Tournament: College Prep | Round: 1 | Opponent: Newport independent | Judge: Travis Fife
The advantage is militarism
Free speech zones are a sham – rather than creating a space for speech, they confine dissent to overlooked corners of university campuses, where it is no longer effective. This regime of restrictions on free speech uses military tactics to suppress open debate and political dissent, an extension of the state’s extralegal violence in the War on Terror
Elmer 8 (Greg Elmer, associate professor of communication and culture at Ryerson University, PhD in communication from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, director of the Infoscape Research Lab at Ryerson University, Andy Opel, associate professor of communication at Florida State University, PhD in mass communication from the University of North Carolina, member of the International Communication Association, November 2008, “Preempting Dissent: The Politics of an Inevitable Future,” pages 29-41)
SHORTLY AFTER THE LARGE-SCALE PROTESTS against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in late November 1999, police, law enforcement agencies, the military, and global weapons manufacturers began to rethink their responses to public protests. Since the Seattle protests, similar semi—annual gatherings of government officials and corporate trade lawyers have consistently attracted large public protests, organized by public-interests groups denied participation in the decision-making process of trade agreements such as the Global Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Wide—scale protests were seen in Prague, Genoa, Cancun, Quebec City, Miami, and, most recently, Mar Del Plata, Argentina. Moreover, as we will see in this chapter, as the size and sophistication of resistance grew, so too did political and legal responses to that resistance. Responses to such protests have been greatly influenced by military and so—called ‘homeland’ security strategies enacted after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the initiation of the controversial second Gulf War. As we see in this chapter, the combination of a changing political climate in response to war and terrorism, particularly the expansion of preemptive forms of social control and political containment, has resulted in a new set of practices that have reconfigured public space and criminalized multiple aspects of free speech and public assembly in the United States. This chapter argues that in the shadow of 9/11, the war in Iraq, and the ongoing “War on Terror,” a disturbing form of geopolitical apartheid has emerged in the United States. At the core of this trend is a set of micro-political strategies and technologies that attempt to contain spaces of dissent and detain protestors (Boghosian, 2004). Some activists and critics have labeled these anti-democratic tendencies the “Miami Model,” after the strategies deployed in November 2003 against Free Trade of the Americas protestors by federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies stationed in Miami. The Miami model of law enforcement was characterized by 1) the deployment of overwhelming numbers of law enforcement officers, 2) preemptive arrests of peaceful and law—abiding protestors, and 3) widespread police surveillance techniques before, during, and after protests (Getzan, 2004). And while these three pillars—overwhelming force, preemptive arrests, and surveillance—-provide a good overview of police and law enforcement strategies, in this chapter we focus on the manner in which spaces of dissent, debate, and democracy are being regulated and policed through the courts, going into more depth in the next chapter, through a study of the introduction of weapons meant to easily contain and detain protestors and, more broadly, immobilize dissent. Of greater concern is the degree to which such strategies systematically marginalize dissent, spatially and politically speaking. From the creation of “free speech zones” and the proposal for protest free “Pedestrian Safety Zones”2° to the political screening of participants in political “town hall meetings,” space has increasingly become a tool to limit open debate, freedom of speech, and political dissent in the US. Part of our interest in exposing the strategies of political segregation, first through the containment of protest spaces, and second, through the deployment of preemptive hand-held weapons, is theoretical. The segregation of deviance has often been influenced by Foucaultian theories of panopticism and social control. An increasing number of scholars, however, are arguing that Foucault’s panoptic prison, even deployed in metaphorical terms, has been overextended, particularly when considering broader geographic perspectives (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000; Elmer, 2004). Many scholars arguing that panopticism must move beyond architectures or institutions of social control, do so in large part to theorize emerging technological, “virtual,” or simulated forms of surveillance and discipline (e.g., Bogard; Gandy). While we find such arguments to be productive, they typically juxtapose their ideas against corporeal surveillance and monitoring of the past. Human surveillance and policing factors, conversely, play a key role in monitoring political organizing activities and training, peaceful protests, and acts of civil disobedience (Boghosian, 2004, p. 29). Moreover, Foucault’s metaphorical use of a penitentiary as the historical trope or dispositif for social discipline, reformation, and self-actualization, while providing a broad conceptual framework for a dispersed theory of self-discipline, control, and conformity, has little to say about that which escapes conformity, namely public protest, civil disobedience, and other forms of social and political dissent. Under the constant gaze of social mores and values, Foucault’s subjects are implored to change and police their own behaviour. The proliferation of surveillance technologies (such as closed-circuit TV, CCTV), preemptive policing, programs that attempt to anticipate future social and geopolitical risks (Elmer Opel, 2006), and the presumption of guilt instead of innocence, are in part a response to past intelligence failures. The inability to gain adequate and up-to-date intelligence on domestic and international risks in the US, UK, Iraq, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, etc., continues to highlight the limits and shortcomings of surveillance programs and intelligence—gathering techniques. The recognition of decentred and distributed network infrastructures and relationships among protesters, migrants, and terrorists in the US and elsewhere, has similarly stretched conventional thinking about the structure and deployment of surveillance programs and technologies. In short, members of such feared networks are not typically considered panoptic subjects, that is to say, they are not clients, candidates, or inmates in need of reform, or self-discipline. Rather, it is argued that such networked subjects have become increasingly influenced by strategic and indefinite forms of containment and detainment. Didier Bigo’s (2006) extension of Foucault’s theories of social control provides a helpful point of departure. While Bigo shares the goal of extending theories of social and political control outside of the prison and other social institutions, he maintains an interest in the social control of populations, specifically through the mobility, capture, and detainment of specific populations. By introducing the concept of the “ban-opticon,” Bigo succeeds in moving outside the panoptic walls of punishment, to question the optics and governmentality of indefinite detainment, a questionable spatial and legal tactic used in the “War on Terror” and with migrant communities. Such detainees, be they in Guantanamo Bay or in immigrant holding centres in the EU and elsewhere, have no intention of turning their subjects into law-abiding, productive citizens (Miller, 1993), rather their goal is both to remove individuals from war, or to merely return them to their previous location—to ban them. In both cases, individuals are immobilized and excluded from participating in war and/ or entering Western societies. Although political protestors produce a different set of challenges from domestic law enforcement and forces of political control in the US—primarily their visibility in the media as increased evidence of opposition to the political status quo—they are similarly immobilized, contained, and in some cases detained without charge. Such detainments, further, in many instances are not subject to punishment (fines, etc.); rather, they are increasingly used to preemptively, and temporarily remove protestors from public spaces until the conclusion of protests (Boghosian, 2004, p. 29). The operationalization of preemptive tactics in the US further highlights the limitations of Foucault’s decentred model of power, in which sovereignty is manifest through dispersed disciplinary technologies. Strategies of political containment and detainment, spatially and individually speaking, are in large part enabled by what Giorgio Agamben (2005) refers to as the “state of exception,” the “no one’sman’s land between public law and political fact” (p. 1). Ironically, while conservatives in the US continue to argue against a “living constitution,” where interpretations over the nation’s law change over time,21 the Bush administration actively sought to reinterpret executive powers during the so-called War on Terror. Following Agamben, Didier Bigo (2006) argues that such interpretations are enacted through explicit declarations by political rulers, a declaration that invokes an exception to the rule of law. Broadly construed, the US administration continues to invoke the War on Terror to blur the line between law and politics. In defence of the secret wiretapping program, the Bush administration has argued that an exception to the rule of law was enacted by the legislation, giving the president preemptive powers to carry out surveillance. Similar arguments have been made in the UK, Canada, and France. The Boston Globe and other media in the US also reported about the growing use of “signing statements” by the US president, as a means to state his exception to the new law. For example, after the signing of US Senator John McCain’s anti—torture bill in the January 2006, the president declared that “The executive branch shall construe the law in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President as Commander in Chief.” He also added that this interpretation “will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President ... of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks” (Savage, 2004). Of course, many American laws that govern executive power, public debate, and, as we see next, dissent and protest in public space, are so broadly written that they practically cultivate political exceptionalism. For example, as an adjunct to debates over the US Patriot Act, the “spatial tactics” of law enforcement have recently produced a series of controversial rulings about the accessibility of public spaces for the purposes of political protest. Thus, at a time when public advocates and intellectuals have reinforced the importance of understanding the democratic and political aspects of various geographies——most notably innovative and tolerant ones (Florida, 2003) and environmentally sustainable ones (Gore, 2007)—the American legal system continues to downplay or altogether avoid spatial considerations in First Amendment cases. Timothy Zick (2005), for example, argues that “The reason courts fail to properly scrutinize spatial tactics is that they have accepted the common conception of place as mere res—a neutral thing, an undifferentiated mass, a backdrop for expressive scenes” (p. 3). Results of this legal conception of place as a “neutral thing” include the protest zones (some resembling cages”) established at both the Democratic and Republican national conventions during the summer of 2004 as well as the now routine practice of keeping protestors many blocks and often miles away from free trade, WTO, or GATT meetings. Later in the same year the G8 summit was held on the tiny (private) Sea Island, just off the coast near Savannah, Georgia, a choice that made it nearly impossible——given the security noose around the island——to stage a meaningful and visible protest. In South Carolina, the well-known activist Brett Bursey gained nationwide attention for a series of attempts to protest against President Bush at Republican Party organized rallies, the last of which, in 2004, resulted in his arrest and conviction under a statute that enables the Secret Security to establish a security perimeter or zone around the president. Mirroring Zick’s argument about the court’s treatment of space as an objective or neutral equation in contemporary politics, an aide to the former South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, was quoted on National Public Radio as saying that: The statute under which Mr. Bursey’s been charged alleges that he failed to vacate an area that had been cordoned off for a visit by the president of the United States. It is a content—neutral statute, and Mr. Bursey is charged not because of what he was doing but because of where he was doing it. The US statute in question—-USC 18: 1 752(a)(l)(ii), “Temporary residences and offices of the President and others”—while not a new, post-9/11 law, nevertheless raises obvious questions and concerns about its use as a political tool for spatially and politically marginalizing dissent. The law in effect establishes a temporary “residence” for the president as he goes about his business across the country. The law forbids groups or individuals from entering or remaining with an area (defined as “building,” “grounds,” or “any posted, cordoned off. . .” area where the president is visiting).24 Moreover, the law does not apply universally, only to those who intend “to impede or disrupt the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions.” Interestingly, in the course of preparing Bursey’s defence, lawyers were able to gain access to the Secret Service’s policy manual on protests. The South Carolina Progressive Network subsequently used the document to highlight the means by which the Bush administration was interpreting the above mentioned law to segregate protestors away from the president’s supporters and the media. Moreover, The Progressive Network also maintained that while the law did give the Secret Service the power to cordon off access to the president, “There is no limitation to the size of the restricted area.” Furthermore, “In the Bursey case, the restricted area was approximately 70 acres and stretched for a mile.”25 With no spatial limits on the separation of protestors from the US president, political marginalization becomes a distinct possibility. The spatial segregation of speakers according to the content of their messages all too easily bifurcates voices and perspectives into “two sides,” mirroring the dominant red/ blue political culture of the US. Thus in the absence of political leaders, protests, and, perhaps more importantly, acts of civil disobedience, lose their publicity, all too often becoming marginalized spectacles distanced from the machinations of political parties, candidates, and government. Zick put it this way: “In these places, protests and demonstrations become staged events, bland and neutered substitutions for the passionate and, yes, sometimes chaotic face-to—face confrontations that have characterized our country’s past” (Zick, 2005, p. 45). The process of segregating public space according to political message and turning public gatherings into “staged events” is contrasted with the actual political strategy of the staged event or “town hall meeting,” where pre-screened publics appear to ask government officials “authentic” questions, a practice that has many online examples as well.26 This illusion of public participation is another quality of the spatial turn in free speech politics where city streets are cordoned off to become de facto “stages” for media cameras. By literally separating the demonstrators from the object of their demonstration, the protest zone becomes “a way of controlling the content of the debate without really acknowledging that is what is being done” (Mitchell, 2003, p. 39). In addition to creating media frames and stages, protest zoning also facilitates preemptive police tactics, placing all potential protestors in one location in the name of security. Fencing in protestors or zoning them away from a given site implies a threat or danger that requires preemptive zoning, thus “assuming guilt until innocence is proven” (Mitchell, 2003, p. 39). Mitchell refers to this zoning as the “ghettoization” of protest; we prefer the South African analogy of an apartheid as more accurate. Whereas a ghetto is often viewed as the result of low-income people clustered together out of necessity and a lack of resources, apartheid was an explicit legal and spatial strategy that segregated settlements and produced a second-class citizenry. Parallels can be drawn to the state of liberal democracy in the United States, where protestors and political dissidents are legally restrained and contained outside of the so-called mainstream political stage. Yet, as we will see in the next chapter, preemptive arrests, facilitated by segregationist spatial tactics and exceptionalist forms of governmentality, often move beyond the realm of the panoptic to the violent repressive use of weaponry, what are creatively termed “less-lethal technologies.” As we shall see, many new crowd control technologies have incorporated decidedly preemptive logics that explicitly reinforce our belief that the preemptive doctrine is as much about controlling behaviours and seeking broader political compliance as it is a technique for reducing actual risks and dangers.
Public colleges deploy a militarized strategy to prevent dissent – they ensure the continuity of militarism by criminalizing opposition to it
Neoliberalism, Militarization, and the Price of Dissent: Policing Protest at the University of California Farah Godrej. Edited by Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 2014. AS
I have offered here a particular window into the ways in which the interests, mechanisms, and operations of both the university system and the neoliberal state are aligned with those of private capital. Of course, that the academy is made to strategically ally with capital as a key piece of neoliberal consolidation should not surprise us. Rather, what is worth noting, I have argued here, is the necessity of the linkages between disinvestment in public education, militarization, and the criminalization of dissent. These necessary linkages demonstrate this volume’s premise that the university is an institution embedded in the hierarchies and inequalities of U.S. racial, gender, and class politics and shed light on the confluence of military and industrial interests as they appear within the U.S. university. I have sought also to emphasize the systematicity and multilayered complexity of this phenomenon. That is, the various pieces of this picture necessarily go together, as rhetoric, law, bureaucracy, and the force of arms all combine effectively to produce the desired end. The neoliberal logic entailed in the privatization of the University of California is, I have argued, necessarily interlinked with the logic of militarization and the criminalization of dissent, because it employs a militarized enforcement strategy, coupled with a political rhetoric that criminalizes the specific behaviors involved in protest and dissent against these strategies. The militarization of the university campus is thus not simply a reflection of the increasing militarization of American law enforcement based on the logic of ongoing threats to public safety encoded in years of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror.25 Rather, such militarization is one prong of a necessary enforcement strategy designed to convey that dissent against privatization is meant to be costly in inflicting various forms of legitimized violence upon those who dissent. The second prong of the enforcement strategy also conveys that dissenters will pay a high price by being criminalized, either through rhetoric that paints them as violent and therefore marginal, unworthy, and undesirable in the public imagination or through legal machinations that force them to expend tremendous financial resources on extricating themselves from prosecution. The language of cost and price here, of course, reminds us of the ongoing hegemony— and perhaps victory— of the conceptual frameworks of neoliberalism and its theoretical accompaniments, such as rational choice theory, predominantly featured in neoclassical economics. These strategies of criminalization and militarization rest on sending signals to adversaries, encoded precisely in these languages, wherein value and worth are measured in terms of indicators such as price or cost, and rational actors are assumed to be guided by a universally comprehensible incentive structure. Thus the strategies of criminalization and militarization rest on de- incentivizing dissent, so to speak, assuming that dissenters will measure the costs inherent in their actions and choose rationally to cease from engaging in such dissent. The continued insistence on dissent is therefore resistance to the logic of neoliberal privatization on multiple levels: it not only calls out the complicity of the university with the neoliberal state and the forces of private capital but also continues to dissent despite the “incentives” offered in exchange for desisting from dissent. And in so doing, it should be signaling its rejection not simply of privatization but of the entire conceptual baggage of neoliberalism, including its logics of rational choice, cost, price, and incentive, as well as its logic of structural violence. In other words, the ongoing struggle against the logic of neoliberal privatization requires that dissent continue, despite its high “price.”
Militarism produces abhorrent violence – the fear of a phantom threat results in a limitless war against limitless enemies – only reconfiguring empire from within is politically effective
McClintock 9—chaired prof of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at UW–Madison. MPhil from Cambridge; PhD from Columbia (Anne, Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, Small Axe Mar2009, Issue 28, p50-74)
By now it is fair to say that the United States has come to be dominated by two grand and dangerous hallucinations: the promise of benign US globalization and the permanent threat of the “war on terror.” I have come to feel that we cannot understand the extravagance of the violence to which the US government has committed itself after 9/11—two countries invaded, thousands of innocent people imprisoned, killed, and tortured—unless we grasp a defining feature of our moment, that is, a deep and disturbing doubleness with respect to power. Taking shape, as it now does, around fantasies of global omnipotence (Operation Infinite Justice, the War to End All Evil) coinciding with nightmares of impending attack, the United States has entered the domain of paranoia: dream world and catastrophe. For it is only in paranoia that one finds simultaneously and in such condensed form both deliriums of absolute power and forebodings of perpetual threat. Hence the spectral and nightmarish quality of the “war on terror,” a limitless war against a limitless threat, a war vaunted by the US administration to encompass all of space and persisting without end. But the war on terror is not a real war, for “terror” is not an identifiable enemy nor a strategic, real-world target. The war on terror is what William Gibson calls elsewhere “a consensual hallucination,” 4 and the US government can fling its military might against ghostly apparitions and hallucinate a victory over all evil only at the cost of catastrophic self-delusion and the infliction of great calamities elsewhere. I have come to feel that we urgently need to make visible (the better politically to challenge) those established but concealed circuits of imperial violence that now animate the war on terror. We need, as urgently, to illuminate the continuities that connect those circuits of imperial violence abroad with the vast, internal shadowlands of prisons and supermaxes—the modern “slave-ships on the middle passage to nowhere”—that have come to characterize the United States as a super-carceral state. 5 Can we, the uneasy heirs of empire, now speak only of national things? If a long-established but primarily covert US imperialism has, since 9/11, manifested itself more aggressively as an overt empire, does the terrain and object of intellectual inquiry, as well as the claims of political responsibility, not also extend beyond that useful fiction of the “exceptional nation” to embrace the shadowlands of empire? If so, how can we theorize the phantasmagoric, imperial violence that has come so dreadfully to constitute our kinship with the ordinary, but which also at the same moment renders extraordinary the ordinary bodies of ordinary people, an imperial violence which in collusion with a complicit corporate media would render itself invisible, casting states of emergency into fitful shadow and fleshly bodies into specters? For imperialism is not something that happens elsewhere, an offshore fact to be deplored but as easily ignored. Rather, the force of empire comes to reconfigure, from within, the nature and violence of the nation-state itself, giving rise to perplexing questions: Who under an empire are “we,” the people? And who are the ghosted, ordinary people beyond the nation-state who, in turn, constitute “us”? We now inhabit a crisis of violence and the visible. How do we insist on seeing the violence that the imperial state attempts to render invisible, while also seeing the ordinary people afflicted by that violence? For to allow the spectral, disfigured people (especially those under torture) obliged to inhabit the haunted no-places and penumbra of empire to be made visible as ordinary people is to forfeit the long-held US claim of moral and cultural exceptionalism, the traditional self-identity of the United States as the uniquely superior, universal standard-bearer of moral authority, a tenacious, national mythology of originary innocence now in tatters. The deeper question, however, is not only how to see but also how to theorize and oppose the violence without becoming beguiled by the seductions of spectacle alone. 6 Perhaps in the labyrinths of torture we must also find a way to speak with ghosts, for specters disturb the authority of vision and the hauntings of popular memory disrupt the great forgettings of official history. Paranoia Even the paranoid have enemies. —Donald Rumsfeld Why paranoia? Can we fully understand the proliferating circuits of imperial violence—the very eclipsing of which gives to our moment its uncanny, phantasmagoric cast—without understanding the pervasive presence of the paranoia that has come, quite violently, to manifest itself across the political and cultural spectrum as a defining feature of our time? By paranoia, I mean not simply Hofstadter’s famous identification of the US state’s tendency toward conspiracy theories. 7 Rather, I conceive of paranoia as an inherent contradiction with respect to power: a double-sided phantasm that oscillates precariously between deliriums of grandeur and nightmares of perpetual threat, a deep and dangerous doubleness with respect to power that is held in unstable tension, but which, if suddenly destabilized (as after 9/11), can produce pyrotechnic displays of violence. The pertinence of understanding paranoia, I argue, lies in its peculiarly intimate and peculiarly dangerous relation to violence. 8 Let me be clear: I do not see paranoia as a primary, structural cause of US imperialism nor as its structuring identity. Nor do I see the US war on terror as animated by some collective, psychic agency, submerged mind, or Hegelian “cunning of reason,” nor by what Susan Faludi calls a national “terror dream.” 9 Nor am I interested in evoking paranoia as a kind of psychological diagnosis of the imperial nation-state. Nations do not have “psyches” or an “unconscious”; only people do. Rather, a social entity such as an organization, state, or empire can be spoken of as “paranoid” if the dominant powers governing that entity cohere as a collective community around contradictory cultural narratives, self-mythologies, practices, and identities that oscillate between delusions of inherent superiority and omnipotence, and phantasms of threat and engulfment. The term paranoia is analytically useful here, then, not as a description of a collective national psyche, nor as a description of a universal pathology, but rather as an analytically strategic concept, a way of seeing and being attentive to contradictions within power, a way of making visible (the better politically to oppose) the contradictory flashpoints of violence that the state tries to conceal. Paranoia is in this sense what I call a hinge phenomenon, articulated between the ordinary person and society, between psychodynamics and socio-political history. Paranoia is in that sense dialectical rather than binary, for its violence erupts from the force of its multiple, cascading contradictions: the intimate memories of wounds, defeats, and humiliations condensing with cultural fantasies of aggrandizement and revenge, in such a way as to be productive at times of unspeakable violence. For how else can we understand such debauches of cruelty? A critical question still remains: does not something terrible have to happen to ordinary people (military police, soldiers, interrogators) to instill in them, as ordinary people, in the most intimate, fleshly ways, a paranoid cast that enables them to act compliantly with, and in obedience to, the paranoid visions of a paranoid state? Perhaps we need to take a long, hard look at the simultaneously humiliating and aggrandizing rituals of militarized institutions, whereby individuals are first broken down, then reintegrated (incorporated) into the larger corps as a unified, obedient fighting body, the methods by which schools, the military, training camps— not to mention the paranoid image-worlds of the corporate media—instill paranoia in ordinary people and fatally conjure up collective but unstable fantasies of omnipotence. 10 In what follows, I want to trace the flashpoints of imperial paranoia into the labyrinths of torture in order to illuminate three crises that animate our moment: the crisis of violence and the visible, the crisis of imperial legitimacy, and what I call “the enemy deficit.” I explore these flashpoints of imperial paranoia as they emerge in the torture at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. I argue that Guantánamo is the territorializing of paranoia and that torture itself is paranoia incarnate, in order to make visible, in keeping with Hazel Carby’s brilliant work, those contradictory sites where imperial racism, sexuality, and gender catastrophically collide. 11 The Enemy Deficit: Making the “Barbarians” Visible Because night is here but the barbarians have not come. Some people arrived from the frontiers, And they said that there are no longer any barbarians. And now what shall become of us without any barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution. —C. P. Cavafy, “Waiting for the Barbarians” The barbarians have declared war. —President George W. Bush C. P. Cavafy wrote “Waiting for the Barbarians” in 1927, but the poem haunts the aftermath of 9/11 with the force of an uncanny and prescient déjà vu. To what dilemma are the “barbarians” a kind of solution? Every modern empire faces an abiding crisis of legitimacy in that it flings its power over territories and peoples who have not consented to that power. Cavafy’s insight is that an imperial state claims legitimacy only by evoking the threat of the barbarians. It is only the threat of the barbarians that constitutes the silhouette of the empire’s borders in the first place. On the other hand, the hallucination of the barbarians disturbs the empire with perpetual nightmares of impending attack. The enemy is the abject of empire: the rejected from which we cannot part. And without the barbarians the legitimacy of empire vanishes like a disappearing phantom. Those people were a kind of solution. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the grand antagonism of the United States and the USSR evaporated like a quickly fading nightmare. The cold war rhetoric of totalitarianism, Finlandization, present danger, fifth columnist, and infiltration vanished. Where were the enemies now to justify the continuing escalation of the military colossus? “And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?” By rights, the thawing of the cold war should have prompted an immediate downsizing of the military; any plausible external threat had simply ceased to exist. Prior to 9/11, General Peter Schoomaker, head of the US Army, bemoaned the enemy deficit: “It’s no use having an army that did nothing but train,” he said. “There’s got to be a certain appetite for what the hell we exist for.” Dick Cheney likewise complained: “The threats have become so remote. So remote that they are difficult to ascertain.” Colin Powell agreed: “Though we can still plausibly identify specific threats—North Korea, Iran, Iraq, something like that—the real threat is the unknown, the uncertain.” Before becoming president, George W. Bush likewise fretted over the post–cold war dearth of a visible enemy: “We do not know who the enemy is, but we know they are out there.” It is now well established that the invasion of Iraq had been a long-standing goal of the US administration, but there was no clear rationale with which to sell such an invasion. In 1997 a group of neocons at the Project for the New American Century produced a remarkable report in which they stated that to make such an invasion palatable would require “a catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” 12
1ac – plan
Public colleges and universities should extend free speech zones to their entire campus.
Rod Kackley | Arizona Shuts Down College Campus Free Speech Zones in the Name of Free Speech. (2016). News and Politics. Retrieved 9 December 2016, from https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/2016/05/30/arizona-shuts-down-college-campus-free-speech-zones-in-the-name-of-free-speech/ Rod Kackley is an award-winning radio and print journalist who covers statehouse news from around the nation for PJ Media. He is also a novelist who has recently launched The St. Isidore Collection, a psychological thriller series, which begins with the novel "A Wicked Plan: Book 1 From the St. Isidore Collection." AS
State Rep. Anthony Kern said he handed out materials as part of a church group on the Glendale Community College campus for several years without any trouble. But one year, “all of a sudden they came up with this free speech zone which was way away from the people,” the Republican told the Arizona Capitol Times. That inspired Kern to introduce House Bill 2615, which broadens campus “free speech zones” to the entire public college campus as opposed to designated areas. It provides students the right to exercise their First Amendment rights without concerns about the time, place and manner unless the public higher education institution can prove the restriction is reasonable and justified. “The First Amendment right of free speech is a bedrock founding principle of our Republic,” said Gov. Doug Ducey (R) when he signed the legislation this month. “Likewise, part of the university experience is to be able to express diverse views, openly, without fear of retribution or intimidation – and to be exposed to other views and perspectives, even if they aren’t politically correct or popular.” “These bills protect free speech throughout our college campuses, and also ensure an individual’s right to engage in free speech isn’t shut down by someone else who disagrees with his or her perspective,” Ducey added. Gov. Ducey also signed House Bill 2548 which could help people like Brittany Mirelez. The Paradise Valley Community College student filed suit against PVCC after administrators prevented her from recruiting on campus for a Young Americans for Liberty chapter. Mirelez’s suit claimed that by confining her to a pre-designated free speech zone, her First Amendment rights had been violated. HB 2548 gives students the right to file lawsuits against colleges and universities, and to receive an award judgment if the court finds that the university or community college has restricted the student’s speech.
1ac – solvency
Student Protest in Campuses specifically allows for the instigation of dissent and questioning of the Military Industrial Complex within the departments in the University that fuel the war—Vietnam War proves
Tilly et. al. Marco Giugni, Doug McAdam, Charles Tilly. (1999). How Social Movements Matter. University of Minnesota Press. AS
The Anti-Vietnam War Movement and Science Although the United States had been involved in fighting nationalist Vietnamese forces on behalf of France as early as 1954, American involvement took a decidedly large step in 1965, when President Johnson took action on the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, dramatically increasing the bombing of North Vietnam. Unlike the earlier "ban the bomb" movement, which had been led mainly by professionals, some scientists, and a handful of pacifists, protest against American involvement in Vietnam was led by students (DeBenedetti 1990). Science was not an early target of campus-based protesters organized against the war, but it became so as a coincidence of student protests that not only took place on college campuses but were increasingly directed against universities themselves, which were seen as full partners in facilitating the war in Vietnam. It is a truism that people tend to protest against the nearest objects, and the military-science alliance on college campuses was quite visible. For many students it was no great leap to begin to ask questions about the relationship between universities and the "military-industrial complex" that Dwight Eisenhower had identified in 1958. There were also more ideological and intellectual reasons for attacking universities and their faculty: members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), who on many campuses acted as leaders of antiwar protest, took seriously the work of Frankfurt school philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who argued that repression in capitalist societies was located not only in the overt actions of the police and courts but in the very institutions, languages, and cultures of a given society (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich 1969: 34—35). Increasingly, students targeted military recruitment programs and research laboratories that received funding for research that was ultimately used by American troops in Vietnam. Between 1965 and 1970 on at least eleven major college campuses,6 military-supported research buildings and laboratories were sites of antiwar protest and were associated with some of the most dramatic events of the period: the 1970 bombing of the Army Math Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, which killed a researcher; the 1970 Kent State University killings; and the 1968 sit-in at Columbia University. In each of these cases, protesters directed their actions against the physical representations of the alliances between universities and the military, usually Department-of-Defense-sponsored laboratories and programs. At Kent State as early as 1968, student protest was directed against the Liquid Crystals Institute, which developed motion detectors used in Vietnam (Heineman 1993: 37) and at Stanford, against the Stanford Research Institute, which was created explicitly to attract defense contracts and upon which Stanford was economically dependent, though the institute was nominally separate from Stanford University. At Columbia University, the 1968 campus occupation was sparked mainly by Columbia's association with the Institute for Defense Analysis, which poured millions of defense dollars into scientific research on campus. Similarly, the bombing of Sterling Hall at the University of Wisconsin in 1970 was motivated by anger toward the university's alliance with the military (Bates 1992; DeBenedetti 1990; Heineman 1993). More generally, protesters considered the war foolish, cruel, and stupid, perpetuated by authorities—including scientists—who were out of touch with citizens. The main charge against scientists was that they had failed to take responsibility for using scientific knowledge and goods for socially useful, rather than deadly and destructive, ends. The attack on science and technology was so widespread that at a White House ceremony for the National Medal of Science Award, President Johnson was compelled to defend scientists: "An aggrieved public does not draw the fine line between 'good' science and 'bad' technology. . . . You and I know that Frankenstein was the doctor, not the monster. But it would be well to remember that the people of the village, angered by the monster, marched against the doctor" (qtd. in Kevles 1978: 400). This larger questioning of authority placed scientists directly in the line of fire, since they had earlier laid claim to status based on political authority and on their role in keeping America safe (DeBenedetti 1990; Kevles 1978; Lapp 1965; Leslie 1993). In conjunction with the direct and public attacks on the alliance between science, universities, and the war in Vietnam, antiauthoritarian challenges made scientists' claims to serve humanity increasingly implausible. It is possible that universities, professional science associations, scientists, and others might simply have ignored these protests. Yet that is not how the story unfolded.
Free Speech zones stifle free speech and make it ineffective, cause more disruption, and allows for schools to selectively choose what speech is acceptable—squo shows no sign of stopping these zones even with court rulings that deem them unconstitutional
David Hacker, It's Time to End Public University Speech Zones, JURIST-Hotline, May 21, 2014, http://jurist.org/hotline/2014/may/david-hacker-speech-zones.php. David J. Hacker serves as senior legal counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom at its Sacramento, California Regional Service Center, where he leads litigation efforts to uphold the constitutionally protected rights of Christian students, faculty and staff at public universities across the nation. He joined Alliance Defending Freedom in 2005 and earned his J.D. from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. AS
Free speech zones on public university campuses sound wonderful in the abstract—a special zone just for free speech! But don't be fooled. College's sell the idea of free speech zones like used car salesmen. They make students think that they want the zones, but in reality, students don't want them and they don't need them. And in the end, students realize they've been duped. Several recent news stories highlight the troubling irony of so-called free speech zones on public university campuses: they are used to stifle speech rather than encourage it. In one story, administrators at the University of Hawaii-Hilo stopped two students from handing out free copies of the US Constitution—the very document that gives us the right to free speech—because the students were standing outside the university's "free speech zone." According to a complaint filed in federal court in Hawaii, the university's free speech zone is essentially a muddy ravine that occupies less than one percent of the university's campus. This is the only place students may speak on campus without prior approval from administrators. In another story, administrators at Modesto Junior College stopped a student from distributing free copies of the Constitution on Constitution Day. The reason? Although he was standing in front of the student center on campus, a likely forum to communicate with his peers, administrators told him that he could not distribute the Constitutions without getting permission five days in advance and even then he could distribute them only in the "free speech area." Like the Hawaii case, the complaint alleged that the so-called "free speech area" was a mere 600 square foot stage. The college eliminated the speech zone and settled
PDF the case in March. These cases would be funny, if only they weren't true. Sadly, despite decades of legal precedent declaring university campuses to be the "marketplaces of ideas" in keeping with their historic role, the restrictions public universities place on student speech today would come as a great surprise to James Madison and the Founding Fathers. A basic review of public forum case law reveals the multiple legal problems these policies present. Generally speaking, to assess a First Amendment claim arising on government property, the US Supreme Court determined in Cornelius v. NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund that a court must first "identify the nature of the forum, because the extent to which the Government may limit access depends on whether the forum is public or nonpublic." Streets, sidewalks and parks are traditional public forums, where restrictions on speech are subject to strict scrutiny. Most public university campuses resemble traditional public forums with streets, sidewalks and open-air quads used by students not only to get around campus, but to socialize and debate ideas. As the court said in Widmar v. Vincent, the "campus of a public university, at least for its students, possesses many of the characteristics of a public forum." When analyzing public university campuses, many courts have ruled that student free speech rights are at their apex in the common outdoor areas of campus. And yet some universities still persist in attempting to classify the entire campus as non-public or limited public forums with lesser protections. But in University of Cincinnati Chapter of Young Americans for Liberty v. Williams, the US District Court for the Southern District of Ohio commented that it was unaware of any precedent establishing that a "public university may constitutionally designate its entire campus as a limited public forum as applied to students." (In a limited public forum, restrictions on speech need only be reasonable and viewpoint neutral.) This makes sense. As the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit noted in Hays County Guardian v. Supple, students "live and work on campus, making the campus . . . a 'town' of which the resident student will be a 'contributing citizen.'" Thus, it should be no surprise that the Ninth Circuit recently declared
that Oregon State University's campus was a public forum for students. Universities often intertwine speech zone policies limiting the location of student speech with policies that require advanced approval for speech. These prior restraints censor speech before it occurs, so there is a heavy presumption against their constitutionality. As the Supreme Court said in Forsyth County v. Nationalist Movement, in order to survive constitutional scrutiny, a prior restraint may not delegate overly broad discretion to a government official; it may not be based on the content of the message if it regulates the time, place or manner of speech; it must be narrowly tailored to serve a significant governmental interest; and it must leave open ample alternative channels for communication. Campus speech zones often fail the content-neutrality requirement because the policies implementing these zones grant administrators unbridled discretion. Thus, administrators allow popular student groups to speak outside the designated zones, but deny the same accommodations to less popular speech, like prolife or Christian students. That is exactly what happened in Pro-Life Cougars v. University of Houston, where university policy allowed administrators to restrict speech to certain areas of campus if it was "potentially disruptive." The Supreme Court warned of these dangers in Forsyth County. It said that policies which vest government officials with unbridled discretion to regulate speech will violate the content-neutrality requirement by allowing for veiled discrimination against some speakers. Universities claim that free speech zones protect student safety, preserve campus aesthetics and prevent disruption of the educational environment. But restricting student speech to one area of campus is not narrowly tailored to any of these interests. Placing all student speech in a small zone on campus actually causes more danger to student safety by requiring competing student groups to voice their ideas in close proximity. Everyone likes a beautiful college campus, but campus aesthetics can be preserved by prohibiting litter, not speech. And preventing substantial disruption of the educational environment can be accomplished by prohibiting bullhorns and loud events near classroom buildings, regardless of where the speech occurs on campus. Of course, free speech zones close off all alternative channels of communication in the outdoor areas of campus. Alternatives are not ample if the speaker is unable to reach his intended audience. So if students want to set up a "debt clock
" near the economics department, but the speech zone is located in a different part of campus, the policy fails constitutional review because it does not allow the students to reach their audience. Students have been incredibly successful in challenging speech zone policies in court. In Roberts v. Haragan, Texas Tech University limited speech to a gazebo on campus. A student who wanted to distribute religious literature elsewhere on campus sued and the Northern District of Texas struck down the policy because its regulation of even simple conversation between classmates was not narrowly tailored to the university's interest in preserving the educational environment. In Williams, the university restricted all "demonstrations, picketing and rallies" to a free speech area which constituted less than 0.1 of the campus. The Southern District of Ohio enjoined the policy because it determined that the outdoor areas of the university's campus were designated public forums for students to speak freely and the policy was not narrowly tailored to the university's interest in maintaining a peaceful and safe campus. Similarly, in Burbridge v. Sampson, the South Orange Community College District restricted student gatherings of twenty or more people to three "preferred" areas. The Central District of California enjoined the policy because the college failed to articulate any interest in limiting the location of speech and the designation of three preferred areas only did not leave open ample alternative channels of communication. Despite courts uniformly striking down university speech zone policies, they persist from coast to coast. "Free speech zones" might sound great at first glance, but they put the First Amendment rights of students in a box and in some cases, a ridiculously small box. When free speech zones prevent students from distributing the US Constitution, we know it is time to put the zones in a box—six feet under—and let students participate freely in the "marketplace of ideas."
1ac – framing
Militarism through war structures all inequalities—not the other way around
John Horgan, Director of the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology, 2012, The End of War, Chapter 5, Kindle p. 1600-1659
Throughout this book, I’ve examined attempts by scholars to identify factors especially conducive for peace. But there seem to be no conditions that, in and of themselves, inoculate a society against militarism. Not small government nor big government. Not democracy, socialism, capitalism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, nor secularism. Not giving equal rights to women or minorities nor reducing poverty. The contagion of war can infect any kind of society. Some scholars, like the political scientist Joshua Goldstein, find this conclusion dispiriting. Early in his career Goldstein investigated economic theories of war, including those of Marx and Malthus. He concluded that war causes economic inequality and scarcity of resources as much as it stems from them. Goldstein, a self-described “pro-feminist,” then set out to test whether macho, patriarchal attitudes caused armed violence. He felt so strongly about this thesis that he and his wife limited their son’s exposure to violent media and contact sports. But by the time he finished writing his 522-page book War and Gender in 2001, Goldstein had rejected the thesis. He questioned many of his initial assumptions about the causes of war. He never gave credence to explanations involving innate male aggression—war breaks out too sporadically for that—but he saw no clear-cut evidence for non-biological factors either. “War is not a product of capitalism, imperialism, gender, innate aggression, or any other single cause, although all of these influence wars’ outbreaks and outcomes,” Goldstein writes. “Rather, war has in part fueled and sustained these and other injustices.” He admits that all his research has left him “somewhat more pessimistic about how quickly or easily war may end.” But here is the upside of this insight: if there are no conditions that in and of themselves prevent war, there are none that make peace impossible, either. This is the source of John Mueller’s optimism, and mine. If we want peace badly enough, we can have it, no matter what kind of society we live in. The choice is ours. And once we have escaped from the shadow of war, we will have more resources to devote to other problems that plague us, like economic injustice, poor health, and environmental destruction, which war often exacerbates. The Waorani, whose abandonment of war led to increased trade and intermarriage, are a case in point. So is Costa Rica. In 2010, this Central American country was ranked number one out of 148 nations in a “World Database of Happiness” compiled by Dutch sociologists, who gathered information on the self-reported happiness of people around the world. Costa Rica also received the highest score in another “happiness” survey, carried out by an American think tank, that factored in the nation’s impact on the environment. The United States was ranked twentieth and 114th, respectively, on the surveys. Instead of spending on arms, over the past half century Costa Rica’s government invested in education, as well as healthcare, environmental conservation, and tourism, all of which helped make the country more prosperous, healthy, and happy. There is no single way to peace, but peace is the way to solve many other problems. The research of Mueller, Goldstein, Forsberg, and other scholars yields one essential lesson. Those of us who want to make the world a better place—more democratic, equitable, healthier, cleaner—should make abolishing the invention of war our priority, because peace can help bring about many of the other changes we seek. This formula turns on its head the old social activists’ slogan: “If you want peace, work for justice.” I say instead, “If you want justice, work for peace.” If you want less pollution, more money for healthcare and education, an improved legal and political system—work for peace
Debate’s focus shouldn’t solely be the production of ethical subjectivities. Rather, taking stances on global issues is necessary to develop accountability to global violence.
David CHANDLER, Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster, ‘9 “Questioning Global Political Activism,” in What is Radical Politics Today? Ed. Jonathan Pugh, 2009, p. 81-84
Today more and more people are ‘doing politics’ in their academic work. This is the reason for the boom in International Relations (IR) study and the attraction of other social sciences to the global sphere. I would argue that the attraction of IR for many people has not been IR theory but the desire to practise global ethics. The boom in the IR discipline has coincided with a rejection of Realist theoretical frameworks of power and interests and the sovereignty/anarchy problematic. However, I would argue that this rejection has not been a product of theoretical engagement with Realism but an ethical act of rejection of Realism's ontological focus.
It seems that our ideas and our theories say much more about us than the world we live in. Normative theorists and Constructivists tend to support the global ethical turn arguing that we should not be as concerned with 'what is' as with the potential for the emergence of a global ethical community. Constructivists, in particular, focus upon the ethical language which political elites espouse rather than the practices of power. But the most dangerous trends in the discipline today are those frameworks which have taken up Critical Theory and argue that focusing on the world as it exists is conservative problem-solving while the task for critical theorists is to focus on emancipatory alternative forms of living or of thinking about the world. Critical thought then becomes a process of wishful thinking rather than one of engagement, with its advocates arguing that we need to focus on clarifying our own END PAGE 81 ethical frameworks and biases and positionality, before thinking about or teaching on world affairs. This becomes 'me-search' rather than research. We have moved a long way from Hedley Bull's (1995) perspective that, for academic research to be truly radical, we had to put our values to the side to follow where the question or inquiry might lead.
The inward-looking and narcissistic trends in academia, where we are more concerned with our reflectivity- the awareness of our own ethics and values - than with engaging with the world, was brought home to me when I asked my IR students which theoretical frameworks they agreed with most. They mostly replied Critical Theory and Constructivism. This is despite the fact that the students thought that states operated on the basis of power and self-interest in a world of anarchy. Their theoretical preferences were based more on what their choices said about them as ethical individuals, than about how theory might be used to understand and engage with the world.
Conclusion
I have attempted to argue that there is a lot at stake in the radical understanding of engagement in global politics. Politics has become a religious activity, an activity which is no longer socially mediated; it is less and less an activity based on social engagement and the testing of ideas in public debate or in the academy. Doing politics today, whether in radical activism, government policy-making or in academia, seems to bring people into a one-to-one relationship with global issues in the same way religious people have a one-to-one relationship with their God.
Politics is increasingly like religion because when we look for meaning we find it inside ourselves rather than in the external consequences of our 'political' acts. What matters is the conviction or the act in itself: its connection to the global sphere is one that we increasingly tend to provide idealistically. Another way of expressing this limited sense of our subjectivity is in the popularity of globalisation theory - the idea that instrumentality is no longer possible today because the world is such a complex and interconnected place and therefore there is no way of knowing the consequences of our actions. The more we engage in the new politics where there is an unmediated relationship between us as individuals and global issues, the less we engage instrumentally with the outside world, and the less we engage with our peers and colleagues at the level of political or intellectual debate and organisation. END PAGE 82
You may be thinking that I have gone some way to describing or identifying what the problems might be but I have not mentioned anything about a solution. I won't dodge the issue. One thing that is clear is that the solution is not purely an intellectual or academic one; the demand for global ethics is generated by our social reality and social experiences. Marx spent some time considering a similar crisis of political subjectivity in 1840s Germany and in his writings - The German Ideology, Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Theses on Feuerbach, and elsewhere - he raged against the idealism of contemporary thought and argued that the criticism of religion needed to be replaced by the criticism of politics - by political activism and social change based on the emerging proletariat (see Marx, 1975, for example). Nearly two centuries later it is more difficult to see an emerging political subject which can fulfil the task of 'changing the world' rather than merely 'reinterpreting it' through philosophy.
I have two suggestions. Firstly, that there is a pressing need for an intellectual struggle against the idealism of global ethics. The point needs to be emphasised that our freedom to engage in politics, to choose our identities and political campaigns, as well as governments' freedom to choose their ethical campaigns and wars of choice, reflects a lack of socialties and social engagement. There is no global political struggle between 'Empire' and its 'Radical Discontents'; the Foucauldian temptation to see power and resistance everywhere is a product of wishful or lazy thinking dominated by the social categories of the past. The stakes are not in the global stratosphere but much closer to home. Politics appears to have gone global because there is a breakdown of genuine community and the construction of fantasy communities and fantasy connections in global space. Unless we bring politics back down to earth from heaven, our critical, social and intellectual lives will continue to be diminished ones. Secondly, on the basis that the political freedom of our social atomisation leads us into increasingly idealised approaches to the world we live in, we should take more seriously Hedley Bull's (1995) injunction to pursue the question, or in Alain Badiou's (2004: 237-8) words subordinate ourselves to the 'discipline of the real'. Subordination to the world outside us is a powerful factor that can bind those interested in critical research, whereas the turn away from the world and the focus on our personal values can ultimately only be divisive. To facilitate external engagement and external judgement, I suggest we experiment with ways to build up social bonds with our peers that can limit our freedoms and develop our sense of responsibility and accountability to others. We may have to construct these social connections artificially but their END PAGE 83 value and instrumentality will have to be proven through our ability to engage with, understand, critique and ultimately overcome the practices and subjectivities of our time.
