Afghanistan Aff
Download 0.73 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Cuomo Advantage (4/4)
Cuomo Advantage (3/4)Fourth, the most obvious example is the war on drugs and its systematic war on women. This outweighs “conventional” war. Mazza 6 (Brittney, PhD candidate at Rutgers U, [http://dialogues.rutgers.edu/vol_05/essays/documents/mazza.pdf] AD: 6/28/10)JM In addition to Davis‘s analysis, the concept of and potential for inherent and state-supported violence can also be evidenced through the prison system and through the “war on drugs” as part of a continuing culture of violence and perpetual “war.” Chris Cuomo argues that war can not be viewed as an incident that is separate or independent from society, but rather that it is essential to recognize the militaristic and violent structures and systems that shape everyday life as contributors to and forms of war. Cuomo suggests that a feminist analysis of war is particularly effective and necessary in seeing war as an ingrained and interwoven aspect of twenty-first century life, as ”part of an enmeshed continua or spectra of state-sponsored and other systemic patriarchal and racist violence” (69). The increasing growth of and reliance on the “prison-industrial complex” in the United States, and the use of a strengthened drug policy to disproportionately affect women of color are examples of a system that utilizes violence and punishment as a means of social control. Militarism in everyday life, especially when its practices and enforcement are aimed specifically toward minorities, undoubtedly impacts conceptions of race, gender and gendered relationships. The increasing reliance on and growth of the prison system in the “war on drugs” as a tool of punishment, fear and control over women and minorities most definitely qualifies as the type of “state-sponsored violence” to which Cuomo refers. The vision of war as a continuous cycle impeding upon the lives and minds of the American public will, as Cuomo suggests, make it likely that citizens will become accustomed to dualisms such as “war and peace,” “good and bad” and “right and wrong.” These black-and-white terms and ways of thinking leave little room for the gray areas of race, class and sex that are often undeniable forces in social conflicts such as the “war on drugs,” and the racist and patriarchal violence that is present in every day social institutions. Our country continues to favor legislation that is unsympathetic to the specific needs of women and mothers, and it continues to cut expenditures on social programs such as welfare while the “prison-industrial complex” engulfs the poor. In this way, the prison system is a means of violence that serves to oppress and punish an ever-increasing number of African American women, and the “war on drugs” remains a war on the black community, family and the female body. Fifth, these anti-drug campaigns justify covert militarism. Zirnite 97(Peter WOLA (Washington Office on Latin America), Washington DC, “Reluctant Recruits The US Military and the War on Drugs”)AQB The "national security" rationale was beefed up in the 1980s when US officials began linking drug traffickers to guerrilla insurgencies in the hemisphere. At a 1984 Senate hearing, federal officials warned that international terrorists were turning to drug trafficking to finance their operations. "Drugs have become the natural ally of those that would choose to destroy democratic societies in our hemisphere through violent means," cautioned then-US Customs Commissioner William Von Rabb, who sought to implicate Cuba and Nicaragua in using the regional drug trade to finance insurgencies throughout Latin America. (7) The next year, the Joint Chiefs of Staff cited the narcoguerrilla threat when it unanimously recommended that the US military take unprecedented action, including the imposition of naval and air blockades, to combat drug trafficking in Central America, a plan they that said could be "a rallying point for this hemisphere." (8) Development of the so-called "narcoguerilla theory" was a critical development in the militarization of international drug control efforts. It has been used not only to justify the Pentagon's involvement in the drug war, but also to legitimize the approach it has taken in carrying out its counter-drug mission. While targets of the Andean operations include "new" enemies - cocaine producers and traffickers - the "old" enemies of Marxist insurgents are explicitly part of antinarcotics programs in Colombia and Peru. Even today, the guerrilla-drug link is routinely cited as an important part of the rationale for increasing military assistance to those military and police forces. Washington is pressing Peruvian officials to accept its proposal for an expanded riverine interdiction program by arguing it would deprive Sendero Luminoso of needed money. (9) The narcoguerrilla theory, however, is widely questioned by experts in the Andean countries and in the United States. While some links undoubtedly exist, traffickers maintain an array of alliances - with state actors as well as guerrilla forces, potentially creating a quagmire for US policy-makers seeking support from the former. In Colombia most often put forward as a bastion of "narco-terrorists" - drug mafias are most closely associated with right-wing paramilitary death squads, which themselves more often than not have close ties to members of the Colombian armed forces. Cuomo Advantage (4/4)Sixth, the plan’s rejection of the militarized “war on drugs” leads to peaceful conflict resolution. Cuomo 96 (Chris, Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies, and Director of the Institute for Women's Studies at the Univerity of Georgia, “War Is Not Just an Event: Reflections on the Significance of Everyday Violence” 1996 ) Moving away from crisis driven politics and ontologies concerning war and military violence also enables consideration of relationships among seemingly disparate phenomena, and therefore can shape more nuanced theoretical and practical forms of resistance. For example, investigating the ways in which war is part of a presence allows consideration of the relationships among the events of war and the following: how militarism is a foundational trope in the social and political imagination; how the pervasive presence and symbolism of soldiers/warriors/patriots shape meanings of gender; the ways in which threats of state-sponsored violence are a sometimes invisible/sometimes bold agent of racism, nationalism, and corporate interests; the fact that vast numbers of communities, cities, and nations are currently in the midst of excruciatingly violent circumstances. It also provides a lens for considering the relationships among the various kinds of violence that get labeled "war." Given current American obsessions with nationalism, guns, and militias, and growing hunger for the death penalty, prisons, and a more powerful police state, one cannot underestimate the need for philosophical and political attention to connec tions among phenomena like the "war on drugs," the "wat on crime," and other state-funded militaristic campaigns. Lastly, militaristic cost-benefit analysis is the same logic of ecocide, which culminates in extinction. Cuomo 96 (Chris, Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies, and Director of the Institute for Women's Studies at the U of Georgia, War Is Not Just an Event: Reflections on the Significance of Everyday Violence, p.42)JM There are many conceptual and practical connections between military practices in which humans aim to kill and harm each other for some declared "greater good," and nonmilitary practices in which we displace, destroy, or seriously modify nonhuman communities, species, and ecosystems in the name of human interests. An early illustration of these connections was made by Rachel Carson in the first few pages of The Silent Spring (1962), in which she described insecticides as the inadvertent offspring of World War II chemical weapons research. We can now also trace ways in which insecticides were part of the Western-defined global corporatization of agriculture that helped kill off the small family farm and made the worldwide system of food production dependent on the likes of Dow Chemical and Monsanto. Military practices are no different from other human practices that damage and irreparably modify nature. They are often a result of cost-benefit analyses that pretend to weigh all likely outcomes yet do not consider nonhuman entities except in terms of their use value for humans and they nearly always create unforeseeable effects for humans and nonhumans. In addition, everyday military peacetime practices are actually more destructive than most other human activities, they are directly enacted by state power, and, because they function as unquestioned "givens," they enjoy a unique near-immunity to enactments of moral reproach. It is worth noting the extent to which everyday military activities remain largely unscrutinized by environmentalists, especially American environmentalists, largely because fear allows us to be fooled into thinking that "national security" is an adequate excuse for "ecological military mayhem" (Thomas 1995, 16). Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 0.73 Mb. Share with your friends:
|