T- can’t Be qpq answers 4 t-have to Be Positive Incentives Answers 6
Download 315.21 Kb.
|
Securitization Kritik Answers(--) The plan is the opposite of the Kritik: we get rid of a missile defense system that targets the so called threats of China and North Korea.(--) Turn: Missile defense locks in fears of the Chinese threat & risks war:Chengxin Pan, 2004 (Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Deakin University) The “China Threat” in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics, Alternatives, vol. 29 For instance, as the United States presses ahead with a missile-defence shield to “guarantee” its invulnerability from rather unlikely sources of missile attacks, it would be almost certain to intensify China’s sense of vulnerability and compel it to expand its current small nuclear arsenal so as to maintain the efficiency of its limited deterrence. In consequence, it is not impossible that the two countries, and possibly the whole region, might be dragged into an escalating arms race that would eventually make war more likely. (--) Alternative doesn’t solve the case:A) Doesn’t solve North Korean proliferation—triggers multiple scenarios of war.B) Doesn’t solve US-Sino relations—which solves their terminal impacts.C) Doesn’t solve South Korea-China relations—which solves their terminal impacts.(--) Permutation: do the plan and the alternative--The permutation solves best: Methodological pluralism creates critical reflexivity and sustainable critique.Roland Bleiker 2014 (professor of international relations at the University of Queensland) INTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, International Theory Between Reification and Self-Reflective Critique, 2014. Retrieved May 26, 2016 from EBSCOhost. Methodological pluralism lies at the heart of Levine’s sustainable critique. He borrows from what Adorno calls a “constellation”: an attempt to juxtapose, rather than integrate, different perspectives. It is in this spirit that Levine advocates multiple methods to understand the same event or phenomena. He writes of the need to validate “multiple and mutually incompatible ways of seeing” (p. 63, see also pp. 101-102). In this model, a scholar oscillates back and forth between different methods and paradigms, trying to understand the event in question from multiple perspectives. No single method can ever adequately represent the event or should gain the upper hand. But each should, in a way, recognize and capture details or perspectives that the others cannot (p. 102). In practical terms, this means combining a range of methods even when—or, rather, precisely when—they are deemed incompatible. They can range from poststructural deconstruction to the tools pioneered and championed by positivist social sciences. The benefit of such a methodological polyphony is not just the opportunity to bring out nuances and new perspectives. Once the false hope of a smooth synthesis has been abandoned, the very incompatibility of the respective perspectives can then be used to identify the reifying tendencies in each of them. For Levine, this is how reification may be “checked at the source” and this is how a “critically reflexive moment might thus be rendered sustainable” (p. 103). It is in this sense that Levine’s approach is not really post-foundational but, rather, an attempt to “balance foundationalisms against one another” (p. 14). There are strong parallels here with arguments by assemblage thinking and complexity theory—links that could have been explored in more detail. (--) Permutation: do the plan and all non-mutually exclusive parts of the alternative.(--) Turn: missile defense programs securitize the US:Jon Hellevig, 3/10/2016 (“Russia and China Will Win the New Arms Race,” http://russia-insider.com/en/russia-and-china-will-win-new-arms-race/ri13258, Accessed 7/21/2016, rwg) Many believe that U.S. president Ronald Reagan engineered the collapse of the Soviet Union with his “Star Wars” arms race program. In fact, the program was more rhetorical than real and personally I do not believe that it was what knocked out the Soviet Union, rather it fell of its own weight caused by the decline of its non-competitive economy and the fading away of the belief in its ideological foundations. Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly true that the USSR spent far too big a proportion of its economic and financial resources on the military and defense, both directly and indirectly. The great paradox is that this time around the new arms race under the ongoing new Cold War will likely break the U.S. economy rather than the Russian. This will sound unbelievable for most people, especially for those who are familiar with the below graph making the rounds in the media. But actually this graph is rather part of the proof of the tenuous position of the USA. It shows that the USA is already spending these huge amounts of money but has nevertheless not reached any kind of overwhelming military superiority over China and Russia, on the contrary they are constantly losing their advantage. I must first address two main assumptions underlying this essay. The first is, that yes there is a new Cold War. Both the Russians and Western leaders and their media have been reluctant to admit this. From the Russian side the idea has been to tone down the rhetoric while I think the West has been loath to let the cat out of the bag so as to prevent their populations from realizing that they have actually brought the world to a new Cold War with the risk of a thermonuclear annihilation. Fortunately, the Russian Prime Minister Medvedev acknowledged the elephant in the room telling - fittingly at the famous Munich Security Conference – that "NATO's policy with regard to Russia has remained unfriendly and opaque. One could go as far as to say that we have slid back to a new Cold War". The second assumption is of considering Russia and China as allies in respect to the subject matter of this essay. Russia and China are joint founders of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization on the economy and military, which is however no NATO-style alliance with commitments to joint military actions in case of attack. The leaders of both countries obviously stress in public that they are in no formal alliance and that their cooperation is not directed against any other country. It is true that it is not directed against other countries in the sense that neither country prepares for an offensive war. But they both are engaged in building their defense capabilities to protect themselves against a very specific enemy, which is the expansive U.S. empire and its coalition of vassal states under the NATO umbrella. Both countries understand very well that the objective of the U.S. led Western elite is to achieve absolute world hegemony and that for this purpose they need to subjugate China and Russia. Hereby it is clear that this strategy foresees the subjugation of Russia in the first place either by a regime change operation or open war, or by wearing it down with economic warfare and terrorism. With Russia under its control, the West would then move to encircle China with sanctions warfare and the military. No other country in the World could go on maintaining an independent stand against the West once China and Russia had succumbed. It is from these considerations that I sum up the Russian and Chinese defense expenditures in comparing them with those of the West, and in particular with the American spending. All that glitters is not gold Let us now return to the paradoxical military spending figures. There is no doubt that America spends nominally much more than China and Russia put together, but the question is not about how much one spends but what one gets for the money. I need to point out that we do not know for sure know how much these countries actually spend on the military because at the end of the day the budgets are not all that transparent. But let’s assume that the United States spends at the level of $700 billion, China $220 billion and Russia from $40 to 50 billion (it is very difficult to state in dollar terms due to the very volatile currency exchange of the ruble to the dollar). Hereby I do not think it makes a lot of a difference what the European vassals of the USA spend. I will concentrate here on Russia, but most of the considerations apply to China as well. By these figures it would seem that the USA spends around three times more than China and Russia taken jointly, and some 15 times more than Russia alone. But there is a difference between spending and spending. Mainly I have in mind here the capability of these countries to develop and produce new state-of-the-art weaponry. First, we must consider the purchasing power parity (PPP) between these countries. In general the PPP of a dollar is about 3 times more in Russia, meaning that with one dollar you get three times more stuff in Russia than in the USA. With the fall of the ruble rate in the past two years, the PPP could be more than 3; on top of that I estimate that the rate is yet sharply higher in the military sector, it could be as high as 5 (or even more). The Chinese PPP coefficient to USA could be estimated as at least 4. Thus alone with adjusting the military spending with the PPP coefficient we see that actually the USA does not have a lead over China and Russia; it could yet be the other way around. To take one concrete example, China's Wing Loong drone cost only $1 million USD to produce, whilst the American equivalent with the same capabilities, the US MQ-9 Reaper cost a whopping $30 million. And it might just be so that the Russian and Chinese military-industrial complexes are much more efficient than the Americans, strange enough. Another factor is that a huge portion (I don’t know which exactly) of the U.S. military spending goes to maintaining their military bases all over the world, which is only a drain on the resources and does not do much good for developing defense capacities. On some estimates, the USA has 800 bases all over the world, and on top of that military personnel and marines in 160 countries and also costly floating bases of the navy, the 10 carrier groups. All in all this could mean half a million troops with family overseas. Russia and China do not carry any corresponding burden of maintaining an overdrawn imperial force across the globe. Wall Street meets War Street The biggest drain on the U.S. defense budget comes from the symbiotic relationship of the U.S. military-industrial complex with the financial sector, that of Wall Street and War Street. This is the securitization of the U.S. military-industrial complex. The main contractors are all listed on the stock exchange and therefore the defense contracts come with huge profit margins in order to satisfy the demands of the stock market ideology. The contracts are not open to any kind of tendering but awarded by intra-Deep State machinations where the congressmen that live off campaign contributions serve as rubber stamps. This mechanism guarantees that the contracts come with the required budgeted profit margins. I do not have any actual figures on that but it much be tremendous. It is very probable that some 30% of the U.S. military budget is siphoned off in form of such profit margins, which are eventually paid out as dividends, or worse yet as payments on stock-buy back schemes. By these considerations, the actual money left over for the physical military development and production is far less than what China and Russia can muster. (--) Link has already been triggered—we’ve already securitized China in the South China Sea and East China Sea.(--) Weigh consequences first—moral absolutism reproduces evil.Isaac 2 — Jeffrey C. Isaac, James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life at Indiana University-Bloomington, 2002 (“Ends, Means, and Politics,” Dissent, Volume 49, Issue 2, Spring, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via EBSCOhost, p. 35-36) As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of one’s intention does not ensure the achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness; it is often a form of complicity in injustice. [end page 35] This is why, from the standpoint of politics—as opposed to religion—pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant. Just as the alignment with “good” may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of “good” that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one’s goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits this judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines political effectiveness. (--) Prefer our issue-specific evidence: Scholars should look to specific contexts when analyzing China.Karl W. Eikenberry, 2015 (retired United States Army lieutenant general who served as the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from April 2009 to July 2011) China’s Place in U.S. Foreign Policy, June 9, 2015. Retrieved May 25, 2016 from http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/06/09/chinas-place-in-u-s-foreign-policy/ An effective U.S. China policy is best built on a thorough assessment of the context in which Sino-American relations exist and operate. China’s remarkable aggregation of national power over the past 35 years has been a source of wonderment: to economists, who have been surprised by that country’s consistently high rate of growth; to political scientists, who are at a loss to explain the persistence of authoritarian Communist Party rule despite its more open market order; and to historians, who describe China’s meteoric rise as unprecedented. But to the U.S. national security community, China’s swift climb up the international power ladder has been a source less of wonderment than of increasing concern. (--) We know enough about China—we know they hate THAAD—that’s 1ac Perletz evidence that THAAD is destroying US-Chinese relations across the board.(--) We are correct about our assumptions about China--realism empirically applies to China.YUAN-KANG WANG 2004 (Assist prof in the Department of Diplomacy, National Chengchi U, Taipei) ISSUES & STUDIES, Offensive Realism and the Rise of China, Mar. 2004. Retrieved May 25, 2016 from http://homepages.wmich.edu/~ymz8097/articles/Wang-offensive%20realism%20and%20china.pdf Contrary to the stance articulated in “Realism, Revisionism, and the Great Powers,” I argue that realism does a reasonable good job in explaining not only Western but also Asian experience. Although a large literature has developed on the Western experience, few international relations scholars take Asia as their empirical focus. In this article I present evidence from Chinese history to support my claim that realism can be fruitfully applied to Asia. Although the Asian state system existed separately from the European one throughout most of history, Asian states—notably China—behaved according to the dictates of realism. Imperial China placed a high premium on the utility of force and looked for opportunities to maximize China’s relative power. China adopted a more offensive posture as its power grew and shifted to a more defensive one as its power declined. (--) Reps K’s bad —Prefer the particularized and surrounding context of HOW our reps were deployed.Shim 14 — (David Shim is Assistant Professor at the Department of International Relations and International Organization of the University of Groningen – As part of the critique of visual determinism, this card internally quotes David D. Perlmutter, Ph.D.. He is Dean of the College of Media & Communication at Texas Tech University. Before coming to Texas Tech, he was the director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. As a documentary photographer, he is the author or editor of seven books on political communication and persuasion. Also, he has written several dozen research articles for academic journals as well as more than 200 essays for U.S. and international newspapers and magazines such as Campaigns & Elections, Christian Science Monitor, Editor & Publisher, Los Angeles Times, MSNBC.com., Philadelphia Inquirer, and USA Today. Routledge Book Publication –Visual Politics and North Korea: Seeing is believing – p.24-25) Imagery can enact powerful effects, since political actors are almost always pressed to take action when confronted with images of atrocity and human suffering resultant from wars, famines and natural disasters. Usually, humanitarian emergencies are conveyed through media representations, which indicate the important role of images in producing emergency situations as (global) events (Benthall 1993; Campbell 2003b; Lisle 2009; Moeller 1999; Postman 1987). Debbie Lisle (2009: 148) maintains that, 'we see that the objects, issues and events we usually study [. . .] do not even exist without the media [.. .] to express them’. As a consequence, visual images have political and ethical consequences as a result of their role in shaping private and public ways of seeing (Bleiker. Kay 2007). This is because how people come to know, think about and respond to developments in the world is deeply entangled with how these developments are made visible to them. Visual representations participate in the processes of how people situate themselves in space and time, because seeing involves accumulating and ordering information in order to be able to construct knowledge of people, places and events. For example, the remembrance of such events as the Vietnam War, the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 or the torture in Abu Ghraib prison cannot be separated from the ways in which these events have been represented in films, TV and photography (Bleiker 2009; Campbell/Shapiro 2007; Moller2007). The visibility of these events can help to set the conditions for specific forms of political action. The current war in Afghanistan serves as an example of this. Another is the nexus of hunger images and relief operations. Vision and visuality thus become part and parcel of political dynamics, also revealing the ethical dimension of imagery, as it affects the ways in which people interact with each other. However, particular representations do not automatically lead to particular responses as, for instance, proponents of the so-called 'CNN effect’ would argue (for an overview of the debates among academic, media and policy-making circles on the 'CNN effect', see Gilboa 2005; see also. Dauber 2001; Eisensee/ Stromberg 2007; Livingston/Eachus 1995; O'Loughlin 2010; Perlmutter 1998, 2005; Robinson 1999, 20011. There is no causal relationship between a specific image and a political intervention, in which a dependent variable (the image) would explain the outcome of an independent one (the act). David Perlmutter (1998: I), for instance, explicitly challenges, as he calls it, the 'visual determinism' of images, which dominates political and public opinion. Referring to findings based on public surveys, he argues that the formation of opinions by individuals depends not on images but on their idiosyncratic predispositions and values (see also, Domke et al. 2002; Perlmutter 2005). Whiteness K AnswersWhiteness Kritik Answers(--) Framework: Debate should be about is the plan better than the status quo or competitive policy option.A) AFF choice—the plan was written in a policy framework—forcing the NEG to respond makes debaters ideologically flexible.B) The resolution asks a policy question—doesn’t ask what we as individuals should do.C) Implications: Either a reason to reject the Kritik or let us weigh our impacts.(--) Permutation: do the plan and the alternative--The permutation solves best: Methodological pluralism creates critical reflexivity and sustainable critique.Roland Bleiker 2014 (professor of international relations at the University of Queensland) INTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, International Theory Between Reification and Self-Reflective Critique, 2014. Retrieved May 26, 2016 from EBSCOhost. Methodological pluralism lies at the heart of Levine’s sustainable critique. He borrows from what Adorno calls a “constellation”: an attempt to juxtapose, rather than integrate, different perspectives. It is in this spirit that Levine advocates multiple methods to understand the same event or phenomena. He writes of the need to validate “multiple and mutually incompatible ways of seeing” (p. 63, see also pp. 101-102). In this model, a scholar oscillates back and forth between different methods and paradigms, trying to understand the event in question from multiple perspectives. No single method can ever adequately represent the event or should gain the upper hand. But each should, in a way, recognize and capture details or perspectives that the others cannot (p. 102). In practical terms, this means combining a range of methods even when—or, rather, precisely when—they are deemed incompatible. They can range from poststructural deconstruction to the tools pioneered and championed by positivist social sciences. The benefit of such a methodological polyphony is not just the opportunity to bring out nuances and new perspectives. Once the false hope of a smooth synthesis has been abandoned, the very incompatibility of the respective perspectives can then be used to identify the reifying tendencies in each of them. For Levine, this is how reification may be “checked at the source” and this is how a “critically reflexive moment might thus be rendered sustainable” (p. 103). It is in this sense that Levine’s approach is not really post-foundational but, rather, an attempt to “balance foundationalisms against one another” (p. 14). There are strong parallels here with arguments by assemblage thinking and complexity theory—links that could have been explored in more detail. (--) Perm do the plan and all the non-mutually parts of the alternative.(--) The alt is too sweeping instead of teleologically suspending whiteness the subject position should be used to train white people to be agents to change the world to end white supremacySullivan 08(Shannon, Whiteness as Wise Provincialism: Royce and the Rehabilitation of a Racial Category, Source: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Spring, 2008), pp. 236- 262, Published by: Indiana University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40321258 Accessed: 18-07-2016 14:59 UTC, LTIII) In practice, this means that white people who care about racial justice need to educate newcomers to whiteness - namely, white children - to be loyal to and care about their race. While Royce s comments about the problem of newcomers due to increased geographical mobility do not apply directly to whiteness,16 white children can be thought of as newcomers to the community of whiteness who do not (yet) have an intimate connection to their race or know how to cultivate and care for it. Here again is an instance in which white supremacists have been allowed to corner the market on whiteness: almost all explicit reflection and writing on how to raise white children as white has been under- taken by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, World Church of the Creator, and Stormfront.17 The association is so tight that the mere suggestion of educating white children in their whiteness is alarming to many people. But educating white children about their whiteness need and should not mean educating them to be white supremacists. A wise form of whiteness would help train the developing racial habits of white children in anti-racist ways.18 (--) Alternative can’t solve all instances of whiteness.(--) Prefer our issue-specific evidence: Scholars should look to specific contexts when analyzing China.Karl W. Eikenberry, 2015 (retired United States Army lieutenant general who served as the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from April 2009 to July 2011) China’s Place in U.S. Foreign Policy, June 9, 2015. Retrieved May 25, 2016 from http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/06/09/chinas-place-in-u-s-foreign-policy/ An effective U.S. China policy is best built on a thorough assessment of the context in which Sino-American relations exist and operate. China’s remarkable aggregation of national power over the past 35 years has been a source of wonderment: to economists, who have been surprised by that country’s consistently high rate of growth; to political scientists, who are at a loss to explain the persistence of authoritarian Communist Party rule despite its more open market order; and to historians, who describe China’s meteoric rise as unprecedented. But to the U.S. national security community, China’s swift climb up the international power ladder has been a source less of wonderment than of increasing concern. (--) Preserving whiteness as a heuristic to educate white people and make them aware of their history has the ability to make plurality and diversity existentially realSullivan 08(Shannon, Whiteness as Wise Provincialism: Royce and the Rehabilitation of a Racial Category, Source: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Spring, 2008), pp. 236- 262, Published by: Indiana University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40321258 Accessed: 18-07-2016 14:59 UTC, LTIII) A wise whiteness also would caution, however, that white people’s appreciation for racial diversity and variety also can be an insidious form of whiteness in disguise. Too often, celebrations of multicultural- ism and racial diversity function as a smorgasbord of racial difference offered up for (middle-to-upper class) white people's consumption and enjoyment. They do this by acknowledging some differences while simultaneously concealing others. It is very easy for white people to recognize and even celebrate racial difference in the form of different food, dress, and cultural customs. It tends to be much more difficult for them to recognize racial difference in the form of economic, educational, and political inequalities. Royces criticism of the leveling tendencies of modern culture does not explicitly depoliticize the issue, and he does mention that variety is needed particularly to counter "the purely mechanical carrying-power of certain ruling social influences," an example of which is the hegemony of white culture (76). But given the tendency white (middle-to-upper class, in particular) people to see ö whiteness as cultureless and boring and thus want to spice it up by dabbling in other, "exotic" cultures, care must be taken that appreciation of diversity is not sanitized through an avoidance of the history and present of white privilege. When that happens, appreciation of plurality 31 and diversity tend to become a covert vehicle for white ontological expansiveness. In contrast, a wise whiteness values and thus transactionally conserves different races, as Outlaw does, without depoliticizging the meaning of those differences. (--) Intelligent whiteness embraces humility—this dismantles racial confidence & superiority—remember that the plan defers to what China wants:Sullivan 08(Shannon, Whiteness as Wise Provincialism: Royce and the Rehabilitation of a Racial Category, Source: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Spring, 2008), pp. 236- 262, Published by: Indiana University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40321258 Accessed: 18-07-2016 14:59 UTC, LTIII) If white people were to make the ideal of humility distinctively their own, it would mean something different than it does for African Americans because of the groups' different histories with the ideal. For white people, becoming humble could be an important step in dismantling their racial confidence, which is sometimes deliberately but often unintentionally or unconsciously based on white superiority. Note that the etymology of "humility" includes humus, meaning "(on the) ground." This definition is the source of humility's connotation of lowliness, but humus also could be developed as groundedness in the sense of resting on a solid base. In the case of white people, this would be a racial groundedness that curbs white pretentiousness and fantasies of moral perfection, superior knowledge, and other forms of alleged grandeur. As an ideal developed distinctively by white people, humility could be a way for white people to develop moral strength that is based not on alleged moral superiority but on an honest reckoning. I deliberately have refrained from using the term "guilt" when sketching the contours of white humility. While white people have a violent history (and sometimes present) as a race and continue to benefit from economic, psychological, geographical, and other forms of racial ö privilege, I do not think that guilt is the most helpful way to respond to "2 white supremacy and hegemony. In part, this is because white guilt tends to direct white people to their feelings in a non-productive way. Let me elaborate this point. Some critical race theorists, such as Ignatiev, 3J have suggested that anti-racist workshops for white people are problematic because they tend to focus on helping white people feel good about themselves rather than on political struggle against racism.32 I disagree - that white people s feelings about their whiteness are irrelevant to anti- ï> racist struggle, but I agree that such struggle is the point. White guilt ^ tends to produce a self-focused, emotional wallowing that distracts white people from political struggle while making it seem as if they are doing something to counter racism.33 (--) The use of identity categories are uniquely problematic and viable solutions become impossible and an economy of violence is the only end that is possible.ENNS Associate Prof of Philosophy & Peace Studies @ Mcmaster University 2007 Diane; “Political Life Before Identity”, Theory & Event 10:1, Project Muse, og) That we need to extricate ourselves not only from the worldview of the perpetrator, but also that of the victim, is the claim I turn to in the remainder of the paper. I will argue, as Mahmood Mamdani does, that once an economy of violence has evolved out of a binary logic of victim and perpetrator, political transformation cannot occur on the basis of identity.5 It is crucial then, that we engage with those thinkers who attempt to refuse the politicization of identities to begin with -- who articulate a sense of political life before it becomes named or names itself by identifying with this or that category. Arendt, Agamben and Fanon give us some clues as to how to reconceive politics and community in radical ways that disrupt the association between politics and identity, community and the common, sovereign power and mere existence. Several noteworthy points of resonance can be found especially between Agamben and Fanon; both of whom express an affirmation of life lived in an altered relation to politics and to other living beings. (--) Affirming identities in terms of victims and perpetrators good and evil lead to genocide Rwanda is the key exampleENNS Associate Prof of Philosophy & Peace Studies @ Mcmaster University 2007 Diane; “Political Life Before Identity”, Theory & Event 10:1, Project Muse, og) In his formidable analysis of the Rwandan genocide, Mahmood Mamdani concludes that political identities are artifacts. This does not mean there are not real victims or real perpetrators, but that continuing to act in the name of an identity once an economy of violence has sprung out of the binary logic of victim and perpetrator, or friend and enemy, does not enable political transformation, but prevents it. The great crime of colonialism, from this perspective, went beyond the expropriation of the native; "the greater crime was to politicize indigeneity in the first place."6 Mamdani includes in this politicization both the negative libeling of the native by the settler, as well as the positive self-assertion of the native response to this libel, a perspective remarkably similar, as we shall see, to Fanon's position in Black Skin White Masks. The 1994 genocide in Rwanda -- unprecedented for its massive civilian participation in the massacre of the Tutsi population -- occurred in the context of a political world set in motion by Belgian colonialism: a world divided into natives and settlers. The genocide was a natives' genocide, Mamdani argues, a struggle by the majority, the Hutu, to cleanse the country of a threatening "alien" presence, the minority Tutsi, a group with a privileged relation to power before colonialism. This was a violence not of neighbors against neighbors then, as it is generally portrayed, he contends, but against a population viewed as a foreigner; a violence therefore that sought to eliminate a foreign presence from home soil. Rather than focusing on the origin of a racial or ethnic difference, the crucial task, according to Mamdani, is to ask when and how Hutu was made into a native identity and Tutsi into a settler identity, and to understand how violence is the key to sustaining the relationship between them.7 It is not merely the settler's or perpetrator's worldview we need to break out of, but that of the victim as well, for they stand or fall together. (--) Failure to engage in the political means you will never be able to affect real changeRORTY prof of philosophy at Stanford 1998 Richard; ”Achieving our country” Such people find pride in American citizenship impossi ble, and vigorous participation in electoral politics pointless. They associate American patriotism with an endorsement of atrocities: the importation of African slaves, the slaughter of Native Americans, the rape of ancient forests, and the Viet nam War. Many of them think of national pride as appropri ate only for chauvinists: for the sort of American who re joices that America can still orchestrate something like the Gulf War, can still bring deadly force to bear whenever and wherever it chooses. When young intellectuals watch John Wayne war movies after reading Heidegger, Foucault, Stephenson, or Silko, they often become convinced that they live in a violent, inhuman, corrupt country. They begin to think of themselves as a saving remnant-as the happy few who have the insight to see through nationalist rhetoric to the ghastly reality of contemporary America. But this insight does not move them to formulate a legislative program, to join a political movement, or to share in a national hope. The contrast between national hope and national self -mockery and self-disgust becomes vivid when one compares novels like Snow Crash and Almanac of the Dead with socialist novels of the first half of the century-books like The Jungle, An American Tragedy, and The Grapes of Wrath. The latter were written in the belief that the tone of the Gettysburg Address was absolutely right, but that our country would have to transform itself in order to fulfill Lincoln's hopes. Transfor mation would be needed because the rise of industrial capi talism had made the individualist rhetoric of America's first century obsolete. The authors of these novels thought that this rhetoric should be replaced by one in which America is destined to become the first cooperative commonwealth, the first class less society. This America would be one in which income and wealth are equitably distributed, and in which the govern ment ensures equality of opportunity as well as individual liberty. This new, quasi-communitarian rhetoric was at the heart of the Progressive Movement and the New Deal. It set the tone for the American Left during the first six decades of the twentieth century. Walt Whitman and John Dewey, as we shall see, did a great deal to shape this rhetoric. The difference between early twentieth-century leftist in tellectuals and the majority of their contemporary counter parts is the difference between agents and spectators. In the early decades of this century, when an intellectual stepped back from his or her country's history and looked at it through skeptical eyes, the chances were that he or she was about to propose a new political initiative. Henry Adams was, of course, the great exception-the great abstainer from ·politics. But William James thought that Adams' diagnosis of the First Gilded Age as a symptom of irreversible moral and political decline was merely perverse. James's pragmatist theory of truth was in part a reaction against the sort of de tached spectators hip which Adams affected. For James, disgust with American hypocrisy and self -deception was pointless unless accompanied by an effort to give America reason to be proud of itself in the future. The kind of proto- Heideggerian cultural pessimism which Adams cultivated seemed, to James, decadent and cowardly. "Democracy," James wrote, "is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failure. Faiths and utopias are the no blest exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croaker's picture. "2 (--) Cross apply the Trump campaign here failure to only promote arguments to the most fringe creates an elimination of cooperation and complete dogma you will play yourselfMcCLEAN Prof @ The New School University 2001David, New School University, “The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope,” http://www.american-philosophy.org/archives/past_conference_programs/pc2001/Discussion%20papers/david_mcclean.htm) Our new president, possessing no towering intellect, talks of a people who share a continent, but are not a nation. He is right, of course. We are only beginning to learn to put tribal loyalties aside and to let ourselves take seriously other more salutary possibilities, though we delude ourselves into believing that we have made great progress. Perhaps so-called "compassionate conservatism," though a gimmick to win a political contest, will bear a small harvest of unintended and positive consequences, although I remain dubious about this if the task of thinking through what it might actually mean remains the chore of George W. Bush. But if the not-too-Neanderthal-Right is finally willing to meet the not-too-wacky-Left at a place of dialogue somewhere in the "middle," then that is good news, provided the Left does not miss the opportunity to rendevous. Yet, there is a problem here. Both the Cultural Left and the Cultural Right tend to be self-righteous purists. The best chance, then, is for the emergence of Rorty's new Political Left, in conjunction with a new Political Right. The new Political Left would be in the better position of the two to frame the discourse since it probably has the better intellectual hardware (it tends to be more open-minded and less dogmatic) to make a true dialogue work. They, unlike their Cultural Left peers, might find it more useful to be a little less inimical and a little more sympathetic to what the other side might, in good faith, believe is at stake. They might leave behind some of the baggage of the Cultural Left's endless ruminations (Dewey's philosophical cud chewing) about commodity fetishization, or whether the Subject has really died, or where crack babies fit into neo-capitalist hegemonies, and join the political fray by parsing and exposing the more basic idiotic claims and dogmas of witless politicians and dangerous ideologues, while at the same time finding common ground, a larger "We" perspective that includes Ronald Reagan and Angela Davis under the same tent rather than as inhabitants of separate worlds. The operative spirit should be that of fraternal disagreement, rather than self-righteous cold shoulders. Yet I am not at all convinced that anything I have described is about to happen, though this essay is written to help force the issue, if only a little bit. I am convinced that the modern Cultural Left is far from ready to actually run the risks that come with being taken seriously and held accountable for actual policy-relevant prescriptions. Why should it? It is a hell of a lot more fun and a lot more safe pondering the intricacies of high theory, patching together the world a priori (which means without any real consideration of those officers and bureaucrats I mentioned who are actually on the front lines of policy formation and regulation). However the risk in this apriorism is that both the conclusions and the criticisms will miss the mark, regardless of how great the minds that are engaged. Intellectual rigor and complexity do not make silly ideas politically salient, or less pernicious, to paraphrase Rorty. This is not to say that air-headed jingoism and conservative rants about republican virtue aren't equally silly and pernicious. But it seems to me that the new public philosopher of the Political Left will want to pick better yardsticks with which to measure herself. Is it really possible to philosophize by holding Foucault in one hand and the Code of Federal Regulation or the Congressional Record in the other? Given that whatever it has meant to be a philosopher has been under siege at various levels, I see no reason why referring to the way things are actually done in the actual world (I mean really done, not done as we might imagine) as we think through issues of public morality and social issues of justice shouldn't be considered a viable alternative to the way philosophy has proceeded in the past. Instead of replacing epistemology with hermeneutics or God knows what else as the foundation of philosophical practice, we should move social philosophers in the direction of becoming more like social and cultural auditors rather than further in the direction of mere culture critics. We might be able to recast philosophers who take-up questions of social justice in a serious way as the ones in society able to traverse not only disciplines but the distances between the towers of the academy and the bastions of bureaucracies seeking to honestly and sometimes dishonestly assess both their failings and achievements. This we can do with a special advantage over economists, social scientists and policy specialists who are apt to take the narrow view of most issues. We do have examples of such persons. John Dewey and Karl Popper come to mind as but two examples, but in neither case was there enough grasp of the actual workings of social institutions that I believe will be called for in order to properly minister to a nation in need of helpful philosophical insights in policy formation. Or it may just be that the real work will be performed by philosophically grounded and socially engaged practitioners rather than academics. People like George Soros come to mind here. (--) Theorizing about epistemology, ontology, and methodology is useless – only policy discussions will have an impact outside of this debateLepgold and Nincic 1 (Joesph, associate professor of Government at Georgetown and Miroslav professor of Poly Sci at UC-Davis, Beyond the Ivory Tower: International Relations Theory and the Issue of Policy Relevance pg. 6-7)JFS Unlike literature, pure mathematics, or formal logic, the study of inter- national relations may be valued largely for its practical implications and insights. SIR, like the major social-science disciplines, initially gained a firm foundation in academia on the assumption that it contributes to improved policy.9 It is part of what August Comte believed would constitute a new, “positive” science of society, one that would supersede the older tradition of metaphysical speculation about humanity and the social world. Progress toward this end has been incomplete as well as uneven across the social sciences. But, in virtually all of these fields, it has been driven by more than just curiosity as an end in itself. Tightening our grip on key social processes via improved understanding has always been a major incentive for new knowledge in the social sciences, especially in the study of international relations. This broad purpose covers a lot of specific ground. Policymakers want to know what range of effective choice they have, the likely international and domestic consequences of various policy decisions, and perhaps whether, in terms of more general interests and values, contemplated policy objectives are really desirable, should they be achievable. But the practical implications of international issues hardly end there. How wars start and end, the causes and implications of economic interdependence, and what leverage individ- ual states might have on trans-state problems greatly affects ordinary citizens’ physical safety, prosperity, and collective identity. Today, it is hard to think of any major public-policy issue that is not affected by a state’s or society’s relationships with other international actors. Because the United States looms so large within the international system, its citizens are sometimes unaware of the range and impact of international events and processes on their condition. It may take an experience such as the long gas lines in the 1970s or the foreign-inspired terrorist bombings in the 1990s to remind them how powerfully the outside world now impinges upon them. As Karl Deutsch observed, even the smallest states can no longer effectively isolate themselves, and even the largest ones face limits on their ability to change others’ behavior or values.11 In a broad sense, globalization means that events in many places will affect people’s investment opportu- nities, the value of their money, whether they feel that their values are safe or under attack, and perhaps whether they will be safe from attack by weap- ons of mass destruction or terrorism. These points can be illustrated by observing university undergraduates, who constitute one of the broadest categories of people who are potentially curious about IR. Unlike doctoral students, they care much less about po- litical science than about the substance of politics. What they seem to un- derstand is that the subject matter of SIR, regardless of the level of theoretical abstraction at which it is discussed, inherently has practical implications. One might argue that whatever our purpose in analyzing IR might be, we can have little confidence in our knowledge absent tightly developed theory and rigorous research. One might then infer that a concern with the practical implications of our knowledge is premature until the field of SIR is better developed on its own terms. But if one assumes that SIR inherently has significant real-world implications, one could also conclude that the balance in contemporary scholarship has veered too far from substance and too close to scholasticism. As in other fields driven by a concern with real-world developments, SIR research has been motivated by both internally- and externally-driven con- cerns. The former are conceptual, epistemological, and methodological mat- ters that scholars believe they need to confront to do their intellectual work: Which research programs are most apt to resolve the field’s core puzzles? What is the meaning of contested concepts? Which empirical evidence or methods are especially useful, convincing, or weak in this field? The latter consist of issues relevant to policy practitioners and citizens: How can people prepare to deal with an uncertain future? More specifically, how can they anticipate future international developments to which they might need to adapt, assess the likely consequences of measures to deal with that future, or at least think about such matters intelligently?12 While the best scholarly work tends to have important ramifications for both types of concerns, the academic emphasis has shifted too far toward work with little relevance out- side academia. This balance must be redressed if SIR is to resonate outside the Ivory Tower. (--) The more that leftist voices withdraw from the public and political world the more that war hawks, climate denialist, and corporate plutocrats will continue to grow and dominate - THE IMPACT IS EXTINCTIONBoggs, 97 (Carl, National University, Los Angeles, Theory and Society, “The great retreat: Decline of the public sphere in late twentieth-century America”, December, Volume 26, Number 6, http://www.springerlink.com.proxy.library.emory.edu/content/m7254768m63h16r0/fulltext.pdf) The decline of the public sphere in late twentieth-century America poses a series of great dilemmas and challenges. Many ideological currents scrutinized here – localism, metaphysics, spontaneism, post-modernism, Deep Ecology – intersect with and reinforce each other. While these currents have deep origins in popular movements of the 1960s and 1970s, they remain very much alive in the 1990s. Despite their different outlooks and trajectories, they all share one thing in common: a depoliticized expression of struggles to combat and overcome alienation. The false sense of empowerment that comes with such mesmerizing impulses is accompanied by a loss of public engagement, an erosion of citizenship and a depleted capacity of individuals in large groups to work for social change. As this ideological quagmire worsens, urgent problems that are destroying the fabric of American society will go unsolved – perhaps even unrecognized – only to fester more ominously in the future. And such problems (ecological crisis, poverty, urban decay, spread of infectious diseases, technological displacement of workers) cannot be understood outside the larger social and global context of internationalized markets, finance, and communications. Paradoxically, the widespread retreat from politics, often inspired by localist sentiment, comes at a time when agendas that ignore or sidestep these global realities will, more than ever, be reduced to impotence. In his commentary on the state of citizenship today, Wolin refers to the increasing sublimation and dilution of politics, as larger numbers of people turn away from public concerns toward private ones. By diluting the life of common involvements, we negate the very idea of politics as a source of public ideals and visions. 74 In the meantime, the fate of the world hangs in the balance. The unyielding truth is that, even as the ethos of anti-politics becomes more compelling and even fashionable in the United States, it is the vagaries of political power that will continue to decide the fate of human societies. This last point demands further elaboration. The shrinkage of politics hardly means that corporate colonization will be less of a reality, that social hierarchies will somehow disappear, or that gigantic state and military structures will lose their hold over people’s lives. Far from it: the space abdicated by a broad citizenry, well-informed and ready to participate at many levels, can in fact be filled by authoritarian and reactionary elites – an already familiar dynamic in many lesser-developed countries. The fragmentation and chaos of a Hobbesian world, not very far removed from the rampant individualism, social Darwinism, and civic violence that have been so much a part of the American landscape, could be the prelude to a powerful Leviathan designed to impose order in the face of disunity and atomized retreat. In this way the eclipse of politics might set the stage for a reassertion of politics in more virulent guise – or it might help further rationalize the existing power structure. In either case, the state would likely become what Hobbes anticipated: the embodiment of those universal, collective interests that had vanished from civil society. 75 (--) History is on our side the only way to ensure that movements achieve their ends is to have an institutional approachGrossberg, 92 (Lawrence, Morris Davis Professor of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “We Gotta Get Out of this Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture”, page 388-389) The demand for moral and ideological purity often results in the rejection of any hierarchy or organization. The question-can the master's tools be used to tear down the master's house?-ignores both the contingency of the relation between such tools and the master's power and, even more importantly, the fact that there may be no other tools available. Institutionalization is seen as a repressive impurity within the body politic rather than as a strategic and tactical, even empowering, necessity. It sometimes seems as if every progressive organization is condemned to recapitulate the same arguments and crisis, often leading to their collapse. 54 For example, Minkowitz has described a crisis in Act Up over the need for efficiency and organization, professionalization and even hierarchy,55 as if these inherently contradicted its commitment to democracy. This is particularly unfortunate since Act Up, whatever its limitations, has proven itself an effective and imaginative political strategist. The problems are obviously magnified with success, as membership, finances and activities grow. This refusal of efficient operation and the moment of organization is intimately connected with the Left's appropriation and privileging of the local (as the site of democracy and resistance). This is yet another reason why structures of alliance are inadequate, since they often assume that an effective movement can be organized and sustained without such structuring. The Left needs to recognize the necessity of institutionalization and of systems of hierarchy, without falling back into its own authoritarianism. It needs to find reasonably democratic structures of institutionalization, even if they are impure and compromised. Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 315.21 Kb. Share with your friends:
|