with regard to the evolution of species and in that evolutionism which unilaterally sanctions the superiority of the human race). In the light of current upheavals, which put an end to any idea of history as a linear process, there are no longer either developed or under-developed peoples. Thus, to encourage hope of evolution - albeit by revolution - among the poor and to doom them, in keeping with the objective illusion of progress, to technological salvation is a criminal absurdity. In actual fact, it is their good fortune to be able to escape from evolution just at the point when we no longer know where it is leading. In any case, a majority of these peoples, including those of Eastern Europe, do not seem keen to enter this evolutionist modernity, and their weight in the balance is certainly no small factor in the West's repudiation of its own history, of its own utopias and its own modernity. It might be said that the routes of violence, historical or otherwise, are being turned around and that the viruses now pass from South to North, there being every chance that, five hundred years after America was conquered, 1992 and the end of the century will mark the comeback of the defeated and the sudden reversal of that modernity. The sense of pride is no longer on the side of wealth but of poverty, of those who - fortunately for them - have nothing to repent, and may indeed glory in being privileged in terms of catastrophes. Admittedly, this is a privilege they could hardly renounce, even if they wished to, but natural disasters merely reinforce the sense of guilt felt towards them by the wealthy – by those whom God visibly scorns since he no longer even strikes them down. One day it will be the Whites themselves who will give up their whiteness. It is a good bet that repentance will reach its highest pitch with the five-hundredth anniversary of the conquest of the Americas. We are going to have to lift the curse of the defeated - but symbolically victorious - peoples, which is insinuating itself five hundred years later, by way of repentance, into the heart of the white race.
4 -Translating misery into capital is a perverse system of neo-imperial academia~-~--vote negative to reject their call for the ballot
5 -Tomsky ‘11: (Terri, Ph.D in English from U-British Columbia, postdoctoral fellow in cultural memory at the University of Alberta From Sarajevo to 9/11: Travelling Memory and the Trauma Economy, Parallax Volume 17, Issue 4, 2011)
6 -In contrast to the cosmopolitization of a Holocaust cultural memory,1 there exist experiences of trauma that fail to evoke recognition and subsequently, compassion and aid. What is it exactly that confers legitimacy onto some traumatic claims and anonymity onto others? This is not merely a question of competing victimizations, what geographer Derek Gregory has criticized as the process of ‘cherry-picking among . . . extremes of horror’, but one that engages issues of the international travel, perception and valuation of traumatic memory.2 This seemingly arbitrary determination engrosses the e´migre´ protagonist of Dubravka Ugresic’s 2004 novel, The Ministry of Pain, who from her new home in Amsterdam contemplates an uneven response to the influx of claims by refugees fleeing the Yugoslav wars: The Dutch authorities were particularly generous about granting asylum to those who claimed they had been discriminated against in their home countries for ‘sexual differences’, more generous than to the war’s rape victims. As soon as word got round, people climbed on the bandwagon in droves. The war . . . was something like the national lottery: while many tried their luck out of genuine misfortune, others did it simply because the opportunity presented itself.3¶ Traumatic experiences are described here in terms analogous to social and economic capital. What the protagonist finds troubling is that some genuine refugee claimants must invent an alternative trauma to qualify for help: the problem was that ‘nobody’s story was personal enough or shattering enough. Because death itself had lost its power to shatter. There had been too many deaths’.4 In other words, the mass arrival of Yugoslav refugees into the European Union means that war trauma risks becoming a surfeit commodity and so decreases in value. I bring up Ugresic’s wry observations about trauma’s marketability because they enable us to conceive of a trauma economy, a circuit of movement and exchange where traumatic memories ‘travel’ and are valued and revalued along the way.¶ Rather than focusing on the end-result, the winners and losers of a trauma ‘lottery’, this article argues that there is, in a trauma economy, no end at all, no fixed value to any given traumatic experience. In what follows I will attempt to outline the system of a trauma economy, including its intersection with other capitalist power structures, in a way that shows how representations of trauma continually circulate and, in that circulation enable or disable awareness of particular traumatic experience across space and time. To do this, I draw extensively on the comic nonfiction of Maltese-American writer Joe Sacco and, especially, his retrospective account of newsgathering during the 1992–1995 Bosnian war in his 2003 comic book, The Fixer: A Story From Sarajevo.5 Sacco is the author of a series of comics that represent social life in a number of the world’s conflict zones, including the Palestinian territories and the former Yugoslavia. A comic artist, Sacco is also a journalist by profession who has first-hand experience of the way that war and trauma are reported in the international media. As a result, his comics blend actual reportage with his ruminations on the media industry. The Fixer explores the siege of Sarajevo (1992–1995) as part of a larger transnational network of disaster journalism, which also critically, if briefly, references the September eleventh, 2001 attacks in New York City. Sacco’s emphasis on the transcultural coverage of these traumas, with his comic avatar as the international journalist relaying information on the Bosnian war, emphasizes how trauma must be understood in relation to international circuits of mediation and commodification. My purpose therefore is not only to critique the aesthetic of a travelling traumatic memory, but also to call attention to the material conditions and networks that propel its travels.¶ Travelling Trauma Theorists and scholars have already noted the emergence, circulation and effects of traumatic memories, but little attention has been paid to the travelling itself. This is a concern since the movement of any memory must always occur within a material framework. The movement of memories is enabled by infrastructures of power, and consequently mediated and consecrated through institutions. So, while some existing theories of traumatic memory have made those determining politics and policies visible, we still don’t fully comprehend the travel of memory in a global age of media, information networks and communicative capitalism.6 As postcolonial geographers frequently note, to travel today is to travel in a world striated by late capitalism. The same must hold for memory; its circulation in this global media intensive age will always be reconfigured, transvalued and even commodified by the logic of late capital.¶ While we have yet to understand the relation between the travels of memory (traumatic or otherwise) and capitalism, there are nevertheless models for the circulation of other putatively immaterial things that may prove instructive. One of the best, I think, is the critical insight of Edward W. Said on what he called ‘travelling theory’.7 In 1984 and again in 1994, Said wrote essays that described the reception and reformulation of ideas as they are uprooted from an original historical and geographical context and propelled across place and time. While Said’s contribution focuses on theory rather than memory, his reflections on the travel and transformation of ideas provide a comparison which helpfully illuminates the similar movements of what we might call ‘travelling trauma’. Ever attendant to the historical specificities that prompt transcultural transformations, the ‘Travelling Theory’ essays offers a Vichian humanist reading of cultural production; in them, Said argues that theory is not given but made. In the first instance, it emanates out of and registers the sometimes urgent historical circumstances of its theorist.¶ Subsequently, he maintains, when other scholars take up the theory, they necessarily interpret it, additionally integrating their own social and historical experiences into it, so changing the theory and, often, authorizing it in the process. I want to suggest that Said’s bird’s eye view of the intellectual circuit through which theory travels, is received and modified can help us appreciate the movement of cultural memory. As with theory, cultural memories of trauma are lifted and separated from their individual source as they travel; they are mediated, transmitted and institutionalized in particular ways, depending on the structure of communication and communities in which they travel.¶ Said invites his readers to contemplate how the movement of theory transforms its meanings to such an extent that its significance to sociohistorical critique can be drastically curtailed. Using Luka´ cs’s writings on reification as an example, Said shows how a theory can lose the power of its original formulation as later scholars take it up and adapt it to their own historical circumstances. In Said’s estimation, Luka´ cs’s insurrectionary vision became subdued, even domesticated, the wider it circulated. Said is especially concerned to describe what happens when such theories come into contact with academic institutions, which impose through their own mode of producing cultural capital, a new value upon then. Said suggests that this authoritative status, which imbues the theory with ‘prestige and the authority of age’, further dulls the theory’s originally insurgent message.8 When Said returned to and revised his essay some ten years later, he changed the emphasis by highlighting the possibilities, rather than the limits, of travelling theory.¶ ‘Travelling Theory Reconsidered’, while brief and speculative, offers a look at the way Luka´ cs’s theory, transplanted into yet a different context, can ‘flame . . . out’ in a radical way.9 In particular, Said is interested in exploring what happens when intellectuals like Theodor Adorno and Franz Fanon take up Luka´ cs: they reignite the ‘fiery core’ of his theory in their critiques of capitalist alienation and French colonialism. Said is interested here in the idea that theory matters and that as it travels, it creates an ‘intellectual . . . community of a remarkable . . . affiliative’ kind.10 In contrast to his first essay and its emphasis on the degradation of theoretical ideas, Said emphasizes the way a travelling theory produces new understandings as well as new political tools to deal with violent conditions and disenfranchized subjects. Travelling theory becomes ‘an intransigent practice’ that goes beyond borrowing and adaption.11 As Said sees it, both Adorno and Fanon ‘refuse the emoluments offered by the Hegelian dialectic as stabilized into resolution by Luka´ cs’.12 Instead they transform Luka´ cs into their respective locales as ‘the theorist of permanent dissonance as understood by Adorno, and the critic of reactive nationalism as partially adopted by Fanon in colonial Algeria’.13¶ Said’s set of reflections on travelling theory, especially his later recuperative work, are important to any account of travelling trauma, since it is not only the problems of institutional subjugation that matter; additionally, we need to affirm the occurrence of transgressive possibilities, whether in the form of fleeting transcultural affinities or in the effort to locate the inherent tensions within a system where such travel occurs. What Said implicitly critiques in his 1984 essay is the negative effects of exchange, institutionalization and the increasing use-value of critical theory as it travels within the academic knowledge economy; in its travels, the theory becomes practically autonomous, uncoupled from the theorist who created it and the historical context from which it was produced. This seems to perfectly illustrate the international circuit of exchange and valuation that occurs in the trauma economy.¶ In Sacco’s The Fixer, for example, it is not theory, but memory, which travels from Bosnia to the West, as local traumas are turned into mainstream news and then circulated for consumption. By highlighting this mediation, The Fixer explicitly challenges the politics that make invisible the maneuvers of capitalist and neoimperial practices. Like Said, Sacco displays a concern with the dissemination and reproduction of information and its consequent effects in relation to what Said described as ‘the broader political world’.14 Said’s anxiety relates to the academic normativization of theory (a ‘tame academic substitution for the real thing’15), a transformation which, he claimed, would hamper its uses for society.¶ A direct line can be drawn from Said’s discussion of the circulation of discourse and its (non)political effects, and the international representation of the 1992–1995 Bosnian war. The Bosnian war existed as a guerre du jour, the successor to the first Gulf War, receiving saturation coverage and represented daily in the Western media. The sustained presence of the media had much to do with the proximity of the war to European cities and also with the spectacular visibility of the conflict, particularly as it intensified. The bloodiest conflict to have taken place in Europe since the Second World War, it displaced two million people and was responsible for over 150,000 civilian casualties.16 Yet despite global media coverage, no decisive international military or political action took place to suspend fighting or prevent ethnic cleansing in East Bosnia, until after the massacre of Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995. According to Gregory Kent, western perceptions about the war until then directed the lack of political will within the international community, since the event was interpreted, codified and dismissed as an ‘ethnic’, ‘civil’ war and ‘humanitarian crisis’, rather than an act of (Serbian) aggression against (Bosnian) civilians.17¶ The rather bizarre presence of a large international press corps, hungry for drama and yet comfortably ensconced in Sarajevo’s Holiday Inn amid the catastrophic siege of that city, prompted Jean Baudrillard to formulate his theory of the hyperreal. In an article for the Paris newspaper Libe´ration in 1993, Baudrillard writes of his anger at the international apathy towards the Bosnian crisis, denouncing it as a ‘spectral war’.18 He describes it as a ‘hyperreal hell’ not because the violence was in a not-so-distant space, but because of the way the Bosnians were ‘harassed by the international media and humanitarian agencies’.19 Given this extensive media coverage, it is important to evaluate the role of representative discourses in relation to violence and its after effects. To begin with, we are still unsure of the consequences of this saturation coverage, though scholars have since elaborated on the racism framing much of the media discourses on the Yugoslav wars.20 More especially, it is¶ the celebrity of the Bosnian war that makes a critical evaluation of its current status in today’s media cycle all the more imperative. Bosnia’s current invisibility is fundamentally related to a point Baudrillard makes towards the end of his essay: ‘distress, misery and suffering have become the raw goods’ circulating in a global age of ‘commiseration’.21 The ‘demand’ created by a market of a sympathetic, yet selfindulgent spectators propels the global travel of trauma (or rather, the memory of that trauma) precisely because Bosnian suffering has a ‘resale value on the futures markets’.22 To treat traumatic memory as currency not only acknowledges the fact that travelling memory is overdetermined by capitalism; more pertinently, it recognizes the global system through which traumatic memory travels and becomes subject to exchange and flux. To draw upon Marx: we can comprehend trauma in terms of its fungible properties, part of a social ‘relation that is constantly changing with time and place’.23 This is what I call the trauma economy. By trauma economy, I am thinking of economic, cultural, discursive and political structures that guide, enable and ultimately institutionalize the representation, travel and attention to certain traumas.¶ The Trauma Economy in Joe Sacco’s The Fixer Having introduced the idea of a trauma economy and how it might operate, I want to turn to Sacco because he is acutely conscious of the way representations of trauma circulate in an international system. His work exposes the infrastructure and logic of a trauma economy in war-torn Bosnia and so echoes some of the points made by Said about the movement of theory. As I examine Sacco’s critical assessment of the Bosnian war, I want to bear in mind Said’s discussion about the effects of travel on theory and, in particular, his two contrasting observations: first, that theory can become commodified and second, that theory enables unexpected if transient solidarities across cultures. The Fixer takes up the notion of trauma as transcultural capital and commodity, something Sacco has confronted in his earlier work on Bosnia.24 The Fixer focuses on the story of Neven, a Sarajevan local and the ‘fixer’ of the comic’s title, who sells his services to international journalists, including Sacco’s avatar. The comic is¶ set in 2001, in postwar Sarajevo and an ethnically partitioned and economically devastated Bosnia, but its narrative frequently flashes back to the conflict in the mid- 1990s, and to what has been described as ‘the siege within the siege’.25 This refers not just to Sarajevo’s three and a half year siege by Serb forces but also to its backstage: the concurrent criminalization of Sarajevo through the rise of a wartime black market economy from which Bosniak paramilitary groups profited and through which they consolidated their power over Sarajevan civilians. In these flashbacks, The Fixer addresses Neven’s experience of the war, first, as a sniper for one of the Bosniak paramilitary units and, subsequently, as a professional fixer for foreign visitors, setting them up with anything they need, from war stories and tours of local battle sites to tape recorders and prostitutes. The contemporary, postwar scenes detail the ambivalent friendship between Neven and Sacco’s comic avatar. In doing so, The Fixer spares little detail about the economic value of trauma: Neven’s career as a fixer after all is reliant on what Sacco terms the ‘flashy brutality of Sarajevo’s war’.26 Even Neven admits as much to his interlocutor, without irony, let alone compassion: ‘“When massacres happened,” Neven once told me, “those were the best times. Journalists from all over the world were coming here”’.27¶ The Fixer never allows readers to forget that Neven provides his services in exchange for hard cash. So while Neven provides vital – indeed for Sacco’s avatar often the only – access to the stories and traumas of the war, we can never be sure whether he is a reliable witness or merely an opportunistic salesman. His anecdotes have the whiff of bravura about them. He expresses pride in his military exploits, especially his role in a sortie that destroyed several Serb tanks (the actual number varies increasingly each time the tale is told). He tells Sacco that with more acquaintances like himself, he ‘could have broken the siege of Sarajevo’.28 Neven’s heroic selfpresentation is consistently undercut by other characters, including Sacco’s avatar, who ironically renames him ‘a Master in the School of Front-line Truth’ and even calls upon the reader to assess the situation. One Sarajevan local remembers Neven as having a ‘big imagination’29; others castigate him as ‘unstable’30; and those who have also fought in the war reject his claims outright, telling Sacco, ‘it didn’t happen’.31¶ For Sacco’s avatar though, Neven is ‘a godsend’.32 Unable to procure information from the other denizens of Sarajevo, he is delighted to accept Neven’s version of events: ‘Finally someone is telling me how it was – or how it almost was, or how it could have been – but finally someone in this town is telling me something’.33 This discloses the true value of the Bosnian war to the Western media: getting the story ‘right’ factually is less important than getting it ‘right’ affectively. The purpose is to extract a narrative that evokes an emotional (whether voyeuristic or empathetic) response from its audience. Here we see a good example of the way a traumatic memory circulates in the trauma economy, as it travels from its site of origin and into a fantasy of a reality. Neven’s mythmaking – whether motivated by economic opportunism, or as a symptom of his own traumatized psyche – reflects back to the international community a counter-version of mediated events and spectacular traumas that appear daily in the Western media. It is worth adding that his mythmaking only has value so long as it occurs within preauthorized media circuits.¶ When Neven attempts to bypass the international journalists and sell his story instead directly to a British magazine, the account of his wartime ‘action against the 43 tanks’ is rejected on the basis that they ‘don’t print fiction’.34 The privilege of revaluing and re-narrating the trauma is reserved for people like Sacco’s avatar, who has no trouble adopting a mythic and hyperbolic tone in his storytelling: ‘it is he, Neven, who has walked through the valley of the shadow of death and blown things up along the way’.35¶ Yet Neven’s urge to narrate, while indeed part of his job, is a striking contrast to the silence of other locals. When Sacco arrives in Sarajevo in 2001 for his follow-up story, he finds widespread, deliberate resistance to his efforts to gather first-hand testimonies. Wishing to uncover the city’s ‘terrible secrets’, Sacco finds his ‘research has stalled’, as locals either refuse to meet with him or cancel their appointments.36 The suspiciousness and hostility Sacco encounters in Sarajevo is a response precisely to the international demand for trauma of the 1990s. The mass media presence during the war did little to help the city’s besieged residents; furthermore, international journalists left once the drama of war subsided to ‘the last offensives grinding up the last of the last soldiers and civilians who will die in this war’.37 The media fascination¶ with Sarajevo’s humanitarian crisis was as intense as it was fleeting and has since been described as central to the ensuing ‘compassion fatigue’ of Western viewers.38 In contrast to this coverage, which focused on the casualties and victims of the war, The Fixer reveals a very different story: the rise of Bosniak paramilitary groups, their contribution (both heroic and criminal) to the war and their ethnic cleansing of non- Muslim civilians from the city. Herein lies the appeal of Neven, a Bosnian-Serb, who has fought under Bosnian- Muslim warlords defending Sarajevo and who considers himself a Bosnian citizen first before any other ethnic loyalty. For not only is Sacco ignorant about the muddled ethnic realities of the war, its moral ambiguities and its key players but he also wants to hear Neven’s shamelessly daring and dirty account of the war, however unreliable. As Sacco explains, he’s ‘a little enthralled, a little infatuated, maybe a little in love and what is love but a transaction’.39 Neven – a hardened war veteran – provides the goods, the first-hand experience of war and, for Sacco’s avatar, that is worth every Deutschemark, coffee and cigarette. He explains in a parenthetical remark to his implied reader: ‘I would be remiss if I let you think that my relationship with Neven is simply a matter of his shaking me down. Because Neven was the first friend I made in Sarajevo . . . he’s travelled one of the war’s dark roads and I’m not going to drop him till he tells me all about it’.40 Sacco’s assertion here suggests something more than a mutual exploitation. The word ‘friend’ describing Sacco’s relationship to Neven is quickly replaced by the word ‘drop’. Having sold his ‘raw goods’, Neven finds that the trauma economy in the postwar period has already devalued his experience by disengaging with Bosnia’s local traumas. As Sacco suggests, ‘the war moved on and left him behind . . . The truth is, the war quit Neven’.41 The Neven of 2001 is not the brash Neven of old, but a pasty-looking unemployed forty-year old and recovering alcoholic, who takes pills to prevent his ‘anxiety attacks’.42 His wartime actions lay heavily on his conscience, despite his efforts to ‘stash . . . deep’ his bad memories.43 The Fixer leaves us with an ironic fact: Neven, who has capitalized on trauma during the war, is now left traumatized and without capital in the postwar situation.¶ Juxtaposing Traumas in a Global Age¶ Sacco’s depiction of the trauma economy certainly highlights the question of power and exploitation, since so many of the interactions between locals and international visitors are shaped by the commodity market of traumatic memories. And while The Fixer provides a new perspective of the Bosnian war, excoriating the profit-seeking objectives of both the media and the Bosnian middle-men amid life-altering events, its general point about the capitalistic vicissitudes of the trauma economy is not significantly different from that sustained in the narratives of Aleksandar Hemon, Rajiv Chandrasekaran or Art Spiegelman.44What distinguishes Sacco’s work is the way it also picks up the possibility described in Edward Said’s optimistic re-reading of travel: the potential for affiliation. As I see it, Sacco’s criticism isn’t leveled merely at the moral grey zone created during the Bosnian war: he is more interested in the framework of representations themselves that mediate, authorize, commemorate and circulate trauma in different ways. been described as central to the ensuing ‘compassion fatigue’ of Western viewers.38 In contrast to this coverage, which focused on the casualties and victims of the war, The Fixer reveals a very different story: the rise of Bosniak paramilitary groups, their contribution (both heroic and criminal) to the war and their ethnic cleansing of non- Muslim civilians from the city. Herein lies the appeal of Neven, a Bosnian-Serb, who has fought under Bosnian- Muslim warlords defending Sarajevo and who considers himself a Bosnian citizen first before any other ethnic loyalty. For not only is Sacco ignorant about the muddled ethnic realities of the war, its moral ambiguities and its key players but he also wants to hear Neven’s shamelessly daring and dirty account of the war, however unreliable. As Sacco explains, he’s ‘a little enthralled, a little infatuated, maybe a little in love and what is love but a transaction’.39 Neven – a hardened war veteran – provides the goods, the first-hand experience of war and, for Sacco’s avatar, that is worth every Deutschemark, coffee and cigarette. He explains in a parenthetical remark to his implied reader: ‘I would be remiss if I let you think that my relationship with Neven is simply a matter of his shaking me down. Because Neven was the first friend I made in Sarajevo . . . he’s travelled one of the war’s dark roads and I’m not going to drop him till he tells me all about it’.40 Sacco’s assertion here suggests something more than a mutual exploitation. The word ‘friend’ describing Sacco’s relationship to Neven is quickly replaced by the word ‘drop’. Having sold his ‘raw goods’, Neven finds that the trauma economy in the postwar period has already devalued his experience by disengaging with Bosnia’s local traumas. As Sacco suggests, ‘the war moved on and left him behind . . . The truth is, the war quit Neven’.41 The Neven of 2001 is not the brash Neven of old, but a pasty-looking unemployed forty-year old and recovering alcoholic, who takes pills to prevent his ‘anxiety attacks’.42 His wartime actions lay heavily on his conscience, despite his efforts to ‘stash . . . deep’ his bad memories.43 The Fixer leaves us with an ironic fact: Neven, who has capitalized on trauma during the war, is now left traumatized and without capital in the postwar situation. Juxtaposing Traumas in a Global Age Sacco’s depiction of the trauma economy certainly highlights the question of power and exploitation, since so many of the interactions between locals and international visitors are shaped by the commodity market of traumatic memories. And while The Fixer provides a new perspective of the Bosnian war, excoriating the profit-seeking objectives of both the media and the Bosnian middle-men amid life-altering events, its general point about the capitalistic vicissitudes of the trauma economy is not significantly different from that sustained in the narratives of Aleksandar Hemon,¶ Rajiv Chandrasekaran or Art Spiegelman.44What distinguishes Sacco’s work is the way it also picks up the possibility described in Edward Said’s optimistic re-reading of travel: the potential for affiliation. As I see it, Sacco’s criticism isn’t leveled merely at the moral grey zone created during the Bosnian war: he is more interested in the framework of representations themselves that mediate, authorize, commemorate and circulate trauma in different ways. suffering’.48 Instead, the panel places Sacco’s (Anglophone) audience within the familiar, emotional context of the September 11, 2001 attacks, with their attendant anxieties, shock and grief and so contributes to a blurring of the hierarchical lines set up between different horrors across different spaces. Consequently, I do not see Sacco’s juxtaposition of traumas as an instance of what Michael Rothberg calls, ‘competitive memory’, the victim wars that pit winners against losers.49 Sacco gestures towards a far more complex idea that takes into account the highly mediated presentations of both traumas, which nonetheless evokes Rothberg’s notion of multidirectional memory by affirming the solidarities of trauma alongside their differences. In drawing together these two disparate events, Sacco’s drawings echo the critical consciousness in Said’s ‘Travelling Theory’ essay. Rather than suggesting one trauma is, or should be, more morally legitimate than the other, Sacco is sharply attentive to the way trauma is disseminated and recognized in the political world. The attacks on theWorld Trade Centre, like the siege of Sarajevo, transformed into discursive form epitomize what might be called victim narratives. In this way, the United States utilized international sympathy (much of which was galvanized by the stunning footage of the airliners crashing into the towers) to launch a retaliatory campaign against Afghanistan and, later, Iraq. In contrast, Bosnia in 1992 faced a precarious future, having just proclaimed its independence. As we discover in The Fixer, prior to Yugoslavia’s break-up, Bosnia had been ordered to return its armaments to the Yugoslav National Army (JNA), which were then placed ‘into the hands of the rebel Serbs’, leaving the Bosnian government to ‘build an army almost from scratch’.50 The analogy between 9/11 and 1992 Sarajevo is stark: Sarajevo’s empty landscape in the panel emphasizes its defencelessness and isolation. The Fixer constantly reminds the reader about the difficulties of living under a prolonged siege in ‘a city that is cut off and being starved into submission’.51 In contrast, September 11, 2001 has attained immense cultural capital because of its status as a significant U.S. trauma. This fact is confirmed by its profound visuality, which crystallized the spectacle and site of trauma. Complicit in this process, the international press consolidated and legitimated the event’s symbolic power, by representing, mediating and dramatizing the trauma so that, as SlavojZ ˇ izˇek writes, the U.S. was elevated into ‘the sublime victim of Absolute Evil’.52 September 11 was constructed as an exceptional event, in terms of its irregular circumstances and the symbolic enormity both in the destruction of iconic buildings and in the attack on U.S. soil. Such a construction seeks to overshadow perhaps all recent international traumas and certainly all other U.S. traumas and sites of shock. Sacco’s portrayal, which locates September eleven in Sarajevo 1992, calls into question precisely this claim towards the singularity of any trauma. The implicit doubling and prefiguring of the 9/11 undercuts the exceptionalist rhetoric associated with the event. Sacco’s strategy encourages us to think outside of hegemonic epistemologies, where one trauma dominates and becomes more meaningful than others. Crucially, Sacco reminds his audience of the cultural imperialism that frames the spectacle of news and the designation of traumatic narratives in particular.¶ Postwar Bosnia and Beyond 2001 remains, then, both an accidental and a significant date in The Fixer. While the (Anglophone) world is preoccupied with a new narrative of trauma and a sense of historical rupture in a post 9/11 world, Bosnia continues to linger in a postwar limbo. Six years have passed since the war ended, but much of Bosnia’s day-to-day economy remains coded by international perceptions of the war. No longer a haven for aspiring journalists, Bosnia is now a thriving economy for international scholars of trauma and political theory, purveyors of thanotourism,53 UN peacekeepers and post-conflict nation builders (the ensemble of NGOs, charity and aid workers, entrepreneurs, contractors, development experts, and EU government advisors to the Office of the High Representative, the foreign overseer of the protectorate state that is Bosnia). On the other hand, many of Bosnia’s locals face a grim future, with a massive and everincreasing unemployment rate (ranging between 35 and 40), brain-drain outmigration, and ethnic cantonments. I contrast these realities of 2001 because these circumstances – a flourishing economy at the expense of the traumatized population – ought to be seen as part of a trauma economy. The trauma economy, in other words, extends far beyond the purview of the Western media networks. In discussing the way traumatic memories travel along the circuits of the global media, I have described only a few of the many processes that transform traumatic events into fungible traumatic memories; each stage of that process represents an exchange that progressively reinterprets the memory, giving it a new value. Media outlets seek to frame the trauma of the Bosnian wars in ways that are consistent with the aims of pre-existing political or economic agendas; we see this in Sacco just as easily as in Ugresic’s assessment of how even a putatively liberal state like the Netherlands will necessarily inflect the value of one trauma over another. The point is that in this circulation, trauma is placed in a marketplace; the siege of Sarajevo, where an unscrupulous fixer can supply western reporters with the story they want to hear is only a concentrated example of a more general phenomenon. Traumatic memories are always in circulation, being revalued in each transaction according to the logic of supply and demand. Victim and witness; witness and reporter; reporter and audience; producer and consumer: all these parties bargain to suit their different interests. The sooner we acknowledge the influence of these interests, the closer we will come to an understanding of how trauma travels.
7 -Independently - their demand for the ballot is bad—it cedes revolutionary potential to the sovereign authority of the judge which paradoxically reaffirms the status quo.
8 -Campbell ‘98: David Campbell, Professor of International Politics at the University of Newcastle in England, 1998, Performing Politics and the Limits of Language, Theory and Event, 2:1
9 -Those who argue that hate speech demands juridical responses assert that not only does the speech communicate, but that it constitutes an injurious act. This presumes that not only does speech act, but that "it acts upon the addressee in an injurious way" (16). This argumentation is, in Butler's eyes, based upon a "sovereign conceit" whereby speech wields a sovereign power, acts as an imperative, and embodies a causative understanding of representation. In this manner, hate speech constitutes its subjects as injured victims unable to respond themselves and in need of the law's intervention to restrict if not censor the offending words, and punish the speaker: This idealization of the speech act as a sovereign action (whether positive or negative) appears linked with the idealization of sovereign state power or, rather, with the imagined and forceful voice of that power. It is as if the proper power of the state has been expropriated, delegated to its citizens, and the state then rememerges as a neutral instrument to which we seek recourse to protects as from other citizens, who have become revived emblems of a (lost) sovereign power (82). Two elements of this are paradoxical. First, the sovereign conceit embedded in conventional renderings of hate speech comes at a time when understanding power in sovereign terms is becoming (if at all ever possible) even more difficult. Thus the juridical response to hate speech helps deal with an onto-political problem: "The constraints of legal language emerge to put an end to this particular historical anxiety the problematisation of sovereignty, for the law requires that we resituate power in the language of injury, that we accord injury the status of an act and trace that act to the specific conduct of a subject" (78). The second, which stems from this, is that (to use Butler's own admittedly hyperbolic formulation) "the state produces hate speech." By this she means not that the state is the sovereign subject from which the various slurs emanate, but that within the frame of the juridical account of hate speech "the category cannot exist without the state's ratification, and this power of the state's judicial language to establish and maintain the domain of what will be publicly speakable suggests that the state plays much more than a limiting function in such decisions; in fact, the state actively produces the domain of publicly acceptable speech, demarcating the line between the domains of the speakable and the unspeakable, and retaining the power to make and sustain the line of consequential demarcation" (77). The sovereign conceit of the juridical argument thus linguistically resurrects the sovereign subject at the very moment it seems most vulnerable, and reaffirms the sovereign state and its power in relation to that subject at the very moment its phantasmatic condition is most apparent. The danger is that the resultant extension of state power will be turned against the social movements that sought legal redress in the first place (24)
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -2017-03-05 21:38:03.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
ParentRound
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -37
Round
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Finals
Team
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Sunset bhat Neg
Title
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -JF - Charity Cannibalism K
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Caselist.CitesClass[56]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,9 +1,0 @@
1 -The battle for the public sphere is over—we lost. Conservatives and Liberals are now two sides of the same coin, and any movement that promises radical change will be destroyed as soon as it becomes visible. An invisible movement has the most subversive potential—voting neg to reject politics is the only political act
2 -The Invisible Committee ‘7: an anonymous group of French professors, phd candidates, and intellectuals, in the book “The Coming Insurrection” published by Semiotext(e) (attributed to the Tarnac Nine by the French police), http://tarnac9.noblogs.org/gallery/5188/insurrection_english.pdf
3 -Whatever angle you look at it from, there's no escape from the present. That's not the least of its virtues. For those who want absolutely to have hope, it knocks down every support. Those who claim to have solutions are proven wrong almost immediately. It's understood that now everything can only go from bad to worse. "There's no future for the future" is the wisdom behind an era that for all its appearances of extreme normalcy has come to have about the consciousness level of the first punks. The sphere of political representation is closed. From left to right, it's the same nothingness acting by turns either as the big shots or the virgins, the same sales shelf heads, changing up their discourse according to the latest dispatches from the information service. Those who still vote give one the impression that their only intention is to knock out the polling booths by voting as a pure act of protest. And we've started to understand that in fact it’s only against the vote itself that people go on voting. Nothing we've seen can come up to the heights of the present situation; not by far. By its very silence, the populace seems infinitely more 'grown up' than all those squabbling amongst themselves to govern it do. Any Belleville chibani 1 is wiser in his chats than in all of those puppets’ grand declarations put together. The lid of the social kettle is triple-tight, and the pressure inside won’t stop building. The ghost of Argentina’s Que Se Vayan Todos 2 is seriously starting to haunt the ruling heads. The fires of November 2005 will never cease to cast their shadow on all consciences. Those first joyous fires were the baptism of a whole decade full of promises. The media’s “suburbs vs. the Republic” myth, if it’s not inefficient, is certainly not true. The fatherland was ablaze all the way to downtown everywhere, with fires that were methodically snuffed out. Whole streets went up in flames of solidarity in Barcelona and no one but the people who lived there even found out about it. And the country hasn’t stopped burning since. Among the accused we find diverse profiles, without much in common besides a hatred for existing society; not united by class, race, or even by neighborhood. What was new wasn’t the “suburban revolt,” since that was already happening in the 80s, but the rupture with its established forms. The assailants weren’t listening to anybody at all anymore, not their big brothers, not the local associations assigned to help return things to normal. No “SOS Racism which only fatigue, falsification, and media omertà 4 could feign putting an end. The whole series of nocturnal strikes, anonymous attacks, wordless destruction, had the merit of busting wide open the split between politics and the political. No one can honestly deny the obvious weight of this assault which made no demands, and had no message other than a threat which had nothing to do with politics. But you’d have to be blind not to see what is purely political about this resolute negation of politics, and you’d certainly have to know absolutely nothing about the autonomous youth movements of the last 30 years. Like abandoned children we burned the first baby toys of a society that deserves no more respect than the monuments of Paris did at the end of Bloody Week 5 ~-~- and knows it. There’s no social solution to the present situation. First off because the vague aggregate of social groupings, institutions, and individual bubbles that we designate by the anti-phrase “society” has no substance, because there’s no language left to express common experiences with. It took a half-century of fighting by the Lumières to thaw out the possibility of a French Revolution, and a century of fighting by work to give birth to the fearful “Welfare State.” Struggles creating the language in which the new order expresses itself. Nothing like today. Europe is now a de-monied continent that sneaks off to make a run to the Lidl 6 and has to fly with the low-cost airlines to be able to keep on flying. None of the “problems” formulated in the social language are resolvable. The “retirement pensions issue,” the issues of “precariousness,” the “youth” and their “violence” can only be kept in suspense as long as the ever more surprising “acting out” they thinly cover gets managed away police-like. No one’s going to be happy to see old people being wiped out at a knockdown price, abandoned by their own and with nothing to say. And those who’ve found less humiliation and more benefit in a life of crime than in sweeping floors will not give up their weapons, and prison won’t make them love society. The rage to enjoy of the hordes of the retired will not take the somber cuts to their monthly income on an empty stomach, and will get only too excited about the refusal to work among a large sector of the youth. And to conclude, no guaranteed income granted the day after a quasi-uprising will lay the foundations for a new New Deal, a new pact, and a new peace. The social sentiment is rather too evaporated for all that. As their solution, they’ll just never stop putting on the pressure, to make sure nothing happens, and with it we’ll have more and more police chases all over the neighborhood. The drone that even according to the police indeed did fly over Seine-Saint-Denis 7 last July 14 th is a picture of the future in much more straightforward colors than all the hazy images we get from the humanists. That they took the time to clarify that it was not armed shows pretty clearly the kind of road we’re headed down. The country is going to be cut up into ever more air-tight zones. Highways built along the border of the “sensitive neighborhoods” already form walls that are invisible and yet able to cut them off from the private subdivisions. Whatever good patriotic souls may think about it, the management of neighborhoods “by community” is most effective just by its notoriety. The purely metropolitan portions of the country, the main downtowns, lead their luxurious lives in an ever more calculating, ever more sophisticated, ever more shimmering deconstruction. They light up the whole planet with their whorehouse red lights, while the BAC 8 and the private security companies’ ~-~- read: militias’ ~-~- patrols multiply infinitely, all the while benefiting from being able to hide behind an ever more disrespectful judicial front. The catch-22 of the present, though perceptible everywhere, is denied everywhere. Never have so many psychologists, sociologists, and literary people devoted themselves to it, each with their own special jargon, and each with their own specially missing solution. It’s enough just to listen to the songs that come out these days, the trifling “new French music,” where the petty-bourgeoisie dissects the states of its soul and the K’1Fry mafia 9 makes its declarations of war, to know that this coexistence will come to an end soon and that a decision is about to be made. This book is signed in the name of an imaginary collective. Its editors are not its authors. They are merely content to do a little clean-up of what’s scattered around the era’s common areas, around the murmurings at bar-tables, behind closed bedroom doors. They’ve only determined a few necessary truths, whose universal repression fills up the psychiatric hospitals and the painful gazes. They’ve made themselves scribes of the situation. It’s the privilege of radical circumstances that justice leads them quite logically to revolution. It’s enough just to say what we can see and not avoid the conclusions to be drawn from it.
4 -To make micropolitics visible is to coopt it by giving resistance an object – this understanding allows resistance to be framed, to be declared a failure and prevents the immanence of imperceptible politics from coalescing around mundane practices and habitudes of existence
5 -Tsianos et al. ‘8: Vassilis, teaches sociology at the University of Hamburg, Germany, Dimitris Papadopoulos teaches social theory at Cardiff University, Niamh Stephenson teaches social science at the University of New South Wales. “Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century” Pluto Press
6 -In this sense imperceptible politics does not necessarily differ from or oppose other prevalent forms of politics, such as state-oriented politics, micropolitics, identity politics, cultural and gender politics, civil rights movements, etc. And indeed imperceptible politics connects with all these various forms of political engagement and intervention in an opportunistic way: it deploys them to the extent that they allow the establishment of spaces outside representation; that is, spaces which do not primarily focus on the transformation of the conditions of the double-R axiom (rights and representation) but on the insertion of new social forces into a given political terrain. In the previous chapter we called this form of politics outside politics: the politics which opposes the representational regime of policing. Imperceptibility is the everyday strategy which allows us to move and to act below the overcoding regime of representation. This everyday strategy is inherently anti-theoretical; that is, it resists any ultimate theorisation, it cannot be reduced to one successful and necessary form of politics (such as state-oriented politics or micropolitics, for example). Rather, imperceptible politics is genuinely empiricist, that is it is always enacted as ad hoc practices which allow the decomposition of the representational strategies in a particular field and the composition of events which cannot be left unanswered by the existing regime of control. If imperceptible politics resists theorisation and is ultimately empiricist, what then are the criteria for doing imperceptible politics? There are three dimensions which characterise imperceptible politics: objectlessness, totality, trust. Firstly, imperceptible politics is objectless, that is it performs political transformation without primarily targeting a specific political aim (such as transformation of a law or institution, or a particular claim for inclusion, etc). Instead imperceptible politics proceeds by materialising its own political actions through contagious and affective transformations. The object of its political practice is its own practices. In this sense, imperceptible politics is non-intentional - and therein lies its difference from state-oriented politics or the politics of civil rights movements, for example - it instigates change through a series of everyday transformations which can only be codified as having a central political aim or function in retrospect. Secondly, imperceptible politics addresses the totality of an existing field of power. This seems to be the difference between imperceptible politics and micropolitics or other alternative social movements: imperceptible politics is not concerned with containing itself to a molecular level of action; it addresses the totality of power through the social changes which it puts to work in a particular field of action. The distinction between molar and molecular (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 275) has only analytical significance from the perspective of imperceptible politics. In fact imperceptible politics is both molar and molecular, because by being local situated action it addresses the whole order of control in a certain field. Imperceptible politics is located at the heart of a field of power and at the same time it opens a way to move outside this field by forcing the transformation of all these elements which are constitutive of this field. In this sense, imperceptible politics is a driving force which is simul¬taneously both present and absent. We described this in the previous chapter by exploring the importance of speculative figurations for the practice of escape. On the everyday level of escape (a level we called in this chapter imperceptible politics) speculative figuration can be translated into trust. This is the third characteristic of imperceptible politics; it is driven by a firm belief in the importance and truthfulness of its actions, without seeking any evidence for, or conducting any investigation into its practices. This is trust. Imperceptible politics is driven by trust in something which seems to be absent from a particular situation. Imperceptible politics operates around a void, and it is exactly the conversion of this void into everyday politics that becomes the vital force for imperceptible politics.
7 -Their arguments about personal agency are ultimately conservative and de-politicizing – arguments for localizing activism within the purview of social location are the equivalent of privatizing social change, creating us as dependent on the necessity of their advocacy. The more successful their strategy is the more damage it does by making institutions necessary to our understanding of social change
8 -Hershock ‘99: East-West Center, 1999. “Changing the way society changes”, Journal of Buddhist Ethics, 6, 154; http://jbe.gold.ac.uk/6/hershock991.html
9 -The trouble is that, like other technologies biased toward control, the more successful legislation becomes, the more it renders itself necessary. Because it aims at rigorous definition ~-~- at establishing hard boundaries or limits ~-~- crossing the threshold of legislative utility means creating conditions under which the definition of freedom becomes so complex as to be self-defeating. Taken to its logical end, legally-biased social activism is thus liable to effect an infinite density of protocols for maintaining autonomy, generating a matrix of limits on discrimination that would finally be conducive to what might be called "axiological entropy" ~-~- a state in which movement in any direction is equally unobstructed and empty of dramatic potential. Contrary to expectations, complete "freedom of choice" would not mean the elimination of all impediments to meaningful improvisation, but rather an erasure of the latter's conditions of possibility. The effectiveness and efficiency of "hard," control-biased technologies depend on our using natural laws ~-~- horizons of possibility ~-~- as fulcrums for leveraging or dictating changes in the structure of our circumstances. Unlike improvised contributions to changes taking place in our situation, dictating the terms of change effectively silences our situational partners. Technological authority thus renders our circumstances mute and justifies ignoring the contributions that might be made by the seasons or the spiritual force of the mountains to the meaning ~-~- the direction of movement ~-~- of our ongoing patterns of interdependence. With the "perfection" of technically-mediated control, our wills would know no limit. We would be as gods, existing with no imperatives, no external compulsions, and no priorities. We would have no reason to do one thing first or hold one thing, and not another, as most sacred or dear. Such "perfection" is, perhaps, as fabulous and unattainable as it is finally depressing. Yet the vast energies of global capital are committed to moving in its direction, for the most part quite uncritically. The consequences ~-~- as revealed in the desecration and impoverishing of both 'external' and 'internal' wilderness (for instance, the rainforests and our imaginations) ~-~- are every day more evident. The critical question we must answer is whether the "soft" technologies of legally-biased and controlled social change commit us to an equivalent impoverishment and desecration. The analogy between the dependence of technological progress on natural laws and that of social activism on societal laws is by no means perfect. Except among a scattering of philosophers and historians of science, for example, the laws of nature are not viewed as changeable artifacts of human culture. But for present purposes, the analogy need only focus our attention on the way legal institutions ~-~- like natural laws ~-~- do not prescriptively determine the shape of all things to come, but rather establish generic limits for what relationships or states of affairs are factually admissible. Laws that guarantee certain "freedoms" necessarily also prohibit others. Without the fulcrums of unallowable acts, the work of changing a society would remain as purely idealistic as using wishful thinking to move mountains. Changing legal institutions at once forces and enforces societal reform. By affirming and safeguarding those freedoms or modes of autonomy that have come to be seen as generically essential to 'being human', a legally-biased social activism cannot avoid selectively limiting the ways we engage with one another. The absence of coercion may be a basic aim of social activism, but if our autonomy is to be guaranteed both fair and just, its basic strategy must be one of establishing non-negotiable constraints on how we co-exist. Social activism is thus in the business of striking structural compromises between its ends and its means ~-~- between particular freedoms and general equality, and between practical autonomy and legal anonymity. By shifting the locus of freedoms from unique persons to generic citizens ~-~- and in substantial sympathy with both the Platonic renunciation of particularity and the scientific discounting of the exceptional and extraordinary ~-~- social activist methodology promotes dramatic anonymity in order to universally realize the operation of 'blind justice'. Much as hard technologies of control silence the contributions of wilderness and turn us away from the rewards of a truly joint improvisation of order, the process of social activism reduces the relevance of the always unique and unprecedented terrain of our interdependence. This is no small loss. The institutions that guarantee our generic independence effectively pave over those vernacular relationships through which our own contributory virtuosity might be developed and shared ~-~- relationships out of which the exceptional meaning of our immediate situation might be continuously realized. In contrast with Buddhist emptiness ~-~- a practice that entails attending to the mutual relevance of all things ~-~- both the aims and strategies of social activism are conducive to an evacuation of the conditions of dramatic virtuosity, a societal depletion of our resources for meaningfully improvised and liberating intimacy with all things.
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -2017-03-05 21:38:04.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
ParentRound
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -37
Round
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Finals
Team
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Sunset bhat Neg
Title
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -JF - Visibility K
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Caselist.CitesClass[57]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,12 +1,0 @@
1 -The name of this kritik is the One Hour Photo, a recount of the story of Kevin Carter, a photographer, whose mission to capture the ideal picture of a starving Sudanese girl threatened by a vulture in 1994 ended tragically. Instead of shooing away the vulture, he spends over twenty minutes trying to get that perfect picture. This is the fault of the 1AC – they are the Kevin Carter that makes methodological criticisms without doing anything to help the situation, only to self-destruct from culpability, as Kevin Carter did through suicide from extreme guilt.
2 -Macleod ‘94: Scott Macleod, ethnographer, conveys the horrifying tale of Photojournalist Kevin Carter in an obituary written for the photographer in 1994 (Time magazine, 12 September 1994, Volume 144, Number 11).
3 -The image presaged no celebration: a child barely alive, a vulture so eager for carrion. Yet the photograph that epitomized Sudan's famine would win Kevin Carter fame - and hopes for anchoring a career spent hounding the news, free-lancing in war zones, waiting anxiously for assignments amid dire finances, staying in the line of fire for that one great picture. On May 23, 14 months after capturing that memorable scene, Carter walked up to the dais in the classical rotunda of Columbia University's Low Memorial Library and received the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography. The South African soaked up the attention. "I swear I got the most applause of anybody," Carter wrote back to his parents in Johannesburg. "I can't wait to show you the trophy. It is the most precious thing, and the highest acknowledgment of my work I could receive." Carter was feted at some of the most fashionable spots in New York City. Restaurant patrons, overhearing his claim to fame, would come up and ask for his autograph. Photo editors at the major magazines wanted to meet the new hotshot, dressed in his black jeans and T shirts, with the tribal bracelets and diamond-stud earring, with the war-weary eyes and tales from the front lines of Nelson Mandela's new South Africa. Carter signed with Sygma, a prestigious picture agency representing 200 of the world's best photojournalists. "It can be a very glamorous business," says Sygma's U.S. director, Eliane Laffont. "It's very hard to make it, but Kevin is one of the few who really broke through. The pretty girls were falling for him, and everybody wanted to hear what he had to say." There would be little time for that. Two months after receiving his Pulitzer, Carter would be dead of carbon-monoxide poisoning in Johannesburg, a suicide at 33. His red pickup truck was parked near a small river where he used to play as a child; a green garden hose attached to the vehicle's exhaust funneled the fumes inside. "I'm really, really sorry," he explained in a note left on the passenger seat beneath a knapsack. "The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist." How could a man who had moved so many people with his work end up a suicide so soon after his great triumph? The brief obituaries that appeared around the world suggested a morality tale about a person undone by the curse of fame. The details, however, show how fame was only the final, dramatic sting of a death foretold by Carter's personality, the pressure to be first where the action is, the fear that his pictures were never good enough, the existential lucidity that came to him from surviving violence again and again - and the drugs he used to banish that lucidity. If there is a paramount lesson to be drawn from Carter's meteoric rise and fall, it is that tragedy does not always have heroic dimensions. "I have always had it all at my feet," read the last words of his suicide note, "but being me just fit up anyway." First, there was history. Kevin Carter was born in 1960, the year Nelson Mandela's African National Congress was outlawed. Descended from English immigrants, Carter was not part of the Afrikaner mainstream that ruled the country. Indeed, its ideology appalled him. Yet he was caught up in its historic misadventure. His devoutly Roman Catholic parents, Jimmy and Roma, lived in Parkmore, a tree-lined Johannesburg suburb - and they accepted apartheid. Kevin, however, like many of his generation, soon began to question it openly. "The police used to go around arresting black people for not carrying their passes," his mother recalls. "They used to treat them very badly, and we felt unable to do anything about it. But Kevin got very angry about it. He used to have arguments with his father. "Why couldn't we do something about it? Why didn't we go shout at those police?' " Though Carter insisted he loved his parents, he told his closest friends his childhood was unhappy. As a teenager, he found his thrills riding motorcycles and fantasized about becoming a race-car driver. After graduating from a Catholic boarding school in Pretoria in 1976, Carter studied pharmacy before dropping out with bad grades a year later. Without a student deferment, he was conscripted into the South African Defense Force, where he found upholding the apartheid regime loathsome. Once, after he took the side of a black mess-hall waiter, some Afrikaans-speaking soldiers called him a kaffir-boetie ("nigger lover") and beat him up. In 1980 Carter went absent without leave, rode a motorcycle to Durban and, calling himself David, became a disk jockey. He longed to see his family but felt too ashamed to return. One day after he lost his job, he swallowed scores of sleeping pills, pain-killers and rat poison. He survived. He returned to the S.A.D.F. to finish his service and was injured in 1983 while on guard duty at air force headquarters in Pretoria. A bomb attributed to the A.N.C. had exploded, killing 19 people. After leaving the service, Carter got a job at a camera supply shop and drifted into journalism, first as a weekend sports photographer for the Johannesburg Sunday Express. When riots began sweeping the black townships in 1984, Carter moved to the Johannesburg Star and aligned himself with the crop of young, white photojournalists who wanted to expose the brutality of apartheid - a mission that had once been the almost exclusive calling of South Africa's black photographers. "They put themselves in face of danger, were arrested numerous times, but never quit. They literally were willing to sacrifice themselves for what they believed in," says American photojournalist James Nachtwey, who frequently worked with Carter and his friends. By 1990, civil war was raging between Mandela's A.N.C. and the Zulu-supported Inkatha Freedom Party. For whites, it became potentially fatal to work the townships alone. To diminish the dangers, Carter hooked up with three friends - Ken Oosterbroek of the Star and free-lancers Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva - and they began moving through Soweto and Tokoza at dawn. If a murderous gang was going to shoot up a bus, throw someone off a train or cut up somebody on the street, it was most likely to happen as township dwellers began their journeys to work in the soft, shadowy light of an African morning. The four became so well known for capturing the violence that Living, a Johannesburg magazine, dubbed them "the Bang-Bang Club." Even with the teamwork, however, cruising the townships was often a perilous affair. Well-armed government security forces used excessive firepower. The chaotic hand-to-hand street fighting between black factions involved AK-47s, spears and axes. "At a funeral some mourners caught one guy, hacked him, shot him, ran over him with a car and set him on fire," says Silva, describing a typical encounter. "My first photo showed this guy on the ground as the crowd told him they were going to kill him. We were lucky to get away." Sometimes it took more than a camera and camaraderie to get through the work. Marijuana, known locally as dagga, is widely available in South Africa. Carter and many other photojournalists smoked it habitually in the townships, partly to relieve tension and partly to bond with gun-toting street warriors. Although he denied it, Carter, like many hard-core dagga users, moved on to something more dangerous: smoking the "white pipe," a mixture of dagga and Mandrax, a banned tranquilizer containing methaqualone. It provides an intense, immediate kick and then allows the user to mellow out for an hour or two. By 1991, working on the dawn patrol had paid off for one of the Bang-Bang Club. Marinovich won a Pulitzer for his September 1990 photographs of a Zulu being stabbed to death by A.N.C. supporters. That prize raised the stakes for the rest of the club - especially Carter. And for Carter other comparisons cropped up. Though Oosterbroek was his best friend, they were, according to Nachtwey, "like the polarities of personality types. Ken was the successful photographer with the loving wife. His life was in order." Carter had bounced from romance to romance, fathering a daughter out of wedlock. In 1993 Carter headed north of the border with Silva to photograph the rebel movement in famine-stricken Sudan. To make the trip, Carter had taken a leave from the Weekly Mail and borrowed money for the air fare. Immediately after their plane touched down in the village of Ayod, Carter began snapping photos of famine victims. Seeking relief from the sight of masses of people starving to death, he wandered into the open bush. He heard a soft, high-pitched whimpering and saw a tiny girl trying to make her way to the feeding center. As he crouched to photograph her, a vulture landed in view. Careful not to disturb the bird, he positioned himself for the best possible image. He would later say he waited about 20 minutes, hoping the vulture would spread its wings. It did not, and after he took his photographs, he chased the bird away and watched as the little girl resumed her struggle. Afterward he sat under a tree, lit a cigarette, talked to God and cried. "He was depressed afterward," Silva recalls. "He kept saying he wanted to hug his daughter." After another day in Sudan, Carter returned to Johannesburg. Coincidentally, the New York Times, which was looking for pictures of Sudan, bought his photograph and ran it on March 26, 1993. The picture immediately became an icon of Africa's anguish. Hundreds of people wrote and called the Times asking what had happened to the child (the paper reported that it was not known whether she reached the feeding center); and papers around the world reproduced the photo. Friends and colleagues complimented Carter on his feat. His self-confidence climbed. Carter quit the Weekly Mail and became a free-lance photojournalist - an alluring but financially risky way of making a living, providing no job security, no health insurance and no death benefits. He eventually signed up with the Reuter news agency for a guarantee of roughly $2,000 a month and began to lay plans for covering his country's first multiracial elections in April. The next few weeks, however, would bring depression and self-doubt, only momentarily interrupted by triumph. The troubles started on March 11. Carter was covering the unsuccessful invasion of Bophuthatswana by white right-wing vigilantes intent on propping up a black homeland, a showcase of apartheid. Carter found himself just feet away from the summary execution of right-wingers by a black "Bop" policeman. "Lying in the middle of the gunfight," he said, "I was wondering about which millisecond next I was going to die, about putting something on film they could use as my last picture." His pictures would eventually be splashed across front pages around the world, but he came away from the scene in a funk. First, there was the horror of having witnessed murder. Perhaps as importantly, while a few colleagues had framed the scene perfectly, Carter was reloading his camera with film just as the executions took place. "I knew I had missed this f~-~-- shot," he said subsequently. "I drank a bottle of bourbon that night." At the same time, he seemed to be stepping up his drug habit, including smoking the white pipe. A week after the Bop executions, he was seen staggering around while on assignment at a Mandela rally in Johannesburg. Later he crashed his car into a suburban house and was thrown in jail for 10 hours on suspicion of drunken driving. His superior at Reuter was furious at having to go to the police station to recover Carter's film of the Mandela event. Carter's girlfriend, Kathy Davidson, a schoolteacher, was even more upset. Drugs had become a growing issue in their one-year relationship. Over Easter, she asked Carter to move out until he cleaned up his life. With only weeks to go before the elections, Carter's job at Reuter was shaky, his love life was in jeopardy and he was scrambling to find a new place to live. And then, on April 12, 1994, the New York Times phoned to tell him he had won the Pulitzer. As jubilant Times foreign picture editor Nancy Buirski gave him the news, Carter found himself rambling on about his personal problems. "Kevin!" she interrupted, "You've just won a Pulitzer! These things aren't going to be that important now." Early on Monday, April 18, the Bang-Bang Club headed out to Tokoza township, 10 miles from downtown Johannesburg, to cover an outbreak of violence. Shortly before noon, with the sun too bright for taking good pictures, Carter returned to the city. Then on the radio he heard that his best friend, Oosterbroek, had been killed in Tokoza. Marinovich had been gravely wounded. Oosterbroek's death devastated Carter, and he returned to work in Tokoza the next day, even though the violence had escalated. He later told friends that he and not Ken "should have taken the bullet." New York was a respite. By all accounts, Carter made the most of his first visit to Manhattan. The Times flew him in and put him up at the Marriott Marquis just off Times Square. His spirits soaring, he took to calling New York "my town." With the Pulitzer, however, he had to deal not only with acclaim but also with the critical focus that comes with fame. Some journalists in South Africa called his prize a "fluke," alleging that he had somehow set up the tableau. Others questioned his ethics. "The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering," said the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times, "might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene." Even some of Carter's friends wondered aloud why he had not helped the girl.
4 -Why does the affirmative refuse to defend the political implications of their agenda? At its core our argument is not particularly complex, the affirmative is an attempt at capturing the best representation of suffering while avoiding the political consequences of action. This perpetuates the sentimentalizing of suffering which precludes effective political engagement.
5 -Kleinman and Kleinman ‘96: Kleinman, prof of Medical Anthropology and Psychiatry @ Harvard, AND Kleinman, sinologist @ Harvard, 1996 (Arthur and Joan, “The Appeal of Experience; the Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times,” Daedalus, Winer, v125 n1 p. exac)
6 -SUFFERING IS ONE OF THE EXISTENTIAL GROUNDS of human experience; it is a defining quality, a limiting experience in human conditions.(1) It is also a master subject of our mediatized times. Images of victims of natural disasters, political conflict, forced migration, famine, substance abuse, the HIV pandemic, chronic illnesses of dozens of kinds, crime, domestic abuse, and the deep privations of destitution are everywhere. Video cameras take us into the intimate details of pain and misfortune. Images of suffering are appropriated to appeal emotionally and morally both to global audiences and to local populations. Indeed, those images have become an important part of the media. As "infotainment" on the nightly news, images of victims are commercialized; they are taken up into processes of global marketing and business competition. The existential appeal of human experiences, their potential to mobilize popular sentiment and collective action, and even their capability to witness or offer testimony are now available for gaining market share. Suffering, "though at a distance," as the French sociologist Luc Boltanski tellingly expresses it, is routinely appropriated in American popular culture, which is a leading edge of global popular culture.(2) This globalization of suffering is one of the more troubling signs of the cultural transformations of the current era: troubling because experience is being used as a commodity, and through this cultural representation of suffering, experience is being remade, thinned out, and distorted. It is important to avoid essentializing, naturalizing, or sentimentalizing suffering. There is no single way to suffer; there is no timeless or spaceless universal shape to suffering. There are communities in which suffering is devalued and others in which it is endowed with the utmost significance. The meanings and modes of the experience of suffering have been shown by historians and anthropologists alike to be greatly diverse.(3) Individuals do not suffer in the same way, any more than they live, talk about what is at stake, or respond to serious problems in the same ways. Pain is perceived and expressed differently, even in the same community.(4) Extreme forms of suffering~-~-survival from the Nazi death camps or the Cambodian catastrophe~-~-are not the same as the "ordinary" experiences of poverty and illness.(5)
7 -Moreover, like Kevin Carter, the affirmative has BECOME THE VULTURE. In framing their advocacy in terms of capturing accurate representation and they reflect a political sympathy no more deep than seeking the Pulitzer prize (In debate spaces we refer to that as “winning the round”). Their refusal to engage in the political eviscerates the efficacy of their advocacy.
8 -Kleinman and Kleinman ‘96: Kleinman, prof of Medical Anthropology and Psychiatry @ Harvard, AND Kleinman, sinologist @ Harvard, 1996 (Arthur and Joan, “The Appeal of Experience; the Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times,” Daedalus, Winer, v125 n1 p. exac)
9 -PROFESSIONAL APPROPRIATIONS OF THE IMAGES OF SUFFERING: PHOTOJOURNALISM AND PUBLIC HEALTH This photograph won a Pulitzer Prize for The New York Times. In the April 13, 1994 issue of the Times, there was a full-page advertisement taken out by the Times' owners in recognition of the three Pulitzer Prizes that it won that year. The Times described this award-winning picture in the following way: To The New York Times, for Kevin Carter's photograph of a vulture perching near a little girl in the Sudan who has collapsed from hunger, a picture that became an icon of starvation. When the photograph first appeared, it accompanied a story of the famine that has once again resulted from political violence and the chaos of civil war in the southern Sudan.(7) The Times, self-congratulatory account fails to adequately evoke the image's shocking effect. The child is hardly larger than an infant; she is naked; she appears bowed over in weakness and sickness, incapable, it would seem, of moving; she is unprotected. No mother, no family, no one is present to prevent her from being attacked by the vulture, or succumbing to starvation and then being eaten. The image suggests that she has been abandoned. Why? The reader again is led to imagine various scenarios of suffering: she has been lost in the chaos of forced uprooting; her family has died; she has been deserted near death in order for her mother to hold on to more viable children. The image's great success is that it causes the reader to want to know more. Why is this innocent victim of civil war and famine unprotected? The vulture embodies danger and evil, but the greater dangers and real forces of evil are not in the "natural world"; they are in the political world, including those nearby in army uniforms or in government offices in Khartoum. Famine has become a political strategy in the Sudan.(8) The photograph has been reprinted many times, and it has been duplicated in advertisements for a number of nongovernmental aid agencies that are raising funds to provide food to refugees. This is a classic instance of the use of moral sentiment to mobilize support for social action. One cannot look at this picture without wanting to do something to protect the child and drive the vulture away. Or, as one aid agency puts it, to prevent other children from succumbing in the same heartlessly inhuman way by giving a donation. The photograph calls for words to answer other questions. How did Carter allow the vulture to get so close without doing something to protect the child? What did he do after the picture was taken? Was it in some sense posed? Inasmuch as Kevin Carter chose to take the time, minutes that may have been critical at this point when she is near death, to compose an effective picture rather than to save the child, is he complicit? Those moral questions particular to Carter's relationship (or nonrelationship) to the dying child were only intensified when, on July 29, 1994, a few months after the Pulitzer Prize announcement, The New York Times ran an obituary for Kevin Carter, who had committed suicide at age thirty-three. That shocking notice of his death, written by Bill Keller, the Times, Johannesburg correspondent, as well as a longer article by Scott Mac Leod in Time magazine on September 12, reported Carter's clarifications about how he took the photograph and what followed:(9)...he wandered into the open bush. He heard a soft, high-pitched whimpering and saw a tiny girl trying to make her way to the feeding center. As he crouched to photograph her, a vulture landed in view. Careful not to disturb the bird, he positioned himself for the best possible image. He would later say he waited about 20 minutes, hoping the vulture would spread its wings. It did not, and after he took his photographs, he chased the bird away and watched as the little girl resumed her struggle. Afterwards he sat under a tree, lit a cigarette, talked to God and cried. He was depressed afterward....He kept saying he wanted to hug his daughter.(10) The Times, obituary ends with a section entitled "The Horror of the Work," in which Jimmy Carter, Kevin's father, observes that his son "Always carried around the horror of the work he did." Keller implies that it was the burden of this "horror" that may have driven Carter to suicide. The article by Scott Mac Leod in Time shows that Kevin Carter had lived a very troubled life, with drug abuse, a messy divorce, deep financial problems, brushes with the police, and was a manic-depressive. We also learn that he had spent much of his career photographing political repression and violence in South Africa, and that he had been deeply affected by the shooting of his best friend and coworker, Ken Oosterbrock, for whom, he told friends, he "should have taken the bullet."(11) His suicide note, besides mentioning these other problems, comes back to the theme of the burden of horror: "I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain...of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners...."(12) From Scott Mac Leod we also learn that Carter had been present at the execution of right-wing paramilitary men in Bophuthatswana; much to his annoyance he had missed the master image snapped by his colleagues of a white mercenary pleading for his life before being executed~-~-a picture that also was reprinted by newspapers around the globe. The article in Time reports that Carter was painfully aware of the photojournalist's dilemma: "I had to think visually," he said once, describing a shoot-out. "I am zooming in on a tight shot of the dead guy and a splash of red. Going into his khaki uniform in a pool of blood in the sand. The dead man's face is slightly grey. You are making a visual here. But inside something is screaming, `My God.' But it is time to work. Deal with the rest later...."(13) Time magazine's writer discovered that some journalists questioned Carter's ethics: "The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering...might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene." Scott Mac Leod notes that even some of Carter's friends "wondered aloud why he had not helped the girl."(14) It is easy to moralize about how Carter's professional success was a result of his failure to act humanely. To balance the account, we need to remember that many photographers and journalists have been killed this year covering some of the more violent political conflicts around the world. "Hardly career advancement," cautioned Bill Kovach, Curator of Harvard's Nieman Foundation, in response to an earlier version of this paper. Kevin Carter's career is as much a story of courage and professionalism as it is a tale of moral failure. Moreover, the photograph he created provided political testimony and drove people to act. Photojournalists, like Kevin Carter, contribute to a global humanitarian effort to prevent silence. That is a considerable contribution. Having learned about Carter's suicide, the prize-winning image, an anonymously public icon of suffering at a distance, becomes part of close experience. Kevin Carter is transformed from a name on the side of the photograph to a narrative, a story that is emplotted with a classic example of Joseph Conrad's depiction of Africa as the heart of darkness, the site of social horror. Carter becomes a subject in the cultural story his photograph helped write by being transformed, infected more than affected, by what he had to bear. But what of the horrors experienced by the little Sudanese girl, who is given neither a name nor a local moral world? The tension of uncertainty is unrelieved. Only now, with the story of Carter's suicide, the suffering of the representer and the represented interfuses. Professional representation as well as popular interpretations would have us separate the two: one a powerless local victim, the other a powerful foreign professional.(15) Yet, the account of Carter's suicide creates a more complex reality. The disintegration of the subject/object dichotomy implicates us all. The theories of a variety of academic professions may help explain how Carter got us into this situation of bringing the global into the local, but they fail to explain how we will get ourselves out of the moral complexities he has intensified for us by projecting the local into the global.(16) We are left only with the unsentimentalized limits of the human condition~-~-a silence seemingly without meaning, possibly without solace. And still the world calls for images: the mixture of moral failures and global commerce is here to stay.(17) Without disputing the photograph's immense achievement, it is useful to explore its moral and political assumptions.(18) There is, for example, the unstated idea that this group of unnamed Africans (are they Nuer or Dinka?) cannot protect their own. They must be protected, as well as represented, by others. The image of the subaltern conjures up an almost neocolonial ideology of failure, inadequacy, passivity, fatalism, and inevitability.(19) Something must be done, and it must be done soon, but from outside the local setting. The authorization of action through an appeal for foreign aid, even foreign intervention, begins with an evocation of indigenous absence, an erasure of local voices and acts. Suffering is presented as if it existed free of local people and local worlds. The child is alone. This, of course, is not the way that disasters, illnesses, and deaths are usually dealt with in African or other non-Western societies, or, for that matter, in the West. Yet, the image of famine is culturally represented in an ideologically Western mode: it becomes the experience of a lone individual.(20) The next step, naturally, is to assume that there are no local institutions or programs. That assumption almost invariably leads to the development of regional or national policies that are imposed on local worlds. When those localities end up resisting or not complying with policies and programs that are meant to assist them, such acts are then labeled irrational or self-destructive. The local world is deemed incompetent, or worse. This may seem too thoroughgoing a critique. Clearly, witnessing and mobilization can do good, but they work best when they take seriously the complexity of local situations and work through local institutions. Moral witnessing also must involve a sensitivity to other, unspoken moral and political assumptions. Watching and reading about suffering, especially suffering that exists somewhere else, has, as we have already noted, become a form of entertainment. Images of trauma are part of our political economy. Papers are sold, television programs gain audience share, careers are advanced, jobs are created, and prizes are awarded through the appropriation of images of suffering. Kevin Carter won the Pulitzer Prize, but his victory, substantial as it was, was won because of the misery (and probable death) of a nameless little girl. That more dubious side of the appropriation of human misery in the globalization of cultural processes is what must be addressed. One message that comes across from viewing suffering from a distance is that for all the havoc in Western society, we are somehow better than this African society. We gain in moral status and some of our organizations gain financially and politically, while those whom we represent, or appropriate, remain where they are, moribund, surrounded by vultures. This "consumption" of suffering in an era of so-called "disordered capitalism" is not so very different from the late nineteenth-century view that the savage barbarism in pagan lands justified the valuing of our own civilization at a higher level of development~-~-a view that authorized colonial exploitation. Both are forms of cultural representation in which the moral, the commercial, and the political are deeply involved in each other. The point is that the image of the vulture and the child carries cultural entailments, including the brutal historical genealogy of colonialism as well as the dubious cultural baggage of the more recent programs of "modernization" and globalization (of markets and financing), that have too often worsened human problems in sub-Saharan Africa.(21) Another effect of the postmodern world's political and economic appropriation of images of such serious forms of suffering at a distance is that it has desensitized the viewer. Viewers are overwhelmed by the sheer number of atrocities. There is too much to see, and there appears to be too much to do anything about. Thus, our epoch's dominating sense that complex problems can be neither understood nor fixed works with the massive globalization of images of suffering to produce moral fatigue, exhaustion of empathy, and political despair.
10 -The alternative is to “refuse the affirmatives denial of politics.” Rather than burying our heads in the sand and pretending that debate is a game of little political consequence with only marginal rhetorical value, we should fully assume the responsibility of political participation. Policymaking as a heuristic to learn scenario planning is good even if politics are bad, scenario analysis of policies is pedagogically valuable – it enhances creativity, deconstructs biases and teaches advocacy skills. Turns their policymaking bad args.
11 -Barma et al ‘16: (May 2016, Advance Publication Online on 11/6/15, Naazneen Barma, PhD in Political Science from UC-Berkeley, Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, Brent Durbin, PhD in Political Science from UC-Berkeley, Professor of Government at Smith College, Eric Lorber, JD from UPenn and PhD in Political Science from Duke, Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, Rachel Whitlark, PhD in Political Science from GWU, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Project on Managing the Atom and International Security Program within the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, “‘Imagine a World in Which’: Using Scenarios in Political Science,” International Studies Perspectives 17 (2), pp. 1-19, http://www.naazneenbarma.com/uploads/2/9/6/9/29695681/using_scenarios_in_political_science_isp_2015.pdf)
12 -What Are Scenarios and Why Use Them in Political Science? Scenario analysis is perceived most commonly as a technique for examining the robustness of strategy. It can immerse decision makers in future states that go beyond conventional extrapolations of current trends, preparing them to take advantage of unexpected opportunities and to protect themselves from adverse exogenous shocks. The global petroleum company Shell, a pioneer of the technique, characterizes scenario analysis as the art of considering “what if” questions about possible future worlds. Scenario analysis is thus typically seen as serving the purposes of corporate planning or as a policy tool to be used in combination with simulations of decision making. Yet scenario analysis is not inherently limited to these uses. This section provides a brief overview of the practice of scenario analysis and the motivations underpinning its uses. It then makes a case for the utility of the technique for political science scholarship and describes how the scenarios deployed at NEFPC were created. The Art of Scenario Analysis We characterize scenario analysis as the art of juxtaposing current trends in unexpected combinations in order to articulate surprising and yet plausible futures, often referred to as “alternative worlds.” Scenarios are thus explicitly not forecasts or projections based on linear extrapolations of contemporary patterns, and they are not hypothesis-based expert predictions. Nor should they be equated with simulations, which are best characterized as functional representations of real institutions or decision-making processes (Asal 2005). Instead, they are depictions of possible future states of the world, offered together with a narrative of the driving causal forces and potential exogenous shocks that could lead to those futures. Good scenarios thus rely on explicit causal propositions that, independent of one another, are plausible—yet, when combined, suggest surprising and sometimes controversial future worlds. For example, few predicted the dramatic fall in oil prices toward the end of 2014. Yet independent driving forces, such as the shale gas revolution in the United States, China’s slowing economic growth, and declining conflict in major Middle Eastern oil producers such as Libya, were all recognized secular trends that—combined with OPEC’s decision not to take concerted action as prices began to decline—came together in an unexpected way. While scenario analysis played a role in war gaming and strategic planning during the Cold War, the real antecedents of the contemporary practice are found in corporate futures studies of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Raskin et al. 2005). Scenario analysis was essentially initiated at Royal Dutch Shell in 1965, with the realization that the usual forecasting techniques and models were not capturing the rapidly changing environment in which the company operated (Wack 1985; Schwartz 1991). In particular, it had become evident that straight-line extrapolations of past global trends were inadequate for anticipating the evolving business environment. Shell-style scenario planning “helped break the habit, ingrained in most corporate planning, of assuming that the future will look much like the present” (Wilkinson and Kupers 2013, 4). Using scenario thinking, Shell anticipated the possibility of two Arab-induced oil shocks in the 1970s and hence was able to position itself for major disruptions in the global petroleum sector. Building on its corporate roots, scenario analysis has become a standard policymaking tool. For example, the Project on Forward Engagement advocates linking systematic foresight, which it defines as the disciplined analysis of alternative futures, to planning and feedback loops to better equip the United States to meet contemporary governance challenges (Fuerth 2011). Another prominent application of scenario thinking is found in the National Intelligence Council’s series of Global Trends reports, issued every four years to aid policymakers in anticipating and planning for future challenges. These reports present a handful of “alternative worlds” approximately twenty years into the future, carefully constructed on the basis of emerging global trends, risks, and opportunities, and intended to stimulate thinking about geopolitical change and its effects.4 As with corporate scenario analysis, the technique can be used in foreign policymaking for long-range general planning purposes as well as for anticipating and coping with more narrow and immediate challenges. An example of the latter is the German Marshall Fund’s EuroFutures project, which uses four scenarios to map the potential consequences of the Euro-area financial crisis (German Marshall Fund 2013). Several features make scenario analysis particularly useful for policymaking.5 Long-term global trends across a number of different realms—social, technological, environmental, economic, and political—combine in often-unexpected ways to produce unforeseen challenges. Yet the ability of decision makers to imagine, let alone prepare for, discontinuities in the policy realm is constrained by their existing mental models and maps. This limitation is exacerbated by well-known cognitive bias tendencies such as groupthink and confirmation bias (Jervis 1976; Janis 1982; Tetlock 2005). The power of scenarios lies in their ability to help individuals break out of conventional modes of thinking and analysis by introducing unusual combinations of trends and deliberate discontinuities in narratives about the future. Imagining alternative future worlds through a structured analytical process enables policymakers to envision and thereby adapt to something altogether different from the known present. Designing Scenarios for Political Science Inquiry The characteristics of scenario analysis that commend its use to policymakers also make it well suited to helping political scientists generate and develop policy-relevant research programs. Scenarios are essentially textured, plausible, and relevant stories that help us imagine how the future political-economic world could be different from the past in a manner that highlights policy challenges and opportunities. For example, terrorist organizations are a known threat that have captured the attention of the policy community, yet our responses to them tend to be linear and reactive. Scenarios that explore how seemingly unrelated vectors of change—the rise of a new peer competitor in the East that diverts strategic attention, volatile commodity prices that empower and disempower various state and nonstate actors in surprising ways, and the destabilizing effects of climate change or infectious disease pandemics—can be useful for illuminating the nature and limits of the terrorist threat in ways that may be missed by a narrower focus on recognized states and groups. By illuminating the potential strategic significance of specific and yet poorly understood opportunities and threats, scenario analysis helps to identify crucial gaps in our collective understanding of global politicaleconomic trends and dynamics. The notion of “exogeneity”—so prevalent in social science scholarship—applies to models of reality, not to reality itself. Very simply, scenario analysis can throw into sharp relief often-overlooked yet pressing questions in international affairs that demand focused investigation. Scenarios thus offer, in principle, an innovative tool for developing a political science research agenda. In practice, achieving this objective requires careful tailoring of the approach. The specific scenario analysis technique we outline below was designed and refined to provide a structured experiential process for generating problem-based research questions with contemporary international policy relevance.6 The first step in the process of creating the scenario set described here was to identify important causal forces in contemporary global affairs. Consensus was not the goal; on the contrary, some of these causal statements represented competing theories about global change (e.g., a resurgence of the nation-state vs. border-evading globalizing forces). A major principle underpinning the transformation of these causal drivers into possible future worlds was to “simplify, then exaggerate” them, before fleshing out the emerging story with more details.7 Thus, the contours of the future world were drawn first in the scenario, with details about the possible pathways to that point filled in second. It is entirely possible, indeed probable, that some of the causal claims that turned into parts of scenarios were exaggerated so much as to be implausible, and that an unavoidable degree of bias or our own form of groupthink went into construction of the scenarios. One of the great strengths of scenario analysis, however, is that the scenario discussions themselves, as described below, lay bare these especially implausible claims and systematic biases.8 An explicit methodological approach underlies the written scenarios themselves as well as the analytical process around them—that of case-centered, structured, focused comparison, intended especially to shed light on new causal mechanisms (George and Bennett 2005). The use of scenarios is similar to counterfactual analysis in that it modifies certain variables in a given situation in order to analyze the resulting effects (Fearon 1991). Whereas counterfactuals are traditionally retrospective in nature and explore events that did not actually occur in the context of known history, our scenarios are deliberately forward-looking and are designed to explore potential futures that could unfold. As such, counterfactual analysis is especially well suited to identifying how individual events might expand or shift the “funnel of choices” available to political actors and thus lead to different historical outcomes (Nye 2005, 68–69), while forward-looking scenario analysis can better illuminate surprising intersections and sociopolitical dynamics without the perceptual constraints imposed by fine-grained historical knowledge. We see scenarios as a complementary resource for exploring these dynamics in international affairs, rather than as a replacement for counterfactual analysis, historical case studies, or other methodological tools. In the scenario process developed for NEFPC, three distinct scenarios are employed, acting as cases for analytical comparison. Each scenario, as detailed below, includes a set of explicit “driving forces” which represent hypotheses about causal mechanisms worth investigating in evolving international affairs. The scenario analysis process itself employs templates (discussed further below) to serve as a graphical representation of a structured, focused investigation and thereby as the research tool for conducting case-centered comparative analysis (George and Bennett 2005). In essence, these templates articulate key observable implications within the alternative worlds of the scenarios and serve as a framework for capturing the data that emerge (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994). Finally, this structured, focused comparison serves as the basis for the cross-case session emerging from the scenario analysis that leads directly to the articulation of new research agendas. The scenario process described here has thus been carefully designed to offer some guidance to policy-oriented graduate students who are otherwise left to the relatively unstructured norms by which political science dissertation ideas are typically developed. The initial articulation of a dissertation project is generally an idiosyncratic and personal undertaking (Useem 1997; Rothman 2008), whereby students might choose topics based on their coursework, their own previous policy exposure, or the topics studied by their advisors. Research agendas are thus typically developed by looking for “puzzles” in existing research programs (Kuhn 1996). Doctoral students also, understandably, often choose topics that are particularly amenable to garnering research funding. Conventional grant programs typically base their funding priorities on extrapolations from what has been important in the recent past—leading to, for example, the prevalence of Japan and Soviet studies in the mid-1980s or terrorism studies in the 2000s—in the absence of any alternative method for identifying questions of likely future significance. The scenario approach to generating research ideas is grounded in the belief that these traditional approaches can be complemented by identifying questions likely to be of great empirical importance in the real world, even if these do not appear as puzzles in existing research programs or as clear extrapolations from past events. The scenarios analyzed at NEFPC envision alternative worlds that could develop in the medium (five to seven year) term and are designed to tease out issues scholars and policymakers may encounter in the relatively near future so that they can begin thinking critically about them now. This timeframe offers a period distant enough from the present as to avoid falling into current events analysis, but not so far into the future as to seem like science fiction. In imagining the worlds in which these scenarios might come to pass, participants learn strategies for avoiding failures of creativity and for overturning the assumptions that prevent scholars and analysts from anticipating and understanding the pivotal junctures that arise in international affairs.
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -2017-03-05 21:38:06.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
ParentRound
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -37
Round
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Finals
Team
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Sunset bhat Neg
Title
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -JF - One Hour Photo K
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Caselist.CitesClass[58]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,9 +1,0 @@
1 -Relying on knowledge derived solely from written literature without actually investigating problems prevents any real change.
2 -Mao 1930: Tse-tung Chairman of the Communist party of China 1943–1974, Revolutionary, May 1930, “OPPOSE BOOK WORSHIP”,http://www.marxists.org/reference/ar...6/mswv6_11.htm //Skills
3 -III. OPPOSE BOOK WORSHIP Whatever is written in a book is right — such is still the mentality of culturally backward Chinese peasants. Strangely enough, within the Communist Party there are also people who always say in a discussion, "Show me where it's written in the book." When we say that a directive of a higher organ of leadership is correct, that is not just because it comes from "a higher organ of leadership" but because its contents conform with both the objective and subjective circumstances of the struggle and meet its requirements. It is quite wrong to take a formalistic attitude and blindly carry out directives without discussing and examining them in the light of actual conditions simply because they come from a higher organ. It is the mischief done by this formalism which explains why the line and tactics of the Party do not take deeper root among the masses. To carry out a directive of a higher organ blindly, and seemingly without any disagreement, is not really to carry it out but is the most artful way of opposing or sabotaging it. The method of studying the social sciences exclusively from the book is likewise extremely dangerous and may even lead one onto the road of counter-revolution. Clear proof of this is provided by the fact that whole batches of Chinese Communists who confined themselves to books in their study of the social sciences have turned into counter-revolutionaries. When we say Marxism is correct, it is certainly not because Marx was a "prophet" but because his theory has been proved correct in our practice and in our struggle. We need Marxism in our struggle. In our acceptance of his theory no such formalisation of mystical notion as that of "prophecy" ever enters our minds. Many who have read Marxist books have become renegades from the revolution, whereas illiterate workers often grasp Marxism very well. Of course we should study Marxist books, but this study must be integrated with our country's actual conditions. We need books, but we must overcome book worship, which is divorced from the actual situation. How can we overcome book worship? The only way is to investigate the actual situation.
4 -And, they promote an oppressive framework by speaking out for the marginalized from a comfortable pedestal of academia and literature without bother to truly investigate the harms of the 1AC.
5 -Lenz ‘4: (Brooke, Assistant Professor of English at Saint Mary's University of Minnesota “Postcolonial Fiction and the Outsider Within: Toward a Literary Practice of Feminist Standpoint Theory” NWSA Journal, 2004, pp. 98-120)
6 -Feminist projects that seek to explore the oppression of "Third World" women have generally been motivated by the best of intentions. Nevertheless, "the practice of privileged persons speaking for or on behalf of less privileged persons," Linda Alcoff notes, "has actually resulted (in many cases) in increasing or reinforcing the oppression of the group spoken for" (1992, 7). This result proceeds from an inability and/or unwillingness to shift the terms of the exploration, an incapacity to actually begin within the conceptual framework of the less privileged, proceeding instead from misconceptions or misapplications of supposedly "universal" realities, similar to Mariah's applications of liberal feminism to Lucy's maternal conflicts. In fact, the assumption that recognizable oppression exists is in itself a refusal to shift the focus, and often results in projects that seek to situate oppression after the fact in relation to social structures that may or may not actually be oppressive.16 A question thus arises about the methodology through which feminist standpoint theory can be applied most appropriately and responsibly. As Alcoff continues, academic feminists "are authorized by virtue of our academic positions to develop theories that express and encompass the ideas, needs, and goals of others. However, we must begin to ask ourselves whether this is a legitimate authority" (1992, 7).
7 -And, failure to probe problems beyond the realm of paper and computer screens means the syllables that fly out of your mouth are gibberish. As an alternative, your right to speak should be unconditionally and fundamentally revoked. Only by truly investigation things can we truly change the objects of our attentions.
8 -Mao 1930: Tse-tung Chairman of the Communist party of China 1943–1974, Revolutionary, May 1930, “OPPOSE BOOK WORSHIP”,http://www.marxists.org/reference/ar...6/mswv6_11.htm //Skills
9 -I. NO INVESTIGATION, NO RIGHT TO SPEAK Unless you have investigated a problem, you will be deprived of the right to speak on it. Isn't that too harsh? Not in the least. When you have not probed into a problem, into the present facts and its past history, and know nothing of its essentials, whatever you say about it will undoubtedly be nonsense. Talking nonsense solves no problems, as everyone knows, so why is it unjust to deprive you of the right to speak? Quite a few comrades always keep their eyes shut and talk nonsense, and for a Communist that is disgraceful. How can a Communist keep his eyes shut and talk nonsense? It won' t do! It won't do! You must investigate! You must not talk nonsense! II. TO INVESTIGATE A PROBLEM IS TO SOLVE IT You can' t solve a problem? Well, get down and investigate the present facts and its past history! When you have investigated the problem thoroughly, you will know how to solve it. Conclusions invariably come after investigation, and not before. Only a blockhead cudgels his brains on his own, or together with a group, to "find solution" or "evolve an idea" without making any investigation. It must be stressed that this cannot possibly lead to any effective solution or any good idea. In other words, he is bound to arrive at a wrong solution and a wrong idea. There are not a few comrades doing inspection work, as well as guerrilla leaders and cadres newly in office, who like to make political pronouncements the moment they arrive at a place and who strut about, criticizing this and condemning that when they have only seen the surface of things or minor details. Such purely subjective nonsensical talk is indeed detestable. These people are bound to make a mess of things, lose the confidence of the masses and prove incapable of solving any problem at all. When they come across difficult problems, quite a number of people in leading positions simply heave a sigh without being able to solve them. They lose patience and ask to be transferred on the ground that they "have not the ability and cannot do the job"; These are cowards' words. Just get moving on your two legs, go the rounds of every section placed under your charge and "inquire into everything''1 as Confucius did, and then you will be able to solve the problems, however little is your ability; for although your head may be empty before you go out of doors, it will be empty no longer when you return but will contain all sorts of material necessary for the solution of the problems, and that is how problems are solved. Must you go out of doors? Not necessarily. You can call a fact-finding meeting of people familiar with the situation in order to get at the source of what you call a difficult problem and come to know how it stands now, and then it will be easy to solve your difficult problem. Investigation may be likened to the long months of pregnancy, and solving a problem to the day of birth. To investigate a problem is, indeed, to solve it.
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -2017-03-05 21:38:08.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
ParentRound
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -37
Round
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Finals
Team
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Sunset bhat Neg
Title
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -JF - Mao K
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Caselist.CitesClass[59]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,6 +1,0 @@
1 -The 1AC’s act of narrative and disconnect from the resolution is decadence – this is fundamentally subjective and destroys the ability for us to engage an actual world of the 1AC – turns their subjectivity arguments.
2 -Gordon ‘6: Lewis Gordon 06—professor at philosophy, African and Judiac Studies at University of Connecticut Storrs—2006 (Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times, p 28-29)
3 -A striking feature (among many) of the contemporary intellectual climate, as I pointed out in the introduction of this book, is the war on evidence. There are many instances of this, but perhaps most memorable are the many "charts" and so-called evidential claims made by Ronald Reagan during his presidency. The so-called evidence he advanced was rarely ever evident. We needn’t blame Reagan for this. It was happening everywhere. Think of the scores of pseudo-intellectuals who have mastered the performance of “academese” and the rhetorical advance of evidence like claims. Lying beneath all this are, of course, nihilistic forces, and lying beneath such forces are, as Friedrich Nietzsche diagnosed little more than a century ago, decadent ones. Where truth has collapsed into commonness, then critical thinking isn't necessary, which makes the work of assessing evidence superfluous. The effect is the kind of nonthinking activities against which Ortega y Gasset argued. There are two extremes of this. On the one hand, there is oversimplicity that demands no reflection. On the other hand, there IS the dense, abstruse appearance of expertise that conceals an absence of thought. Both don't require thinking because their ultimate appeal is appearance. ¶ Evidence is paradoxically that which has been hidden but revealed as a conduit for the appearance of another hidden reality. In effect, then, It is an appearance that enables appearance, but it is an appearance that requires thinking in order to appear. In short, it is not an appearance that stimulates thought but a form of thought that stimulates appearance. This means that evidence is always symbolic; it always refers beyond Itself. Because whether affirmed or rejected, it always extends itself publicly for assessment, evidence is peculiarly social. And since it is social, evidence is subject to the complex exchange of intersubjective activities. Evidence must, in other words be subject to norms" and "criteria." By norms, I don't here mean normativity or social prejudices but instead an understanding of where an exceptional instance versus a typical instance of a case holds. This requires further understanding of relevance, which, too, requires the value of distinction. All this together provides a clue to the contemporary problem. When simply the performance of presenting evidence substitutes for evidence, then anything can count as evidence. We see this in scholarly texts where the authors announce the importance of looking at a subject and then later argue asa though that announcement itself constituted examination. Think, as well, of some texts in literary and cultural studies with long, run-on commentary in end notes and footnotes that serve no role of substantiating the claims they supposedly demarcate. We also see it in cases where pronouncements of past failures of certain social remedies take the form of perennial truths.
4 -Decadence allows the colonization of methods – turns the case
5 -Gordon ‘14: Lewis Gordon 14—professor of philosophy, African and Judiac Studies at the University of Connecticut—2014 (“Disciplinary Decadence and the Decolonization of Knowledge,” Africa Development 39.1: 81-92, 88).
6 -The first is regarding the political significance of this critique. For politics to exist, there must be discursive opposition over relations of power. Such activity involves communicative possibilities that rely on the suspension of violent or repressive forces. In effect, that makes politics also a condition of appearance. To be political is to emerge, to appear, to exist. Colonisation involves the elimination of discursive opposition between the dominant group and the subordinated group. A consequence of this is the attempted elimination of speech (a fundamental activity of political life) with a trail of concomitant conditions of its possibility. It is not that colonised groups fail to speak. It is that their speaking lacks appearance or mediation; it is not transformed into speech. The erasure of speech calls for the elimination of such conditions of its appearance such as gestural sites and the constellation of muscles that facilitates speech – namely, the face. As faceless, problem people are derailed from the dialectics of recognition, of self and other, with the consequence of neither self nor other. Since ethical life requires others, a challenge is here raised against models of decolonial practice that centre ethics. The additional challenge, then, is to cultivate the options necessary for both political and ethical life. To present that call as an ethical one would lead to a similar problem of coloniality as did, say, the problem of method raised by Fanon. European modernity has, in other words, subverted ethics. As with the critique of epistemology as first philosophy, ethics, too, as first philosophy must be called into question. It is not that ethics must be rejected. It simply faces its teleological suspension, especially where, if maintained, it presupposes instead of challenging colonial relations. Even conceptions of the ethical that demand deference to the Other run into trouble here since some groups, such as blacks and Indians/Native Americans, are often not even the Other. This means, then, that the ethical proviso faces irrelevance without the political conditions of its possibility. This is a major challenge to liberal hegemony, which calls for ethical foundations of political life, in European modernity. It turns it upside down. But in doing so, it also means that ethics-centred approaches, even in the name of liberation, face a similar fate.
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -2017-03-05 21:38:09.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
ParentRound
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -37
Round
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Finals
Team
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Sunset bhat Neg
Title
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -JF - Decadence DA
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Caselist.RoundClass[32]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -2017-02-16 05:46:56.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Round
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -1
RoundReport
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Stanford
Caselist.RoundClass[33]
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -2017-03-04 22:47:40.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Round
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -1
RoundReport
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Central Valley
Caselist.RoundClass[34]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -48
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -2017-03-04 22:48:21.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Arjun Tambe
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Lake Highland
Round
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -1
RoundReport
... ... @@ -1,3 +1,0 @@
1 -Structural Violence AC
2 -Neoliberalism K
3 -Warming DA
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Greenhill
Caselist.RoundClass[35]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -49
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -2017-03-04 22:48:59.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Round
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -1
RoundReport
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Central Valley
Caselist.RoundClass[36]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -50
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -2017-03-04 22:49:26.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Round
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -1
RoundReport
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -St Marks
Caselist.RoundClass[37]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -2017-03-05 21:37:56.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Round
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Finals
RoundReport
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -x
Caselist.CitesClass[5]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,32 @@
1 +The invocation of “survival” as the basis of the plan makes all atrocities possible and removes the value of survival itself – in an attempt to save our world, they have destroyed it.
2 +Callahan ‘73: Daniel Callahan, Fellow at the Institute of Society and Ethics, 1973, The Tyranny of Survival, Pages 91-93)
3 +
4 +The value of survival could not be so readily abused were it not for its evocative power. But abused it has been. In the name of survival, all manner of social and political evils have been committed against the rights of individuals, including the right to life. The purported threat of Communist domination has for over two decades fueled the drive of militarists for ever-larger defense budgets, no matter what the cost to other social needs. During World War II, native Japanese-Americans were herded, without due process of law, to detention camps. This policy was later upheld by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States (1944) in the general context that a threat to national security can justify acts otherwise blatantly unjustifiable. The survival of the Aryan race was one of the official legitimations of Nazism. Under the banner of survival, the government of South Africa imposes a ruthless apartheid, heedless of the most elementary human rights. The Vietnamese war has seen one of the greatest of the many absurdities tolerated in the name of survival: the destruction of villages in order to save them. But it is not only in a political setting that survival has been evoked as a final and unarguable value. The main rationale B. F. Skinner offers in Beyond Freedom and Dignity for the controlled and conditioned society is the need for survival. For Jacques Monod, in Chance and Necessity, survival requires that we overthrow almost every known religious, ethical and political system. In genetics, the survival of the gene pool has been put forward as sufficient grounds for a forceful prohibition of bearers of offensive genetic traits from marrying and bearing children. Some have even suggested that we do the cause of survival no good by our misguided medical efforts to find means by which those suffering from such common genetically based diseases as diabetes can live a normal life, and thus procreate even more diabetics. In the field of population and environment, one can do no better than to cite Paul Ehrlich, whose works have shown a high dedication to survival, and in its holy name a willingness to contemplate governmentally enforced abortions and a denial of food to surviving populations of nations which have not enacted population-control policies. For all these reasons it is possible to counterpoise over against the need for survival a "tyranny of survival." There seems to be no imaginable evil which some group is not willing to inflict on another for sake of survival, no rights, liberties or dignities which it is not ready to suppress. It is easy, of course, to recognize the danger when survival is falsely and manipulatively invoked. Dictators never talk about their aggressions, but only about the need to defend the fatherland to save it from destruction at the hands of its enemies. But my point goes deeper than that. It is directed even at a legitimate concern for survival, when that concern is allowed to reach an intensity which would ignore, suppress or destroy other fundamental human rights and values. The potential tyranny survival as value is that it is capable, if not treated sanely, of wiping out all other values. Survival can become an obsession and a disease, provoking a destructive singlemindedness that will stop at nothing. We come here to the fundamental moral dilemma. If, both biologically and psychologically, the need for survival is basic to man, and if survival is the precondition for any and all human achievements, and if no other rights make much sense without the premise of a right to life—then how will it be possible to honor and act upon the need for survival without, in the process, destroying everything in human beings which makes them worthy of survival. To put it more strongly, if the price of survival is human degradation, then there is no moral reason why an effort should be made to ensure that survival. It would be the Pyrrhic victory to end all Pyrrhic victories.
5 +And the fear of death causes psychological damage – rejection of this fear causes greater appreciation of life.
6 + Van Nuys ‘8: Dr. David Van Nuys writes in “AN INTERVIEW WITH IRVIN YALOM, MD ON DEATH ANXIETY” under the Psychotherapy section, February 20th. Dr. Irvin Yalom is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at Stanford University and the author of several highly acclaimed textbooks, including Existential Psychotherapy and The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy. He is also the author of stories and novels related to psychotherapy, including Love's Executioner, When Nietzsche Wept, Lying on the Couch, Momma and the Meaning of Life, and The Schopenhauer Cure. His latest non-fiction book is Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death. http://www.gulfbend.org/poc/view_doc.php?type=docandid=28821; AB
7 +Though death cannot be avoided, confronting the fact that you will die has rewards, namely that people who are able to do it tend to become calmer, more centered and aware and more able to ignore distractions and anxieties and focus on what is truly important (e.g., loving relationships). Confronting death makes life more poinient and meaningful in essence. You appreciate life more if you treat each day as your last. This is illustrated quite well by Dicken's classic story, "A Christmas Carol" in which the protagonist, Scrooge, has an awakening into life and compassion only after the Ghost of Christmas Future shows him his grave.
8 +The fear of death dissolves the ability to live a mentally liberated life in which we can live life to the fullest – embracing death is necessary to remove the shackles of death’s supposed evil ontology.
9 +Howard ‘9: January 1, 2009, Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness, Review by Benjamin Howard of Roshi’s new book: BEING WITH DYING: CULTIVATING COMPASSION AND FEARLESSNESS IN THE PRESENCE OF DEATH, PhD in anthropology
10 +“Snow was general all over Ireland,” writes James Joyce at the end of his short story “The Dead.” In this celebrated story Gabriel Conroy, a middle-aged Dubliner, comes to terms with his own mortality. As often in Western literature, snow is a metaphor for death. Today, what is general all over America—and indeed the world—is fear, whether its object be joblessness, a terrorist attack, or the more familiar specters of aging, sick-ness, and death. What have Zen teachings to say about fear? And what has Zen practice to offer? One person who has confronted fear in general and the fear of death in particular is Joan Halifax Roshi, founder and Abbot of the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Trained as an anthropologist, Roshi Joan turned to Zen practice after the death of her grandmother. For the past four decades she has devoted her life to teaching Zen and caring for the dying. In her new book, Being with Dying (Shambhala Publications), Halifax presents the fruit of her life’s work. Observing that the fear of death causes many of us to avoid, ignore, or otherwise deny the “only certainty of our lives,” she reminds us that “to deny death is to deny life.” And to embrace death can be the ultimate form of liberation: The sooner we can embrace death, the more time we have to live completely, and to live in reality. Our acceptance of death influences not only the experience of dying but also the experience of living; life and death lie along the same continuum. One cannot—as so many of us try to do—lead life fully and struggle to keep the inevitable at bay.
11 +The 1AC prescribes death to have an evil ontology – this is a terrible foundation for making decisions because it actively prohibits discourse against oppressive structures under a rhetoric of a greater good and is an independent reason to reject the aff.
12 +Their use of nuclear extinction rhetoric specifically guarantees structural violence – makes war inevitable
13 +Martin ‘84: (Brian, research associate in the Dept. of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, Australian National University, and a member of SANA, “Extinction Politics,” Scientists Against Nuclear Arms Newsletter, number 16, May, pp. 5-6, http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/84sana1.html)
14 +The peace movement also has denigrated the value of civil defence, apparently, in part, because a realistic examination of civil defence would undermine beliefs about total annihilation. The many ways in which the effects of nuclear war are exaggerated and worst cases emphasized can be explained as the result of a presupposition by antiwar scientists and activists that their political aims will be fulfilled when people are convinced that there is a good chance of total disaster from nuclear war.7 There are quite a number of reasons why people may find a belief in extinction from nuclear war to be attractive.8 Here I will only briefly comment on a few factors. The first is an implicit Western chauvinism The effects of global nuclear war would mainly hit the population of the United States, Europe and the Soviet Union. This is quite unlike the pattern of other major ongoing human disasters of starvation, disease, poverty and political repression which mainly affect the poor, nonwhite populations of the Third World. The gospel of nuclear extinction can be seen as a way by which a problem for the rich white Western societies is claimed to be a problem for all the world. Symptomatic of this orientation is the belief that, without Western aid and trade, the economies and populations of the Third World would face disaster. But this is only Western self-centredness. Actually, Third World populations would in many ways be better off without the West: the pressure to grow cash crops of sugar, tobacco and so on would be reduced, and we would no longer witness fresh fish being airfreighted from Bangladesh to Europe. A related factor linked with nuclear extinctionism is a belief that nuclear war is the most pressing issue facing humans. I disagree, both morally and politically, with the stance that preventing nuclear war has become the most important social issue for all humans. Surely, in the Third World, concern over the actuality of massive suffering and millions of deaths resulting from poverty and exploitation can justifiably take precedence over the possibility of a similar death toll from nuclear war. Nuclear war may be the greatest threat to the collective lives of those in the rich, white Western societies but, for the poor, nonwhite Third World peoples, other issues are more pressing. In political terms, to give precedence to nuclear war as an issue is to assume that nuclear war can be overcome in isolation from changes in major social institutions, including the state, capitalism, state socialism and patriarchy. If war is deeply embedded in such structures - as I would argue9 - then to try to prevent war without making common cause with other social movements will not be successful politically. This means that the antiwar movement needs to link its strategy and practice with other movements such as the feminist movement, the workers' control movement and the environmental movement. A focus on nuclear extinction also encourages a focus on appealing to elites as the means to stop nuclear war, since there seems no other means for quickly overcoming the danger. For example, Carl Sagan, at the end of an article about nuclear winter in a popular magazine, advocates writing letters to the presidents of the United States and of the Soviet Union.10 But if war has deep institutional roots, then appealing to elites has no chance of success. This has been amply illustrated by the continual failure of disarmament negotiations and appeals to elites over the past several decades. Just about everyone, including generals and prime ministers, is opposed to nuclear war. The question is what to do about it. Many people have incorporated doomsday ideas into their approaches. My argument here is that antiwar activists should become much more critical of the assumptions underlying extinction politics.
15 +Turns the aff - structural violence outweighs – kills more people than nuclear war.
16 +Gilligan '96: (James, Faculty – Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and its Causes, p. 191-196)
17 +You cannot work for one day with the violent people who fill our prisons and mental hospitals for the criminally insane without being forcibly and constantly reminded of the extreme poverty and discrimination that characterize their lives. Hearing about their lives, and about their families and friends, you are forced to recognize the truth in Gandhi’s observation that the deadliest form of violence is poverty. Not a day goes by without realizing that trying to understand them and their virulent behavior in purely individual terms is impossible and wrong-headed. Any theory of violence, especially a psychological theory, that evolves from the experience of men in maximum security prisons and hospitals for the criminally insane must begin with the recognition that these institutions are only microcosms. They are not where the major violence of our society takes place, and the perpetrators who fill them are far from being the main causes of most violent deaths. Any approach to a theory of violence needs to begin with a look at the structural violence of this country. Focusing merely on those relatively few men who commit what we define as murder could distract us from examining and learning from those structural causes of violent death that are far more significant from a numerical or public health, or human, standpoint By “structural violence” I mean the increased rates of death and disability suffered by those who occupy the bottom rungs of society, as contrasted with the relatively lower death rates experienced by those who are above them. Those excess deaths (or at least a demonstratably large portion of them) are a function of class structure; and that structure is itself a product of society’s collective human choices, concerning how to distribute the collective wealth of the society. These are not acts of God. I am contrasting “structural” with “behavioral violence,” by which I mean the non-natural deaths and injuries that are caused by specific behavioral actions of individuals against individuals, such as the deaths we attribute to homicide, suicide, soldiers in warfare, capital punishment, and so on. Structural violence differs from behavioral violence in at least three major respects The lethal effects of structural violence operate continuously rather than sporadically, whereas murders, suicides, executions, wars, and other forms of behavioral violence occur one at a time. Structural violence operates more or less independently of individual acs; independent of individuals and groups (politicians, political parties, voters) whose decisions may nevertheless have lethal consequences for others. Structural violence is normally invisible, because it may appear to have had other (natural or violent) causes. Neither the existence, the scope and extent, nor the lethal power of structural violence can be discerned until we shift our focus from a clinical or psychological perspective, which looks at one individual at a time, to the epidemiological perspective of public health and preventative medicine. Examples are all around us. Continues – Page 195 The 14 to 18 million deaths a year caused by structural violence compare with about 100,000 deaths per year from armed conflict. Comparing this frequency of deaths from structural violence to the frequency of those caused by major military and political violence, such as World War II (an estimated 49 million military and civilian deaths, including those caused by genocide~-~~-~-or about eight million per year, 1939-1945), the Indonesian massacre of 1965-66 (perhaps 575,000 deaths), the Vietnam war (possibly two million, 1954-1973), and even a hypothetical nuclear exchange between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. (232 million), it was clear that even war cannot begin to compare with structural violence, which continues year after year. In other words, every fifteen years, on the average, as many people die because of relative poverty as would be killed in a nuclear war that caused 232 deaths, and every single year, two to three times as many people die from poverty throughout the world as were killed by the Nazi genocide of the Jews over a six-year period. This is, in effect, the equivalent of an ongoing, unending, in fact accelerating, thermonuclear war, or genocide, perpetuated on the week and poor every year of every decade, throughout the world. Structural violence is also the main cause of behavioral violence on a socially and epidemiologically significant scale (from homicide and suicide to war and genocide). The question as to which of the two forms of violence—structural or behavioral—is more important, dangerous, or lethal is moot, for they are inextricably related to each other, as cause to effect.
18 +Death is a neutral mechanism of nature - this is an independent avenue that necessitates the alternative.
19 +Epicurus 311 BCE: Letter to Meneocues, translated by Professor Robert Drew Hicks, http://classics.mit.edu/Epicurus/menoec.html, BRACKETED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE
20 +Accustom yourself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply awareness, and death is the privation of all awareness; therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life an unlimited time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terror; for those who thoroughly apprehend that there are no terrors for them in ceasing to live. Foolish, therefore, is the person who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer. But in the world, at one time people shun death as the greatest of all evils, and at another time choose it as a respite from the evils in life. The wise person does not deprecate life nor do does they he fear the cessation of life. The thought of life is no offense to them him, nor is the cessation of life regarded as an evil. And even as people choose of food not merely and simply the larger portion, but the more pleasant, so the wise seek to enjoy the time which is most pleasant and not merely that which is longest. And he who admonishes the young to live well and the old to make a good end speaks foolishly, not merely because of the desirability of life, but because the same exercise at once teaches to live well and to die well. Much worse is he who says that it were good not to be born, but when once one is born to pass with all speed through the gates of Hades. For if he truly believes this, why does he not depart from life? It were easy for him to do so, if once he were firmly convinced. If he speaks only in mockery, his words are foolishness, for those who hear believe him not.
21 +Emotional numbing is the result of fearing death – we must free ourselves to regain full emotion
22 +Anderson ‘4: Nancy Anderson writes in “Work with Passion: How to Do What You Love for a Living” in 2004.
23 +Fear of death causes preoccupation with the idea of death, fostering lack of purpose and concentration on what you cannot control. People who fear death often numb their feelings as a way to avoid awareness of their impending deaths. Without the feelings, they live in the illusion that time is not passing by. Concentrating on the future is also an effective way to avoid the present. For example, one of my clients worried about old age and death even though she was in her early fifties. Sarah’s preoccupation with her demise was reinforced by all other fears: the fear of poverty, losing love, criticism, and illness. Underneath all the fears was an unconscious belief that life was meaningless.
24 +The alternative is to vote negative as a method of rejecting their survivalist justification and freeing ourselves from the fear of death.
25 +AND discourse shapes reality – the way we come to our conclusions define the way we orient ourselves towards all problems in society. Since the discourse of the aff is independently bad, it is an independent reason to reject the aff, regardless of what benefits renewables or anything else supposedly good the aff advocates for. Discourse spills over to all decision-making in society, the 1AC plan is only relevant to this one hyper-specific policy, thus neg discourse is key.
26 +Doty ‘97: Roxanne Lynn Doty, assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Arizona State University, Imperial Encounters, 1997, p. 169-171
27 +This study begins with the premise that representation is an inherent and important aspect of global political life and therefore a critical and legitimate area of inquiry. International relations are inextricably bound up with discursive practices-that put into circulation representations that are taken as "truth." The goal-of-analyzing these practices is not to reveal essential truths that have been obscured, but rather to examine bow certain representations underlie the production of knowledge and, identities and how these representations make various courses of action possible. AS Said (1979: 21) notes, Mere is no such thing as a delivered presence, but there is a re-presence, or representation. Such an assertion does not deny the existence of the material world, but rather suggests that material objects and subjects are constituted as such within discourse. SO, for example, when U.S. troops march into Grenada, this is certainly "real: though the march of troops across a piece of geographic space is in itself singularly uninteresting and socially irrelevant outside of the representations that produce meaning. It is only when "American" is attached to the troops and "Grenada” to the geographic space that meaning is created. What the physical behavior itself is, though, is still far from certain until discursive practices constitute it as an "invasion; a 'show of force," "training exercise, “a "rescue, “and SO on. What is "really" going on in such a situation is inextricably linked to the discourse within which it is located. To attempt a neat separation between discursive and nondiscursive practices, understanding the former as purely linguistic, assumes a series of Dichotomies – thought/reality appearance essence, mind matter, word/world, subjective/objective - that a critical genealogy calls into Question. Against this, the perspective taken here affirms the material and performative character of discourse. 'In suggesting that global politics, and specifically the aspect that has to do with relations between the North and the South, is linked to representational practices 1 am suggesting that the issues and concerns that constitute these relations occur within a 'reality' whose content has for the most part been defined by the representational practices of the ‘first world'. Focusing on discursive practices enables one to examine how the processes that produce "truth" and "knowledge" work and how they are articulated with the exercise of political, military, and economic power.
28 +
29 +The plan was already proposed in the context of the advantages and discourse of the 1AC meaning that any hypothetical implementation would be influenced by that rhetoric – it cannot be undone… this means no access to a perm.
30 +Extinction is inevitable – especially under the aff’s fear of death
31 +Burrowes ‘14: Robert J. Burrowes writes in “Why is Near Term Human Extinction Inevitable?” on December 17th, 2014. Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of 'Why Violence?' http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40499.htm; AB
32 +In my view, human extinction is the most likely outcome. But not simply because we are inflicting too many insults on the planetary environment. Extinction is inevitable because of human fear and, specifically, unconscious fear: The fear in ourselves and others that is not experienced consciously but which often drives three capacities that are vitally important in any context: the focus of our attention, our capacity to adequately analyse the evidence (if we get our attention focused on it) and our behaviour in response to this analysis. For example, if you do not know that your fear is making you screen out unpalatable information, then you won't even notice that you have turned your attention elsewhere and have now forgotten what you just read. Or your fear might prevent you adequately analysing the evidence and/or responding intelligently to it.
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +2016-11-14 05:04:05.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +x
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +x
ParentRound
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +4
Round
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +1
Team
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +Sunset bhat Neg
Title
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +1 - Death K
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +SeptOct
Caselist.CitesClass[6]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,18 @@
1 +Banning nuclear power is a form of imperial paternalism – it just re-inscribes colonialism by creating blanket policy decisions without case-by-case consent. Natives have their own energy and economic infrastructure to be concerned about.
2 +Jefferies ‘8: Sierra M. Jefferies, J.D. candidate, “ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AND THE SKULL VALLEY GOSHUTE INDIANS' PROPOSAL TO STORE NUCLEAR WASTE,” Journal of Land, Resources and Environmental Law, 2008
3 +Second, opposition to the Band’s attempt to make use of its land seems to imply that the Band does not have the ability to make to make informed decisions regarding the use of its land. In response to similar environmental opposition to tribal attempts at commercial waste development, Native American attorneys Keven Gover and Jana Walker criticized the paternalistic undertones of opposition, "Much of the environmental community seems to assume that, if an Indian community decides to accept such a project, it either does not understand the potential consequences or has been bamboozled by an unprincipled waste company. In either case, the clear implication is that Indians lack the intelligence to balance and protect adequately their own economic and environmental resources. 03 For the Skull Valley Goshutes, this was a rare opportunity to benefit financially from the undesirable land they have been granted. The surrounding toxic land uses, barren desert nature of the land and lack of other resources undoubtedly weighed heavily in their decision to move forward with the project. Leon Bear, tribal leader has stated, "We don’t have an energy source like oil or gas or coal, we feel that we're being prejudiced against as far as gaming."94 Interestingly, tribes that were not similarly restricted in land use options also participated in the federal selection process for the MRS and pursued private storage facilities. Among them was the Mescalero Apache tribe of New Mexico. Unlike the Goshutes, the Mescalero were not limited in opportunities to develop their land for profit. By contrast, at the time of the federally proposed MRS, the Mescalero were already operating several multi-million dollar businesses. 95 The Mescalero were not compelled by limited available uses for their land. Grace Thorpe, "a member of the Sac and Fox Tribe, an opponent of the MRS program, and President of the National Environmental Coalition of Native Americans" stated "Ithe Mescalero don't need this nuclear waste ... they have a five star resort, a casino, two ski lifts, forestry resources and a sawmill m98
4 +Media and other outlets keeps distorting Native needs – assumptions need to STOP
5 +Gover and Walker ‘92: (Kevin, Prof of Law ASU, Jana L, ESCAPING ENVIRONMENTAL PATERNALISM: ONE TRIBE'S APPROACH TO DEVELOPING A COMMERCIAL WASTE DISPOSAL PROJECT IN INDIAN COUNTRY http://faculty.virginia.edu/ejus/ESCAPE.htm)
6 +We have been asked to address the issue of environmental racism in the context of commercial solid and hazardous waste projects on Indian reservations. Let us say at the outset that we have no quarrel with those who believe that undesirable facilities-such as waste disposal facilities more likely to be found in a poor minority community than in a wealthy white one.' However, the environmental community must come to understand that not all such facilities are unwanted by the host community and that, in those cases where a community wishes to have such a facility, its decision is to be respected. As an example of such a host community located in Indian country, we will use our experience in helping the Campo Band of Mission Indians of California develop a solid waste project on its reservation. With respect to waste disposal, there are two issues facing Indian tribes today. First, how do tribes dispose of the solid waste generated on their reservations, and second, does a tribe want to use its land as a site for a commercial waste project as a form of economic development? Almost without exception, over the last year the media has focused its entire attention on the issue of commercial projects. We cannot count the number of articles in magazines and newspapers titled "Dances with Garbage."2 The media has created a steady drumbeat of stories about tribes all over the country building landfills and taking in hazardous waste, implying that the waste industry is marauding unchecked in Indian country, immune from any environmental regulation whatsoever. Is it true? In our experience over the last few years, this is just not the case, and we believe that much of the media attention has been misguided and uninformed. Even if we assume that some waste companies are targeting Indian country, tribes have almost always repelled these so-called attacks.3 In most cases, tribes are not even giving these companies an interview. Of the dozens of proposals that apparently have been made to tribes, only a small number remain under serious consideration.4 Tribal governments quite clearly have demonstrated that they are fully capable of deciding whether or not a project will serve their best interests. To set the record straight, the bigger problem is not that the waste industry is beating a path to the tribal door. Rather, it is the unauthorized and illegal dumping occurring on reservations. For most Indian communities the problem of open dumping on tribal lands is of much greater concern than the remote prospect that a commercial waste disposal facility may be sited on a reservation. Until 1986, Congress had left tribal governments completely out of the federal environmental scheme. In 1986, Congress enacted the first tribal amendments to federal environmental laws. Those amendments allowed tribes to be treated as states for program enforcement and grants under the Safe Drinking Water Act.5 Congress enacted similar amendments to Superfund in 1986,6 the Clean Water Act in 1987,7 and the Clean Air Act in 1990. 8 Unfortunately, Congress has not yet enacted tribal amendments to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA)9 authorizing tribes to assume primary enforcement authority for solid and hazardous waste programs.
7 +American imperialism dominates society to destroy indigenous culture – turns case and outweighs.
8 +Galeota ‘4: Julia Galeota placed first in the thirteen-to-seventeen-year-old age category of the 2004 Humanist Essay Contest for Young Women and Men of North America. “Cultural Imperialism: An American Tradition.” 2004 Humanist Essay Contest Winner. Getrun.info. The Humanist. 2004. http://www.getrun.info/pdf/tradition/5.pdf
9 +Travel almost anywhere in the world today and, whether you suffer from habitual Big Mac cravings or cringe at the thought of missing the newest episode of MTV’s The Real World, your American tastes can be satisfied practically everywhere. This proliferation of American products across the globe is more than mere accident. As a byproduct of globalization, it is part of a larger trend in the conscious dissemination of American attitudes and values that is often referred to as cultural imperialism. In his 1976 work Communication and Cultural Domination, Herbert Schiller defines cultural imperialism as: the sum of the processes by which a society is brought into the modern world system, and how its dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced, and sometimes bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even to promote, the values and structures of the dominant center of the system. Thus, cultural imperialism involves much more than simple consumer goods; it involves the dissemination of ostensibly American principles, such as freedom and democracy. Though this process might sound appealing on the surface, it masks a frightening truth: many cultures around the world are gradually disappearing due to the overwhelming influence of corporate and cultural America. The motivations behind American cultural imperialism parallel the justifications for U.S. imperialism throughout history: the desire for access to foreign markets and the belief in the superiority of American culture. Though the United States does boast the world’s largest, most powerful economy, no business is completely satisfied with controlling only the American market; American corporations want to control the other 95 percent of the world’s consumers as well. Many industries are incredibly successful in that venture. According to the Guardian, American films accounted for approximately 80 percent of global box office revenue in January 2003. And who can forget good old Micky D’s? With over 30,000 restaurants in over one hundred countries, the ubiquitous golden arches of McDonald’s are now, according to Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, “more widely recognized than the Christian cross.” Such American domination inevitably hurts local markets, as the majority of foreign industries are unable to compete with the economic strength of U.S. industry. Because it serves American economic interests, corporations conveniently ignore the detrimental impact of American control of foreign markets. Corporations don’t harbor qualms about the detrimental effects of “Americanization” of foreign cultures, as most corporations have ostensibly convinced themselves that American culture is superior and therefore its influence is beneficial to other, “lesser” cultures. Unfortunately, this American belief in the superiority of U.S. culture is anything but new; it is as old as the culture itself. This attitude was manifest in the actions of settlers when they first arrived on this continent and massacred or assimilated essentially the entire “savage” Native American population. This attitude also reflects that of the late nineteenth-century age of imperialism, during which the jingoists attempted to fulfill what they believed to be the divinely ordained “manifest destiny” of American expansion. Jingoists strongly believe in the concept of social Darwinism: the stronger, “superior” cultures will overtake the weaker, “inferior” cultures in a “survival of the fittest.” It is this arrogant belief in the incomparability of American culture that characterizes many of our economic and political strategies today.
10 +The alternative is to allow indigenous communities to decide whether or not they want the use of nuclear power through a case-by-case basis; this means no blanket prohibition.
11 +Claiming that Natives generally don’t want nuclear power is still a blanket assumption which re-inscribes oppressive colonialism because some tribes still may want nuclear.
12 +Gover and Walker ‘92: Kevin, and Jana L. Walker (Native American Attorneys at Gover, Stetson and Williams). "Escaping Environmental Paternalism: One Tribe's Approach to Developing a Commercial Waste Disposal Project in Indian Country." University of Colorado Law Review 63 (1992): 933.
13 +The second and more controversial issue facing tribes involves the use of reservation lands as sites for commercial solid and hazardous waste disposal facilities. Looking at the waste industry as a form of economic development, in many respects it can be a good match for tribal communities. The industry is usually willing to pay the costs of developing new projects without requiring a tribe to put any cash up front. Since most tribes just do not have the money to independently fund large-scale economic development, this makes the industry attractive to Indian communities desperate for development. The waste industry needs isolation and an abundance of land, and, again, because of the overall lack of tribal economic development, undeveloped land is a resource that many tribes have. The waste industry also provides numerous opportunities for unskilled and semi-skilled workers, including training in the construction and environmental compliance fields. On most reservations, unemployment is extremely high and opportunities for training Indians very limited. Finally, the waste industry is and must be recognized as an indispensable and legitimate part of the services sector of the economy, and as such, can be an extremely profitable form of development for tribes. All of this means that, under certain circumstances, a solid or hazardous waste disposal project may represent a viable and appropriate form of industrial development for some tribes and can provide extraordinary opportunities for economic development on some reservations. It is not appropriate for every community, and we certainly are not urging tribes to site waste facilities on their reservations. Each tribe must decide for itself if it is interested in such development. Our intent is merely to put things in a more honest perspective and to describe one process that, when and if a tribe seriously considers a commercial waste proposal, it can use to evaluate the proposal effectively and, if it's feasible, plan for its development.
14 +The alt best addresses historical injustice by allowing natives to control their own destinies and decide how to move forward – nuclear jurisdiction is a fundamental step.
15 +
16 +Segal ‘12: (Alice, URANIUM MINING AND THE NAVAJO NATION - LEGAL INJUSTICE Southern California Review of Law and Social Justice 21 S. Cal. Rev. L. and Social Justice 355)
17 +As a result of this one-way relationship, courts were able to strip away Navajo children from their families. This injustice was not corrected until Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act, which provided the Navajo with greater authority. n281 To compensate for historical injustices such as this, as well as to allow them to define for themselves their own people groups, the Navajo Nation should be granted greater authority over its land as a sovereign tribe. However, Congress has resisted efforts to increase Navajo authority because this would reduce the federal government's power. An optimal solution that would satisfy the interests of both Congress and the Navajo Nation would be to give the Navajo authority over uranium mining. Under the NRC's lax oversight, federal agencies have proven inept at regulating uranium mining and cleanup. Courts have deferred to the agencies' poor decisions, perpetuating inefficient and reckless mining. On the other hand, the Navajo government has both the interest and organizational capacity to regulate uranium mining because the Nation has a personal stake in protecting its people from further exposure to radioactive material. The interests of the Navajo suggest that, with congressional help, the Navajo government would work to resolve the unfair treatment of its people through careful management of uranium mining.
18 +Mutually exclusive with the aff since tribes that want nuclear power can continue to use it.
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +2016-11-14 05:04:36.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +x
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +x
ParentRound
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +5
Round
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +1
Team
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +Sunset bhat Neg
Title
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +1 - Native Paternalism K
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +St Marks
Caselist.CitesClass[7]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,38 @@
1 +First is Framing
2 +The role of the judge is to be a critical analyst testing whether the underlying assumptions of the AFF are valid. This is a question of the whether the AFF scholarship is good – not the passage of the plan.
3 +First, the aff advocacy takes the wrong approach – our role as intellectuals is not to offer prescriptive solutions, rather it is to offer analyses that expose harmful powers and expose them to light, this is a pre-req to policy making
4 +Jones 99 ~Richard Wyn Jones, Professor International Politics @ Aberystwyth University, '99 (Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory, p. 155-163)~
5 +The central political task of the intellectuals is to aid in the construction of a
6 +AND
7 +as both an inspiration and a challenge to critical security studies.
8 +
9 +
10 +Second, the knowledge claims of the AC are the jumping off point for the debate – our framework provides a more reasonable neg burden. When a student turns in an F paper, no teacher has an obligation to write an entirely new paper to show it was bad – pointing out major academic deficiencies would justify failing the paper – the ballot asks who did the better debating, so if their analysis is wrong, they haven't.
11 +
12 +
13 +Second is the Substance
14 +These environmental justice movements only re-entrench neoliberalism because of the interests for transnational capital and therefore causes more structural violence
15 +Cleere 16 (Cleere, Rickie. "Environmental Racism and the Movement for Black Lives: Grassroots Power in the 21st Century." Pomona College, 2016. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1153andcontext=pomona_theses.)
16 +Opal Tometi, BLM co-founder, has said that environmental issues are "
17 +AND
18 +justice movements. CX is binding and this a direct link to neoliberalism.
19 +
20 +And, this turns case because the neoliberal violence of the state further entrenches violence through co-optation and causes a struggle for black communities on a global scale
21 +Cleere 16 (Cleere, Rickie. "Environmental Racism and the Movement for Black Lives: Grassroots Power in the 21st Century." Pomona College, 2016. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1153andcontext=pomona_theses.)
22 +Through my research and investigation I have come to the conclusion that environmental justice movement
23 +AND
24 +doing something to contribute to a new era of revolutionary struggle.
25 +
26 +
27 +And, Cap causes extinction and endless structural violence – it is a try or die for the alt.
28 +Farbod 15 ( Faramarz Farbod , PhD Candidate @ Rutgers, Prof @ Moravian College, Monthly Review, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/farbod020615.html, 6-2)
29 +Global capitalism is the 800-pound gorilla. The twin ecological and economic crises
30 +AND
31 +and social systems will soon reach a point of no return.
32 +
33 +
34 +The debate is about starting points - the AFF begins with prohibiting nuclear power which puts the cart before the horse. The alternative is a cultural, anti-neoliberal critique to expand our understanding of state violence which is a necessary pre requisite and this means the neolib is not inevitable.
35 +Cleere 16 (Cleere, Rickie. "Environmental Racism and the Movement for Black Lives: Grassroots Power in the 21st Century." Pomona College, 2016. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1153andcontext=pomona_theses.)
36 +I was first introduced to the concept of environmental racism in college courses, but
37 +AND
38 +many lives as possible must challenge the root of the problem: neoliberalism.
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +2016-11-14 05:05:19.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +Arjun Tambe
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +Lake Highland
ParentRound
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +6
Round
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +1
Team
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +Sunset bhat Neg
Title
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +1 - Neoliberalism K
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +Greenhill
Caselist.CitesClass[26]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,18 @@
1 +First is Framing
2 +The role of the judge is to be a critical analyst testing whether the underlying assumptions of the AFF are valid. This is a question of the whether the AFF scholarship is good – not the passage of the plan.
3 +First, the aff advocacy takes the wrong approach – our role as intellectuals is not to offer prescriptive solutions, rather it is to offer analyses that expose harmful powers and expose them to light, this is a pre-req to policy making
4 +Jones ‘99: Richard Wyn Jones, Professor International Politics @ Aberystwyth University, ‘99 (Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory, p. 155-163)
5 +The central political task of the intellectuals is to aid in the construction of a counterhegemony and thus undermine the prevailing patterns of discourse and interaction that make up the currently dominant hegemony. This task is accomplished through educational activity, because, as Gramsci argues, “every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350). Discussing the relationship of the “philosophy of praxis” to political practice, Gramsci claims: It the theory does not tend to leave the “simple” in their primitive philosophy of common sense, but rather to lead them to a higher conception of life. If it affirms the need for contact between intellectuals and “simple” it is not in order to restrict scientific activity and preserve unity at the low level of the masses, but precisely in order to construct an intellectual-moral bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small intellectual groups. (Gramsci 1971: 332-333). According to Gramsci, this attempt to construct an alternative “intellectual-moral bloc” should take place under the auspices of the Communist Party – a body he described as the “modern prince.” Just as Niccolo Machiavelli hoped to see a prince unite Italy, rid the country of foreign barbarians, and create a virtu-ous state, Gramsci believed that the modern price could lead the working class on its journey toward its revolutionary destiny of an emancipated society (Gramsci 1971: 125-205). Gramsci’s relative optimism about the possibility of progressive theorists playing a constructive role in emancipatory political practice was predicated on his belief in the existence of a universal class (a class whose emancipation would inevitably presage the emancipation of humanity itself) with revolutionary potential. It was a gradual loss of faith in this axiom that led Horkheimer and Adorno to their extremely pessimistic prognosis about the possibilities of progressive social change. But does a loss of faith in the revolutionary vocation of the proletariat necessarily lead to the kind of quietism ultimately embraced by the first generation of the Frankfurt School? The conflict that erupted in the 1960s between them and their more radical students suggests not. Indeed, contemporary critical theorists claim that the deprivileging of the role of the proletariat in the struggle for emancipation is actually a positive move. Class remains a very important axis of domination in society, but it is not the only such axis (Fraser 1995). Nor is it valid to reduce all other forms of domination – for example, in the case of gender – to class relations, as orthodox Marxists tend to do. To recognize these points is not only a first step toward the development of an analysis of forms of exploitation and exclusion within society that is more attuned to social reality; it is also a realization that there are other forms of emancipatory politics than those associated with class conflict.1 This in turn suggests new possibilities and problems for emancipatory theory. Furthermore, the abandonment of faith in revolutionary parties is also a positive development. The history of the European left during the twentieth century provides myriad examples of the ways in which the fetishization of party organizations has led to bureaucratic immobility and the confusion of means with ends (see, for example, Salvadori 1990). The failure of the Bolshevik experiment illustrates how disciplined, vanguard parties are an ideal vehicle for totalitarian domination (Serge 1984). Faith in the “infallible party” has obviously been the source of strength and comfort to many in this period and, as the experience of the southern Wales coalfield demonstrates, has inspired brave and progressive behavior (see, for example, the account of support for the Spanish Republic in Francis 1984). But such parties have so often been the enemies of emancipation that they should be treated with the utmost caution. Parties are necessary, but their fetishization is potentially disastrous. History furnishes examples of progressive developments that have been positively influenced by organic intellectuals operating outside the bounds of a particular party structure (G. Williams 1984). Some of these developments have occurred in the particularly intractable realm of security. These examples may be considered as “resources of hope” for critical security studies (R. Williams 1989). They illustrate that ideas are important or, more correctly, that change is the product of the dialectical interaction of ideas and material reality. One clear security-related example of the role of critical thinking and critical thinkers in aiding and abetting progressive social change is the experience of the peace movement of the 1980s. At that time the ideas of dissident defense intellectuals (the “alternative defense” school) encouraged and drew strength from peace activism. Together they had an effect not only on short-term policy but on the dominant discourses of strategy and security, a far more important result in the long run. The synergy between critical security intellectuals and critical social movements and the potential influence of both working in tandem can be witnessed particularly clearly in the fate of common security. As Thomas Risse-Kappen points out, the term “common security” originated in the contribution of peace researchers to the German security debate of the 1970s (Risse-Kappen 1994: 186ff.); it was subsequently popularized by the Palme Commission report (Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues 1982). Initially, mainstream defense intellectuals dismissed the concept as hopelessly idealistic; it certainly had no place in their allegedly hardheaded and realist view of the world. However, notions of common security were taken up by a number of different intellectuals communities, including the liberal arms control community in the United States, Western European peace researchers, security specialists in the center-left political parties of Western Europe, and Soviet “institutchiks” – members of the influential policy institutes in the Soviet Union such as the United States of America and Canada Institute (Landau 1996: 52-54; Risse-Kappen 1994: 196-200; Kaldor 1995; Spencer 1995). These communities were subsequently able to take advantage of public pressure exerted through social movements in order to gain broader acceptance for common security. In Germany, for example, “in response to social movement pressure, German social organizations such as churches and trade unions quickly supported the ideas promoted by peace researchers and the SPD” (Risse-Kappen 1994: 207). Similar pressures even had an effect on the Reagan administration. As Risse-Kappen notes: When the Reagan administration brought hard-liners into power, the US arms control community was removed from policy influence. It was the American peace movement and what became known as the “freeze campaign” that revived the arms control process together with pressure from the European allies. (Risse-Kappen 1994: 205; also Cortright 1993: 90-110). Although it would be difficult to sustain a claim that the combination of critical movements and intellectuals persuaded the Reagan government to adopt the rhetoric and substance of common security in its entirety, it is clear that it did at least have a substantial impact on ameliorating U.S. behavior. The most dramatic and certainly the most unexpected impact of alternative defense ideas was felt in the Soviet Union. Through various East-West links, which included arms control institutions, Pugwash conferences, interparty contacts, and even direct personal links, a coterie of Soviet policy analysts and advisers were drawn toward common security and such attendant notions as “nonoffensive defense” (these links are detailed in Evangelista 1995; Kaldor 1995; Checkel 1993; Risse-Kappen 1994; Landau 1996 and Spencer 1995 concentrate on the role of the Pugwash conferences). This group, including Palme Commission member Georgii Arbatov, Pugwash attendee Andrei Kokoshin , and Sergei Karaganov, a senior adviser who was in regular contact with the Western peace researchers Anders Boserup and Lutz Unterseher (Risse-Kappen 1994: 203), then influenced Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s subsequent championing of common security may be attributed to several factors. It is clear, for example, that new Soviet leadership had a strong interest in alleviating tensions in East-West relations in order to facilitate much-needed domestic reforms (“the interaction of ideas and material reality”). But what is significant is that the Soviets’ commitment to common security led to significant changes in force sizes and postures. These in turn aided in the winding down of the Cold War, the end of Soviet domination over Eastern Europe, and even the collapse of Russian control over much of the territory of the former Soviet Union. At the present time, in marked contrast to the situation in the early 1980s, common security is part of the common sense of security discourse. As MccGwire points out, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (a common defense pact) is using the rhetoric of common security in order to justify its expansion into Eastern Europe (MccGwire 1997). This points to an interesting and potentially important aspect of the impact of ideas on politics. As concepts such as common security, and collective security before it (Claude 1984: 223-260), are adopted by governments and military services, they inevitably become somewhat debased. The hope is that enough of the residual meaning can survive to shift the parameters of the debate in a potentially progressive direction. Moreover, the adoption of the concept of common security by official circles provides critics with a useful tool for (immanently) critiquing aspects of security policy (as MccGwire 1997 demonsrates in relation to NATO expansion). The example of common security is highly instructive. First, it indicates that critical intellectuals can be politically engaged and play a role – a significant one at that – in making the world a better and safer place. Second, it points to potential future addressees for critical international theory in general, and critical security studies in particular. Third, it also underlines the role of ideas in the evolution in society. CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES AND THE THEORY-PRACTICE NEXUS Although most proponents of critical security studies reject aspects of Gramsci’s theory of organic intellectuals, in particular his exclusive concentration on class and his emphasis on the guiding role of the party, the desire for engagement and relevance must remain at the heart of their project. The example of the peace movement suggests that critical theorists can still play the role of organic intellectuals and that this organic relationship need not confine itself to a single class; it can involve alignment with different coalitions of social movements that campaign on an issue or a series of issues pertinent to the struggle for emancipation (Shaw 1994b; R. Walker 1994). Edward Said captures this broader orientation when he suggests that critical intellectuals “are always tied to and ought to remain an organic part of an ongoing experience in society: of the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless” (Said 1994: 84). In the specific case of critical security studies, this means placing the experience of those men and women and communities for whom the present world order is a cause of insecurity rather than security at the center of the agenda and making suffering humanity rather than raison d’etat the prism through which problems are viewed. Here the project stands full-square within the critical theory tradition. If “all theory is for someone and for some purpose,” then critical security studies is for “the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless,” and its purpose is their emancipation. The theoretical implications of this orientation have already been discussed in the previous chapters. They involve a fundamental reconceptualization of security with a shift in referent object and a broadening of the range of issues considered as a legitimate part of the discourse. They also involve a reconceptualization of strategy within this expanded notion of security. But the question remains at the conceptual level of how these alternative types of theorizing – even if they are self-consciously aligned to the practices of critical or new social movements, such as peace activism, the struggle for human rights, and the survival of minority cultures – can become “a force for the direction of action.” Again, Gramsci’s work is insightful. In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci advances a sophisticated analysis of how dominant discourses play a vital role in upholding particular political and economic orders, or, in Gramsci’s terminology, “historic blocs” (Gramsci 1971: 323-377). Gramsci adopted Machiavelli’s view of power as a centaur, ahlf man, half beast: a mixture of consent and coercion. Consent is produced and reproduced by a ruling hegemony that holds sway through civil society and takes on the status of common sense; it becomes subconsciously accepted and even regarded as beyond question. Obviously, for Gramsci, there is nothing immutable about the values that permeate society; they can and do change. In the social realm, ideas and institutions that were once seen as natural and beyond question (i.e., commonsensical) in the West, such as feudalism and slavery, are now seen as anachronistic, unjust, and unacceptable. In Marx’s well-worn phrase, “All that is solid melts into the air.” Gramsci’s intention is to harness this potential for change and ensure that it moves in the direction of emancipation. To do this he suggests a strategy of a “war of position” (Gramsci 1971: 229-239). Gramsci argues that in states with developed civil societies, such as those in Western liberal democracies, any successful attempt at progressive social change requires a slow, incremental, even molecular, struggle to break down the prevailing hegemony and construct an alternative counterhegemony to take its place. Organic intellectuals have a crucial role to play in this process by helping to undermine the “natural,” “commonsense,” internalized nature of the status quo. This in turn helps create political space within which alternative conceptions of politics can be developed and new historic blocs created. I contend that Gramsci’s strategy of a war of position suggests an appropriate model for proponents of critical security studies to adopt in relating their theorizing to political practice. THE TASKS OF CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES If the project of critical security studies is conceived in terms of war of position, then the main task of those intellectuals who align themselves with the enterprise is to attempt to undermine the prevailing hegemonic security discourse. This may be accomplished by utilizing specialist information and expertise to engage in an immanent critique of the prevailing security regimes, that is, comparing the justifications of those regimes with actual outcomes. When this is attempted in the security field, the prevailing structures and regimes are found to fail grievously on their own terms. Such an approach also involves challenging the pronouncements of those intellectuals, traditional or organic, whose views serve to legitimate, and hence reproduce, the prevailing world order. This challenge entails teasing out the often subconscious and certainly unexamined assumptions that underlie their arguments while drawing attention to the normative viewpoints that are smuggled into mainstream thinking about security behind its positivist façade. In this sense, proponents of critical security studies approximate to Foucault’s notion of “specific intellectuals” who use their expert knowledge to challenge the prevailing “regime of truth” (Foucault 1980: 132). However, critical theorists might wish to reformulate this sentiment along more familiar Quaker lines of “speaking truth to power” (this sentiment is also central to Said 1994) or even along the eisteddfod lines of speaking “truth against the world.” Of course, traditional strategists can, and indeed do, sometimes claim a similar role. Colin S. Gray, for example, states that “strategists must be prepared to ‘speak truth to power’” (Gray 1982a: 193). But the difference between Gray and proponents of critical security studies is that, whereas the former seeks to influence policymakers in particular directions without questioning the basis of their power, the latter aim at a thoroughgoing critique of all that traditional security studies has taken for granted. Furthermore, critical theorists base their critique on the presupposition, elegantly stated by Adorno, that “the need to lend suffering a voice is the precondition of all truth” (cited in Jameson 1990: 66). The aim of critical security studies in attempting to undermine the prevailing orthodoxy is ultimately educational. As Gramsci notes, “every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350; see also the discussion of critical pedagogy in Neufeld 1995: 116-121). Thus, by criticizing the hegemonic discourse and advancing alternative conceptions of security based on different understandings of human potentialities, the approach is simultaneously playing apart in eroding the legitimacy of the ruling historic bloc and contributing to the development of a counterhegemonic position. There are a number of avenues of avenues open to critical security specialists in pursuing this educational strategy. As teachers, they can try to foster and encourage skepticism toward accepted wisdom and open minds to other possibilities. They can also take advantage of the seemingly unquenchable thirst of the media for instant pundistry to forward alternative views onto a broader stage. Nancy Fraser argues: “As teachers, we try to foster an emergent pedagogical counterculture …. As critical public intellectuals we try to inject our perspectives into whatever cultural or political public spheres we have access to” (Fraser 1989: 11). Perhaps significantly, support for this type of emancipatory strategy can even be found in the work of the ultrapessimistic Adorno, who argues: In the history of civilization there have been not a few instances when delusions were healed not by focused propaganda, but, in the final analysis, because scholars, with their unobtrusive yet insistent work habits, studied what lay at the root of the delusion. (cited in Kellner 1992: vii) Such “unobtrusive yet insistent work” does not in itself create the social change to which Adorno alludes. The conceptual and the practical dangers of collapsing practice into theory must be guarded against. Rather, through their educational activities, proponent of critical security studies should aim to provide support for those social movements that promote emancipatory social change. By providing a critique of the prevailing order and legitimating alternative views, critical theorists can perform a valuable role in supporting the struggles of social movements. That said, the role of theorists is not to direct and instruct those movements with which they are aligned; instead, the relationship is reciprocal. The experience of the European, North American, and Antipodean peace movements of the 1980s shows how influential social movements can become when their efforts are harnessed to the intellectual and educational activity of critical thinkers. For example, in his account of New Zealand’s antinuclear stance in the 1980s, Michael C. Pugh cites the importance of the visits of critical intellectuals such as Helen Caldicott and Richard Falk in changing the country’s political climate and encouraging the growth of the antinuclear movement (Pugh 1989: 108; see also COrtright 1993: 5-13). In the 1980s peace movements and critical intellectuals interested in issues of security and strategy drew strength and succor from each other’s efforts. If such critical social movements do not exist, then this creates obvious difficulties for the critical theorist. But even under these circumstances, the theorist need not abandon all hope of an eventual orientation toward practice. Once again, the peace movement of the 1980s provides evidence of the possibilities. At that time, the movement benefited from the intellectual work undertaken in the lean years of the peace movement in the late 1970s. Some of the theories and concepts developed then, such as common security and nonoffensive defense, were eventually taken up even in the Kremlin and played a significant role in defusing the second Cold War. Those ideas developed in the 1970s can be seen in Adornian terms of the a “message in a bottle,” but in this case, contra Adorno’s expectations, they were picked up and used to support a program of emancipatory political practice. Obviously, one would be naïve to understate the difficulties facing those attempting to develop alternative critical approaches within academia. Some of these problems have been alluded to already and involve the structural constraints of academic life itself. Said argues that many problems are caused by what he describes as the growing “professionalisation” of academic life (Said 1994: 49-62). Academics are now so constrained by the requirements of job security and marketability that they are extremely risk-averse. It pays – in all senses – to stick with the crowd and avoid the exposed limb by following the prevalent disciplinary preoccupations, publish in certain prescribed journals, and so on. The result is the navel gazing so prevalent in the study of international relations and the seeming inability of security specialists to deal with the changes brought about by the end of the Cold War (Kristensen 1997 highlights the search of U.S. nuclear planners for “new targets for old weapons”). And, of course, the pressures for conformism are heightened in the field of security studies when governments have a very real interest in marginalizing dissent. Nevertheless, opportunities for critical thinking do exist, and this thinking can connect with the practices of social movements and become a “force for the direction of action.” The experience of the 1980s, when, in the depths of the second Cold War, critical thinkers risked demonization and in some countries far worse in order to challenge received wisdom, thus arguably playing a crucial role in the very survival of the human race, should act as both an inspiration and a challenge to critical security studies.
6 +
7 +Second, the knowledge claims of the AC are the jumping off point for the debate – our framework provides a more reasonable neg burden. When a student turns in an F paper, no teacher has an obligation to write an entirely new paper to show it was bad – pointing out major academic deficiencies would justify failing the paper – the ballot asks who did the better debating, so if their analysis is wrong, they haven’t.
8 +
9 +Second is the Substance
10 +The aff’s use of civil suits focuses on punishing individual perpetrators of violence – this obscures the endemic violence of police forces
11 +Feldman 15 (Leonard Feldman, Hunter College, CUNY) “Police Violence and the Legal Temporalities of Immunity” LADI
12 +On the same day the Department of Justice declined to prosecute Ferguson Missouri Officer Darren Wilson for civil rights violations in the shooting death of Michael Brown, it issued a scathing report as part of a “Pattern and Practice” investigation of the entire police force. Concerning the former—the decision not to prosecute—while this paper has focused on the legal grey hole of civil litigation for civil rights violations, it is possible to detect similar forms of legal immunity in the high thresholds for prosecution established by 18 U.S.C. § 242. The legal reasoning overlaps 25 with that in civil litigation because in the criminal cases the courts use the same standard of “objective reasonableness” developed in the civil cases (Graham, Garner, and Scott) to establish that a rights violation occurred. While there is no qualified immunity defense (according to the Supreme Court in Pearson) there is a higher willfulness standard (and “specific intent” requirement) for proving a violation that similarly works to shield police.55 (Campaign Zero, discussed below, recommends eliminating the willfulness standard for Federal Civil Rights prosecutions of police officers.56) Perhaps the Court felt less compelled to erect barriers to criminal prosecutions (as opposed to civil litigation) since it assumed that federal prosecutors’ discretion would accomplish the very same objective. Concerning the latter—the Department of Justice’s report on the entire police force of Ferguson, as well as the complicity of judges and city officials—it offers the promise of constraining police use of force by using the threat of litigation to address broader and deeper policies and practices. As Coates argues, “the focus on the deeds of alleged individual perpetrators, on perceived bad actors, obscures the broad systemic corruption which is really at the root.”57 Similarly, Madar writes, “far more useful are the DOJ Civil Rights Division’s root-and-branch interventions into violently dysfunctional police forces, triggered by ‘patterns and practices’ of systematic rights violations rather than any one particular incident.”58 Moving beyond both law and sovereignty narrowly construed, enables attention to what Harmon describes as the “problem of regulation” and the role of “other institutions and sources of law in regulating the police.”59 As Harmon shows, police use of force is embedded in a dense but also permissive regulatory environment running the gamut from administrative rules to employment and collective 26 bargaining law to state level licensing regulations. Consent decrees, Memoranda of Understanding and Collaborative Agreements all emerge out of or in the shadow of Department of Justice “pattern or practice” investigations, aiming to change policies and practices at the department level. Furthermore, even tools such as quantitative benchmarking can be deployed in the service of structural reform: A DOJ study cited by Rushin of the Washington D.C. police force contrasted what they discovered to be 15 rate of excessive force incidents as compared to a benchmark “‘well-managed and supervised police department’ that should only expect about 1 or 2 percent of all incidents to involve excessive use of force.”60 And in Cincinnati, Shatmeier describes successful police department reform in the wake of a Department of Justice “pattern or practice” investigation through consent agreements that relied on “experimentalist regulation.”61
13 +Using the law to solve the law is contradictory. The aff assumes the police violence can be addressed by bringing it under the control of law – in fact, the law is the apparatus legitimating police violence. Civil suits only identify “operational errors” committed by the police, fail to convict police, and excuse and reinforce the violence of the policing apparatus itself.
14 +Simon Behrman 11 (Simon Behrman, ) Police killings and the law – International Socialism, 1-4-2011 LADI
15 +Ever since the late 1970s some on the left have declared that Britain is either in or on the cusp of a police state.5 Yet even after the miners’ strike, various pieces of draconian anti-terrorist legislation and other attacks on civil liberties, the British state remains very much a capitalist democracy. Nevertheless, during this period the use of firearms has become ever more widespread in the police force. It was little noticed, for example, that during the 1990s police forces up and down the country began regularly deploying Armed Response Vehicles (ARV), equipped with a huge stock of firepower.6 The impetus for this began when the IRA bombing campaign came to the mainland. Indeed, the weaponry introduced including live firearms, plastic bullets and CS gas were all road-tested first in Northern Ireland. The point is that just as these developments in police practice have outlived the Irish “emergency”, so too a state of emergency appears to be becoming a more permanent feature of policing policy which has in turn led to a justification for retaining and expanding the right of the police to use lethal force. Examples where “unprecedented” circumstances have been claimed as justification for the use of police-state tactics are mass detentions of anti-capitalist protesters and the threat of suicide bombers. It is very likely that as social instability caused by the economic crisis develops this too will be claimed as justification for the continued use of “emergency” powers. Of course, Marx and Engels argued that capitalist democracy was a major advance over feudalism and offered to the working class a far better terrain on which to fight than other, more authoritarian, forms of capitalist rule. Yet throughout his writings, from “On the Jewish Question” in 1843 right through to the Critique of the Gotha Programme over 30 years later, Marx highlighted two crucial aspects of capitalist democracy. First, democracy and equality in the political sphere mask the massive inequalities that exist in the economic domain where capital operates a dictatorship over labour. Second, as Lenin put it, capitalist democracy provided “the best possible political shell of capitalism”.7 Because the working class poses such a potentially powerful threat to the dictatorship of capital, relying on rule by consent rather than by violence is always the preferred tactic of bourgeois rule. But, and this is the key point, the monopoly on the use of violence that the dictatorship of capital exercises through its state means that killings by the police, along with other forms of state terror, can be accommodated without violating the norms of capitalist democracy. This is achieved via the rule of law, specifically the legal form that, as the Soviet jurist Evgeny Pashukanis argued, shares the same structure as the commodity form. My argument here is that certain police-state tactics such as extra-judicial killings have become possible without the loss of legitimacy and rule by consent conferred by governing under the rule of law. Instead law itself has become a perfect vehicle for such tactics. In short, police violence must be understood not as a departure from capitalist democracy but as a function of it. From policing by terror to policing by consent In spite of the shocking nature of recent killings by the police, it is important to recognise that throughout their history the police have frequently used extreme violence against suspects, bystanders, demonstrators and workers on strike. The violence deployed by the modern police is in fact far less than that of their predecessors of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Douglas Hay has described how the British ruling class of that period imposed their authority through state terror.8 From 1688 until 1820 the death penalty was extended from about 50 offences to over 200, most involving crimes against property.9 Executions were bloody public spectacles intended to instil fear into the lower classes. An additional element of this strategy involved armed members of the local gentry, the yeomanry and special constables. If those ad hoc forces failed to keep order they were reinforced by the deployment of the military around the country. This became increasingly necessary with the intensification of riots in the countryside as the effects of the birth of modern capitalism began to bite. Following in the wake of this brute force, judges would be sent into the affected areas to dispense summary justice. The causes of the riots and the need for the ruling class to impose terror on the populace were rooted in a massive transformation of economic relations during the 18th century. This represented a concerted shift from the remnants of feudalism towards capitalism. Brutal methods were necessary for the ruling class during a period that saw a massive theft from the poor in a process described by Marx as the “primitive accumulation of capital”.10 The new bourgeoisie seized common lands through successive Enclosure Acts, thus impoverishing and starving the local peasantry who relied on these to support and feed themselves. Enclosure had two effects—forcing the rural poor to resort to poaching and scavenging on the estates of the rich, and pushing increased numbers of them from the land into the cities to seek work. The uprooting of communities in the countryside and the chaos of expanding cities with a lack of housing and work for the new arrivals led to social instability fed by anger and desperation from those who had been dispossessed. This period of transition saw the ruling class deploy a combination of forms of rule inherited from the feudal period, and new forms that better suited a capitalist society. An inheritance from feudalism was the use of terror tempered by mercy. The huge increase in crimes punishable by the death penalty was in fact accompanied by a comparative reduction in its actual use. More often those sentenced to death were encouraged to seek clemency from either the king or the property owner against whom they had committed the offence. Assuming they demonstrated a suitable amount of humility, they would be shown mercy and their sentence commuted. Note that in this arrangement law and socio-economic relations appear in one and the same guise. The same person who held a higher social position to you could also at their discretion prosecute you. Following conviction they could accept or reduce the punishment. Sometimes the property owner would negotiate with the convict terms for doing work on their land in exchange for dropping the prosecution. In effect, this was not the rule of law but instead naked class power adorned with some of the rituals of law. In like manner, the application of physical force was not governed by law, but rather by expediency. Once a riot broke out the armed forces of the state were permitted to use whatever force was necessary to restore the king’s peace. This worked up to a point when dealing with the rural poor. For the landed gentry, the debilitating injuries and killing of the local peasants did not disturb their lives or livelihoods on their increasingly large estates. Moreover, the only weapon the peasantry could deploy against the force of the state was their own ability to organise and fight. But face to face against a much better armed and organised military force, they were invariably beaten. With the growth of the working class in the cities the balance of class forces changed. The urban working class living closer together in built up areas were better able to organise and defend themselves. At the 1819 “Peterloo” massacre in Manchester, for example, the crowd numbered possibly up to 150,000, larger than any riot or uprising since the English Revolution almost two centuries earlier. In addition, many of the protesters had been carrying out practice drills for weeks in advance. With just 1,000 troops and 400 constables, the authorities would only be able to break up the protest through the use of extreme violence, and so it was. Men, women and children were stampeded by horses, sabred and whipped relentlessly through the streets of Manchester. The attack that began shortly before 2pm lasted well into the evening, at the end of which at least 11 were dead and about 500 injured. Peterloo exposed the limits of the strategy of terror deployed against the working class. Such concentrated violence caused a major scandal that shocked even sections of the middle classes and the establishment. Moreover, the violence failed to subdue the emerging movement for political and civil rights. Instead it led to a growing number of demonstrations, riots and strikes culminating in the great Chartist movement for manhood suffrage. The Chartists were responsible for, among other things, organising in 1842 the first general strike in history. This new form of resistance was not as easy to deal with as a riot. After all one cannot literally beat a mass of workers back to work. Also, if too many are incapacitated by police and military violence, the capitalists will suffer in the immediate term through fewer workers being able to work. Indeed, the level of violence was far less than in previous uprisings such as Peterloo and at Merthyr in previous decades. The sentences handed out to Chartists were minimal compared with earlier reckonings by the ruling class. No one was sentenced to death and most convictions for rioting or other crimes were punished with terms of imprisonment of a few months up to a few years, although the leading agitators were treated more harshly, many of them sentenced to transportation or much longer jail terms. The fear of the power of the working class also led the government to concede a number of reforms such as the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, which led initially to lower food prices, and the Factory Act 1847 limiting working hours. This was in contrast to the pattern during the 18th century where the ruling class was able to steal wealth from the poor at an ever increasing rate. It was also during this period that the military began to be replaced by the police as the primary tool for enforcing public order. The Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 established the force in the capital. In response to the first Chartist agitation, the 1839 County Police Act was enacted allowing the formation of regional police forces. The fear of disorder from demobilised soldiers returning from the Crimean War led to the 1856 County and Borough Act which established police forces across the whole of the country. This period during the mid-19th century represents British capitalism maturing from the more brutalist primitive accumulation of capital into a settled capitalist democracy. Central to this process was the development of the rule of law as the primary method of enforcing order. Legally regulated state violence was replacing naked class terror. The police force was founded on the principle of “citizens in uniform”. In other words, they were bound by the same laws as anyone else. They were also made structurally independent from the control of either politicians or individual members of the ruling class. Thus they were also bound by law in a manner unlike that of the yeomanry or other military forces, whose authority came directly from the Crown and the socio-economic power exercised in localities by the landed gentry and aristocracy. The establishment of the police was part and parcel of a move away from a form of class rule which saw little separation between economic and juridical power. Within decades the state assumed a monopoly on the application of criminal law and, with the police, a monopoly over the use of violence. This accruing of power by the state at first alarmed sections of the ruling class, which is why many of them initially opposed the setting up of a police force. But it quickly became clear that the use of physical force by the capitalist state would not be deployed against property rights, but against labour and the poor. In his classic work on the birth of the prison, Michel Foucault shows convincingly how the move from the application of the power of the king to the power of law provided a more efficient and less risky form of social control. The messy system in force during the later feudal period could lead to: the fear of the uproar, shouting and cheering that the people usually indulge in, the fear that there would be disorder, violence, and outbursts against the parties, or even against the judges… Before the justice of the sovereign, all voices must be still.11 The final word uttered by an apparently neutral and rational law was far more effective in silencing the oppressed. The police became legitimised as “embodiments of impersonal, rational authority”, as opposed to the naked class power of the yeomanry.12 What Foucault glosses over is the fact that this change was a direct result of a set of new economic relationships. The feudal order rested on an ideology of a class born to rule; thus their authority and their right to dispense “justice” was unquestionable. The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, rule on the basis of a series of contractual relations. Economic exploitation is rooted in the payment of wages for labour power. This has the effect of normalising exploitative relations such as in the expression: “A fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.” Equally, the rule of law is predicated on notions of fairness, reasonableness and equivalence. Phrases such a “paying the price” for committing a crime, or “let the punishment fit the crime” illuminate this aspect of law. This is quite distinct from feudalism when punishment was a demonstration of the “majesty” and power of the monarch, the nobility or the church. The contractual nature specific to capitalist exploitation finds its equivalent in legal relations. Phil Cohen identifies the police as the first branch of the British state to develop an ideological as well as a purely repressive function…to protect the institutions of private property, and to enforce statutory norms of public order primarily designed to ensure the free circulation of commodities, including the commodity of labour power.13 At first the urban working class had to be disciplined into accepting these norms. Violence between police and local working class communities, defending what they considered as their own territory, was a common feature right up to World War One. But over time there was a “gradual ideological penetration of ‘The Law’ into the basic conditions of working class life”.14 Cohen explains this as a result of social changes in the composition of the working class. While there may be some truth in that, referring to the police as “The Law” also illustrates something else. Unlike their predecessors, the police were not just deployed to put down riots and other major disturbances, but also assigned to manage everyday order in the community. Criminologists sometimes describe this as a dual role involving “parking tickets and class repression”.15 As a result the law and “The Law” gradually came to be seen as indispensable to a well-ordered society, irrespective of class, politics or economics. In short, an ideology of “police fetishism” developed.16 I would argue that this is a direct result of two other fetishes closely linked together—that of law and commodities. Pashukanis In his 1924 book, Law and Marxism, Pashukanis developed what has become known as the “commodity form” theory of law. In it he sought to explain the legal form as one inherently tied to the commodity form. He begins his analysis using the same methodology as Marx does in Capital: “In as much as the wealth of capitalist society appears as ‘an immense collection of commodities’, so this society itself appears as an endless chain of legal relations”.17 What these two sets of relationships—commodity exchange and legal relations—have in common is the notion of the autonomous egoistic individual. When commodity owners go to market to engage in trade, they must each recognise in the others their exclusive right of ownership over their commodities; otherwise they cannot expect their own rights to be so recognised. Thus the basic principle of commodity exchange, the freedom of every seller freely to dispose of their property, gives rise to the concept of universal and equal rights, which is an ideological misrepresentation of capitalist relations as a whole, but one that accurately reflects the actual material conditions in which subjects under capitalism find themselves. The claim of one commodity owner on all others to recognise his own rights as such creates a subjective, and thus seemingly natural, desire to recognise those same rights in others. From this starting point Pashukanis is able to make the following analogy with law: “The legal subject as representative and addressee of every possible claim, the succession of subjects linked together by claims on each other, is the fundamental legal fabric which corresponds to the economic fabric”.18 Thus just as we have the market in which every buyer and seller comes metaphorically brandishing their commodities to exchange, so the law is a regulated market of legal subjects haggling over their respective bundles of rights. The rule of capital is thus also necessarily the rule of law. In “On the Jewish Question” Marx argued that the bourgeoisie emancipated the state from economics and religion by placing it (the state) above society, and thus giving it the appearance of being independent and above the classes.19 As Pashukanis expresses it: By appearing as a guarantor, authority becomes social and public, an authority representing the impersonal interest of the system… Thus there arises, besides direct unmediated class rule, indirect reflected rule in the shape of official state power as a distinct authority, detached from society.20 This provides a theoretical underpinning for the transition from naked class rule to rule by law that I discussed earlier. Commodities and legal relations did, of course, exist in many pre-capitalist societies. But in the same way that a society where free alienation of property raises the commodity to its highest and most generalised level, where exploitation becomes mediated via the legal contract, ie where the exploited worker “figures as a legal subject disposing of his labour power as a commodity”, so also legal relations reach their highest form under conditions of generalised commodity exchange: “The legal form attains universal significance, legal ideology becomes the ideology par excellence, and defending the class interest of the exploiters appears with ever increasing success as the defence of the abstract principle of legal subjectivity”.21 The crucial import of Pashukanis’s analysis is that he is able to reveal how the specific form of social regulation under capitalism, that is rights-based law, is able successfully to transform the subjective needs of the ruling class into an objective set of relationships for society as a whole, by means of which the coercive role of law is then in turn subjectivised (internalised) by the rest of us. The dispersal of responsibilities At first blush it may seem counter-intuitive to apply a theory of law that identifies the logic of equivalence and autonomous egoistic individualism to the application of lethal force by the state against unarmed individuals. However, if we take at look at how the police are able to justify their actions in law, the relevance of Pashukanis will become apparent. There was no disputing the fact that de Menezes was neither armed when he was shot, nor was he a terrorist. How could this wilful and unnecessary taking of life not result in any legal sanction? Crucially, the failure to bring any individual or group of police officers to justice over the de Menezes killing was a result of the dispersal of responsibilities created by law.22 This process rests upon the principle of the autonomous egoistic individual who functions as the commodity owner and legal subject par excellence. In much the same way that the market economy appears as an impersonal and naturalistic process involving an endless chain of buyers and sellers, so law functions in a similar way as each individual stands in relation to all others owing certain duties and possessing certain rights. One of the aspects of the operation which was highlighted in the inquest into de Menezes’s death was the police’s bronze, silver, gold structure used for firearms, and other emergency operations. This structure was developed by the Metropolitan Police in order to develop clear command, following the, from their point of view, catastrophic failure of organisation during the Broadwater Farm riots in 1985.23 One aspect of this system highlighted in the de Menezes inquest was that it removed many crucial strategic and tactical decisions from the officers on the ground and placed them instead in the hands of commanding officers situated miles away in a room in New Scotland Yard. This led to several crucial mistakes in the operation that meant that police officers on the ground missed several opportunities safely to stop de Menezes before he entered the Tube. But it also reinforced the dispersal of responsibilities in such a way that none of the commanding officers, nor any of the officers on the ground could be held criminally liable for the decisions made. This is one reason why the Metropolitan Police as a corporate entity could be successfully prosecuted under health and safety legislation, but that no individual officer was answerable in law for the mistakes made and the decisions taken. A similar conclusion was reached in the Police Ombudsman’s report into the 2003 killing of Neil McConville, a teenage joy-rider in Northern Ireland.24 According to the Ombudsman, the failure to appoint a Bronze Commander in charge on the ground was a critical factor leading to the death of McConville. Thus the officers who carried out the operation were exonerated from blame. On the other hand the senior officers who held the positions of Silver and Gold Commander respectively were merely reprimanded for bad management. Because they were not on the ground and did not fire any shots they were not culpable either. Several senior police officers testified during the de Menezes inquest that one of the concerns the Metropolitan Police had when developing the Kratos policy was that the armed police officer on the ground would be very hesitant in executing a suspect without warning without legal safeguards to protect themselves. During Kratos training members of the specialist firearms unit SO19, who would be assigned to carry out the executions, expressed fears that they would be held both morally and legally responsible, particularly should anything go wrong. It was for this reason that the role of the Designated Senior Officer (DSO) was created within the Kratos policy. The idea was that in a situation where police officers found themselves confronted by a suspected suicide bomber, the DSO, situated in New Scotland Yard, would be responsible for giving the order to shoot. This would take the pressure off the police officers who would actually have to carry out such an extreme and violent act. But surely this then places full legal responsibility on the DSO? Not so, according to the evidence presented to the de Menezes inquest. For the DSO, Commander Cressida Dick, did not give any such order; indeed, her last order to the SO19 officers before they descended into the Tube was ambiguous. The SO19 officers ended up using deliberately lethal force, due to what they claimed was a reasonable judgement based on de Menezes’s behaviour, and coupled with the reports they had received from surveillance officers, senior officers and the DSO during their briefings that morning and throughout the tracking of de Menezes. The responsibility for the killing was thus dispersed amongst the dozens of police officers involved in the operation. Not only does this dispersal of responsibilities create almost insurmountable problems in holding the police accountable, but it also reinforces the logic of capitalism in which bad things result from the market—unemployment, starvation, recessions etc—not because any individual capitalists are responsible but because that is just the way the system involving countless autonomous egoistic individuals operates. The Metropolitan Police declared eight months after the killing of de Menezes that Kratos remained “fit for purpose”; the Stockwell shooting had merely been a result of some operational errors.25 Equally, in the case of McConville, the Ombudsman’s recommendations stressed the importance of clear policies, training and command for operations involving potentially lethal force.26 The report reserved its concluding comment for criticising commanding officers for a lack of effective management.27 In both these cases the issue under consideration was not posed as one of an agent of the state walking up to a member of the public and, without warning, shooting them in the head, or one of a police officer using a semi-automatic rifle to deal with an alleged juvenile delinquent. Rather the issue was considered to be a lack of efficient organisation. It was to this logic of managing barbaric acts through law that Hannah Arendt was referring in her description of the “banality of evil”.28 The “reasonableness” of police killings Ever since the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE) the police have been recognised in law as possessing certain special powers, which the rest of us do not have, such as the right to stop and search and detain individuals. However, in terms of the use of force, in the eye of the law they remain neither more nor less than “citizens in uniform”. In other words legally they are to be held to account for taking another person’s life in much the same way as you or me. The law offers us two main defences for killing someone. The first is the common law of self-defence. The second is contained in Section 3 of the Criminal Law Act 1967, which states that “a person may use such force as is reasonable in the circumstances in the prevention of crime, or in effecting or assisting in the lawful arrest of offenders or suspected offenders or of persons unlawfully at large”. This obviously refers mainly to the police, but it also applies to any one of us confronted by someone committing a criminal act, eg a burglar in our home. The key term common to both this statutory provision and the defence of self-defence is “reasonableness”. In order to uphold a defence to a charge of murder or manslaughter, one needs to prove two things—that the force used was both necessary and proportionate. If someone attempts to grab my wallet, it will be necessary for me to use physical force to stop them. If someone merely threatens to steal my wallet tomorrow, it would not be necessary for me physically to attack or restrain them. Assuming that I am actually being mugged, the question then arises as to the level of force I can legitimately apply. If in this scenario I push the thief to the ground then that would probably be considered a proportionate degree of force. If I took out a knife and stabbed them in the chest, then that would almost certainly be considered disproportionate. However, if the thief produces a gun when robbing me, the use of a knife might be considered proportionate and legitimate. A key principle evident in the law here is that of balance and rational calculation. I may only do to you something that can be measured as equivalent to the danger posed by you. In each and every case where the police shoot a suspect dead, they always claim that they feared deadly and imminent danger from the victim. So the police officers who shot de Menezes “honestly believed” that he was an armed suicide bomber, and therefore shooting him in the head was a reasonable and proportionate response. In law, the fact that they were subsequently shown to be mistaken does not vitiate their claim as to what their subjective fear was at the time they shot him. It was on the same basis that the case against members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) charged with one of the shoot to kill incidents in 1982 was dismissed. The judge in that case, Lord Justice Gibson, argued that the police had reacted reasonably given the potential danger they faced from known members of the IRA. Indeed, notoriously, he went a step too far by commending the defendants for bringing the murdered IRA suspects to the “final court of justice”. Although, in an unprecedented move, he subsequently had to retract his remarks from the bench, the logic expressed fits perfectly the way in which the devaluation of the lives of suspects allows the police to justify the use of extreme violence against them. The jurisprudence has tended to judge what is reasonable from the subjective standpoint of the police officer who has applied lethal force.29 This then places a disproportionate emphasis on the testimony of the police officer concerned. Again Lord Justice Gibson makes the point crystal clear: The question whether there was the necessary criminal intention is not to be judged…by the standard of what one thinks one would have done or should have done had one been in that situation. The question is: has the Crown proved beyond any reasonable doubt what was the actual state of mind, belief and understanding of the accused police officers in the heat and anxiety of the moment, faced, as they understood it, with but a fleeting second to decide and to act…30 This justification was repeated in almost exactly the same terms more than two decades later to justify the murder of de Menezes morally and legally. When placed in the context of the potential threat from terrorists the criteria of what might be considered reasonable are widened considerably. Instead of the law acting as a restraint upon the police officer, the yardstick by which to measure the legitimate extent of lethal force applied by the police has instead been judged on the basis of the extent of the potential violence committed by the terrorist. The hyperbole that surrounds the “war on terror”, a war whose end cannot be envisaged in a world racked by imperialism, is largely responsible for investing in the concept of a reasonable use of force, a pre-emptive dimension based on quasi-apocalyptic expectations of what terrorists are capable of carrying out. An academic writing on the experience in Northern Ireland points out how the concept of proportionality became so fluid that it facilitated the use of lethal force by law enforcement agents for almost any crime even if it was only a vague notion of a terrorist crime… This has had the profound subsidiary effect that security forces were enabled to engage with supposed terrorists in situations that would enable them the full protec-tion of the law due to the elasticity and elusiveness of the concept of “reasonableness”. 31 It has sometimes been argued that the problem is simply one of English law being out of step with the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), which applies a more rigorous or objective test in judging the “honest belief” of the police officer.32 However, in a case from 2001 concerning yet another lethal shooting of an unarmed suspect by the police the same court held that “it is not for the court to substitute its own opinion of the situation for that of a police officer who was required to react in the heat of the moment”.33 As Clair de Than points out, this judgment has the effect of placing even greater emphasis on the subjective testimony of the police officer: “It does not have to be a reasonable mistake, merely an honest one”.34 The vague concepts of reasonableness and proportionality, which are integral to law, are given detail and weight by reference to the perceived enormity of the crime that may take place, in order to justify an extra-judicial policy of shoot to kill. In this way the context of what is considered reasonable is shifted towards more brutal policing methods. This paradigm shift, of which Kratos is a part, is born of an increased use of exceptional measures. This leads many to claim that what is needed is a return to a firmer rule of law in order to resist the tendency to resort to states of emergency to fight the “war on terror”. But this is a category mistake, for states of emergency are not departures from law, but are rooted within it. In a footnote, Pashukanis says that when it comes to times of heightened revolutionary struggle, we can observe how the official machinery of the bourgeois state apparatus retires into the background as compared with the volunteer corps of the fascists and others. This further substantiates the fact that, when the balance of society is upset, it seeks salvation not in the creation of a power standing above society, but in the maximal harnessing of all forces of the classes in conflict.35 This passage is problematic as it suggests that the ruling class can simply and consciously put aside the law for its own preservation. If this were so, then it would seem to negate his central point about law’s roots in the objective relations of capital, relations in which they themselves dominate. Mark Cowling identifies the problem as that of “the idea of equivalence and the idea of class terror coming into conflict with one another”.36 Pashukanis is right that at the most acute phases of class struggle, such as existed in Russia in 1917 or Italy a few years later, the ruling class does act in the way he describes. But in order to understand the ever closer and more permanent relationship between law and the state of exception, we must look beyond Pashukanis. What has become increasingly evident over the last century has been the fact that in most cases the ruling class is able to manage its way through crises not by abandoning law, but rather by extending its reach. The “state of exception” Giorgio Agamben argues that the “state of exception”, which has with increasing frequency been used to justify extreme departures from the liberal norms of the rule of law, is in fact a function of law itself.37 Here Agamben is drawing on the work of two critics of capitalist democracy; from the right Carl Schmitt who argued that the state of exception is the necessary foundation of sovereign power38 and from the left Walter Benjamin who posited that “’the state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule”.39 Indeed, as long ago as 1851 Marx identified the apparent anomaly of states of exception being written into law in his critique of the liberal-democratic French Constitution of November 1848.40 There are many problems in Agamben’s work, particularly his ahistorical attempt to explain the state of exception as a feature of all human civilisations stretching back to antiquity and beyond. Indeed, in this he departs from all his key influences—Schmitt, Benjamin, Arendt, Foucault—by ignoring the specificity of how power is exercised in modernity. Nonetheless, his work offers some very useful insights by developing the relationship between law and the state of exception that is merely hinted at in Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History”. In doing this Agamben provides a necessary corrective to the idealised celebration of the rule of law that exists amongst the liberal left and indeed among a significant portion of the Marxist left.41 It has become a feature of modern capitalist democracies to call in aid tactics which violate the norms of the rule of law, yet which are justified on the basis of defending the rule of law against existential threats, real or imagined. After almost a decade of the “war on terror” examples are familiar and numerous—Guantanamo Bay, extraordinary rendition, water-boarding, control orders, etc. This argument has, of course, also been used by the police when they claim that they are facing “unprecedented circumstances” which necessitate the deployment of more brutal tactics. The danger in this approach was recognised more than 30 years ago by the ECtHR, when the court ruled that there were limits to the use of national security in justifying extreme methods, even, or perhaps especially, legal ones: The Court, being aware of the danger such a law poses of undermining or even destroying democracy on the ground of defending it, affirms that the Contracting States may not, in the name of the struggle against terrorism, adopt whatever measures they deem appropriate.42 And, in words that brought a cheer from every civil libertarian, Lord Hoffman famously declared in a case which struck down New Labour’s policy of detention without trial of terrorist suspects that “the real threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of a people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these”.43 However, the decision of the House of Lords in that case was not that it was illegal for the government to detain without trial per se, but that the policy was discriminatory, as it did not apply to British citizens, thus breaching the principle of equivalence. The government responded with control orders, which to date stand in law. In mainstream discussions of the problem of the state of exception, it is presented as a contradiction which exposes the gap between the self-identity of liberal democratic societies and the abuses committed by certain governments or state agencies. For Agamben, on the other hand, the state of exception is in fact a latent yet integral function of sovereignty, embodied as much in capitalist democracy as in fascist and other authoritarian political systems. Agamben argues that the claim by the state of the need to protect itself, and wider society, against perceived threats requires it to regularly impose sanctions which fall outside the rule of law. The contradiction thus emerges in that the rule of law can only be protected by regularly going outside the rule of law. Agamben gives as an example the Nazi state, which throughout its existence did not abolish the liberal Weimar constitution, but merely suspended it at regular intervals.44 Thus, legally, the “lawlessness” of the Nazis was in fact rooted in the liberal constitutional Weimar Republic. And in a perverse piece of legal formality, just prior to being sent to the death camps German Jews were stripped of their citizenship, precisely so that they would not be covered by the normal legal rights of other citizens.45 In a like manner, although at a far lower level of barbarism, in Britian shoot to kill has evolved from an unofficial and ad hoc tactic into a policy of extra-judicial killing in the form of the Kratos policy. The ability of the police to act beyond the bounds of the rule of law has, paradoxically, become written into law. This creates a space around the suspected suicide bomber, where the norms of criminal law and police practice are suspended. Yet its status as an official policy, implemented without violating the norms of governmental procedure, grounds this extra-legal policy within the framework of the law. One police officer has attempted to justify Kratos on the basis that it authorises not shoot to kill but the right to take action which, “in order to save life, may have to take life”.46 Echoes here of the infamous comment made by a senior US Army officer during the Vietnam War: “It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.” This barbaric contradiction in terms recurs throughout the arguments used to justify draconian anti-terrorist measures. The rule of law must be suspended in order to preserve the rule of law. The situations in which the police adopt lethal force are often described as “unprecedented”, with suspects as “dangerous”, “desperate”, “won’t be taken alive”, etc. In striking the balance between the reasonable use of force and the perceived danger posed by the suspect, the mean point gets moved to an extremity. A senior member of the security forces explained how the language of necessity was used to justify lethal force in Northern Ireland: “Was it a decision to kill those people? I don’t think it would have been phrased like that. Somebody would have said, ‘How far do we go to remove this group of terrorists?’ and the answer would have been, ‘As far as necessary’.”47 Similar arguments were used by the Nazis and other totalitarian regimes in the cause of maintaining stability and the security of the state. Indeed, it was this logic that led Schmitt from a critical defender of the Weimar Republic into a supporter and theorist for the Nazis. In the conflict between human rights and security, the latter must always trump the former, for without security there cannot be a social framework strong enough to support human rights. This is but a concrete expression of Agamben’s point that It is as if the judicial order contained an essential fracture between the position of the norm and its application, which, in extreme situations, can be filled only by means of the state of exception, that is, by creating a zone in which application is suspended, but the law, as such, remains in force.48 Agamben allows us to grasp the interrelationship between law and the state of exception, and thus fill the gap left in Pashukanis’s formulation. In attempting to answer the question as to why the evolution of an official shoot to kill policy has met with relatively little outcry compared to the scandal that followed the killings by the RUC in the early 1980s, Agamben’s work illuminates the essential role of law in grounding and thus normalising exceptional and brutal police tactics. The retreat of the organised working class and the concomitant decay in politics have left a gap that has been occupied by law. Benjamin’s injunction that we confront “states of emergency” with a real state of emergency is a call to reject the confines of the rule of law when faced with state violence. The failure to do so leads one into accepting the legal form on which the legitimacy of state violence rests. This is precisely the mistake made by EP Thompson and his followers who argue that the rule of law is a “universal good” which supposedly transcends capitalism.49 A crucial aspect missing from Agamben’s analysis is an understanding of what grounds law and the state of exception, as well as what makes these concepts evolve over time. Instead he points to a highly obscure figure in early Roman law, homo sacer (sacred man), as a recurring figure in Western societies.50 The homo sacer refers to someone who “may be killed, but not sacrificed.” In other words, this person has no value—their life may be taken away without legal sanction. Thus, Agamben argues, the homo sacer is representative of those targeted by the law under a state of exception as being beyond the protection of the law. But Agamben is not able to explain why certain groups or individuals are capable of becoming homo sacer and others not. Indeed, he goes so far at one point as to suggest that today we may all be homines sacri.51 He appears to argue (Agamben is obscure at the best of times) that anyone who poses a threat to the state, or whom the state merely perceives as a threat is liable to become the homo sacer. If this is so it raises the question of why the working class as a whole or even significant sections of it have not been subjected to this process. The reason why this is so is because the always present, if hidden, power of the working class cannot be legislated or terrorised away. Working class organisation can be smashed, but the latent power of the working class is impossible to eliminate. To place any powerful group in society within the category of the homo sacer would fundamentally destabilise the rule of capital. Thus Nazi terror on the streets was necessary politically to break the power of the organised left and the trade unions before those sections of the working class could be made the homo sacer. Nonetheless, even under fascism capital cannot escape the logic of the legal form that, as Pashukanis convincingly argues, is the necessary guarantor of commodity exchange. Thus the fetish of legal formalities that pervaded Nazi rule is not the anomaly it at first appears. The racist content of Nazi law was, of course, qualitatively different than that which exists under capitalist democracy, and all the gains achieved by the working class such as collective bargaining rights were abolished. Yet the basic legal form remained because the economic base of capitalism remained. Not only did the Nazis keep to the legal niceties of the constitutional state, but the working class continued to sell their labour power on the basis of a contractual exchange with employers. For this reason when the demand for labour exceeded supply during the late 1930s, particularly in the construction industry, wages went up in some cases by 30 percent.52 So while the homo sacer is flawed as an analysis of the generalised form of capitalist rule, as a metaphor it does provide a very useful way of understanding how the police, in the example under discussion here, are able to kill without being legally culpable. Indeed, it would seem to reinforce Pashukanis’s theory by identifying the extent to which legal rights are co-determinate with the measuring of value. Subjects who are from the point of view of the state expendable or individually dangerous can be made into homines sacri, at the mercy of the state’s monopoly of violence. This can certainly apply to, for example, refugees, terrorist suspects or other “subversives”. The process by which such lives are devalued, and the way in which the law colludes in this is discussed next. Suspect Communities Contrary to the claims made by the Metropolitan Police following the killing of de Menezes that terrorist attacks on the Tube were unprecedented, the very first bombing of the London Underground took place more than a century earlier in 1883. At first the Irish were blamed, although later it transpired that the bomb had been the work of anarchists. As a result, the police and the press began targeting the Jewish community, which was identified as a hotbed of anarchist refugees from Eastern Europe. The barrister Richard Harvey has drawn the obvious analogy with Harry Stanley, Diarmuid O’Neill, Neil McConville and Jean Charles de Menezes. What all had in common was membership, or perceived membership, of communities which had been viewed as and thus targeted as suspect. Once it was Jewish communities who were perceived as a breeding ground for anarchist violence, followed by the Irish community harbouring Republican terrorists; today it is Muslim communities supposedly encompassing Al Qaida sympathisers that fulfil the role of a suspect community.53 In this demonisation of minority communities lie the origins of the elite police squads tasked with the use of lethal force. The Special Irish Branch was set up to fight the Irish Republican Fenian movement in the 1880s. This has since changed its name to the less offensive sounding, though no less offensive in deed, Special Branch. It was officers from SO19 of the Special Branch that carried out the killings of O’Neill, Stanley and de Menezes. Paddy Hillyard coined the term “suspect community” to describe a sub-group of the population that is singled out for state attention as being “problematic”. Specifically in terms of policing, individuals may be targeted, not necessarily as a result of suspected wrong doing, but simply because of their presumed membership of that sub-group. Race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, language, accent, dress, political ideology or any combination of these factors may serve to delineate the sub-group.54 Muslims, as a suspect community, are often portrayed as anti-Enlightenment and thus anti human rights, threatening a “civilised” way of life.55 But, as the authors of a recent study at London Metropolitan University argue, it is also symptomatic of a discourse of “anti-rationality” of the suspect community as fanatical and immune to reason or argument.56 In the case of Neil McConville, shot dead in April 2003 by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), the justification for his death was created after the event, by suggestions fed by the PSNI that he was variously linked to paramilitaries or drug gangs. In the days following the killing of McConville headlines in the press included allegations of involvement in these criminal activities, all of which were completely untrue. The same thing happened with Harry Stanley, when a list of his previous, spent criminal convictions was read out to the inquest into his death despite their complete irrelevance to the circumstances surrounding the shooting. Again, with de Menezes, the police circulated smears in the media about alleged drug use and his immigration status. Of course none of these allegations were intended to justify the police’s actions per se; their aim was to associate the victims with certain groups who would be considered of lesser value—criminals, drug dealers/users, illegal immigrants—thus devaluing their claim to a legal right not to be murdered by the state. As Hillyard points out: Once dehumanised, people can be viewed with ethical indifference and moral questions are of no concern to the police carrying out their tasks. The police are only doing their job. As violence has become increasingly concentrated under state control, moral responsibility is replaced by a technical responsibility.57 De Menezes was neither Muslim nor from the Middle East. What set off the chain of events which led to his death was the misidentification of him by the police surveillance team as a “North African male”. Likewise, Harry Stanley was shot dead by armed police to whom it had been reported that he had an Irish accent when in fact he was Scottish. What these two examples show is the way in which the suspect community is defined by appearances, by superficial attributes.58 This reverses the normal modus operandi of policing whereby evidence or hard intelligence is the prerequisite for the use of force. Moreover, the fact that in both these cases the victim was misidentified simply points up the extent to which perceived membership of the suspect community is sufficient to give rise to an “honest belief” by police that lethal use of force is necessary and proportionate. Had Stanley not had an “Irish” accent or de Menezes a darkish skin, both would probably still be alive today. And as we saw above, “honest belief” forms the basis for the legal defence of police officers who kill unarmed or innocent suspects. In this insidious manner racist and cultural stereotypes become legal justifications for the taking of life by state agents. Hillyard has pointed out how the Prevention of Terrorism Act 1974 (PTA) effectively introduced a “dual system of criminal justice”, one system operating under the PTA and the other under ordinary criminal law. As a result a dichotomy developed between terrorist suspects and “ordinary decent criminals”.59 Today we face a similar separation between those subjected to recent anti-terrorist legislation as distinct from regular criminal law.60 This distinction functions within both law and a broader social context, with one reinforcing the other. The threat from terrorists is exaggerated by politicians and media alike. This in turn creates a greater sense of fear of violence about the suspect community in general, and that small minority seeking to use violence in particular. This dynamic then provides a platform for the introduction of ever more draconian laws, and brutal police methods. The argument from the police and others is that the threat from Al Qaida is wholly Muslim just as the threat from the IRA was mostly Irish, and thus it is reasonable to target those communities. Yet we must not forget that this “dual system” is not one of completely distinct and hermetically sealed areas of law. The foundational principles of the rule of law do not permit such a thing. Norms, legal tests and police practice are constantly migrating between the two. Think, for example, of how anti-terror legislation has been used to detain protesters or to stop and search individuals suspected of petty crimes. The state of exception and its associated policing strategies become the norm. Hillyard’s detailed study on how violence targeted the Irish community comes to this conclusion: It is commonplace to counter-pose the rule of law to the abuse of power or acts of violence. Law, from this perspective, is seen as the antithesis of violence… But this dichotomy is false… Law is…an integral part of the repression and organisation of state violence.61 Conclusion In hindsight, the period lasting from the later half of the 19th century through to the 1960s saw the proliferation of various mechanisms that in a thousand strands bound the working class ideologically to capitalism. In Gramscian terms, hegemony was manifested in aspects of civil society such as education, culture, community identity, civic projects, etc. The police were successfully woven into this apparatus as a necessary, if not necessarily benign, method of preserving social cohesion. But, as Reiner puts it, “when neoliberalism unravelled this complex of subtle, hidden controls, the thin blue line turned out to be a Maginot line”.62 Thus, on the one hand, the role of the police in maintaining order within capitalist democracy has not altered fundamentally in the last 150 years or so. Yet, on the other hand, the retreat of the organised working class in the face of neoliberalism has revealed the violence that exists at the heart of policing and the rule of law. The problem has been that throughout this period the ideology of the rule of law has become ever stronger, and indeed has been taken up by sections of the left as the solution to the problem of police violence. My aim here has been to demonstrate, using Pashukanis’s commodity-form theory of law, Agamben’s work on the state of exception and Hillyard’s description of suspect communities, how the law as such (not merely particular laws or legal systems) is complicit in legitimising police violence, even at the extreme end involving the deliberate killing of innocent people.
16 +The debate is about starting points - the AFF limits qualified immunity, which is simply a tool of the state from which it comes. THE AFF puts the cart before the horse. This requires re-orienting our methodological starting point. The alternative is to create spaces beyond the grasp of bureaucratic institutions – our utopian ethic is key to breaking out of normative legal thought in the present. This is a cultural critique to expand our understanding of state violence which is a necessary pre requisite and this means that state violence is not inevitable.
17 +Newman 11 (Saul, associate professor in the Department of Government in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, DC, “Postanarchism: a politics of anti-politics” (October 2011), Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 16 no. 3)
18 +At the same time, this aporetic moment of tension central to classical anarchism generates new and productive articulations of politics and ethics. The disjunction between politics and anti-politics is what might be called an ‘inclusive’ disjunction: a compound in which one proposition is true only if its opposing proposition is also true. Politics, at least in a radical, emancipatory sense, has only a consistent identity if an anti-political, indeed utopian, dimension is also present—otherwise it remains caught within existing political frameworks and imaginaries. Conversely, anti-politics only makes sense if it takes seriously the tasks of politics—building, constructing, organizing, fighting, making collective decisions and so on—where questions of power and exclusion inevitably emerge. However, this proximity to power does not invalidate anarchism; rather, it leads to a greater sensitivity to the dangers of power and the need to invent, as mentioned before, new micro-political practices of freedom through which power is subjected to an ongoing ethical interrogation. Where the political pole imposes certain limits, the anti-political pole, by contrast, invokes an outside, a movement beyond limits. It is the signification of the infinite, of the limitless horizon of possibilities. This is both the moment of utopia and, in a different sense, the moment of ethics. Anarchism has an important utopian dimension, even if the classical anarchists themselves claimed not to be utopians but materialists and rationalists. Indeed, some utopian element—whether acknowledged or not—is an essential part of any form of radical politics; to oppose the current order, one inevitably invokes an alternative, utopian imagination. However, we should try to formulate a different approach to utopianism here: the importance of imagining an alternative to the current order is not to lay down a precise programme for the future, but rather to provide a point of exteriority as a way of interrogating the limits of this order. As Miguel Abensour puts it: ‘Is it not proper to utopia to propose a new way of proceeding to a displacement of what is and what seems to go without saying in the crushing name of “reality”?’37 We are crushed under the weight of the current order, which tells us that this is our reality, that what we have now is all there is and all there ever will be. Utopia provides an escape from this stifling reality by imagining an alternative to it; it opens up different possibilities, new ‘lines of flight’. Here, we should think about utopia in terms of action in the immediate sense, of creating alternatives within the present, at localized points, rather than waiting for the revolution. Utopia is something that emerges in political struggles themselves.38 Ethics also implies an outside to the existing order, but in a different sense. Ethics, as I understand it here, involves the opening up of the existing political identities, practices, institutions and discourses to an Other which is beyond their terms. Ethics is more than the application of moral and rational norms. It is rather the continual disturbance of the sovereignty of these norms, and the identities and institutions that draw their legitimacy from them, in the name of something that exceeds their grasp. Importantly, then, ethics is what disturbs politics from the outside. This might be understood in the Levinasian sense of ‘anarchy’: ‘Anarchy cannot be sovereign like an arche. It can only disturb the State—but in a radical way, making possible moments of negation without any affirmation.’39 The point is, however, that politics cannot do without anti-politics, and vice versa. The two must go together. There must always be an anti-political outside, a utopian moment of rupture and excess that disturbs the limits of politics. The ethical moment cannot be eclipsed by the political dimension; nor can it be separated from it, as someone like Carl Schmitt maintained.40 If there is to be a concept of the political, it can only be thought through a certain constitutive tension with ethics. At the same time, anti-politics needs to be politically articulated; it needs to be put into action through actual struggles and engagements with different forms of domination. There must be some way of politically measuring the anti-political imaginery, through victories, defeats, and strategic gains and reversals. So while anti-politics points to a transcendence of the current order, it cannot be an escape from it; it must involve an encounter with its limits, and this is where politics comes in. The transcendence of power involves an active engagement with power, not an avoidance of it; the realization of freedom requires an ongoing elaboration of new practices of freedom within the context of power relations.
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +2016-11-14 05:30:40.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +x
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +x
ParentRound
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +25
Round
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +1
Team
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +Sunset bhat Neg
Title
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +1 - Neoliberal Scapegoating K - derp version
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +Central Valley
Caselist.RoundClass[5]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +6
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +2016-11-14 05:04:35.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +x
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +x
Round
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +1
RoundReport
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +x
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +St Marks
Caselist.RoundClass[6]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +7
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +2016-11-14 05:05:18.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +Arjun Tambe
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +Lake Highland
Round
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +1
RoundReport
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,3 @@
1 +Structural Violence AC
2 +Neoliberalism K
3 +Warming DA
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +Greenhill
Caselist.RoundClass[25]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +26
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +2016-11-14 05:30:33.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +x
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +x
Round
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +1
RoundReport
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +x
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +Central Valley

Schools

Aberdeen Central (SD)
Acton-Boxborough (MA)
Albany (CA)
Albuquerque Academy (NM)
Alief Taylor (TX)
American Heritage Boca Delray (FL)
American Heritage Plantation (FL)
Anderson (TX)
Annie Wright (WA)
Apple Valley (MN)
Appleton East (WI)
Arbor View (NV)
Arcadia (CA)
Archbishop Mitty (CA)
Ardrey Kell (NC)
Ashland (OR)
Athens (TX)
Bainbridge (WA)
Bakersfield (CA)
Barbers Hill (TX)
Barrington (IL)
BASIS Mesa (AZ)
BASIS Scottsdale (AZ)
BASIS Silicon (CA)
Beckman (CA)
Bellarmine (CA)
Benjamin Franklin (LA)
Benjamin N Cardozo (NY)
Bentonville (AR)
Bergen County (NJ)
Bettendorf (IA)
Bingham (UT)
Blue Valley Southwest (KS)
Brentwood (CA)
Brentwood Middle (CA)
Bridgewater-Raritan (NJ)
Bronx Science (NY)
Brophy College Prep (AZ)
Brown (KY)
Byram Hills (NY)
Byron Nelson (TX)
Cabot (AR)
Calhoun Homeschool (TX)
Cambridge Rindge (MA)
Canyon Crest (CA)
Canyon Springs (NV)
Cape Fear Academy (NC)
Carmel Valley Independent (CA)
Carpe Diem (NJ)
Cedar Park (TX)
Cedar Ridge (TX)
Centennial (ID)
Centennial (TX)
Center For Talented Youth (MD)
Cerritos (CA)
Chaminade (CA)
Chandler (AZ)
Chandler Prep (AZ)
Chaparral (AZ)
Charles E Smith (MD)
Cherokee (OK)
Christ Episcopal (LA)
Christopher Columbus (FL)
Cinco Ranch (TX)
Citrus Valley (CA)
Claremont (CA)
Clark (NV)
Clark (TX)
Clear Brook (TX)
Clements (TX)
Clovis North (CA)
College Prep (CA)
Collegiate (NY)
Colleyville Heritage (TX)
Concord Carlisle (MA)
Concordia Lutheran (TX)
Connally (TX)
Coral Glades (FL)
Coral Science (NV)
Coral Springs (FL)
Coppell (TX)
Copper Hills (UT)
Corona Del Sol (AZ)
Crandall (TX)
Crossroads (CA)
Cupertino (CA)
Cy-Fair (TX)
Cypress Bay (FL)
Cypress Falls (TX)
Cypress Lakes (TX)
Cypress Ridge (TX)
Cypress Springs (TX)
Cypress Woods (TX)
Dallastown (PA)
Davis (CA)
Delbarton (NJ)
Derby (KS)
Des Moines Roosevelt (IA)
Desert Vista (AZ)
Diamond Bar (CA)
Dobson (AZ)
Dougherty Valley (CA)
Dowling Catholic (IA)
Dripping Springs (TX)
Dulles (TX)
duPont Manual (KY)
Dwyer (FL)
Eagle (ID)
Eastside Catholic (WA)
Edgemont (NY)
Edina (MN)
Edmond North (OK)
Edmond Santa Fe (OK)
El Cerrito (CA)
Elkins (TX)
Enloe (NC)
Episcopal (TX)
Evanston (IL)
Evergreen Valley (CA)
Ferris (TX)
Flintridge Sacred Heart (CA)
Flower Mound (TX)
Fordham Prep (NY)
Fort Lauderdale (FL)
Fort Walton Beach (FL)
Freehold Township (NJ)
Fremont (NE)
Frontier (MO)
Gabrielino (CA)
Garland (TX)
George Ranch (TX)
Georgetown Day (DC)
Gig Harbor (WA)
Gilmour (OH)
Glenbrook South (IL)
Gonzaga Prep (WA)
Grand Junction (CO)
Grapevine (TX)
Green Valley (NV)
Greenhill (TX)
Guyer (TX)
Hamilton (AZ)
Hamilton (MT)
Harker (CA)
Harmony (TX)
Harrison (NY)
Harvard Westlake (CA)
Hawken (OH)
Head Royce (CA)
Hebron (TX)
Heights (MD)
Hendrick Hudson (NY)
Henry Grady (GA)
Highland (UT)
Highland (ID)
Hockaday (TX)
Holy Cross (LA)
Homewood Flossmoor (IL)
Hopkins (MN)
Houston Homeschool (TX)
Hunter College (NY)
Hutchinson (KS)
Immaculate Heart (CA)
Independent (All)
Interlake (WA)
Isidore Newman (LA)
Jack C Hays (TX)
James Bowie (TX)
Jefferson City (MO)
Jersey Village (TX)
John Marshall (CA)
Juan Diego (UT)
Jupiter (FL)
Kapaun Mount Carmel (KS)
Kamiak (WA)
Katy Taylor (TX)
Keller (TX)
Kempner (TX)
Kent Denver (CO)
King (FL)
Kingwood (TX)
Kinkaid (TX)
Klein (TX)
Klein Oak (TX)
Kudos College (CA)
La Canada (CA)
La Costa Canyon (CA)
La Jolla (CA)
La Reina (CA)
Lafayette (MO)
Lake Highland (FL)
Lake Travis (TX)
Lakeville North (MN)
Lakeville South (MN)
Lamar (TX)
LAMP (AL)
Law Magnet (TX)
Langham Creek (TX)
Lansing (KS)
LaSalle College (PA)
Lawrence Free State (KS)
Layton (UT)
Leland (CA)
Leucadia Independent (CA)
Lexington (MA)
Liberty Christian (TX)
Lincoln (OR)
Lincoln (NE)
Lincoln East (NE)
Lindale (TX)
Livingston (NJ)
Logan (UT)
Lone Peak (UT)
Los Altos (CA)
Los Osos (CA)
Lovejoy (TX)
Loyola (CA)
Loyola Blakefield (MA)
Lynbrook (CA)
Maeser Prep (UT)
Mannford (OK)
Marcus (TX)
Marlborough (CA)
McClintock (AZ)
McDowell (PA)
McNeil (TX)
Meadows (NV)
Memorial (TX)
Millard North (NE)
Millard South (NE)
Millard West (NE)
Millburn (NJ)
Milpitas (CA)
Miramonte (CA)
Mission San Jose (CA)
Monsignor Kelly (TX)
Monta Vista (CA)
Montclair Kimberley (NJ)
Montgomery (TX)
Monticello (NY)
Montville Township (NJ)
Morris Hills (NJ)
Mountain Brook (AL)
Mountain Pointe (AZ)
Mountain View (CA)
Mountain View (AZ)
Murphy Middle (TX)
NCSSM (NC)
New Orleans Jesuit (LA)
New Trier (IL)
Newark Science (NJ)
Newburgh Free Academy (NY)
Newport (WA)
North Allegheny (PA)
North Crowley (TX)
North Hollywood (CA)
Northland Christian (TX)
Northwood (CA)
Notre Dame (CA)
Nueva (CA)
Oak Hall (FL)
Oakwood (CA)
Okoboji (IA)
Oxbridge (FL)
Oxford (CA)
Pacific Ridge (CA)
Palm Beach Gardens (FL)
Palo Alto Independent (CA)
Palos Verdes Peninsula (CA)
Park Crossing (AL)
Peak to Peak (CO)
Pembroke Pines (FL)
Pennsbury (PA)
Phillips Academy Andover (MA)
Phoenix Country Day (AZ)
Pine Crest (FL)
Pingry (NJ)
Pittsburgh Central Catholic (PA)
Plano East (TX)
Polytechnic (CA)
Presentation (CA)
Princeton (NJ)
Prosper (TX)
Quarry Lane (CA)
Raisbeck-Aviation (WA)
Rancho Bernardo (CA)
Randolph (NJ)
Reagan (TX)
Richardson (TX)
Ridge (NJ)
Ridge Point (TX)
Riverside (SC)
Robert Vela (TX)
Rosemount (MN)
Roseville (MN)
Round Rock (TX)
Rowland Hall (UT)
Royse City (TX)
Ruston (LA)
Sacred Heart (MA)
Sacred Heart (MS)
Sage Hill (CA)
Sage Ridge (NV)
Salado (TX)
Salpointe Catholic (AZ)
Sammamish (WA)
San Dieguito (CA)
San Marino (CA)
SandHoke (NC)
Santa Monica (CA)
Sarasota (FL)
Saratoga (CA)
Scarsdale (NY)
Servite (CA)
Seven Lakes (TX)
Shawnee Mission East (KS)
Shawnee Mission Northwest (KS)
Shawnee Mission South (KS)
Shawnee Mission West (KS)
Sky View (UT)
Skyline (UT)
Smithson Valley (TX)
Southlake Carroll (TX)
Sprague (OR)
St Agnes (TX)
St Andrews (MS)
St Francis (CA)
St James (AL)
St Johns (TX)
St Louis Park (MN)
St Margarets (CA)
St Marys Hall (TX)
St Thomas (MN)
St Thomas (TX)
Stephen F Austin (TX)
Stoneman Douglas (FL)
Stony Point (TX)
Strake Jesuit (TX)
Stratford (TX)
Stratford Independent (CA)
Stuyvesant (NY)
Success Academy (NY)
Sunnyslope (AZ)
Sunset (OR)
Syosset (NY)
Tahoma (WA)
Talley (AZ)
Texas Academy of Math and Science (TX)
Thomas Jefferson (VA)
Thompkins (TX)
Timber Creek (FL)
Timothy Christian (NJ)
Tom C Clark (TX)
Tompkins (TX)
Torrey Pines (CA)
Travis (TX)
Trinity (KY)
Trinity Prep (FL)
Trinity Valley (TX)
Truman (PA)
Turlock (CA)
Union (OK)
Unionville (PA)
University High (CA)
University School (OH)
University (FL)
Upper Arlington (OH)
Upper Dublin (PA)
Valley (IA)
Valor Christian (CO)
Vashon (WA)
Ventura (CA)
Veritas Prep (AZ)
Vestavia Hills (AL)
Vincentian (PA)
Walla Walla (WA)
Walt Whitman (MD)
Warren (TX)
Wenatchee (WA)
West (UT)
West Ranch (CA)
Westford (MA)
Westlake (TX)
Westview (OR)
Westwood (TX)
Whitefish Bay (WI)
Whitney (CA)
Wilson (DC)
Winston Churchill (TX)
Winter Springs (FL)
Woodlands (TX)
Woodlands College Park (TX)
Wren (SC)
Yucca Valley (CA)