1ac myth 1ac -critical Introduction of us armed Forces Aff


War causes permanent psychological trauma to pregnant women that are terrorized because of their ethnic background



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Fanon

War causes permanent psychological trauma to pregnant women that are terrorized because of their ethnic background


Fanon 63 (Frantz Fanon born in Martinque and studied medicine in France, specializing in psychiatry. He found his sympathies turning toward the Algerian Nationalist Movement, which he later joined. The Wretched of the Earth 1963, Grove Press New York, NY pg 206-207)

Puerperal psychosis refers to those mental disorders which occur in women during maternity. Such disorders can occur immediately before or several weeks after childbirth. Their psychological determinism is highly complex. The two major causes are thought to be a disruption to the endocrine glands and the occurrence of a "psychological shock" –a term that, although vague, corresponds roughly to what is commonly known as a "bad fright." Ever since the French government's decision to apply their scorched earth policy and establish a buffer zone over hundreds of kilometers there are almost 300,000 refugees along the Tunisian and Moroccan borders. The state of dire poverty they live in is no secret. International Red Cross commissions have paid them a number of visits and on ascertaining their extreme poverty and precarious living conditions, they recommended increased aid by international organizations. Given the malnutrition that is rampant in these camps it is therefore inevitable that the pregnant women are particularly prone to developing puerperal psychoses. These refugees live in an atmosphere of permanent insecurity, the combined effects of frequent raids by French troops applying the "right to hunt and pursue," aerial bombardments-there is no end to the bombing of Moroccan and Tunisian territories by the French army, and Sakiet-Sidi-Youssef, the martyred village in Tunisia is the bloodiest example-machine gun raids as well as the breakup of the family unit as a result of flight. In truth, there are few Algerian women refugees who do not suffer from mental disorders following childbirth. There are various symptoms: agitation sometimes accompanied by furor; deep asthenic depression coupled with multiple suicide attempts; symptoms of anxiety accompanied by tears, lamentations, and appeals for mercy, etc. Likewise, the delusional disorders present many different characteristics: a delusion of vague persecution, aimed at anyone; a delirious aggressivity aimed at the French, who want to kill the unborn or newborn child; an impression of imminent death in which the mothers beg the invisible killers to spare their children. Once again we must point out that the underlying problem is not solved by sedation or a reversal of the symptoms. Even after the patient has been cured, her predicament maintains and nurtures these pathological complications

Colonial and imperialist war leads to mental disorders for the colonized


Fanon 63(Frantz Fanon born in Martinque and studied medicine in France, specializing in psychiatry. He found his sympathies turning toward the Algerian Nationalist Movement, which he later joined. The Wretched of the Earth 1963, Grove Press New York, NY pg 181-182)

But the war goes on. And for many years to come we shall be bandaging the countless and sometimes indelible wounds inflicted on our people by the colonialist onslaught. Imperialism, which today is waging war against a genuine struggle for human liberation, sows seeds of decay here and there that must be mercilessly rooted out from our land and from our minds. We shall deal here with the problem of mental disorders born out of the national war of liberation waged by the Algerian people. Perhaps the reader will find these notes on psychiatry out of place or untimely in a book like this. There is absolutely nothing we can do about that. We had no control over the fact that the psychiatric phenomena, the mental and behavioral disorders emerging from this war, have loomed so large among the perpetrators of "pacification" and the "pacified" population. The truth is that colonization, in its very essence, already appeared to be a great purveyor of psychiatric hospitals. Since 1954 we have drawn the attention of French and international psychiatrists in scientific works to the difficulty of "curing" a colonized subject correctly, in other words making him thoroughly fit into a social environment of the colonial type.

Orientalism

US Citizenship is not enough—Racism based on “Security” Goes Deeper




US citizenship does not fight back against racism. Views of Japanese Americans from US military officers demonstrate the type of deep seated racism that emerges during wartime. Call to preserve national security become instruments for expressing violent and contagious forms of racism.


Huong Vu, ’02 (US AGAINST THEM: THE PATH TO NATIONAL SECURITY IS PAVED BY RACISM, 50 Drake L. Rev. 639).

Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, the head of the Western Defense Command, aggressively recommended internment of Japanese Americans because he believed they had a genetic predisposition that made them a threat to national security. n104 His report stated: "'In the war in which we are now engaged racial affinities are not severed by migration. The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become 'Americanized,' the racial strains are undiluted.'" n105 In newspaper interviews, DeWitt declared that "'a Jap's a Jap.'" n106 DeWitt claimed Japanese Americans signaled Japanese ships on the Pacific Coast, that a significant amount of weapons and other contraband had been seized by the FBI from homes and businesses of Japanese Americans, and that those of Japanese descent could never assimilate and had strong ethnic allegiance to Japan. n107 However, because little evidence existed to prove DeWitt's claims that all people of Japanese descent were threats to national security, DeWitt also argued that it would be impossible to determine which Japanese American was loyal and which was not. n108 According to DeWitt, "'there isn't such a thing as a loyal Japanese and it is impossible to determine their loyalty by investigation.'" n109 "[W]e must worry about the Japanese all the time until [the Japanese are] wiped off the map." n110 Army intelligence, on the other hand, officially reported that the internment camps were not needed.



Korematsu was built on widespread racism in the government. National security became the tool for racist beliefs and anti-Japanese sentiment


Huong Vu, ’02 (US AGAINST THEM: THE PATH TO NATIONAL SECURITY IS PAVED BY RACISM, 50 Drake L. Rev. 639).
Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps because of their race. n95 "The myth of military necessity was used as a fig leaf for a particular variant of American racism." n96 Before President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, the push for internment became fierce due to antiJapanese sentiment. n97 Many government officials believed that Japanese Americans were loyal to Japan and not the United States. n98 President Roosevelt, holding deep anti-Japanese feelings himself, believed every Japanese American posed a threat to national security. n99 In hearings for the Tolan Committee, n100 future Chief Justice Earl Warren stated that Japanese American organizations were heavily involved in seditious activities even though no solid evidence existed to prove these activities. n101 The report of the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities stated that "'no Japanese can ever be loyal to any other nation than Japan.'" n102 Both the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, and a government investigative body led by Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, reported unsubstantiated claims of Japanese Hawaiians committing espionage in support of the attack on Pearl Harbor. n103

Colonialism is the Problem, not war powers allocation. The impact they are describing and they racism they pin-point—the narratives of Presidential War Power they tell—are not about Executive authority as much as they are about colonialism as a whole.

John Hayakawa Torok, CUNY Law, ’04 (Howard Law Journal, Fall, 2004 Doctoral Candidate, Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley. J.D. 1991 C.U.N.Y. Law School. 48 How. L.J. 351, “Freedom Now! Race Consciousness and the Work of De-Colonization Today.”)



Frantz Fanon, a central figure in the Algerian Revolution of 1952 to 1961, held that colonialism is violence in its pure form. n187 Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana held that the "raison d'etre of colonialism is the thorough exploitation of the subject peoples and territories." n188 Bert [*380] J. Thomas, the editor of the volume of essays I relied upon for my discussion here, asserts: "Pan-Africanism is a coherent theory, which has as its aim the complete destruction of all phases of colonialism and their consequences." n189 John Henrik Clarke in the preface to the Thomas book states that the essays deal with "the African world struggle and the search for an ideology of liberation." n190 The search for an ideology of liberation by and for people of color, in the domestic and international spheres, is a complex, continuing task. European imperialism led to the colonization of the Americas, Africa and Asia. n191 In aid of colonialism, the Portuguese began the European slave trade from Africa over five centuries ago. Colonialisms begat racisms. n192 Frantz Fanon found that racism had become an ideology in the colonial milieu. "Metropolitan scholars, particularly anthropologists, keep this racism alive, since they are prone to write that "before the advent of colonialism, [the native's] history was one which was dominated by barbarism." n193 De-colonization involved and involves not only access to state power in the former European colonies, but the colonized's rejection of internalized racism. n194 This, Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi n195 posit, is necessarily a violent, painful process. n196 As anti-subordination legal theorists and activists located in the United States, we live in, and with, the legacies of colonial projects. As American lawyers and law teachers of color, we do well to examine the life work of Charles Hamilton Houston and William Henry Hastie. n197

Re-racialization of Muslims is a HUGE category, sweeping a number of groups into the “terrorist Other” category through religion, race, nationality, and ethnicity.


Ibrahim, ’09 (Nagwa Ibrahim, The Origins of Muslim Racialization in U.S. Law, 7 UCLA J. ISLAMIC & NEAR E.L. 121, 121 (2008/09) Nagwa Ibrahim is a civil rights attorney with the law firm of Hadsell Stormer Keeny Richardson & Renick. She is also an alumna of the UCLA School of Law Critical Race Studies Program)

Whereas the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII centered on the racialization of Japanese as a distinct ethnic group from other Asians, the re-racialization of Muslims as the fictionalized "terrorist enemy" post 9/11 does not just indiscriminately conflate Arabs with Muslims. Under this new Muslim-looking category, Muslims are conflated with non-Muslim Middle Easterners and non-Muslim South Asians, including Sikhs and other people of color. Thus "the Muslim terrorist other" is a pan-racial, pan-ethnic enemy that is identified both through physical cues such as skin color and national origin, as well as actual or perceived performative cues related to the practice of Islam in the U.S. and regions with large Muslim populations such as the Middle East, Indonesia, Pakistan, or Afghanistan. These performative cues include surnames, the head covering worn by some women, the beard worn by some men, the practice of Islamic rituals like prayer, and even certain accents. n76 In addition, national origin plays a role in the construction of the "Muslim terrorist other" where those who come from countries with large Muslim populations, such as Arab Christians, are also subjected to this racial construction.



American Militarism perpetuates the white supremacist racial hierarchy


JiYoung Um, 2012(Ji-Young Um is Visiting Assistant Professor with appointments in the American Studies Program and the English Department at Williams College. Um has written and presented on representations of minority soldiers in the U.S., intersections of militarism, empire, and racism, Asian Americans and U.S. wars in Asia, and visual cultures and race. She is currently working on a book manuscript that argues for reading America's wars as racial projects that reveal the constitutive relationship between militarism and racism “Citizen and Terrorist, Citizen as Terrorist: Military, Citizenship, and Race in the Age of War on Terror.” Postmodern Culture: Volume 22, Number 3, May 2012)

The enlistment of volunteers for the U.S. military in the years since the Cold War and the Vietnam War has a particular relationship to the national body and racial ideology. As McAlister has shown, the post-Vietnam War U.S. military not only functions as a representative microcosm of a diverse and multi-racial nation, but also provides the justification for America's imperial militarism while disavowing racism.2Thus, the citizen-soldiers of the modern U.S. military serve a dual purpose: to protect and defend the nation-state, but also to stand in for the national community they call upon to rally around the nation-state at war.3 The racialized soldier of the multicultural military is invoked in an appeal to the national community to see itself as pluralist, meritocratic, and multi-racial and simultaneously represents that national self-image. Because of the powerful link between the military and citizenship, which I will elaborate on later in the essay, the military continues to serve as the premier site through which race, racism, belonging, and citizenship are negotiated and resolved. But if it has historically functioned as such, the military has not, in fact, effectively resolved the contradictions of race and citizenship in national and political life. While the military has appeared to promote racial progress, its recruitment and integration of racial minorities in the U.S. reveal the opposite.4The figure of the racialized soldier tasked with resolving these negotiations instead reveals the military's complicity in the reproduction of conditions that compel racialized citizens and non-citizens to participate in militarism and warfare. By perpetuating and exploiting the narrative that these racialized subjects "loved their country so much . . . that they were able to look beyond the discrimination they experienced and in time overcame racism," militarism and racism work hand in hand to sustain racial hierarchy and domination and exploit them for warfare (Fujitani 262).


U.S. Military heavily recruits non-citizen immigrant soldiers to fight in wars


JiYoung Um, 2012(Ji-Young Um is Visiting Assistant Professor with appointments in the American Studies Program and the English Department at Williams College. Um has written and presented on representations of minority soldiers in the U.S., intersections of militarism, empire, and racism, Asian Americans and U.S. wars in Asia, and visual cultures and race. She is currently working on a book manuscript that argues for reading America's wars as racial projects that reveal the constitutive relationship between militarism and racism “Citizen and Terrorist, Citizen as Terrorist: Military, Citizenship, and Race in the Age of War on Terror.” Postmodern Culture: Volume 22, Number 3, May 2012)

The military has an intimate connection to formal citizenship as well as to symbolic citizenship. Military service can expedite naturalization processes for both non-citizen green card holders/permanent residents and non-green card holding immigrants.5 According to the Department of Homeland Security, service in any branch of the U.S. Armed Forces can also qualify service members for waivers of certain general naturalization requirements. During peacetime, one or more years of service counts as qualifying service, while during "Periods of Hostilities" any length of service qualifies, even for those who are not permanent residents. It is worthwhile noting that this provision—requiring no minimum period of service—was authorized after September 11, 2001, and that we have been in a "Period of Hostility" since that date.6 The Pentagon also announced in 2008 plans to begin recruiting immigrants with temporary visas, not just green card holders or permanent residents, for the military.7 While the initiative itself is not specifically geared towards racial and ethnic minorities, given the patterns of immigration to the U.S. in the past several decades, it would be safe to assume that this initiative has the potential to attract and increase the number of recruits from minority communities. Significantly, a New York Times article reporting on this initiative notes that the program specifically aims to attract and recruit native speakers, including Arabic-speaking immigrants, as language specialists (Preston).


JiYoung Um, 2012(Ji-Young Um is Visiting Assistant Professor with appointments in the American Studies Program and the English Department at Williams College. Um has written and presented on representations of minority soldiers in the U.S., intersections of militarism, empire, and racism, Asian Americans and U.S. wars in Asia, and visual cultures and race. She is currently working on a book manuscript that argues for reading America's wars as racial projects that reveal the constitutive relationship between militarism and racism “Citizen and Terrorist, Citizen as Terrorist: Military, Citizenship, and Race in the Age of War on Terror.” Postmodern Culture: Volume 22, Number 3, May 2012)

The affinity of militarism, citizenship, and racism is also illuminated through the genealogy of power that Michel Foucault outlines in his 1976 lectures.8 The decline of sovereign power and its "right to take life or let live," as Foucault argues here and elsewhere, came to be transformed into "the power to 'make' live and to 'let' die" (241). The difference between the two is, in short, power over death versus power over life. Under biopower and disciplinary power, management and regulation of life become the primary modes through which individual bodies and populations are governed. We might also understand citizenship as a technology or mechanism of regulatory State power. The nation, as Foucault theorizes, is not determined by its ability to exercise domination but by "its ability to administer itself, to manage, govern, and guarantee the constitution and workings of the figure of the State and State power" (223). In other words, citizenship is one site or technology through which the State exercises biopower.


The military is the main apparatus for biopower of nonwhite groups


JiYoung Um, 2012(Ji-Young Um is Visiting Assistant Professor with appointments in the American Studies Program and the English Department at Williams College. Um has written and presented on representations of minority soldiers in the U.S., intersections of militarism, empire, and racism, Asian Americans and U.S. wars in Asia, and visual cultures and race. She is currently working on a book manuscript that argues for reading America's wars as racial projects that reveal the constitutive relationship between militarism and racism “Citizen and Terrorist, Citizen as Terrorist: Military, Citizenship, and Race in the Age of War on Terror.” Postmodern Culture: Volume 22, Number 3, May 2012)

The military is a central apparatus for managing populations on the margins of the national community—that is to say, those whose citizenship, formal or otherwise, has always already been in question—and their relationship to the nation-state. The military, especially in times of war, has offered itself as a vehicle through which various communities from which it solicits manpower might gain the rights and benefits of citizenship. But if we understand that the military exists primarily to provide State security, we must understand that it operates in the interests of the nation-state.9 Citizenship, at its simplest, names a juridical status within a particular state, with attendant rights and benefits, yet its operation suggests much more. That various populations (including women and African Americans) with formal citizenship status within the nation have been consistently denied the rights and benefits that other citizens enjoy, while others (Asian Americans, Latina/o Americans) have consistently been seen and treated as foreigners and non-citizens regardless of formal citizenship status, speaks to the dynamic operations of citizenship and citizenry as technologies of State power for the management of people and populations. The history of the so-called second-class citizenry in the United States reveals the ideological and social domains of citizenship that have implications far beyond one's legal status in the State. The promise or guarantee of citizenship is always and necessarily conditional. Especially in times of war and national crises, such promises are at once powerfully seductive and dangerous, revealing the precariousness of citizenship and belonging.


War authorizes the logic of biopower using racism as permit for the state to kill


JiYoung Um, 2012(Ji-Young Um is Visiting Assistant Professor with appointments in the American Studies Program and the English Department at Williams College. Um has written and presented on representations of minority soldiers in the U.S., intersections of militarism, empire, and racism, Asian Americans and U.S. wars in Asia, and visual cultures and race. She is currently working on a book manuscript that argues for reading America's wars as racial projects that reveal the constitutive relationship between militarism and racism “Citizen and Terrorist, Citizen as Terrorist: Military, Citizenship, and Race in the Age of War on Terror.” Postmodern Culture: Volume 22, Number 3, May 2012)

The racialized citizen-soldier exists at the uneasy intersection of biopower and disciplinary power, and consequently at the intersection of life and death. If, as Foucault suggests, racism is the limit of making, controlling, and managing life, if it is "the indispensable precondition that allows someone to be killed, that allows others to be killed," then the racialized soldier exemplifies the paradox of how technologies oriented toward making live also make die (256). Because of biopower's commitment to life, only racism permits the State to kill, and racism makes it possible for subjects to be exposed not only to literal death but also to forms of social death such as rejection and expulsion (256). Racism here, as Foucault explains, has two functions: it allows for distinction, for "the break between what must live and what must die" (254). But it does not simply authorize death. Racism also enables war by authorizing the logic of biopower, which dictates that the destruction of one race is necessary for another race to live and regenerate itself (255). In other words, war is not simply waged to kill enemy races but also to continue and maintain one's own race. War and racism are twin expressions of a murderous state that is otherwise obliged to preserve and guarantee life. That is to say, war and racism are not defined by a causal relationship. Rather, if we follow Foucault and understand both as "basic mechanism[s] of power" of the modern state, we might also see war and militarism as racism and vice versa (254). And if war itself is an expression and function of racism that makes possible the operation of State power, the racialized soldier is positioned simultaneously as agent and object of racism. As members of the military responsible for State security and waging war who are at the same time targets of the State power to let die, racialized soldiers occupy a paradoxical and precarious position between life and death. To put it another way, the racialized soldier is a figure at once for citizen and enemy. Cynthia Enloe shows how soldiers from minority communities reveal the ways in which imperatives of State security come into conflict with those of national community. As Enloe's study notes, their inclusion and participation in the military can lead to demands for equal standing and rewards befitting full members of the national community. While such demands have led to some shifts in policy and public opinion, the ethnic/minority soldiers' status does not necessarily shift accordingly. The perils of embodying both citizen and enemy simultaneously are perhaps particularly hazardous for those who are perceived as threats to State security.

Dispensability

Non-human world is seen as dispensable and dispensability leads to the destruction of whole populations


Rabaka 2007 Department of Ethnic Studies Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America (CSERA), University of Colorado-Boulder

(Reiland , The Souls of White Folks, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Critique of White Supremacy and Contributions to Critical White Studies, Journal of African-American Studies, pp. 1-15)


Moving beyond a strictly materialist (politico-economic and/or class-centered) account of race and racism, and hitting at the heart of white supremacy, Du Bois, in “The Souls of White Folk,” queried the “colored world” and those whites who would open themselves to moral and materialist questions: “How many of us today fully realize the current theory of colonial expansion, of the relation of Europe which is white, to the world which is black and brown and yellow? Bluntly put, that theory is this: It is the duty of white Europe to divide up the darker world and administer it for Europe’s good” (1995a, p. 459). Part of Du Bois’s critique of white supremacy reveals his reliance on racial materialist arguments, where the other portion of his critique revolves around his own homegrown cultural nationalism, which was more often later in his life, what I will term, a cultural internationalism that sought to accent and highlight commonalities and kinships amongst people of color based on their endurances and experiences of, and struggles against European imperial expansion and all out white (cultural, social, political, legal, educational, religious, aesthetic and economic) domination and discrimination. Du Bois’s critical comments in “The Souls of White Folk” deserve quotation at length, as his argument is elaborated throughout several carefully constructed paragraphs that poignantly capture the crux of his critique of white supremacy: The European world is using black and brown men for all the uses which men know. Slowly but surely white culture is evolving the theory that “darkies” are born beasts of burden for white folk. It were silly to think otherwise, cries the cultured world, with stronger and shriller accord. The supporting arguments grow and twist themselves in the mouths of merchant, scientist, soldier, traveler, writer, and missionary: Darker peoples are dark in mind as well as in body; of dark, uncertain, and imperfect descent; of frailer, cheaper stuff; they are cowards in the face of mausers and maxims; they have no feelings, aspirations, and loves; they are fools, illogical idiots—“half-devil and half-child.” Such as they are civilization must, naturally, raise them, but soberly and in limited ways. They are not simply dark white men. They are not “men” in the sense that Europeans are men. To the very limited extent of their shallow capacities lift them to be useful to whites, to raise cotton, gather rubber, fetch ivory, dig diamonds—and let them be paid what men think they are worth— white men who know them to be well-nigh worthless. Such degrading of men by men is as old as mankind and the invention of no one race or people. Ever have men striven to conceive of their victims as different from the victors, endlessly different, in soul and blood, strength and cunning, race and lineage. It has been left, however, to Europe and to modern days to discover the eternal world-wide mark of meanness—color! Such is the silent revolution that has gripped modern European culture in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its zenith came in Boxer times: White supremacy was all but world-wide, Africa was dead, India conquered, Japan isolated, and China prostrate, while white America whetted her sword for mongrel Mexico and mulatto South America, lynching her own Negroes the while. (p. 460)

U.S. Hegemony causes other non-European nations to massively dispose of their own people in order to gain access to First world respect through nuclearism


Mathur, 2001 President, India Region, Nielsen India, India

(Piyush, "Nuclearism : The Contours of a Political Ecology," Social Text, 66 (Volume 19, Number 1), Spring 2001, pp.2 (Article)Duke University Press)


Accordingly, to situate nuclear technology requires considering the ways through which the global hierarchies of military and economic power have come to create a larger cross-cultural psychological environment that tacitly accepts the technology as the final arbitrator of power and prestige. As countries attempt to respond to this global order by actively participating in nuclearism, as India and Pakistan have done, they inescapably incur unprecedented costs to the local populations and commit violence regionally. In other words, like most universals, nuclearism is a costly and violent enterprise in regional terms, but it outclasses all other universals both quantitatively and qualitatively. The material and psychological contingencies of nuclearism have been powerful enough to generate an environment of their own across geographies, which I shall refer to as nuclearism’s “political ecology.”

You can never relate to the life in the concentration camp without experiencing that horror, it is the state of being outside of life and death.


Mbembe 03 research professor in history and politics at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa

Achille, "Necropolitics," Public Culture 15(1): 11–40

In order to answer these questions, this essay draws on the concept of biopower and explores its relation to notions of sovereignty (imperium) and the state of exception.3 Such an analysis raises a number of empirical and philosophical questions would like to examine briefly. As is well known, the concept of the state of exception has been often discussed in relation to Nazism, totalitarianism, and the concentration/ extermination camps. The death camps in particular have been interpreted variously as the central metaphor for sovereign and destructive violence and as the ultimate sign of the absolute power of the negative. Says Hannah Arendt: “There are no parallels to the life in the concentration camps. Its horror can never be fully embraced by the imagination for the very reason that it stands outside of life and death.4 Because its inhabitants are divested of political status and reduced to bare life, the camp is, for Giorgio Agamben, “the place in which the most absolute conditio inhumana ever to appear on Earth was realized.”5 In the political-juridical structure of the camp, he adds, the state of exception ceases to be a temporal suspension of the state of law. According to Agamben, it acquires a permanent spatial arrangement that remains continually outside the normal state of law.

The extraction and looting of natural resources by militias has led to the ruthless attempts of controlling categories of people


Mbembe 03 research professor in history and politics at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa

Achille, "Necropolitics," Public Culture 15(1): 11–40

Second, the controlled inflow and the fixing of movements of money around zones in which specific resources are extracted has made possible the formation of enclave economies and has shifted the old calculus between people and things. The concentration of activities connected with the extraction of valuable resources around these enclaves has, in return, turned the enclaves into privileged spaces of war and death. War itself is fed by increased sales of the products extracted.68 New linkages have therefore emerged between war making, war machines, and resource extraction.69 War machines are implicated in the constitution of highly transnational local or regional economies. In most places, the collapse of formal political institutions under the strain of violence tends to lead to the formation of militia economies. War machines (in this case militias or rebel movements) rapidly become highly organized mechanisms of predation, taxing the territories and the population they occupy and drawing on a range of transnational networks and diasporas that provide both material and financial support. Correlated to the new geography of resource extraction is the emergence of an unprecedented form of governmentality that consists in the management of the multitudes. The extraction and looting of natural resources by war machines goes hand in hand with brutal attempts to immobilize and spatially fix whole categories of people or, paradoxically, to unleash them, to force them to scatter over broad areas no longer contained by the boundaries of a territorial state. As a political category, populations are then disaggregated into rebels, child soldiers, victims or refugees, or civilians incapacitated by mutilation or simply massacred on the model of ancient sacrifices, while the “survivors,” after a horrific. exodus, are con. ned in camps and zones of exception.70

War is longer fought between states, it now targets unarmed civilian populations whose death has no value


Mbembe 03 research professor in history and politics at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa

Achille, "Necropolitics," Public Culture 15(1): 11–40



This form of governmentality is different from the colonial commandement.71 The techniques of policing and discipline and the choice between obedience and simulation that characterized the colonial and postcolonial potentate are gradually being replaced by an alternative that is more tragic because more extreme. Technologies of destruction have become more tactile, more anatomical and sensorial, in a context in which the choice is between life and death.72 If power still depends on tight control over bodies (or on concentrating them in camps), the new technologies of destruction are less concerned with inscribing bodies within disciplinary apparatuses as inscribing them, when the time comes, within the order of the maximal economy now represented by the “massacre.” In turn, the generalization of insecurity has deepened the societal distinction between those who bear weapons and those who do not (loi de repartition des armes). Increasingly, war is no longer waged between armies of two sovereign states. It is waged by armed groups acting behind the mask of the state against armed groups that have no state but control very distinct territories; both sides having as their main targets civilian populations that are unarmed or organized into militias. In cases where armed dissidents have not completely taken over state power, they have provoked territorial partitions and succeeded in controlling entire regions that they administer on the model of . efdoms, especially where there are mineral deposits.73 The ways of killing do not themselves vary much. In the case of massacres in particular, lifeless bodies are quickly reduced to the status of simple skeletons. Their morphology henceforth inscribes them in the register of undifferentiated generality: simple relics of an unburied pain, empty, meaningless corporealities, strange deposits plunged into cruel stupor. In the case of the Rwandan genocide— in which a number of skeletons were at least preserved in a visible state,if not exhumed—what is striking is the tension between the petrification of the bones and their strange coolness on one hand, and on the other, their stubborn will to mean, to signify something. In these impassive bits of bone, there seems to be no ataraxia: nothing but the illusory rejection of a death that has already occurred. In other cases, in which physical amputation replaces immediate death, cutting off limbs opens the way to the deployment of techniques of incision, ablation, and excision that also have bones as their target. The traces of this demiurgic surgery persist for a long time, in the form of human shapes that are alive, to be sure, but whose bodily integrity has been replaced by pieces, fragments, folds, even immense wounds that are dif. cult to close. Their function is to keep before the eyes of the victim—and of the people around him or her—the morbid spectacle of severing.


Racism is tied to a politics of death which is linked to the biodpolitical extermination of sovereign power, racism instrumental rationality conflates the distinction between war and politics


Mbembe 03 research professor in history and politics at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa

Achille, "Necropolitics," Public Culture 15(1): 11–40


In Foucault’s formulation of it, biopower appears to function through dividing people into those who must live and those who must die. Operating on the basis of a split between the living and the dead, such a power defines itself in relation to a biological field—which it takes control of and vests itself in. This control presupposes the distribution of human species into groups, the subdivision of the population into subgroups, and the establishment of a biological caesura between the ones and the others. This is what Foucault labels with the (at first sight familiar) term racism.17 That race (or for that matter racism) figures so prominently in the calculus of biopower is entirely justifiable. After all, more so than class-thinking (the ideology that defines history as an economic struggle of classes), race has been the ever present shadow in Western political thought and practice, especially when it comes to imagining the inhumanity of, or rule over, foreign peoples. Referring to both this ever-presence and the phantomlike world of race in general, Arendt locates their roots in the shattering experience of otherness and suggests that the politics of race is ultimately linked to the politics of death.18 Indeed, in Foucault’s terms, racism is above all a technology aimed at permitting the exercise of biopower, “that old sovereign right of death.”19 In the economy of biopower, the function of racism is to regulate the distribution of death and to make possible the murderous functions of the state. It is, he says, “the condition for the acceptability of putting to death.”20 Foucault states clearly that the sovereign right to kill (droit de glaive) and the mechanisms of biopower are inscribed in the way all modern states function;21 indeed, they can be seen as constitutive elements of state power in modernity. According to Foucault, the Nazi state was the most complete example of a state exercising the right to kill. This state, he claims, made the management, protection, and cultivation of life coextensive with the sovereign right to kill. By biological extrapolation on the theme of the political enemy, in organizing the war against its adversaries and, at the same time, exposing its own citizens to war, the Nazi state is seen as having opened the way for a formidable consolidation of the right to kill, which culminated in the project of the “.Final solution.” In doing so, it became the archetype of a power formation that combined the characteristics of the racist state, the murderous state, and the suicidal state.It has been argued that the complete conflation of war and politics (and racism, homicide, and suicide), until they are indistinguishable from one another, is unique to the Nazi state. The perception of the existence of the Other as an attempt on my life, as a mortal threat or absolute danger whose biophysical elimination would strengthen my potential to life and security—this, I suggest, is one of the many imaginaries of sovereignty characteristic of both early and late modernity itself. Recognition of this perception to a large extent underpins most traditional critiques of modernity, whether they are dealing with nihilism and its proclamation of the will for power as the essence of the being; with reification understood as the becoming-objectof the human being; or the subordination of everything to impersonal logic and to the reign of calculability and instrumental rationality.22 Indeed, from an anthropological perspective, what these critiques implicitly contest is a definition of politics as the warlike relation par excellence. They also challenge the idea that, of necessity, the calculus of life passes through the death of the Other; or that sovereignty consists of the will and the capacity to kill in order to live. Taking a historical perspective, a number of analysts have argued that the material premises of Nazi extermination are to be found in colonial imperialism on the one hand and, on the other, in the serialization of technical mechanisms for putting people to death—mechanisms developed between the Industrial Revolution and the First World War. According to Enzo Traverso, the gas chambers and the ovens were the culmination of a long process of dehumanizing and industrializing death, one of the original features of which was to integrate instrumental rationality with the productive and administrative rationality of the modern Western world (the factory, the bureaucracy, the prison, the army). Having become mechanized, serialized execution was transformed into a purely technical, impersonal, silent, and rapid procedure. This development was aided in part by racist stereotypes and the flourishing of a class-based racism that, in translating the social conflicts of the industrial world in racial terms, ended up comparing the working classes and “stateless people” of the industrial world to the “savages” of the colonial world.23

Eugenics

Militarism and war create the conditions for promoting eugenics. World War I example proves.


Turda 09 RCUK Academic Fellow in Biomedicine in the Department of History at Oxford

Brookes University (Marius, "The Biology of War," Austrian History Yearbook 40 (2009): 238–264, pp. 240-241). Available at http://www.academia.edu/213512/ The_Biology_of_War_Eugenics_in_Hungary_1914_-1918.


World War I nurtured an extraordinary proliferation of eugenic arguments.10 Such a literature

had already emerged in the nineteenth century as a biologically informed response to social problems perceived as endemic to industrialized societies. The prewar years had witnessed the ideological consolidation of eugenics and its positioning at the intersection of various scientific disciplines, such as sociology and anthropology, and political ideologies, such as



racism and nationalism.11 Eugenics strived to address and solve a range of demographic and hereditary issues linked to the alleged deterioration of the nation’s biological condition. Eugenicists feared both the adverse consequences of declining fertility rates and the equally detrimental effects of the increased number, visibility, and fiscal costs of disabled individuals on society. The relentless exposition of these anxieties during the war contributed to the growing prestige eugenics and its solutions to demographic and social crises eventually enjoyed. Nonetheless, these eugenic arguments, relevant as they were for countries afflicted by war, were often couched in a nationalist rhetoric about racial supremacy and survival. In addition to occasioning the introduction of social and medical policies dealing with particular groups, eugenics generated a resurgence of nationalist concerns about the deterioration of the nation’s racial qualities.

U.S. Eugenics Laws inspired Nazi Germany’s holocaust


Grimes, Fleischman and Jaeger, 2009 doctoral student in the College of Information Studies and a Graduate Research Assistant for the Center for Information Policy and Electronic Government at the University of Maryland; Assistant Professors in the College of Information Studies and Assistant Director & Director of the Center for Information Policy and Electronic Government at the University of Maryland (Justin M., Kenneth R., & Paul T., "Virtual Guinea Pigs: Ethical implications of Human Subjects Research in Virtual Worlds." International Journal of Internet Research Ethics Vol.2(1), February 2009, http://ijire.net/issue_2.1/grimes.pdf)

History has repeatedly demonstrated that horrible atrocities can occur without proper ethical guidelines and enforcement. Using historical landmarks in human research, several parallels between research involving humans and research involving avatars can be seen. While issues of ethics and human research have been intertwined through the annals of history, the fundamental developments on the ethics of human research are concentrated during the 20th century. Much of the work towards a set of universal moral codes in terms of human medical and behavioral research bore out of a series of infamous events, the most distressing being, the eugenics movement in the United States, the Tuskegee Syphilis study, and the Nazi human experiments during World War II. The eugenics movement, which began in the mid-nineteenth century by English scientist Sir Francis Galton, was based on the idea that only genetically fit individuals should have the right to reproduce, having been based very inaccurately on the principles of evolution (Cowan, 1985; Gray, 1999). This idea led to a “scientific” movement became very popular through the mid-twentieth century in many parts of the world, particularly in the United States. Along with reinforcing the racism and sexism of the time, eugenics became the inspiration for a wide array of laws mandating the compulsory institutionalization, sterilization, or even extermination of persons with physical and mental disabilities (Jaeger & Bowman, 2002; 2005). These laws in the U.S. inspired many other nations—Britain, Canada, Australia, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, among them—to pass similar laws (Jaeger & Bowman, 2005). California’s eugenics laws were so draconian that their text served as the basis of the laws of Nazi Germany used to justify the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of persons with disabilities in Europe (Reilly, 1991). Ultimately, most eugenics laws were permanently abandoned when the practices of Nazi Germany became known (Jaeger & Bowman, 2005).

Even after it the establishment of the Nuremberg code in the 40s to prevent medical atrocities from occurring worldwide the U.S. continued its heinous Eugenic practices in Tuskegee up until the 1970s


Grimes, Fleischman and Jaeger, 2009 Grimes, Fleischman and Jaeger, 2009 doctoral student in the College of Information Studies and a Graduate Research Assistant for the Center for Information Policy and Electronic Government at the University of Maryland; Assistant Professors in the College of Information Studies and Assistant Director & Director of the Center for Information Policy and Electronic Government at the University of Maryland (Justin M. Grimes, Kenneth R. Fleischman, & Paul T. Jaeger, "Virtual Guinea Pigs: Ethical implications of Human Subjects Research in Virtual Worlds." International Journal of Internet Research Ethics Vol.2(1) February 2009, http://ijire.net/issue_2.1/grimes.pdf)

During World War II, the Nazi regime also committed a significant number of horrifying human medical experiments on prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates (Proctor, 1988; Weindling, 2005). These experiments included infecting non-voluntary 'participants' with malaria, freezing them for frostbite research, performing pressurization experiments with high altitudes, exposing their boides to various industrial materials, and introducing them to various deathly gases, bacterium, viruses, and poisons (Spitz, 2005). These experiments were often carried out in sadistic manner with no concern for scientific principles and the participant's ultimate well being. Many survivors suffered severe pain and experienced horrible deaths in large numbers, with little to negligible gain in the area of knowledge for their unwilling sacrifices (Weindling, 2005). After the war, the Nazi doctors and officials who carried out the experiments were tried before an international tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany. While the doctors were found guilty and punished, there was a sense in the international medical and scientific communities that proper rules of conduct should be established to prevent such atrocities from reoccurring in the form of the Nuremberg Code (Barnbaum & Byron, 2001). The Nuremberg Code consisted of ten ethical principles on medical human experimentation, including requirements of voluntary and informed consent, properly formulated scientific experimentation practices, and a lack of coercion and deception. Informed consent is the concept that a participant understands the facts and implications of a given situation. In the research context, informed consent is an important ethical component, as informed consent gives the power to the participant and prevents abuses from a lack of understanding. By giving the power of choice to the participant, this eliminates most potential for participants to be used as a means to an end, which follows deontological ethics, notably Kantianism. Informed consent has become an important staple of ethical human research. The Tuskegee Syphilis experiment, which began in 1932 and continued until 1970s, was a study were the participants were denied proper medical treatment for Syphilis (Barnbaum & Byron, 2001). The study was particularly notorious as it used and abused poor people who were uneducated or misinformed about their medical conditions and who were overwhelmingly African American (Barnbaum & Byron, 2001). Beyond that fact that patients were denied treatment, they were also intentionally deceived. Crucial information about the study and the explanations of the researchers' activities were withheld, which, if understood, would have affected the decision making process of the participants, potentially leading to the unnecessary suffering and deaths of many of the participants (Barnbaum & Byron, 2001).


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