Reps toolbox – 7wk seniors ahfm
Download 0.86 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Holocaust Reps Good
Imperialism GoodTurn American imperialism prevents genocides and wars Boot 3 (senior fellow for the national security studies “U.S. Imperialism: A force for Good” http://www.cfr.org/iraq/us-imperialism-force-good/p5959)JC What is the greatest danger facing America as it tries to rebuild Iraq: Shiite fundamentalism? Kurdish separatism? Sunni intransigence? Turkish, Syrian, Iranian or Saudi Arabian meddling? All of those are real problems, but none is so severe that it can't readily behandled. More than 125,000 U.S. troops occupy Mesopotamia. They are backed up by the resources of the world's richest economy. In a contest for control of Iraq, America can outspend and outmuscle any competing faction. The greatest danger is that America won't use all of its power for fear of the "I" word -- imperialism. When asked on April 28 on al-Jazeera whether the United States was "empire building," Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld reacted as if he'd been asked whether he wears women's underwear. "We don't seek empires," he replied huffily. "We're not imperialistic. We never have been." That's a fine answer for public consumption. The problem is that it isn't true. The United States has been an empire since at least 1803, when Thomas Jefferson purchased the Louisiana Territory. Throughout the 19th century, what Jefferson called the "empire of liberty" expanded across the continent. When U.S. power stretched from "sea to shining sea," the American empire moved abroad, acquiring colonies ranging from Puerto Rico and the Philippines to Hawaii and Alaska. While the formal empire mostly disappeared after the Second World War, the United States set out on another bout of imperialism in Germany and Japan. Oh, sorry -- that wasn't imperialism; it was "occupation." But when Americans are running foreign governments, it's a distinction without a difference. Likewise, recent "nation-building" experiments in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan are imperialism under another name. Mind you, this is not meant as a condemnation. The history of American imperialism is hardly one of unadorned good doing; there have been plenty of shameful episodes, such as the mistreatment of the Indians. But, on the whole, U.S. imperialism has been the greatest force for good in the world during the past century. It has defeated the monstrous evils of communism and Nazism and lesser evils such as the Taliban and Serbian ethnic cleansing. Along the way, it has helped spread liberal institutions to countries as diverse as South Korea and Panama. Yet, while generally successful as imperialists, Americans have been loath to confirm that's what they were doing. That's OK. Given the historical baggage that "imperialism" carries, there's no need for the U.S. government to embrace the term. But it should definitely embrace the practice. That doesn't mean looting Iraq of its natural resources; nothing could be more destructive of the goal of building a stable government in Baghdad. It means imposing the rule of law, property rights, free speech and other guarantees, at gunpoint if need be. This will require selecting a new ruler who is committed to pluralism and then backing him or her to the hilt. Iran and other neighbouring states won't hesitate to impose their despotic views on Iraq; we shouldn't hesitate to impose our democratic views. ***HOLOCAUST TRIVIALIZATIONHolocaust Reps BadUsing the word Holocaust allows the actual genocide to occur Freeman 91 ( Michael professor at the university of essex “Holocaust and Genocide studies” http://dl2af5jf3e.scholar.serialssolutions.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/?sid=google&auinit=M&aulast=Freeman&atitle=The+theory+and+prevention+of+genocide&id=doi:10.1093/hgs/6.2.185&title=Holocaust+and+genocide+studies&volume=6&issue=2&date=1991&spage=185&issn=8756-6583)JC Wiesel's critique of scholarship deserves careful evaluation. Academics and scientists can be arrogant, but are not necessarily so and some academics share Wiesel's view that the Holocaust overwhelms understanding:2 Understanding the Holocaust does not require an appeal to 'laws', which play hardly any role in social science nowadays.13 Complete identification with victims and executioners is certainly impossible, but a degree of empathy is not." Further, empathy is necessary but not sufficient for understanding genocide. We need to know how victims and executioners became such. No social agents fully understand the origins of their predicaments. Understanding genocide, therefore. requires us to look beyond the understandings of victims and executioners to the causes of their situations:5 Wiesel has declared his constant goal to have been 'to invoke the past as a shield for the future'. If this is possible, there must be some similarity between past and future. Wiesel concedes that the theories that have been proposed to understand the Holocaust may contain 'a fraction of the truth*:6 Our obligation, then, surely is to collect, criticise, and improve rather than to dismiss these fractions. It is true that no language can adequately represent the Holocaust. But this is in part a general problem of getting language to represent experience. The problem is exceptionally difficult when language seeks to grasp the Holocaust, because of the extraordinary and overwhelming character of the event. There is certainly a danger that academic and scientific discourses may dehumanise the human.' 7 And yet, with all its horror, genocide is social behaviour, and it would surely be a greater moral error for social science to evade than to confront it. Holocaust Reps GoodComparing the Holocaust to other genocides is key to prevent future genocides Freeman 91 ( Michael professor at the university of essex “Holocaust and Genocide studies” http://dl2af5jf3e.scholar.serialssolutions.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/?sid=google&auinit=M&aulast=Freeman&atitle=The+theory+and+prevention+of+genocide&id=doi:10.1093/hgs/6.2.185&title=Holocaust+and+genocide+studies&volume=6&issue=2&date=1991&spage=185&issn=8756-6583)JC Much has been written about the claim that the Holocaust was unique and therefore cannot be compared with other genocides." I shall confine myself to the following points. First, every event is unique: unique events may, however, be similar and comparable. Second, important events are unique in important respects, but may also be similar in important respects. Third, the Hitlerite intent to destroy the Jews was uniquely thorough-going. Fourth, the uniqueness of the Holocaust does not preclude the usefulness of comparing it with other genocides. Robert Jay Litton has, for example. proposed that the concept of national or racial therapy may be common to the Holocaust and other genocides. This hypothesis must be tested empirically: it cannot be dismissed a priori.19 Finally, we repeat the point we made about Wiesel: if knowledge of the past can be a shield for the future, past and future must have important elements in common. Comparison therefore may contribute to prevention. We need a comparative theory of genocide, therefore, which respects the uniqueness of the Holocaust. Concealing the holocaust causes more genocides to occur Stannard 96 (David E. Professor at the University of Hawaii “The dangers of calling the Holocaust unique” http://www.codoh.com/library/document/530)JC Surely no one other than a rabid Holocaust denier would claim that those "indirect" killings were not a part of the Holocaust. In the same way, the massive number of deaths from disease, starvation, exposure, and exhaustion that characteristically are suffered by other victims of genocidal assault cannot morally be separated from the rest. None of these challenges to the "uniqueness" argument minimizes or denies in any way the horrendous suffering of Jews in the Holocaust. But they do suggest why those who insist on the uniqueness of the Holocaust, when faced with the growing body of information that refutes their claim, increasingly have had to turn to the manipulation, fabrication, and misstatement of fact to advance their argument. Under scrutiny, a revealing pattern emerges in much of the recent literature that denies the comparability of the Holocaust and other examples of genocide: The advocates of Holocaust uniqueness resort to many of the same assertions used by those who deny that the Holocaust ever occurred. Over and over again, dubious massaging of the data leads one author after another to minimize drastically the death toll in other genocides; to claim that the deaths that did occur during those other "tragedies" were routine wartime casualties or the result of "natural causes" such as disease; to deny evidence of official intent to commit genocide. But whereas Holocaust deniers are rightly seen as anti-Semitic crackpots, those who say the Holocaust was unique are regarded by many people as the bearers of truth. There are obvious political reasons why. Contemporary scholarship on the case of Armenian genocide provides a glimpse of these reasons. From 1915 through 1923, between one-half and three-quarters of the Armenians in the collapsing Ottoman Empire-roughly one million to 1.5 million innocent people-were slaughtered by a government that had been taken over by xenophobic nationalists who considered the Armenians a dangerous religious minority. Although debate continues as to the precise number of Armenians killed, no serious historian today questions the existence of the Armenian genocide. But the Republic of Turkey, which came into being in 1923 as the successor to the Ottoman Empire, officially denies that any such mass killing ever took place. While it is not unusual for countries to deny the truth about their violent pasts, it might seem odd that Israel enthusiastically supports the Turkish government's position. Just last year, for example, the government of Israel banned from Israeli television a documentary on the Armenian genocide and quashed an effort by the Israeli Education Ministry to introduce the slaughter of the Armenians into highschool curricula. Moreover, on at least two occasions recently, Israeli government officials and Jewish lobbyists in the United States have joined forces with Turkey in blocking U. S. proposals to commemorate the Armenian genocide. Why would the descendants of those who died in one of the most monstrous genocides in human history be motivated to join in a genocide-denying propaganda effort on behalf of a country that is demonstrably guilty of genocide? The answer is what the essayist Phillip Lopate calls "extermination pride . . a sort of privileged nation status in the moral honor roll." The Holocaust historian Zygmunt Bauman has noted that Israel uses the Holocaust "as the certificate of its political legitimacy, a safe-conduct pass for its past and future policies, and, above all, as the advance payment for the injustices it might itself commit." Doing so creates the need to play down other genocides. As one proponent of the uniqueness of the Holocaust, Edward Alexander, has put it, to describe as genocidal the ghastly agonies suffered by others-the Armenians, for instance-is "to plunder the moral capital" of the Jewish people. It is to "steal the Holocaust. " In a classic case of quid pro quo, the Turkish government has demonstrated its gratitude for Israel's support in denying the Armenian genocide by declaring its agreement with Israel's claim of the uniqueness of the Holocaust. And in the middle of this cynical and dehumanizing reciprocation stand the pro-uniqueness writers, who have provided Turkey and Israel with their contrived intellectual support. T o be sure, those who maintain that the Holocaust was unique do not by any means represent the entirety of Jewish scholarship on the subject. On the contrary, dogmatic proponents of uniqueness are something of a cult within the world of genuine scholarship. Israel W. Charny, executive director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem, describes them as self-appointed "high priests." He strongly objects to what he calls their "fetishistic" efforts to "establish the exclusive 'superiority' or unique form of any one genocide." Yet in the public realm, Jewish suffering has attained what the religion scholar Richard L. Rubenstein calls "religio-mythic" status. Consider what the international outcry would be today, if reports surfaced of a massive deportation of thousands of Jews from Germany to Romania, where they were met with a nationwide campaign of terrorism, violence, and murder. But that is precisely what did happen recently-except the victims were Gypsies. No one has ever bestowed religio-mythic status upon their torment, and they have no political chips to play in the games of international power politics. Thus, no outcry has been heard over the brutality and persecution they continue to face throughout Europe. Proponents of the uniqueness of the Holocaust not only do damage to historical truth, but in their determination to belittle all genocides other than the Holocaust, they are, in fact, accomplices in the efforts of numerous governments to conceal and deny their own pasts or to obscure current campaigns of mass violence, such as those in Guatemala (where more than 100,000 people have been slaughtered by the government in recent years) and in East Timor (where one-third of the indigenous population has been wiped out). What is true for the Jews is true for others, as well: Genocide concealed is genocide likely to recur. This is not an academic game. Real people's lives are at stake. Horrendous as Jewish suffering in the Holocaust was, it is essential that false claims for its uniqueness not be permitted to denigrate the memory of other genocides-or to impede the desperately needed expansion of human-rights protections to other threatened peoples throughout the world today 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 0.86 Mb. Share with your friends:
|