similar “complex” template with a headerv.web.umkc.edu/vegam/2007sdi/american...

UMKC - SDI2007 / Stanley – Walters Lab

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM K INDEX

1NC SHELL...............................................................................................................................................................................................2LINK EXTENSION...................................................................................................................................................................................6AT: PERM................................................................................................................................................................................................10LINK/IMPACT EXTENSION...............................................................................................................................................................11IMPACT EXTENSION...........................................................................................................................................................................14RACISM IMPACT..................................................................................................................................................................................18GENOCIDE IMPACT............................................................................................................................................................................19EUROCENTRISM IMPACT.................................................................................................................................................................20ALTERNATIVE SOLVENCY...............................................................................................................................................................21ALT SOLVES – HUMAN RIGHTS......................................................................................................................................................24

AT: FRAMEWORK................................................................................................................................................................................25UTILITARIANISM BAD.......................................................................................................................................................................28CONSEQUENTIALISM BAD...............................................................................................................................................................33REALISM BAD.......................................................................................................................................................................................34REALISM FAILS....................................................................................................................................................................................36ONTOLOGY FIRST...............................................................................................................................................................................37REPRESENTATIONS KEY..................................................................................................................................................................38

ANSWERS

WEST GOOD...........................................................................................................................................................................................39EUROCENTRISM GOOD.....................................................................................................................................................................45PERM SOLVENCY................................................................................................................................................................................46ALT FAILS..............................................................................................................................................................................................50CONSEQUENTIALISM GOOD...........................................................................................................................................................52REALISM INEVITABLE.......................................................................................................................................................................54REALISM GOOD...................................................................................................................................................................................56AT: ONTOLOGY FIRST........................................................................................................................................................................61AT: REPRESENTATIONS FIRST.......................................................................................................................................................62AFF FRAMEWORK...............................................................................................................................................................................63FRAMEWORK EXTENSIONS.............................................................................................................................................................64

1/65


1NC SHELLA. AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM IS THE IDEA THAT THE US IS THE “MODEL NATION” REPRESENTING THE WORLDS LAST, BEST CHANCE AT SALVATION. THIS IDEOLOGY IS ROOTED IN THE MISSION OF OUR PURITAN ANCESTORS AND OUR DESIRE TO CONTROL THE WORLD.Deborah Madsen, 1998 AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM PG. 37-38

Franklin powerfully redefined the Puritan mission: recasting the terms of success, where material prosperity assumed a prominence it had not had before, where the conditions of life for Americans were defined less in spiritual terms than earlier, where the collective salvation of the community was transformed into a form of

government that would protect the rights of all citizens. What remained was the perception that America would continue to be judged by the other nations of the world to whom America would remain a model, a guide, a measure. And also a guardian of the inalienable rights of man, so recently enshrined in the Constitution: it is in this aspect that America appears in Philip Freneau's poem, 'On Mr Paine's Rights of Man' (1795). So shall our nation, formed on Virtue's plan,Remain the guardian of the Rights of Man,A vast republic, famed through every clime,Without a king, to see the end of time. 35

Freneau thus represents an important element of the evolving mythology of American exceptionalism: America is to be not only a model nation but also will be the world's guardian, regulating the conduct of other nations, and representing the world's last and best chance at salvation.

2/65


1NC SHELLB. EXCEPTIONALISM IS A COGNITIVE MAP USED TO STRUCTURE AND ORDER THE WORLD….THE RHETORIC OF EXCEPTIONALISM IS USED AS A MASK FOR THE HISTORICAL REALITIES OF AMERICAN IMPERIALISM. ALL RESISTANCE TO THE PLAN AND ALL “OTHERS” WILL BE FORCED TO CONFORM OR BE TERMINATED.Deborah Madsen, 1998, American Exceptionalism, PG. 143-144

The conflict between progress and the cost of progress, of course, places in question the entire ideology of progress: America's inherited commitment to the concept of divine providence and the mythology of the nation's special historical mission ensured that progress

was seen as a benevolent process. But for those who did not succeed or progress? Failure is not accounted for by the mythology of American exceptionalism—conformity or elimination (as was intended for the Indians) are the only alternatives. So Cawelti concludes, America in the twentieth century has had to confront a number of profound and disturbing ambiguities about violence which stem from conflicting historical traditions

and realities. The popular nineteenth century image of America as a redeemer nation, a new peace-loving Christian democracy, innocent of the hatred and violence of the past and with a mission to bring peace, prosperity and democracy to the world was a compelling cultural self-image. Yet the vision contrasted profoundly with the reality of an inordinately high level of individual and social aggression, beginning with the revolution which created the new nation and continuing through domestic and foreign wars of moralistic conquest and the violent subjection of black people and Indians. To preserve the self-image it has been necessary to disguise the aggressive impulse of these historical realities under the mask of moral purity and social redemption through violence. Thus, there has always been an observable similarity between the pattern of justifying rhetoric used to defend American military policy and the Western drama. 18 How contemporary writers, living in the contemporary America to which Cawelti alludes, deal with the enduring mythology of American exceptionalism is the issue to which I now turn. This striking collage, described to achieve maximum dramatic effect, summarises the military versus public conflict of values that informs the Rambo movies. The peace movement, the counter-culture, Flower Power, takes on a grotesque aspect in Vietnam, as icons of an alien culture. The issue of patriotism emerges again here: underpinning the insanity of military command is an unquestioning belief in the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, a profound commitment to the inevitability of American expansion and an uncompromising vision of America as the redeemer nation committed to extending the domain of freedom and America's control over it. The theme of Manifest Destiny is underlined in Dispatches by a network of references to Indians; the Vietnamese conflict becomes a game of 'Cowboys and Indians', in one captain's words (p. 55) and, as I remarked above, the conflict between officers and grunts is

made to echo the conflict between Owen Thursday (Henry Fonda) and Kirby York (John Wayne), models of the Easterner versus the Westerner. The imposition of exceptionalist mythology, rather than its discovery, is revealed by that image in Davies's collage of 'a map of the western United States with the shape of Vietnam reversed and fitted over California ' (p. 144). Exceptionalism provides a cognitive map, a structure, by which to bring the chaos of Vietnam into some kind of pattern, order, logic. And Herr does this, using the terminology of seventeenth-century Puritan exceptionalism to describe his own confrontation with the howling wilderness. He writes of the Vietnamese jungle: 'The Puritan belief that Satan dwelt in Nature could have been born here' (p. 80); this observation formalises his earlier perception: Forget the Cong, the trees would kill you, the elephant grass grew up homicidal, the ground you were walking over possessed malignant intelligence, your whole environment was a bath. Even so, ... it was a privilege just to be able to feel afraid (p. 59).The environment that is Vietnam is, in this way, translated into the terms of American cultural mythology. The Vietnamese landscape becomes comprehensible if seen to require a kind of redemption that can only come from God's chosen people, those whose historical mission it is to save other nations from their own folly.

Exceptionalism has always offered a mythological refuge from the chaos of history and the uncertainty of life. In the process, American history has been made a site of contention where the struggle to control and dominate the terms of national destiny, on the one hand, has involved, on the other hand, a struggle for cultural survival: by appropriation, annexation, conquest and invasion, the Anglo-Saxon United States has spun the thread of exceptionalism across a continent and through four centuries of cultural development. Exceptionalism w as the legacy of the Old World for the New, but exceptionalism is now the legacy of the United States for us all.

3/65


1NC SHELLC. THE IMPOSITION OF A MORAL, INTERNATIONAL ORDER PERPETUATES WARFARE, VIOLENCE, AND OTHERIZATION. THIS IS THE ROOT OF ALL RISKS TO OUR SURVIVAL.

Ronnie Lipschutz, 2001 “(b)orders and (dis)orders: the role of moral authority in global politics” Identities, borders, orders: Rethinking International Relations Theory, ed. Matthias Albert, David Jacobson, and Yosef Lapid.

To restore its moral authority, consequently, the nation-state must redraw the borders between good and evil, mastering disorder through imposition of new (b)orders. The United States—both government and conservative social elites—are attempting to restore order at home and abroad in two ways. First, the official foreign policy of

“democratization and enlargement” represents an attempt to expand the boundaries of the “good world.” Those who follow democracy and free markets subscribe to a moral order that makes the world safe for goodness and peace (but see the critique of this idea in Mansfield and Snyder

1995). Second, a policy of disciplinary deterrence is being directed against so-called rogue states (now called “states of concern” by the U.S. government), terrorists, and others of the “bad bloc” who are said to threaten the “good world” with destruction even though they possess only a fraction of the authority, influence, and military firepower of the latter. Ordinary deterrence, whether conventional or nuclear, is aimed against any state with the physical military capabilities to threaten or

attack. Disciplinary deterrence is different. It is an act of (supra) national morality, not of national interests, of drawing lines in the sand, and not in blood. Disciplinary deterrence is, to be sure, warfare by another means, but it is violence inflicted through demonstration, through publicity, through punishment on those who do not follow the rules. It has the trappings of an effort to correct wayward parties, that is, those who fall out of line and violate the priniciples of a world moral order whose form and rules are not always so clear. It is a practice fully of the media age, relying on rapid and widespread communication and the receipt of the message by those who might think of resistance, but who are warned to think twice and induced to back down. Ideally, then, disciplinary deterrence becomes a form of self-regulation, an institutionalized practice that limits behavior simply through awareness of it. The paradox of disciplinary

deterrence is, however, that there is no one there. It is conducted against imagined enemies, with imaginary capabilities, and the worst of imagined intentions (Lipschutz 1995, 12; Lipshutz 1999b). Where these enemies might choose to issue a challenge, or why they would do so, is not at all evident. But that these enemies represent the worst of all possible moral actors is hardly questioned

4/65


1NC SHELLD. THE ALTERNATIVE TEXT IS: REJECT THE AFFIRMATIVE; DENY THE IMPERATIVE OF CONTROL AND ACCEPT THE WORLD.

VOTING NEGATIVE IS EXACTLY WHAT IS SUPPRESSED BY THE AFFIRMATIVE …THE INABILITY OF NATIONS, PUBLIC HEALTH, SECURITY, AND LIFE TO BE CONTROLLED. THIS ACT OF GIVING UP COMPLETELY THE WILL TO DOMINATION ALLOWS THE WORLD TO BE REVEALED TO YOU. FAILURE OF THE ALTERNATIVE ALLOWS NO OTHER POSSIBILITY THAN THE ULTIMATE DESTRUCTION OF THAT WHICH WE CONTROL AND DOMINATE

DEBORAH MADSEN, 1998 AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM, PG. 154-155

The character of William Slothrop, first American ancestor of the hero Tyrone Slothrop, is a dissenter, heretic, fugitive from what Pynchon calls 'the Winthrop machine'. He is the spokesman for the preterite, the unredeemed who define by opposition the class of the elect; they are 'the "second Sheep" without whom there'd be no elect'. 10 William argues for the holiness of the pigs he escorts to slaughter,

the preterite pigs that define by their mortality the election of those who may transcend death, the pigs who are 'possessed ... by trust for men, which the men kept betraying ... possessed by innocence they couldn't lose ... by faith in William as another variety of pig, at home with the Earth, sharing the same gift of life' (p. 647). This attitude of acceptance, of simply being at home in the world, represents in the narrative an alternative to the 'grim rationalization of the World' that is the means by which American imperialism spreads and perpetuates itself . Variously referred to as 'Them' or 'The Firm', these neo-

colonial interests seek to replace natural diversity and disorder with stable, rational and controllable systems of meaning. But the more 'They' try to control, the more eludes Their grasp and so, ironically, the more They become caught up in the very category of the chaotic, the uncontrollable, the worthless (the preterite) that They seek to destroy. Like the native peoples and landscape of the New World, who were faced with a grim choice between assimilation and destruction, the nations of the world are now subject to the choice inscribed in exceptionalist ideology: submission to Their control or destruction. Exceptionalism allows no other possibility. William Slothrop suggests an alternative: 'the fork in the road America never took, the singular point she jumped the wrong way from' (p. 647). William manages to escapethe control of the colonial authorities by settling in the wilderness, at a distance from Boston. There, he is free of the demands of colonial rhetoric , the mythology of the Great Migration as a divinely-appointed errand, the imperative to assert control over the New World . So the narrator asks, 'Suppose the Slothropite heresy had had the time to consolidate and prosper? Might there have been fewer crimes in the name of Jesus [representing the interests of the elect] and more mercy in the name of Judas Iscariot? It seems to Tyrone Slothrop that there might be a route back' (pp. 647-8). That quest for a way back, out of the complications of America's

historical mission and exceptionalist rhetoric, engages all the characters of Gravity's Rainbow. The same issue occupies the thoughts of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, the eponymous heroes of Pynchon's latest novel, Mason & Dixon (1997).

5/65


LINK EXTENSIONAMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM IS BASED IN PURITAN ORIGINS WHERE THE US IS THE “REDEEMER NATION” HERE TO SAVE THE WORLD FROM ITSELF

Deborah Madsen, 1998 AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM PG. 2

The concept of American exceptionalism is used frequently to describe the development of American cultural identity from Puritan origins to the present . Exceptionalism informs the foundational work of such influential theorists of American culture as Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch. I move to an account of exceptionalism in the theoretical writing of Miller and Bercovitch after describing the Tudor inheritance that was exported to Massachusetts and provided a powerful ideological bond between the Old World and the New. But before embarking on the historical dimension, an introduction to the vocabulary of

exceptionalism is needed. As will become clear, exceptionalism is above all a way of talking about American history and culture, it is a form of interpretation with its own language and logic. The key terms that will be encountered in the following pages are: 'visible sainthood', 'the saving remnant', 'elect nation' or 'redeemer nation', 'federal covenant', and 'typology' (which also has its own vocabulary).

The Idea that Americans play a special role in saving the rest of the world is a core belief at the heart of American Exceptionalism

Calibresi in 2006 Dix Professor of Constitutional Law. Boston University Law Review, 86 B.U.L. Rev. 1335 Boston University Law Review. Pg Ln

In conclusion, Americans are a uniquely moralistic people. This moralism has its roots in the Puritans' belief that New England was a land promised to them by God, that they were an elect group of believers predestined for salvation, and that their new civilization would become a light and a guide to all the nations of the earth. Remarkably, this core idea remains vibrantly alive four centuries later in the belief of many Americans that America is a special place with a special kind of people and a special role to play vis-a-vis the rest of the world. Although the Puritan vision of the shining city on a hill has been gradually shorn of its most sectarian Protestant claims over the last four hundred years, American exceptionalism remains a vital part of the ideology of what it means to be an American. One can approve or disapprove of the ideology of American exceptionalism as a normative matter, but one cannot deny that as a positive matter the ideology exists and has deep roots.

6/65


United States arrogance of power and importance toward developing nations leads to an expansion of American ExceptionalismGleijeses, Professor of American Foreign Policy, 2003 “The Rhetorica and Reality of American Foreign Policy, SAIS Johns Hopkins University, http://www.sais-jhu.edu/pubaffairs/publications/saisphere/winter03/gleijeses.html

Lack of historical memory and the manipulation of history help maintain the myth of American exceptionalism. So too does the fact that when Americans reflect on their historical record they tend to overlook the Third World. The result is that the seamiest side of U.S. foreign policy is obscured. The United States, for example, has a fair record in its relations with Canada, but certainly not with Mexico. It gave comfort to the Europeans who fought for their countries’ independence in the 19th and 20th centuries, but not to the Spanish Americans who rose against Spain in the early 19th century. After World War II, the United States lent no support to the colonial peoples of Africa and Asia as they struggled for independence, and in several cases it helped the colonial power. With important exceptions, in Europe it stood on the side of democratic governments during the Cold War; in the Third World, it embraced some of the world’s most vicious dictators and overthrew governments (including democratic governments) with a zeal that reflected not American idealism, but the arrogance of power.What is the relevance of this for the present? If Americans today—like Wilson a century ago—could look clearly at what the United States has done, instead of being swayed by rhetoric, perhaps they might begin to appreciate the fears of other countries confronted with America’s power. They might begin to understand that foreign critics may not be knaves riddled with envy. They might even begin to see the utility of international law.

But this is idealism. The reality is that the gulf between Americans’ perceptions of themselves and the world’s perception of the United States is widening and that, at this moment of immense U.S. power, this widening gulf is frightening. The consequences are unforeseeable.

7/65


“Expert” Western accounts of an ideological good done by the United States leads to a perpetuation of American Exceptionalism. Your claims that the plan is key are merely manifestations of this ideological divide between the West and the Rest.

Gleijeses, Professor of American Foreign Policy, 2003 “The Rhetorica and Reality of American Foreign Policy, SAIS Johns Hopkins University, http://www.sais-jhu.edu/pubaffairs/publications/saisphere/winter03/gleijeses.html

Foreigners take a more cynical view of U.S. intentions, but foreign criticism always has been conveniently dismissed as motivated by envy or ignorance. In order to help Americans understand the world, and particularly developing countries, the U.S. media rely on the “good native”—foreign-born experts, many of them living in this country, who explain in fluent English what a force for good the United States is and how those from their native region who hold different views are either ignorant or knaves and, always, envious. Americans’ lack of fluency in foreign languages reinforces their tendency to rely almost exclusively on the U.S. media and, therefore, on these “good natives.”Americans believe that the U.S. media is the most independent in the world, but it has consistently reflected and perpetuated the consensus. In the name of patriotism, it has fostered the myth of the City on the Hill. Take, for example, the 1954 CIA overthrow of the democratic government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. A few weeks after the operation, a CIA study, “World Comment,” indicated that the foreign press had virtually unanimously concluded that the CIA had engineered Arbenz’s downfall. This was hardly surprising. In the words of the CIA inspector general, Lyman Kirkpatrick, “The figleaf was very transparent, threadbare.”

The ideological political rhetoric of United States superiority perpetuates American Exceptionalism. What is not uniquely American is ridiculed and rejected.

Sellevold, no dateMartin, (Editorial Assistant of the Australian Rationalist) “A look of American Exceptionalism” No. 65 pg 47http://www.rationalist.com.au/65/p46-48.pdf

It seems the idea of American exceptionalism is not so much manifested in an actual difference between the US and other countries in terms of outward behaviour, but more in terms of a ‘truth’ about the mental and moral superiority of Americans being actively reiterated by American culture to the American public via movies, television and political rhetoric. To generalise, all Americans are told every day in the media that only they know how the world really works, and only they know how it should be worked. In this way, the myth is kept alive. It has been said that the US does not have an ideology, it is an ideology. One needs only to look at the ubiquitous American flag to realise that there might be some truth in this. US culture is riddled with patriotism, and too often it is not a ‘clean’ patriotism, in that pride is felt about the United States in and of itself, but rather a ‘dirty’ patriotism wherein everything that is not American is actively put down, ‘dumbified’ or ridiculed.

8/65


United States Human Rights Promotion Internationally perpetuates the myth of American Exceptionalism

Aka in 2006Phillip, Prof. of Politic Science, Chicago State University. Akron Law Review. 39 Akron L. Rev. 417 pg ln

Reference to the United States's approach to human rights has an ironic ring given "the pervasive notion" in America "that there was something un-American and communistic about human rights." 101 But the U.S. still has an approach to human rights even where, as this Article argues, that approach is incomprehensive. The traditional view in the U.S. approach to human rights holds that America recognizes and guarantees only political-civil rights to the exclusion and relegation of

socioeconomic human rights and the rights of peoples, which the U.S. does not promote. Numerous indicators attend this orientation with consequences for governmental pursuit or promotion of human rights. One was the tendency, known as

"exceptionalism," wherein the U.S. preaches support for the rule of law in international affairs that it refuses to adhere to domestically. 102 Related to "exceptionalism" is the [*434] propensity of the U.S. government not to ratify international

human rights treaties or to reluctantly ratify them many years after they have gone into force or to ratify subject to numerous "reservations, understandings, or declarations" (RUDs). The U.S. ratified the Genocide Convention only in 1987, a dubious-record thirty-six years after the treaty's adoption in 1951; the ICCPR only in 1992, as well as the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment 103 and the ICERD both in 1994. The U.S. has yet to ratify

the CEDAW, the CRC, and the ICESCR. America shares the dubious honor with Somalia as the two countries in the world that have yet to ratify the CRC. 104 The U.S. government also does not permit individual complaints under the ICCPR. 105

Appending RUDs to the U.S. Senate's consent to a treaty can greatly limit the impact of the ratified treaties on U.S. law. Unfortunately, that can be their only purpose, as one analyst laments in a special collection focusing on U.S. human rights. 106

These RUDs became so restrictive at one point that the Netherlands lodged a complaint against the U.S. government, justifiably remonstrating that the RUDs are incompatible with the basic purposes of treaties which require nations to align

their domestic law with the terms of the affected treaties. 107 Not only did the U.S. government refuse to ratify treaties, in general it displayed a disinclination to support the very international institutions America helped found after World War II

and an unwillingness to support new popular initiatives in international law

9/65

https://www.lexis.com/research/retrieve?_m=3488add0e44f0961f65c465896cf9631&docnum=2&_fmtstr=FULL&_startdoc=1&wchp=dGLzVlz-zSkAb&_md5=c3fc84e43513191cc70c10fa5cf91464&focBudTerms=&focBudSel=all#n107%23n107








AT: PERM

EACH AGE HAS ITS OWN EXCUSES – BUT THE PLAN ACTION FOR SALVATION ENTRENCHES COLONIAL POWER.

Mohammed Bedjaoui, 1979 Towards a New International Economic Order

Each age invents its own excuses and camoflauge. Thus Europe acquired colonies in the sixteenth century under the pretext of combating the infidels and evangelizing them, whereas it was in actual fact to reduce them to slavery and exploit their wealth. Later on, colonies were taken in order to bring the

inhabitants the enlightenment of civilization and dispense its benefits. From this point of view, everyone is somebody else’s ‘savage’ if he does not share the proselytizer’s ethical, political, philosophical or religious system of reference. If it is decreed that the territory concerned should be allotted to the colonial power desiring it, the native inhabitants must clearly be rendered incapable of running and ruling the country. They must therefore be prounounced unfit for its administration. As a finishing touch, if the ‘savages’ are unable to manage their public affairs unaided, it is because they are even incapable of discerning what is for their own good and their own salvation. They are reduced to the condition of minors, who will fortunately one day be educated up to the age of reason and responsibility by the colonial power.

The proposition that the West is the key guarantor of international stability perpetuates the status quo order based on colonization, racism and oppressionSiba N’Zatioula Grovogui (professor of political science at Johns Hopkins), 1996Sovereigns, Quasi-sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in International Law

The empirically dubious claim regarding the capacity of Africans and other Third World peoples to govern has provided the basis for two equally tenuous and complementary propositions. One is the intimation that Western models ultimately offer the only reasonable alternative to the current state of international affairs. In this regard, Western policymakers and policy advocates have suggested that the survival of developing nations depends on their submission to the mandates of the present hegemons. The other proposition is that Western philosophy, science and culture remain the sole guarantors of international stability and prosperity.Although lacking empirical necessity, the metaphysical dissociation of postcolonial crises from the deficiencies of decolonization has been sustained by a philosophical commitment to the status quo. It is my contention that this theoretical and ideological position conflicts with the proclaimed objectives of the present international regime: peace, stability, interdependence, multilateralism, international co-existence. In particular, Western perceptions of the self and others signified by the claims and propositions outlined here, have undermined the quest for sound solutions to two categories of post-colonial international crises. The first category consists of conflicts resulting from the breakdown of legitimacy, themselves attributable to the lack of resources essential for nation building. These domestic contestations often lead to political chaos affecting other states. The second category encompasses conflicts that originate in outside interference. They are the result of either outright subversion by hegemonic powers or destabilizing pressures by Western-dominated international institutions. In particular, the proposed authoritative solutions to these crises demand the further erosion of African (and Third World) self determination and sovereignty as a prerequisite to attaining the objectives of the international regime. This post-colonial project would afford an insurmountable advantage to the West within hierarchical institution structures. Once unquestioned, this ethically deficient post-colonial regime has increasingly come under scrutiny in the Third World, and as a result has called the very survival of the Western-inspired international order into question.

10/65


American Exceptionalism makes it psychologically impossible to implement a policy with the accountability necessary to solve for the problem of the affirmative.

Barnett, Professor of Political Science, University of MinnesotaInternational Herald Tribune, May 23, 2007

I'm disgusted with the American political discourse at the moment. We have not even begun the process of acknowledging just how much damage, pain and destruction we Americans have caused with our foreign policy. Americans, still infused with the hubris of exceptionalism, as David Rieff notes, are not psychologically capable of having this moment of honesty. And right now we cannot begin the process of accountability. Without accountability, it will be impossible for America to lead with responsibility and humility.

11/65


LINK/IMPACT EXTENSIONEXCEPTIONALIST THINKING SUCH AS THE US IS MORALLY RIGHT, MORE SKILLED, OR BEST ABLE TO ACT JUSTIFIES OUR CONTINUED INTERVENTION IN PLACES LIKE VIETNAM AND CONTINUED GENOCIDE THROUGHOUT THE GLOBE--CONDONED BY A MYTHOLOGICAL VIEW OF US FOREIGN POLICY DOMINANCEDeborah Madsen, 1998, American Exceptionalism, PG. 157-9

In an important essay , 'American Paramilitary Culture and the Reconstitution of the Vietnam War', James William Gibson questions the mythical

place of war in American culture and extends the application of exceptionalist thinking from the Manifest Destiny that informed nineteenth-century expansionist conflicts to the Vietnam War. Citing Richard Slotkin's work on the ritual violence of representations of the frontier, Gibson argues:

The Indian wars formed a fundamental American myth: to justify taking away Indian lands, first colonists and later 'American' explorers and settlers developed a national mythology in which 'American' technological and logistic superiority in warfare became culturally transmitted as signs of cultural-moral superiority. European and 'American' 'civilisation' morally deserved to defeat Indian 'savagery'. Might made right and each victory recharged the culture and justified expansion - what Slotkin calls 'regeneration through violence '. 12

Gibson extends this analysis from nineteenth-century expansionist activities to the Vietnam conflict. He claims that the '[p]rimary American mythology survived the closing of the frontier and the final subordination of the Indians by changing to incorporate new enemies at the very same time US economic and political interests wanted an overseas empire'. Here he cites the conflict with Cuba, the battle of San Juan Hill, Theodore Roosevelt and the 'Rough Riders', who were

named for the cowboys and Indians of Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show, some of whom enlisted in the First Cavalry under a special deal with Cody. 13 Hollywood was 'purged' of communism in 1947 and through the 1950s produced the Westerns and war movies that were perceived to be safe and to promote a coherent

view of American warfare: Americans fight on the morally correct side; Americans are more skilled than their opponents (so might meets right); no-one is innocent and any civilian casualties are caused by the bad guys; war does not appear dangerous and the principal heroes usually do not die; war is portrayed as a process of male bonding and a necessary rite of passage to manhood.14 The connection between Vietnam movies, Westerns and the enduring legacy of American exceptionalism is underlined by Alf Louvre and Jeffrey Walsh in their introduction to a collection of essays about the cultural rhetoric employed by film representations of the Vietnam War: Tell Me Lies About Vietnam: Cultural Battles for the Meaning of the War. They describe films like Little Big Man, The Wild Bunch, Chato's Land, Ulzana's Raid and Soldier Blue as exemplifying 'the tortured accommodations the western was ... forced to make' after Vietnam. They go on, 'Such movies reverse previous generic formulations and expectations by including scenes of massacres, rapes, mutilations and pillage carried out by white frontiersmen: hence the Indian population substitutes mythically for the Vietnamese devastated by Rolling Thunder.

America is forced to confront its own genocidal past.'15 Beyond the horror of genocide, America confronts the controlling ideology of exceptionalism which has justified these acts of violence. The conception of an exceptional historical mission is extended, in representations of Vietnam, beyond the continental United States and beyond the nationalistic grasp of Manifest Destiny to encompass foreign policy and a role in global politics as well. Once again, America is required to save the world from itself. Not, as in the seventeenth century, from misguided religious institutions, but now from corrupt political institutions that are inconsistent with the democratic capitalism that America is destined to exemplify and disseminate

12/65


IMPACT EXTENSION AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM IS A JUSTIFICATION FOR CONSTANT INTERVENTIONS THROUGHOUT THE GLOBE. PUTS US IN A STATE OF TERMINAL WAR AGAINST OTHERS.

Joseph Fallon, 2001 “the dangerous myth of American exceptionalism”, https://www.vdare.com/fallon/exceptionalism.htm, October 2001

Americans, on the other hand, profess “American exceptionalism.” They assert that the United States is unique among the countries of the world because she alone has successfully functioned under the same Constitution for more than 200 years. According to “American exceptionalism,” the government of the United States has never been overthrown, and the U.S. Constitution has never been changed—except through the

amendment process, as established by the Constitutional Convention in 1787. If ignorance is bliss, then Americans live in a terminal state of euphoria. The War Between the States (as Congress officially termed the conflict in 1928) or the “Civil War” (as the politically correct intentionally mislabel it) alone shatters the myth of

“American exceptionalism.”American exceptionalism, however, is not just a myth; it is a dangerous myth, because of its four false corollaries: First, the government of the United States is morally and politically superior to all other governments; second, the government of the United States is “indispensable” for the peace and prosperity of the world; third, other governments, as a matter of national self-interest, must conform to the policies of the government

of the United States; and fourth, if any country’s government refuses to conform, then the government of the United States is morally entitled to impose economic sanctions or launch military attacks against that country. Neoconservative “theorists” William Kristol and Robert Kagan took the belief in American exceptionalism to its logical conclusion in the Summer 1996 issue of Foreign Affairs. The objective of the government of the United States, they declared in “Towards a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” must be nothing less than “benevolent global

hegemony.” Kristol and Kagan validate the observation of Albert Camus that “the welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants.” The myth of American exceptionalism has transformed the United States from a federal republic with limited constitutional powers into an “evil empire” and a “rogue state.” From Afghanistan to Waco, from Ruby Ridge to Yugoslavia, the United States behaves increasingly as both the political equivalent of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “superman” and an embryonic version of George Orwell’s “Oceania.” Since the advent of political correctness, the U.S. government already practices the Orwellian concepts of “newspeak” and “doublethink.” Its domestic and foreign policies are slowly conforming to the official creed of Oceania—“War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength.”

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM CREATES A PSYCHOLOGICAL CLIMATE THAT LEADS TO RISKY INTERVENTIONS AND CONTINUED COLONIALISM.

Gil Merom, 1999 “israels national security and myth of exceptionalism” Political Science Quarterly, Fall 1999

More significantly, a false sense of exceptionalism can create among leaders and their followers a psychological climate that leads to the disregard of international constraints and the experience of other communities. How can a nation or its leaders, who perceive themselves and/or the situation as exceptional, draw lessons or establish a rational process of learning from the experience of others? In short, a belief in exceptionalism can lead to a primitive interpretation of international reality and to the following arguments: no existing solution can be adopted since the problems are unprecedented; only an exceptional solution is adequate; such a solution is feasible and can overcome the circumstances or historical quasi-laws, since it is devised and executed by exceptional people. When the most important dimensions of national security and state strategy are involved, notions of exceptionalism can lead to risky and badly calculated adventures. Thus, the renouncing of notions of exceptionalism, though difficult and costly, might at some point become essential. It could help to avoid setting over-ambitious goals and to develop irrational perceptions of ends-means relationships. It could prevent an ethical regression that can stem from the idea that "morally superior" people are entitled to follow their own standards of behavior.

13/65

https://www.vdare.com/fallon/exceptionalism.htm


THE BELIEF THAT WE CAN MANAGE INDIVIDUALS AND COUNTRIES ONLY IF WE INSTRUCT THEM IN THE PROPER GEOPOLITICAL EDUCATION POSITIONS HUMANITY AS MASTERS IN THE DREAM OF TOTAL CONTROL. TOTAL CONTROL IS NEVER POSSIBLE AND RESULTS ONLY IN COMMODIFICATION OF LIFE

MCWHORTER 92 (HEIDEGGER AND THE EARTH, ESSAYS IN ENVIRONMENT PHILOSOPHY, 2-7)

Some might find this unnecessarily harsh. We academicians may wish to contest the accusation. Surley, in the universities of all places, thinking is going on. But Heidegger had no respect for that or any other kind of complacency. The thinking he saw as essential is no more likely, perhaps unfortunately, to be found in universities or among philosophers than anywhere else. For the thinking he saw as essential is not the simple amassing and

digesting of facts or even the mastering of complex relationships or the producing of ever more powerful and inclusive theories. The thinking Heidegger saw as essential, the thinking his works call us to, is not a thinking that seeks to master anything, not a thinking that results from a drive to grasp and know and shape the world; it is a thinking that disciplines itself to allow the world – the earth, things – to show themselves on their own terms. Heidegger called this kind of thinking ‘reflection’. In 1936 he wrote, “Reflection is the courage to make the truth of our own presuppositions and the realm of our own goals into the things that most deserve to be called in question.” Reflection is thinking that never rests complacently in the conclusions reached yesterday; it is thinking that continues to think, that never stops with a

satisfied smile and announces; “ We can cease; we have the right answer now. On the contrary, it is thinking that loves its own life, its own occurring, that does not quickly put a stop to itself, as thinking intent on a quick solution always tries to do. Thinking today must concern itself with the earth. Wherever we turn – on newsstands, on the airwaves, and in even the most casual of conversations everywhere – we are inundated by the predictions bear themselves out in our own experience. We now live the the ugly, painful, and impoverishing consequences of decades of technological innovation and expansion without restraint, of at least a century of disastrous “ natural resource management” policies, and of more than two centuries of virtually unchecked

industrial pollution – consequences that include the fact that millions of us on any given day are suffering, many of us dying of diseases and malnutrition that are the results of humanly produced ecological devastation; the fact that thousands of species now in existence will no longer exist on this planet by the turn of the century; the fact that our plant’s climate has been altered, probably

irreversibly, by the carbon dioxide and chlorofluorcarbons we have heedlessly poured into our atmosphere; and the mind-boggling fact that it may now be within humanity’s power to destroy all life on this globe deserve to be called in question. Heidegger’s work pushes thinking to think though the assumption that underlie both our ecological vandalism and our love of scientific solution, assumptions that also ground the most basic patterns of our current ways of being human. What is most illustrative is often also what is most common Today, on all sides of ecological debate we hear, with greater and greater frequency, the word management. On one hand, business people want to manage natural resources so that there will be plenty of coal and oil and recreational facilities for future generations. These groups and factions within them debate vociferously over which management policies are the best, that is the most efficient and manageable. Radical environmentalists damn both groups and claim it is human populations growth and rising expectations that are in need of management. But wherever we look, wherever we listen, we see and hear the term management. We are living in a veritable age of management and time management, to name just a few. As we approach middle age we continue to practice these essential arts, refining and adapting our regulatory regimes as the pressures of life increase and the body begins to break down. We have become a society of managers- of our homes, careers, portfolios, estates, even of our own bodies - so is it surprising that we set ourselves up as the managers of the earth itself? And yet, as thoughtful earth-dwellers we, must ask, what does this signify? In numerous essays - in particular, the beautiful 1953 essay, “The Question

Concerning Technology” - Heidigger speaks of what he sees as the danger of dangers in this our age. This danger is a kid of forgetfulness- a forgetfulness that Heidegger thought could result nor only in nuclear disaster or environmental catastrophe, but in the loss of what makes us the kind of

beings we are, beings who can think and who can stand in thoughtful relationship to things. This forgetfulness is not a forgetting of facts and their relationships; it is a forgetfulness of something far more important and far more fundamental than that. He called it forgetfulness of ‘the mystery’. It would be easy to imagine that but by ‘the mystery’ Heidegger means some sort of entity some things, temporarily hidden or permanently ineffable. But ‘the mystery’ is not the name of some thing; it is the event of the occurring together of revealing and concealing. Every academic discipline, whether it be biology or history, anthropology or mathematics, is interested in discovery, in the revelation of new truths. Knowledge, at least as it is institutionalized in the modern world, is concerned, then, with what Heidegger would call revealing, the bringing to light, or the coming to presence of things, However, in order for any of this revealing to occur, Heidegger says, concealing must also occur. Revealing and concealing belong together. Now, what does this mean? We know that in order to pay attention to one thing, we must stop paying close attention to something else. In order to read philosophy we must stop reading cereal boxes. In order to attend the needs of students we must sacrifice some of our research time. Allowing for one thing to reveal itself means allowing for the concealing of something else. All revealing comes at the price of concomitant conceal of something else. All revealing comes at the price of concomitant concealment. But this is more than just a kind of Kantian acknowledgement of human Heidegger is not simply dressing up the obvious, that is, the fact that no individual can undergo two different experiences stimulatiously. His is not a point about

human subjectivity at all. Rather, it is a point about revealing itself. When revealing reveals itself as temporarily linear and causally ordered, for example, it cannot simultaneously reveal itself as ordered by song and unfolding in dream. Furthermore, in revealing, revealing itself is concealed in order for what is revealed to come forth. Thus, when revealing occurs concealing occurs as well. The two events are one and cannot be separated. Too often we forget. The radiance of revelation blinds us both to its own event and to the shadows that it casts so that

14/65


revealing conceals itself and its self concealing conceals itself, and we fall prey to that strange power of vision to consign to oblivion whatever cannot be seen. Even our forgetting is forgotten, and all traces of absence absent themselves from our world. The noted physicist Steven Hawking, is his book a ‘a brief history of time’, writes “The eventual goal of science is to provide a single theory that describes the whole universe.” Such a theory many people would assert, would be a systematic arrangement of all knowledge both already acquired and theoretically possible., It would be a theory to end all theories, outside of which no information, no revelation could, or would need to, occur. And the advent of such a theory would be as the shining of a light into every corner of being. Nothing would remain concealed. This dream of Hawking’s is a dream of power, in fact, it is a dream of absolute power, absolute control. It is a dream of the ultimate managerial Utopia. This, Heidegger would contend, is the dream of technological thought in the modern age. We dream of knowing, grasping everything, for then we can control, then we can manage, everything. But it is only a dream in

itself predicated, ironically enough, upon concealment, the self concealing of he mystery. We can never control the mystery, the belonging together of revealing and concealing, In order to approach the world in a matter exclusively technological, calculative, mathematical, scientifically, we must already have given up (or lost or been expelled by, or perhaps ways of being such as we are even impossible within) other approaches or modes of revealing that would unfold into knowledges of other sorts. Those other approaches or paths of thinking must already have been obliterated; those other knowledges must already concealed themselves in order for technological or scientific revelation to occur.

The danger of managerial approach to the world lies not, then, in what it knows – not in penetration into the secrets of galactic emergence or nuclear fission – but in what it forgets, what it itself conceals. It forgets that any other truths are possible, and it forgets that the belonging together of revealing with concealing is forever beyond the power of human management. We can never have, or know, it all; we can never manage everything.What is now especially dangerous about this sense of our own managerial power, born of forgetfulness is that it results in our viewing the world as mere resources to be stored or consumed. Managerial or technological thinkers, Heidegger says, view the earth, the world all things as mere Bestand, standing-reserve.All is here simply for human use. No plant, no animal, no ecosystem has a life of its own, has any significance, apart from human desire and need. Nothing, we say, other than human beings, has any intrinsic value. All things are instruments for the working out of human will. Whether we believe that God gave Man domination or simply that human might (sometimes called intelligence or rationality) in the face of ecological fragility makes us always right, we managerial, technological thinkers tend to believe that the earth is only a stockpile or a set of commodities to be managed, bought, and sold. The forest is timber; the river, a power source. Even people have become resources, human recourses, personnel to be managed, or populations to be controlled. This managerial, technological mode of revealing, Heidegger says,

is embedded in and constructive of Western culture and has been gathering strength for centuries. Now it is well on its way to extinguishing all other modes of revealing, all other ways of being human and being earth. It will take tremendous effort to think through this danger, to think past it and beyond, tremendous courage and resolve to allow thought of the mystery to come forth; thought of the inevitability, along with revealing, of concealment, of loss, of ignorance; thought of the occurring of things and their passage of events not ultimately under human control. And of course even the call to allow this thinking – couched as is so often must be in a grammatical imperative appealing to an agent – it itself is a paradox, the first that must be faced and allowed to speak to us and to shatter us as it scatters thinking in new directions, directions of which we have not yet dreamed, directions of which we may never dream.And shattered we may be, for our self-understanding is at stake; in fact, our very selves – selves engineered by the technologies of power that shaped, that are, modernity – are at stake. Any thinking that threatens the notion of human being as modernity has posited it – as rationally self-interested individual, as self-possessed bearer of rights and obligations, as active mental and moral agent – is thinking that threatens our very being, the configurations of subjective existence in our age. Those configurations of forces will resist this thinking. Their resistance will occur in many forms. However, one of the most common ways that modern calculative selfhood will attempt to reinstate itself in the face of Heidegger’s paradoxical call to think the earth is by employing a strategy that has worked so well so many times before; it will feel guilty. Those of us who are white know this strategy very well. Confronted with our racism we respond not by working to dismantle the structures that perpetrate racism but rather by feeling guilty. Our energy goes into self-rebuke, and the problems pointed out to us become so painful for us to contemplate that we keep our distance from them . Through guilt we paralyze ourselves. Thus guilt is a marvelous strategy for maintaining the white racist self. Those of us who are women have sometimes watched this strategy employed by the caring, liberal-minded men in our lives. When we have exposed sexism, pressed

our criticisms and our claims, we have seen such men – the ‘good’ men, by far the most responsive men – deflate, apologize, and ask us to forgive. But seldom have we seen honest attempts at change. Instead we have seen guilt deployed as a cry for mercy on the status quo; and when pity is not forthcoming we have seen guilt turn to rage, and we have heard men ask “Why are you punishing us?” The primary issue then becomes the need to attend to the feeling of those criticized rather than to their oppressive institutions and behaviors. Guilt thus protects the guilty. Guilt is a facet of power; it is not recording of power or a signal of oppression’s end. Guilt is one of the modern managerial self’s maneuvers of self-defense. Of course guilt does not feel that way. It feels like something unchosen, something we undergo. It feels much more like self-abuse

than self-defense. But we are shaped, informed, produced in our very selves by the same forces of history that have created calculative, technological revealing. Inevitably, whether we are confronted with the unacceptability of what is foundational for our lives, those foundations exert force to protect themselves. This exertion, which occurs as and in the midst of very real pain, is not a conscious choice; but that does not lessen – in fact it

15/65


strengthens – its power as a strategy of self-defense. Calculative, technological thinking struggles to defend and maintain itself through us as us.

American Exeptionalism creates a double standard in U.S. foreign policy. This double standard undercuts and undermines the legitimacy of effective solutions.

Koh 93Harold, Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law, Yale Law School, Stanford Law Review, 55 Stan. L. Rev. 1479

This brings me to the fourth and most problematic face of American exceptionalism: when the United States actually uses its exceptional power and wealth to promote a double standard. The most problematic case is not distinctive American rights culture, a taste for different labels, or a flying [*1486] buttress mentality, but rather, when the United States proposes that a different rule should apply to itself than applies to the rest of the world. Recent well-known examples include such diverse issues as the International Criminal Court, 23 the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, 24 executing juvenile offenders or persons with mental disabilities, 25 declining to implement orders of the International Court of Justice with regard to the death penalty, 26 or claiming a Second Amendment exclusion from a proposed global ban on the illicit transfer of small arms and light weapons. 27 In the post-9/11 environment, further examples have proliferated: America's attitudes toward the global justice system, holding Taliban detainees on Guantanamo without Geneva Convention hearings, and asserting a right to use force in preemptive self-defense, about all of which I will say more shortly.

For now, we should recognize at least four problems with double standards. The first is that, when the United States promotes double standards, it invariably ends up not on the higher rung, but on the lower rung with horrid bedfellows - for example, with such countries as Iran, Nigeria, and Saudi [*1487] Arabia, the only other countries that have not in practice either abolished or declared a moratorium upon the imposition of the death penalty on juvenile offenders. 28 This appearance of hypocrisy undercuts America's ability to pursue an affirmative human rights agenda. Worse yet, by espousing the double standard, the United States often finds itself co-opted into either condoning or defending other countries' human rights abuses, even when it previously criticized them (as has happened, for example, with the United States critique of military tribunals in Peru, Russia's war on Chechen "terrorists," or China's crackdown on Uighur Muslims). 29 Third, the perception that the United States applies one standard to the world and another to itself sharply weakens America's claim to lead globally through moral authority. This diminishes U.S. power to persuade through principle, a critical element of American "soft power." Fourth, and perhaps most important, by opposing the global rules, the United States can end up undermining the legitimacy of the rules themselves, not just modifying them to suit America's purposes. The irony, of course, is that, by doing so, the United States disempowers itself from invoking those rules, at precisely the moment when it needs those rules to serve its own national purposes.

16/65

https://www.lexis.com/research/retrieve?_m=7ae5507173fa82a9264186414e58f97c&csvc=le&cform=&_fmtstr=FULL&docnum=1&_startdoc=1&wchp=dGLzVlz-zSkAb&_md5=7630ec6738802b7424a84d4ebe3d5522#n29%23n29








THE LOGIC OF AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM REINFORCES EUROCENTRISM AND PERPETUATES RACIAL DOMINATION.Deborah Madsen, American Exceptionalism, 1998 Pg. 150-1

McMurtry's treatment of the wasted lives and disappointed hopes sacrificed to the mythology of America's exceptional national destiny is characterised by an elegiac tone, a wistfulness that mourns the loss of a vision that was heroic despite its lack of reality. But in Toni Morrison's revision of American history, her project to reinscribe race as a fundamental element determining the shape of the national destiny, she offers a damning indictment of the destructive capability of this very vision. Morrison emphasises the racial aspect of American exceptionalism: the visible saints, God's chosen people, are invariably white, untouched by the curse of Ham or any

other sign of imperfection. To be perfected, in exceptionalist terms, is to be Europeanised; to beEuropean is to be Caucasian and it is certainly not to be black. The racial aspect of exceptionalism became problematic only after the original ecclesiastical and spiritual mission of American exceptionalism was replaced with a political mission to promote and protect the institution of democracy as a model for all national governments. Even then, it was the abolitionist focus upon America's actual departure from the idealism of the national mythology that introduced race as a troubling element. In slave narratives and other abolitionist forms, slavery and racism were identified as corrupting

America's approach to the condition of national perfection; slavery proved how far fallen were God's chosen people. Toni Morrison does not rehearse these ideas over in her writing; rather, she goes beyond to expose the history that is obscured by an exclusive focus on a narrative of American history that is motivated solely by the mythology of exceptionalism. In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) she is concerned to explore the importance of the theme of race, twinned with that of colour, in the canonical texts of the American literary tradition. 4 She recontextualises American literature so that classic 'white' works are seen afresh within the historical moment of their production and reception, uncensored by exceptionalist expectations. She explains, 'Living in a racially articulated and predicated world, I could not be alone in reacting to this aspect of the American cultural and historical condition. I began to see how the literature I revered, the literature I loathed, behaved in its encounterwith racial ideology. American literature could not help being shaped by that encounter.' 5 Not only American literature but American history also is shaped by the racial encounter. As Morrison subsequently remarked about the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearing: 'as is almost always the case, the site of the exorcism of critical

national issues was situated in the miasma of black life and inscribed on the bodies of black people'.6 The relationship between racism and exceptionalism is one of these 'critical national issues'.

17/65


RACISM IMPACTRACISM WILL DESTROY US ALL – MUST REJECT ALL RACISM.

Barndt 1991 (Joseph, Dismantling Racism: The Continuing Challenge to White America, 1991, p. 155-56)

To study racism is to study walls. We have looked at barriers and fences and limitations, ghettos and prisons. The prison of racism confines us all, people of color and white people alike. It shackles the victimizer as well as the victim. The walls forcibly keep people of color and white people separate from each other; in our separate prisons we are all prevented from achieving the human potential that God intends for us. The limitations imposed on people of color by poverty, subservience, and powerlessness are cruel, inhuman, and unjust; the effects of uncontrolled

power, privilege, and greed, which are the marks of our white prison will inevitably destroy us as well. But we have also seen that the walls of racism can be dismantled. We are not condemned to an inexorable fate, but are offered the vision and the possibility of freedom. Brick by brick, stone by stone, the prison of individual, institutional, and cultural racism can be destroyed. You and I are urgently called to join the efforts of those who know it is time to tear down, once and for all, the walls

of racism. The danger of self-destruction seems to be drawing ever more near. The results of centuries of national and worldwide conquest and colonization, of military buildups and violent aggression, of overconsumption and environmental destruction may be reaching the point of no return. A small and predominantly white minority of global population

derives its power and privilege from sufferings of the vast majority of peoples of color. For the sake of the world and ourselves, we dare not allow it to continue.

18/65


GENOCIDE IMPACT

Genocide must be prevented at all costs, its corporate nature makes it morally worse than extinction

Lang 85 Berel, Prof Philosophy, The Philisophical Forum, vol. XVI, #1-2 Winter 84/85, A number of further questions arise in connection with the act of genocide, in particular with the status of its agents. That genocide entails the intended destruction of a group does not by itself imply that the destruction must itself be the act of a group; but the extent of actions required by any design for genocide is so broad as virtually

to ensure that the purpose will involve corporate decisions and effort. Admittedly, the same technological advances (in communications, for example) that make genocide as a collective action increasingly possible also increase the likelihood that an individual acting alone could initiate such actions. (When the push of a single button can produce immeasurable catastrophic effects, we discover the possibility of an order of destruction beyond genocide as well: “omnicide.”) But it is also clear that the opprobrium attending the term “genocide” comes in part from its connotation of a corporate action - as if the same act or set of acts would be a lesser fault, easier to understand or even excuse, if a single person rather than a group were responsible, with the connection of the latter (we suppose) to a public moral code and to decisions that would have had to be made or supported collectively. The fact of corporate responsibility sometimes diminish the enormity of an action, as when the difficulty of

assigning specific responsibility gives to the action a vagueness of reference similar to that of a natural or otherwise impersonal force. But the almost necessarily corporate origins of genocide seem rather to accentuate its moral enormity, multiplying the individual acts of consciousness that would have been required to produce the larger corporate act.

19/65


EUROCENTRISM IMPACT

EUROCENTRISM NATURALIZES OPPRESSION AND MAKES EXTINCTION INEVITABLE. Edgardo Lander , Professor of Social Sciences at Universidad Central de Venezuala in Caracas, 2006.[UNBECOMING MODERN: COLONIALISM, MODERNITY, COLONIAL MODERNITIES, p. 191-192, Google Book Search, JT//JDI] *—the text trails off at the end of p.191 and picks up in a new paragraph in the original!

The perspective of Eurocentric knowledge is the central aids of a discourse that not only naturalizes but renders inevitable the increasingly intense polarization between a privileged minority and the worlds’ excluded, oppressed majorities. Eurocentric knowledge also lies at the center of a predatory model of civilization that threatens to destroy the conditions that make life possible on Earth . For this reason the critique of Eurocentrism and the development/recovery of alternate knowledge perspectives cannot be interpreted as merely an esoteric intellectual or academic preoccupation, or for that matter as a topic for interesting debates within a narrow community of scholars working on epistemological problems. In reality, these issues are closely related to vital political demands, both local and global, which are linked in…The most powerful effect of the naturalization of social practices is its effectiveness in clouding power relationships underlying the hegemonic tendencies of globalization.

20/65


ALTERNATIVE SOLVENCYALT SOLVES –MUST GIVE UP THE WILL TO DOMINATE TO ALLOW ETHICS.SCOTT 90 (THE QUESTION OF ETHICS: NIETZSCHE, HEIDEGGER, FOUCAULT)

In the context of the question of ethics, Heidegger’s thought is a region of language—we can call it an ethos—which develops out of transformations

of metaphysical thinking. It overcomes the priority of subject and will be maintaining the unresolvable question of being, obliviousness to which yielded the priority of subject and will. The effect of Heidegger’s thinking takes place as one undergoes the transformations of metaphysical thinking that occur in the process of his discourse. These transformations are forecast by the transformation that takes place in Being and Time: time is rethought in an

open and free resolve regarding the continuous morality of human being and of the human world. A different discourse develops out of this rethinking; a transformation of thinking regarding origin, purpose, and being. Interest in overcoming mortality or finding something deathless for thought and hope becomes less functional. The thorough historicity of being and thought can be reconsidered without the metaphysical polarities of time and eternity, relative-absolute, or contingent being and necessary being. Heidegger’s thought is moved by questions that have been traditionally suppressed and that show the deep uncertainties, the fearful projections, the gaps and severences that constitute our tradition of thought. In the movement of the

question of being, that question, which is constitutive of the meanings and connotations of our philosophical history explicitly moves thinking. Instead of being obscured by words and thought, in Being and Time, the question of being is made manifest by words and thoughts. Two things happen, First, the language and thought that carry the question of being explicitly have themselves been formed in resolutions that override the question of being.. Language and thought are changed in their functions

and meanings in the processes by which the question of being is developed and maintained in Being and Time. Second, the language and thought in Being and Time also tend to cover the question of being with their meanings, which developed when the question of being wAs largely ignored. The simultaneous obscurity and manifestness of the question of being occur again in this language, but now

as an explicit and formative part of the language. A different way of thinking begins to come out of this obscurity and manifestness in the thought of being, and in Heidegger’s work the direction of this thinking is toward a way of thinking in which the very thought of being seems to be undergoing transformation, transmutation, and passing away. Something similar though much less developed happens in his writing regarding the question of ethics. The issue is closely associated with the question of being, but is not so clearly thematized. The question, we found, occurs in studies related to authenticity, truth, dwelling, and difference. In the present context, we can state the question in this way, how have we human beings been separated from each other in our world in such a way that our divergences of language and thought have resulted in dispute and destruction? I state the question this way in order to highlight the significance of our tradition’s experiences of ethea which we discussed in the last chapter. We are formed of cultural differences on which depend our senses of belonging, our particular senses of being. But they are also differences in the absence of a nomos that transcends an ethos or a confederation of several ethea. The question of ethics thus arises in the severance and nomadism that are constitutive of our commonalities. We have noted that some of the most cherished values of our ethos are kept in Heidegger’s language, such as affirmation of thinking, peace without destruction, and nonmanipulative enhancement of differences. But another

dimension of his thinking puts these values in question. At the center of his thoughT is the ontological difference between being and beings. It is a difference that is traditionally affirmed. The though is that being is not a being, but in Heidegger’s work this ontological difference gives in our tradition a continuous fissure in attempts to think or to apply in everyday life the essential unity or identity of being. The pervasiveness or nearness of being in our traditions means, in its difference from beings, the pervasiveness or nearness of gaping and severance, not unlike mere space or complete silence. “Dif-ference” pervades our talk, though, and practice regarding life and its commonalities. This constitutive gaping, indicated by the ontological difference between being and beings, means not only the absence of substantia, but also the ethnic discontinuous quality of our various nurturing fields of axioms, rules, and principles. If one tries to overcome the strife yielding differences among beings by appeal to the nature of being, one perpetuates those differences by setting a group of axioms, rules, and

principles over other groups that will, in turn, fight for their ways of belonging. Being will not translate into values that are universal for human beings. This a descriptive claim that ethical solutions to problems of destructive differences tend to perpetuate destructive differences by ways of thinking and acting that ignore or blindly attempt to override the inevitable fact that, in our traditions, commonalities are partial and regional. There appears to be no basis in the heart of our history for a continuing harmony provided by an essential identity pervasive for all differences. If we accept this description as accurate, we might work within an ethos that has the goal of allowing differences and developing a “dia-logos” out of the allowing processes. The inevitability of ethea and their many ways of dwelling is allowed. This inevitability is affirmed in the intention to hear, speak, and think without an overarching field of principles for establishing right or goodness. But his is far less than we have been taught to hope for, and it suggests that even our best hopes, when they look for a final nomos, carry destructive separation from the fragmented bases for human community.Heideggger’s effort to allow the priority of differences to emerge with awareness in his thinking has become possible in large measure because the priority of the difference between beings was thematized in his early work in the question of being. One result of this question is that in Heidegger’s thought the thoroughgoing fragmentation of Western culture is given thematic focus. Heidegger’s thinking itself must be seen as a fragmenting focus in which ethnic belligerence becomes optional as this thinking holds itself in question. The ontological difference of being and beings mean that a peculiar distance, a cut, a fundamental difference vis-à-vis what exists and the essential possibility for existence is in our language regarding all things, if we follow differences, ontological distances, unfathomable mysteries, and above all the relations of domination and violation we follow the destiny in our culture of the ill-considered ontological difference of being and beings. We have

seen this cut already in the structures of ethea, structures that are both of belonging and of hostile violence. As Heidegger brings to awareness the significance of this difference in our language and though, he develops a way of thinking that does not constitute one more ethic that aspires to superiority and dominance. He develops with his discourse awareness of the pervasive strife of difference in the history and structure of his own discourse. His is to be a kind of thinking, a dwelling place, that anticipates its own overcoming. By giving priority

21/65


to difference to conversation that makes difference its space for dialogue and to self-overcoming this way of thinking provides conditions that might erase the dimension of violent hostility that has constituted many types of traditional ethical thinking. The options in our traditions that most attracted Heidegger were focused on dwelling. He attempted to let the freeing horning aspect of ethos restate itself to a way that erased the belligerent stubbornness in its development. The language of Western mystics, distanced from the imposing structures of creed and worship, helped Heidegger to dislodge the dominance of the ethic subject in the history of Western experience. The possibilities of dwelling with things in the language of disclosure, not of calculation, helped still more. He found, particularly in early Greek though, the possibility for speaking and thinking ja which things are allowed to be in their own self-showing ethos, a language and thinking that give way to the clearing release of beings. These possibilities give hope that one might think without the domination of one ethos and without the consequences of that domination the privileging of self-judgment, calculation, and representation. These possibilities are to be pursued only with the greatest tentativeness. The assertiveness and hard-nosed certainty that we intuitively demand when we feel ourselves to be at our best constitute rejection and suppression of the language and thinking that begin to emerge in

Heidegger’s work. The possibility exists to appropriate the ontological difference in our heritage in such a way that differences are addressed without interest in domination. That kind of address cannot be carried out in the discursive functions, emotions, and intentions that develop with the dominations of ethic rightness and goodness. This is a quandary, because without control in an ethos of well-chosen values, we are surely doomed to nomadic violence of the worse kind. But another kind of nomadic violence on a grand scale among large, overpowering ethea appears to be inevitable in a heritage in which ethnic rightness and goodness mean that those who live in that ethos have the right to overcome others by disputation, conversion, or the imposed control of law. If the “free space of opening” could give us our thoughts and names, perhaps a world appropriate to our own deepest history and experiences might emerge, a world that appropriates as well the consequent privilege of differences in relation to founded, universal values. But how is one to begin? How is one to face this dark obscurity, the free clearing in common with other people who live according to very different values? One modest option can be found in a way of speaking together. Is it possible to converse in the

domain of free and open clearing as distinct from a region that is circumscribed by a given body of meaning and value? If we are able to let the dominance of will pass away, for example, without the intentions of asceticism or self-sacrifice, without the idea of God or the patterns of universal law or the way of Christ, but let the dominance of will pass away in the puzzling experience of things coming to presence, do words and thoughts then form that carry with them not only their own release but the “release of presence” by language and thought? Can “dif-ference” happen with alertness as people converse together so that beings are released to their differences without ethnic judgment? Will a way of being together develop in which the priority of valuing and judgment changes to a very different kind of affirmation, one that is appropriate to the granting of being in its difference of beings? Heidegger’s essay “The Conversation on a Country Path” engages in such experiment. This is a conversation among three academics who pursue the possibility of speaking and thinking without giving priority to willing or representation. They develop a slow, careful rhythm of finding words and names for nonvolitional occurrences. They work together to keep in mind primarily the word Gelassenheit ‘clearing release’, which names what they come to suspect is a dimension of speaking and thinking that can take place in ways about which they are unclear. They release themselves easily from Meister Echart’s Christian assumptions and language which gave context to Gelassenheit in his writing. They emphasize the word now by assuming that they do not know exactly what they are talking aobut when use it. The word and what it names are, however, equally available. They say the word in a variety of contexts and cultivate a waiting sense, listeningTo what the word can say in the contexts. They develop among themselves a state of mind characterized by uncertainty and waiting without despair or definite expectation. The image is one of being on a path, like wanderers. The path is already there, and they are already on it when they notice it but it is not defined by a

specific destination, as a highway or a road would have. They feel alert and in the open and the path they are on accentuates the openness around them. This openness is not like an infinite expanse, but is like a region in which the path goes its way. The region pervades and rests in its path, its countryside, its fences, and fields and buildings. It is like a language or a way of thinking that pervades whatever is said and thought. The three people use a variety of words to speak of this pervasive allowance: sheltering, abiding, resheltering, withdrawing and returning, coming to meet us, relonging, release. They find that their own releasing uncertainty about thinking and Gelassenheit,

their bearing of alert waiting and exploring, put them in touch with the dimension of clearing release in their own conversation. Their lack of prescriptiveness attunes them to the nonprescriptiveness that takes place in speaking and thinking. The more they are released from demanding or insisting though, the more a dimension of speaking and thinking emerges that is different from the language of force, drive, intention, system, or subjectivity. Their own attunement is puzzling to them. It increases their uncertainty and their alertness. It draws them into the conversation, encourages their speaking and thinking, gives them an issue for which their best prescriptions and methods are ill-suited. Their gelassene attunement returns them repeatedly in their conversations to the gelassene region of thinking and speaking, and they do not know what that means. Something abides in their conversation that they can neither will nor represent. It neither solves nor resolves. It does, however, seem to bring them together through release and to occasion increasing interaction. What the three academicians attempt to think happens among them. In the process of their conversation, they find themselves increasingly attuned to each other through or in something else for which they are trying to find fitting words. They find themselves getting closer to the nearing effect of language had thinking, and by the end of the conversation they are in sufficient accord with each other’s thoughts and sentences. They find that their ideas are formed in the situation of release, uncertainty, and the clustering of fitting words. The transformation that develops is a process of which they find themselves a part. But the transformative process in this conversation is not like that of transvaluation in Nietzsche’s discourse of “de-structuring” in Being and Time. The conflict and overcoming that characterize those processes are no longer present. This conversation is gentic in the sense that transvaluation and ce-struction have themselves been left aside. The overwhelming, undercutting transmutation and the often violent recasting of words and thought that occurred in the transformation of metaphysical thinking have been released in this interaction, and this experience of release seems to open into a dimension of thinking that was as closed to transvaluation and de-struction as it was to their progenitor, metaphysical thinking. The conversation has no element of strife to overcome. It lacks the desire to cut (or slash) through disagreement or to establish definitive word combinations. The pressure for academic success is gone. There is no need to establish dominance or to carve out an excellent achievement. There is no fear of thoughtful closeness and intimacy. Something else is taking place. Instead of being like a process of bifurcation, the time of the conversation is more like a nearing of differences. Instead of mortal care, the being of this conversation is like an open way to wait. Instead of the metaphors of seeing, those of hearing seem best suited to the released waiting. The activity of the three people, which is hard, concentrated work for them, does not reflect back on itself, but is more like the effort involved in stepping back from one’s characteristic, intuitive hold on things so that something else can take place with more freedom and attention than is otherwise the case. The three participants fin that

22/65


words come together in this process and that different thoughts form that indicate the situation of release rather than a situation of determined and well-intentioned effort. Heidegger’s way of thinking is this conversation is unmarked by the determined struggle that characterizes his own and other ways of thinking that struggle to

overcome metaphysics. In that sense, his conversation is beyond both metaphysics and its overturning. When one thinks within this conversation, the differences among ethea become occasions for dialogue without dominance or recalcitrance. The participants continually differentiate, seek no center, and find thinking to be like a shapeless clearing, like being in the midst of beings, that gives presence and occasions the demand of learning how to speak and think beyond the limits of self-interested ways of life. This modest option cannot quiet our fears of living beyond ethical thought. But it can be taken as one beginning in which our culturally dominant solution to the problem of differences among ethea has begun to be rethought without the violence bred of the dominant classical ‘solutions’ in sharp differences of value and meaning.

23/65


ALT SOLVES – HUMAN RIGHTSReplacing American Exceptionalism with Internationalism solves for global human rights abuses.


Replacing exceptionalism with application of international standards will, as indicated before, remove the possibility ever present under the current system of the scope or meaning of inalienable rights coming under attack during periods of internal and external threats in the U.S. 181 Professor Koh regretfully observed that the Bush administration chose "to place itself outside the global justice system and to pursue a hostile course" when it had more viable options to pick from. 182 But the U.S. hostility to international law and the U.N. system is an orientation predating the second President Bush that only got worse since his administration took office. One of the viable options Koh said the U.S. [*450] could have chosen is to "announce broadscale changes in the rules by which the United States had previously accepted international human rights standards." 183 But the statement is more figuratively than substantively true. As this Article shows, because the U.S. insulates itself from international human rights standards, there are few standards to form the basis for any "broad-scale changes." Although U.S. power "can be decisive in stopping human rights abuses," the U.S. affords little leadership to the international human rights movement. 184 The only change is that the habit of exemption from international standards has grown with little prospect of diminishment under President George W. Bush. 185

United States exclusive focus on political – civil rights fails. International standards focusing on socioeconomic human rights is critical to human rights protections.


The U.S. follows an incomprehensive approach to human rights that focuses exclusively on political-civil rights to the neglect and relegation of socioeconomic and collective human rights. However, the recent natural disaster in the U.S.'s gulf region and

the lack of a progress in the U.S. national government policies toward Native Americans reveal the inadequacy of a human rights approach anchored solely on political-civil rights. The hurricane disaster that ravaged New Orleans exemplified the

consequences that can attend a low-grade commitment to socioeconomic human rights. The unfavorable socioeconomic conditions of nationality groups, such as blacks, and the lack of positive result in the U.S. government's responses to American

Indians' campaign for internal self-determination, both testify to the problem that can come from lack of attention to group rights.

To increase its commitment to socioeconomic human rights as well as to the rights of peoples while correcting constitutional weaknesses in political-civil rights, made worse now by the war on terrorism, the U.S. needs to embrace international human

rights standards. The debate recently among Supreme Court justices regarding the place of international law in Supreme Court jurisprudence "reflects a broader development that is gaining momentum around the country: Human rights are

coming home." 256 Embracement of international human rights standards also has positive long-term consequences for both U.S. power [*463] and sovereignty that continuing self-insulation from those standards stands every chance of damaging. 257

U.S. pursuit of freedom will remain "unfinished" so long as America protects and promotes only political-civil rights to the exclusion of the remaining two other categories of human rights.

24/65









AT: FRAMEWORK

Counter Interpretation : Affs must defend a topical plan. They can claim advantages from political method, ethics, and the relation of the two and the negative can criticize that relationship.

Prefer our interpretation

1. Context—We are a community of academics, not policymakers2. Education—It allows for learning about political process and ethics, as well as the intersection

of the two. Education is more important than fairness, because fairness is arbitrary, but the raw amount of material isn’t.

3. Responsibility—Their interpretation allows teams to get away with making racist or sexist jokes if they are not accountable for what they said it replicates violence through language.

4. They tie identity to the nation state—we are unable to conceive of ourselves absent the federal government. A balance is key which is why our interpretation is better. 5. There is zero chance of actually influencing the government which is why our framework that allows ethics should be preferred.

25/65


And, we have a disad to their framework

Their regulation of the framework of the debate is rooted in a power regime that dictates thought.

Liftin 94 (Ozone Discourses) pg. 37-38

One should not understand this epistemological shift as a wholesale elimination of the subject, despite the language of some poststructualists. Rather, what is entailed is the decentering of the subject, engendered by a refocusing of one’s methodological lenses on the study of discursive practices rather

than agents. Just as power necessarily entails some degree of subjectivity, even if only in contingent form, so too do discursive practices. Discourses could not exist without individuals and groups promoting them, identifying with them, and even struggling with them. Discursive practices are inconceivable without discursive agents, coalitions, and knowledge brokers. Yet the overarching regulation of the political field by codes, specifically linguistic codes, “transcends the generative and critical capacities of any individual speaker or speech act” (Terdiman 1985:39). The supreme power is the power to delineate boundaries of thought—a feature of discursive practices more than of specific agents. What becomes important, then, is how certain discourses come to dominate the field and how other, more marginal counterdiscourses establish networks of resistance within particular “power/knowledges” or “regimes of truth” (Foucault 1980).

Rejecting this thought dictation opens up space in debate for agency. It is prior to their framework args.

Bleiker 00 (Popular Dissent, Human Agency, and Global Politics pg. 18-19).

Gazing beyond the boundaries of disciplinary knowledge is necessary to open up questions of traversal dissent and human agency. Academic disciplines, by virtue of what they are, discipline the production and diffusion of knowledge. They establish the rules of intellectual exchange and define the methods, techniques, and instruments that are considered proper for this purpose. Such conventions not only suggest on what ground things can be studies legitimately, but also decide what issues are worthwhile to be assessed in the first place. Thus, as soon as on addresses academic disciplines on their own terms, one has to play according to the rules of a discursive “police” which is reactivated each time one speaks. In this case, on cuts off any innovative thinking spaces that exist on the other side of this margin.

26/65


Their appeals to fairness and predictability are a form of realist censorship that destroys critical thinking in order to perpetuate violent power politicsButler, Professor at UC Berkeley, 2k4 (Judith, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence pg. XVII-XXI)

Dissent and debate depend upon the inclusion of those who maintain critical views of state policy and civic culture remaining part of a larger public discussion of the value of policies and politics . To charge those who voice critical views with treason,

terrorist-sympathizing, anti-Semitism, moral relativism, postmodernism, juvenile behavior, collaboration, anachronistic Leftism, is to seek to destroy the credibility not of the views that are held, but of the persons who hold them. It produces the climate of fear in which to voice a certain view is to risk being branded and shamed with a heinous appellation. To continue to voice one’s views under those conditions is not easy; since one must not only discount the truth of the appellation, but brave

the stigma that seizes up ftom the public domain. Dissent is quelled, in part, through threatening the speaking subject with an uninhabitable identification. Because it would be heinous to identify as treasonous, as a collaborator, one fails to speak, or one

speaks in throttled ways, in order to sidestep the terrorizing identification that threatens to take hold. This strategy for quelling dissent and limiting the reach of critical debate happens not only through a series of shaming tactics which have a certain psycho-logical terrorization as their effect, but they work as well by producing what will and will not count as a viable speaking subject and a reasonable opinion within the public domain. It is precisely because one does not want to lose one’s status as a viable speaking being that one does not say what one thinks. Under social conditions that regulate identifications and the sense of viability to this degree, censorship operates implicitly and forcefully. The line that circum scribes what is speakable and what is livable also functions as an instrument of censorship.

To decide what views will count as reasonable within the public domain, however, is to decide what will and will not count as the public sphere of debate. And if someone holds views that are not in line with the nationalist norm, that person comes to lack credibility as a speaking person, and the media is riot open to him or her (though the internet, interestingly, is). The foreclosure of critique empties the public domain of debate and democratic contestation itself, so that debate becomes the exchange of views among the like-minded, and criticism, which ought to be central to any democracy, becomes a fugitive and suspect activity.

Public policy, including foreign policy, often seeks to restrain the public sphere from being open to certain forms of debate and the circulation of media coverage. One way a hegemonic understanding of politics is achieved is through circumscribing what will and will not be admissible as part of the public sphere itself. Without disposing populations in such a way that war seems good and right and true, no war can claim popular consent, and no administration can maintain its popularity To produce what will constitute the public sphere, however, it is necessary to control the way in which people see, how they hear, what they see. The constraints are not only on content— certain images of dead bodies in Iraq, for instance, are considered unacceptable for public visual consumption but on what “can” be heard, read, seen, felt, and known. The public sphere is constituted in part by what can appear, and the regulation of the sphere of

appearance is one way to establish what will count as reality, and what will not . It is also a way of establishing whose lives can be marked as lives, and whose deaths will count as deaths. Our capacity to feel and to apprehend hangs in the balance. But so, too, does the fate of the reality of certain lives and deaths as well as the ability to think critically and publicly about the effects of war.

27/65


UTILITARIANISM BAD

UTILITY PRINCIPLE ENABLES THE FORCIBLE DESTRUCTION OF GROUPS WHO CANNOT CONTRIBUTE TO THE GREATER GOOD ANOMALY 2K5 (JONNY, NIETZSCHE'S CRITIQUE OF UTILITARIANISM, THE JOURNAL OF NIETZSCHE STUDIES 29, http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.missouristate.edu/journals/journal_of_nietzsche_studies/v029/29.1anomaly.html)

Thus Nietzsche thinks utilitarians are committed to ensuring the survival and happiness of human beings, yet they fail to grasp the unsavory consequences which that commitment may entail. In particular, utilitarians tend to ignore the fact that effective long-run utility promotion might require the forcible destruction of people who either enfeeble the gene pool or who have trouble converting resources into utility—incurable depressives, the severely handicapped, and exceptionally fastidious people all seem potential targets. Nietzsche also, however, criticizes utilitarianism by questioning the psychological possibility of the sort of disinterested altruism he thinks utilitarians endorse.

28/65


UTILITARIANISM IS THE GREATEST FORM OF MORAL EVIL – HITLER CANNOT BE CONDEMNED FOR BEING UNETHICAL BUT ONLY FOR KILLING PEOPLE – THIS RESULTS IN AN ARBITRARY FORM OF CALCULATION – THIS IS RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL HARM Treanor no date (but there are references to at least 2005) Paul http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/forget.html

Is any good done by Holocaust memory? It clearly has effects, and some people value these effects. One response to my views was that Holocaust memory at least brought justice for the surviving victims, and that it gave people a capacity to judge the present in terms of the past and an "awareness of the magnitude of modern

human cruelty". But that is the problem: much modern human cruelty is legitimised by historical reference to the Holocaust. The ethics of Holocaust memory repeatedly refer to utilitarian arguments: about sacrificing one to save many.In the Kosovo example, military intervention - driven by public knowledge of atrocities - saved some people and killed others. The utilitarian tradition in ethics has a

simple answer in such cases: calculate the suffering and benefit, and choose the option with net benefit ('utility'). The rigid utilitarian would say: "sacrifice the lives of hundreds of Serb civilians, if that is necessary to end mass killings of thousands in Kosovo". That was indeed the ethical position taken by the NATO: although its generals are not trained as moral philosophers, the organisation has a consistently utilitarian ethic. T hat is not surprising, because utilitarianism is widely accepted in western culture.

Those who refer to the Holocaust as legitimation for military action, are almost inevitably utilitarian. They argue that the victims of the Holocaust should have been rescued in 1943 or 1944, and they feel that the past failure should be compensated in the present. However at that time no rescue would have been possible, other than large-scale war against Germany. Even given knowledge of the plans to exterminate European Jews, and even given a decision by the Soviet Union and the western allies to rescue them, the only realistic option was what in fact happened: opposing land forces fight their way into Germany after massive strategic bombardment. Any such war would have killed millions of Germans - which the utilitarian ethic would find acceptable . Some people retrospectively take a utilitarian position about Holocaust victims themselves. They argue that the Allies should have bombed Auschwitz, inevitably killing many prisoners, in order to interrupt the systematic extermination.This illustrates the great evil of utilitarian ethics. The utilitarians start by opposing the Holocaust, but soon they are planning to kill prisoners in Auschwitz. Utilitarians abandon moral norms in favour of a calculation - an arbitrary form of calculation, since there are other options. The logic of utilitarianism implies that the Holocaust is not evil in itself, but subject to calculation, And so ultimately, utilitarian logic will accept the Holocaust, if that prevents 'greater harm'.Suppose a new Hitler comes to hold absolute power on earth. He arrests 12 million Jews and divides them into two groups of 6 million. He plans to exterminate both groups. However, if you will carry out the extermination of one group, he will release the other. There is no alternative decision. Would you implement that new Holocaust?If you are a utilitarian, you would. If you think that it is morally legitimate, to kill 500 innocent Serbs to save 5000 innocent Albanians, then probably you would. Obviously, 500 dead is less than 5000 dead, and obviously 6 million dead is less than 12 million dead. In the real world, Holocaust memory is certainly quoted in support of killing - no doubt of that. President Clinton explicitly quoted it in support of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. If there was no Holocaust memory, he could not have referred to it. The claim that is good to remember the Holocaust, includes the implicit qualification in spite of its use to justify force - and that is a utilitarian approach.The truth is, that the memory of the Holocaust does not encourage people to do absolute and unconditional good. It usually serves to justify harm to others. I have never seen any postwar example, where the Holocaust inspired a person to act in an unquestionably good way. I see many examples, where people do things they know are controversial - and quote the Holocaust in defence of their actions. The more extreme the actions, the more likely they are to appeal to the Holocaust.Remembering the Holocaust is like placing a live hand grenade in a room full of small children. It is no good to them in any way, and sooner or later they will play with it, and kill or injure themselves. Only an evil person would do such a thing. Those who place Holocaust memory on earth are the historians, the archivists, the museum directors, the writers, the designers of Holocaust memorials, the creators of memory websites. Politicians and philosophers demand and emphasise Holocaust memory. They bear a heavy responsibility, and it is increasing. A hypothetical United States conquest of Africa, to "implement human rights and stop genocide", would probably kill over ten million people. (That guess is based on the civilian

29/65


casualties in Iraq and Vietnam). The longer the Holocaust is remembered, the more people will suffer, the more people will die, the more injustice will be done - all with reference to that memory. The right thing to do is to terminate the memory.

30/65


Utilitarianism does not explain why the individual should behave morally; and doesn’t support the notion that an individual should die for a cause. This logic deteriorates until we view everyone as the enemy and allow constant otherization

Robert P. Murphy, (a Rowley Fellow of the Mises Institute), 2001 Is Utilitarianism Viable? http://www.mises.org/story/698

The fundamental problem with utilitarianism is this: Despite a succession of ingenious proponents, its advocates have yet to explain why the individual should behave morally. The fact that we are all better off if we all behave morally is utterly true and utterly irrelevant. (Such an argument violates the cherished Austrian precepts of marginalism and individualism.) The truly difficult moral issues resemble the familiar Prisoner’s Dilemma; regardless of everyone else’s behavior, the individual does better by exploiting others. It is true that a society suffering from widespread theft would be intolerable, even from a thief’s point of view, but any individual robbery has very little impact on the overall level of crime. Yeager does the best he can to address this problem. He explains (pp. 169–172) that work in economics and biology shows that cooperation can yield a higher lifetime utility—or evolutionary fitness—since exploiters can be punished in the future for current selfish behavior. He points out (pp. 164–167) that psychological reasons may also explain why "honesty is the best policy." These clever and interesting results mitigate the apparent conflict between egoism and altruism Nonetheless, they merely

show that the standard examples of critics need to be picked more carefully. No appeal to "tit-for-tat" strategies can evade the dilemma of someone called upon to sacrifice his life. Yeager has the honesty to acknowledge this: We can understand the general utility of a rule requiring a person, in rare extreme cases, to sacrifice his interests and even his life for others’ sake. Such a duty might be part of the terms of employment of a . . . soldier. . . . Morality can require fulfilling responsibilities even when, in exceptional extreme cases, doing so is ruinous to oneself. Holding oneself and others to the rules is in the long-run interest of everyone. Once we tolerate anyone’s

making an exception in his own favor, we subvert the purpose that the rules serve. . . . But suppose that one of these extreme cases had actually arisen and that you, a superior officer, were in radio contact with the person whose self-sacrifice you now required. How could you persuade him to perform his duty? You could hardly argue that his doing so would be in his own interest as well as in the general interest, for his own interest would be to save himself. You might appeal to his interest in being remembered as a hero rather than surviving as a coward despised by himself and others. But that argument is hardly compelling: it amounts to denying, after all, the postulated exceptional but genuine clash between self-interest and social interest.. . . If [the soldier] had a deeply ingrained moral character, he would perform his duty anyway. Furthermore, it would have been in his own interest throughout his life up to the time in question to have that sort of character, as opposed to the character of someone ready to shirk his duty whenever shirking seemed expedient. The rules calling for self-sacrifice in the exceptional case are directed to persons in the abstract who might conceivably some day find themselves in the

postulated exigent roles and situations. They are not especially directed to specific persons whose lives are already at stake (p. 186).In other words, if you pause to wonder why you should ever die for a cause, then the honest utilitarian must admit: You should not .This candid admission, in my opinion, is fatal to utilitarianism. There are all sorts of situations—i.e., not simply the soldier being asked to take a hill—where conventional morality requires an individual to forego genuine (i.e. long-run) gain. References to the benefits of a virtuous character will not convince someone who is lacking such a character in the first place. Moreover, if everyone agreed with Yeager and other utilitarians that it were foolish to sacrifice oneself in these rare instances, an element of doubt would arise in all social interactions. Although pangs of conscience might be a wonderful evolutionary byproduct, it would be in the interest of everyone to steel himself against such "irrational" feelings (while still behaving in accordance with them under normal circumstances). One’s very life might one day depend on it.It doesn’t really matter

whether my conjecture is empirically true. The decisive issue is that, if it were true—that is, if the level of conventionally moral behavior did in fact deteriorate over time, until everyone viewed each other as a potentially deadly enemy—the utilitarian would have nothing much to say. He might lament the trend, but only in the way an astronomer would lament a comet hurtling toward Earth. Throughout the process, the utilitarian could not condemn anyone’s actions as immoral.

31/65

http://www.mises.org/story/698


Utilitarianism promotes unethical depersonalization of the moral agent…destroys human agencyRobert Guay, 2005 A Refutation of Consequentialism, Metaphilosophy, Vol. 36, No. 3, April 2005

Many points of awkwardness for consequentialism, both mild andextreme, have been recognized: its apparent inability to serve as a publicmorality, the limitlessness of responsibility, the difficulty of weighingpresent good against future good, its questionable role within deliberation,that someone can create an obligation for you by wanting things orcausing trouble, that the aggregate of goods is not even as coherentlystructured as an individual’s good, and so on. The most famouscomplaint against consequentialism, however, is perhaps what has cometo be known as the ‘‘integrity’’ argument (cf. Williams 1973). As usuallyunderstood (Pettit 1997, esp. 97ff., and Scheffler 1982, 22), the argumentis that consequentialism requires persons to reflect and act in ways thatundermine their integrity, and thus promotes an unappealing andunethical depersonalization of the moral agent. Properly understood,however, the argument is that although consequentialism is nominallyneutral as to the good, 9 the demand to maximize actually favors certain goods over others in a way that makes consequentialism fall intosenselessness.

32/65


CONSEQUENTIALISM BAD

Consequentialism cannot produce an effective comprehensive moral doctrine. A moral life requires an ongoing enterprise. This also destroys human agency. Robert Guay, 2005A Refutation of Consequentialism, Metaphilosophy, Vol. 36, No. 3, April 2005

I call attention to the integrity argument here because it and many ofconsequentialism’s other troubles all share one common form. They arisefrom the combination of diachronic and synchronic elements. This origin explains why these troubles are not always apparent. The examples of our literary tradition usually present us with a fixed and narrowly circumscribedchoice situation: one gives someone something or not, with some benefit to her or not, and some loss to him or not. With all the relevant considerations fixed in place, assessment is at least possible. But in the case of the integrity argument, what constitutes the good comes to b affected by the principle of right. When what one should do is settled by what matters, and what matters is conditioned by what one should do,then both agency and the good are undermined. Faced with a decisivemoment, and a future good to look to, someone could be expected tomake the right choice, or at least be held to the right standard. But amoral life, one hopes, is an ongoing enterprise. Demands on agency,accordingly, require the standing possibility of making sense of one’slife, something that consequentialism makes impossible. In this article Ihave tried to make that case in its most general form, that of conflicting temporal horizons. A long life doubtless remains for consequentialist assessment; indeed, sometimes it does represent a demand of rationality,and sometimes this is the decisive consideration. But consequentialism as a comprehensive moral doctrine should be put to rest.11

33/65


REALISM BAD REALISM CREATES A DEATH DRIVE – A CONTINUAL SEARCH FOR VIOLENCE DER DERIAN 98 (JAMES, ON SECURITY) http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/lipschutz12.html

In these passages we can discern the ontotheological foundations of an epistemic realism, in the sense of an ethico-political imperative embedded in the nature of things. 28 The sovereign state and territoriality become the necessary effects of anarchy, contingency, disorder that are assumed to exist independent of and prior to any

rational or linguistic conception of them. In epistemic realism, the search for security through sovereignty is not a political choice but the necessary reaction to an anarchical condition: Order is man-made and good; chaos is natural and evil. Out of self-interest, men must pursue this good and constrain the evil of excessive will through an alienation of individual powers to a superior, indeed supreme, collective power. In short, the security of epistemic realism is ontological, theological and teleological: that is, metaphysical. We shall see, from Marx's and Nietzsche's

critiques, the extent to which Hobbesian security and epistemic realism rely on social constructions posing as apodictic truths for their power effects. There is not and never was a "state of nature" or a purely "self-interested man"; there is, however, clearly an abiding fear of violent and premature death that compels men to seek the security found in solidarity. The irony, perhaps even tragedy, is that by constituting the first science of security, Hobbes made a singular contribution to the eventual subversion of the metaphysical foundations of solidarity.

THERE REALISM ARGUMENTS ARE NOTHING MORE THAN A CONSERVATIVE FORM OF ETHICS DESIGNED TO PREVENT LIBRATORY CHANGEZIZEK 2K1 (SLAVOJ, “WHAT CAN LENIN TELL US ABOUT FREEDOM TODAY?” THE SYMPTOM ISSUE 1, FALL/WINTER)

Today, even the self-proclaimed post-Marxist radicals endorse the gap between ethics and politics, relegating politics to the domain of doxa, of pragmatic considerations and compromises which always and by definition fall short of the unconditional ethical demand. The notion of a politics which would not have been a series of mere pragmatic interventions, but the politics of Truth, is dismissed as "totalitarian." The breaking out of this deadlock, the reassertion of a politics of Truth today, should take the form of a return to Lenin. Why Lenin, why not simply Marx? Is the proper return not the return to origins proper? Today, "returning to Marx" is already a minor academic fashion. Which Marx do we get in these returns? On the one hand, the Cultural Studies Marx, the Marx of the postmodern sophists, of the Messianic promise; on the other hand, the Marx who foretold the dynamic of today's globalization and is as such evoked even on Wall Street. What these both Marxes have in common is the denial of politics proper; the reference to Lenin enables us to avoid these two pitfalls.

There are two features which distinguish his intervention. First, one cannot emphasize enough the fact of Lenin's externality with regard to Marx: he was not a member of Marx's "inner circle" of the initiated, he never met either Marx or Engels; moreover, he came from a land at the Eastern borders of "European civilization." (This externality is part of the standard Western racist argument against Lenin: he introduced into Marxism the Russian-Asiatic "despotic principle"; in one remove further, Russians themselves disown him, pointing towards his Tatar origins.) It is only possible to retrieve the theory's original impulse from this external position, in exactly the same way St Paul, who formulated the basic tenets of Christianity, was not part of Christ's inner circle, and Lacan accomplished his "return to Freud" using as a leverage a totally distinct theoretical tradition. (Freud was aware of this necessity, which is why he put his trust in Jung as a non-Jew, an outsider - to break out of the Jewish initiatic community. His choice was bad, because Jungian theory functioned in itself as initiatic Wisdom; it was Lacan who succeeded where Jung failed.) So, in the same way St Paul and Lacan reinscribe the original teaching into a different context (St Paul reinterprets Christ's crucifixion as his triumph; Lacan reads Freud through the mirror-stage Saussure), Lenin violently displaces Marx, tears his theory out of its original context, planting it in another historical moment, and thus effectively universalizes it.

Second, it is only through such a violent displacement that the "original" theory can be put to work, fulfilling its potential of political intervention. It is significant that the work in which Lenin's unique voice was for the first time clearly heard is What Is To Be Done? - the text which exhibits Lenin's unconditional will to intervene into the situation, not in the pragmatic sense of "adjusting the theory to the realistic claims through necessary compromises," but, on the contrary, in the sense of dispelling all opportunistic compromises, of adopting the unequivocal radical position from which

it is only possible to intervene in such a way that our intervention changes the coordinates of the situation. The contrast is here clear with regard to today's Third Way "postpolitics," which emphasizes the need to leave behind old ideological divisions and to confront new issues, armed with the necessary expert knowledge and free deliberation that takes into account concrete people's needs and demands.

34/65


REALISM IS A SEARCH FOR CONTROL AND KNOWLEDGE. THIS ARGUMENT IS AN ATTEMPT TO DISCREDIT ALTERNATIVE WAYS OF KNOWING. THE SAME LOGIC THAT JUSTIFIES MANAGING THE WORLD IS EMPLOYED IN THIS ARGUMENT. EVEN ACADEMIA MUST BE RENDERED STABLE – REJECT THE NOTION THAT REALISM IS SALVATION

CAMPBELL 98 (DAVID, WRITING SECURITY, 193-4)

Of course, my hope is that the force of this analysis will mollify if no; assuage some of these concerns. But it has to be recognized that, such a desire is limited.-but not precluded-by the nature of the agonism that exists between the logic of interpretation (which, outlined in the Introduction, underpins this analysis an the entailments of epistemic realism. It is n t a limit that is enabled by the incontmensurabiIity of paradigms or some such formulation, for this agonism is not something that an be

resolved on methodological or epistemological grounds. It is a limit commissioned by the fact that each approach instantiates a different- ethic. Epistemic realism can be considered a commitment designed to contain what Richard Bemstein has called the "Cartesian anxiety," the proposition that asserts that either we have some sort of ultimate foundation for our knowledge or we are plunged into tile void of the relative, the irrational, the arbitrary, the nihilistic. As Bernstein notes, the search for a foundation and the anxiety it inculcates is more than an effort to solve the problem of the basis for knowledge and truth: "It is the quest for some fixed point, some stable rock upon which we can secure our lives against the vicissitudes that constantly threaten us.""' However, this ethical impulse cannot be satisfied, particularly when we remind our selves (as chapter 2 noted) that the culture of modernity necessitates external guarantees but has erased the ontological preconditions for them. It was this situation, after all, that granted to fear and danger the capacity of securing that which could no longer be reasoned into existence. As a result, epistemic realism is sustainable only through the faith of its adherents believing that they are warding off a threat. In consequence, it seems that the processes that were implicated in the rise of the state are now replicated in the traditional discourses of

the relations between states. The evangelism of fear centered an death grounded the church's project of salvation; the evangelism of fear articulated in the anxiety about an unfinished and dangerous world secured the state such that security occupied the position of salvation; now the evangelism of fear enunciated by those hoping to ward of "foreign" intellectual influences works to contain the instability of their representations of the world.

THE ONLY WAY TO BREAK FREE FROM REALISM IS VOTING NEGATIVE. IT REJECTS STABILIZATION OF RISKS AND DESIRES AND ULTIMATELY ALLOWS FOR SUSTAINABLE ETHICAL STRATEGIESDER DERIAN 98 (JAMES, ON SECURITY) http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/lipschutz12.html

This is why I believe the philosophical depth of Nietzsche has more to offer than the hyperbolic flash of Baudrillard. Can we not interpret our own foreign policy in the light of Nietzsche's critique of security? As was the case with the origins of an ontotheological security, did not our debt to the Founding Fathers grow "to monstrous

dimensions" with our "sacrifices"--many noble, some not--in two World Wars? Did not our collective identity, once isolationist, neutralist and patriotic, become transfigured into a new god, that was born and fearful of a nuclear, internationalist, interventionist power? The evidence is in the reconceptualization: as distance, oceans and borders became less of a protective barrier to alien identities, and a new international economy required penetration into other worlds, national interest became too weak a semantic guide. We found a stronger one in national security , as embodied and institutionalized in the National Security Act of 1947, as protected by the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, and as reconstructed by the first, and subsequent National Security Council meetings of the second, cold war.

Nietzsche speaks a credible truth to increasingly incredible regimes. He points toward a way in which we might live with and recognize the very necessity of difference. He recognizes the need to assert heterogeneity against the homogenizing and often brutalizing forces of progress. And he eschews all utopian schemes to take us out of the "real" world for a practical strategy to celebrate, rather than exacerbate, the anxiety, insecurity and fear of a new world order where radical otherness is ubiquitous and indomitable.

35/65


REALISM FAILSRealism is a representation of technologised thinking-it will inevitably fail to respond to the needs of politics because it ignores the history of circumstances in favor of efficient administration

Michael Dillon (senior lecturer in politics and international relations at the university of Lancaster) 1996 The politics of security

‘What happens’, Gerald Bruns asks, ‘when you try to follow Heidegger up or down one of his paths of thinking, studying him, trying out his moves, finding yourself caught up in him?’ His response seems to me to be an exemplary one. One of the things that happens, he says, ‘is that you begin to appreciate why people are careful to confine themselves to forms of mental activity that have no history’. By that he meant: purely analytical programs like formal logic, philosophy of language, lin guistics, semiotics, most forms of literary criticism, perhaps most of what gets taught in school: programs you can get in and out of quickly and cleanly without the burden of having done anything more blameworthy than test, or apply, a certain method, skill, technique, or training. Precisely because it is so dangerous — and dangerous precisely because it is so intimately connected with history — there is often an almost desperate, and even violent, insistence that politics, too, both as a practice and as an object of study, be reduced in this way. In short, technologised. So-called political ‘realists’ and ‘idealists’ alike, for example, and for similar reasons, would reduce the political to the formulaic so as to settle its hash once and for all. I take their responses, however, to be symptomatic of a persistent and ancient desire to escape the sheer difficulty as well as the historicality and singularity of the political. One cannot take up the question of the political, then, without taking up the question of history. That means that the ‘scientific’, purely analytic programmatic, approach to politics is not only out, however, it also means that it is construed as another expression of the technologising of the thought and life of politics, of which politics itself threatens to become the instrument. Just as the political, I will argue, arises neither from an Augustinian nor a Hobbesian lack (the original fall from God’s grace, or the radical insecurity of the state of nature) but from the ebullient free excess of existence itself, so the hermeneutical phenomenological study of politics that I would advocate would similarly not be a science out of a lack either, since it also springs from the superabundance of the very event of (a potentially political) existence as well. <P75-76>

Realism arguments have no weight- the nuclear age proves the inadequacies of realist political theory, as realism has culminated in the possibility of human species extinction


There is more than an academic interest at stake, therefore, in this modern conjunction between the philosophical and the political. How we think and what we do, what we think and how we are doing, condition one another. There is clearly more than a coincidence also in relying upon post-Nietzschean thought to argue for that reappraisal of both which requires a recovery of the question of the political. For between Hegel and Heidegger metaphysics exposed itself to its own deconstructive impulses. After Marx ‘one finds Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Freud, and Nietzsche turning philosophy upon itself, thereby unmasking its own taboos and twisted roots’; realising and exhausting its potential, according to Heidegger, in the advent of the epoch of technology. The same period also witnessed the exhaustion of the European State system’s modern metaphysical resolution of the question of the political — its profoundly ambiguous and deeply problematic inauguration as both a State of emergency and a certain kind of democratic project — through the very globalisation of the language, forms and practices of the politics of security upon which it was based. The advent of the globalised industrial nuclear age exhibits not only the hollowness of that system’s foundational promises to secure order, identity and freedom — hence the reason why the disciplines which promise to tell the truth about the operation of its orders and identities appear to be so peculiarly limited and unreal in their vaunted realistic representation of reality — but also, in the gulf that exists between what its (inter)national political prospectus offers and what its (inter)national politics provides; the exhaustion of its political imagination. For this was a period, in which World War One was critical, when that (inter)national politics of security finally realised the full potential of the self-immolative dynamic pre-figured in its very inception; the real prospect of human species extinction. <P 26-27>

36/65


ONTOLOGY FIRSTEvery aspect of politics contains an ontology-the way that we live is inherently influenced by the way that we think. only by examining the ontology of metaphysics can new ways of political being emerge


The radical hermeneutical phenomenology which issues from Heidegger’s thinking and questioning shows how we understand as we do because we exist as we do. Understanding as we do in the way that we exist, we came, in the tradition of the ‘West’, to think metaphysically. Metaphysics asked about the truth of Being, of what is, but answered with an account of the truth of the Being of beings, that is to say of things we find present to hand. Truth was therefore thought to be lodged in the truthfulness of the assertion about the Being of beings. In the absence of God it came to be founded in the subject making the assertion. The result was the dominance of the representative—calculative thought of modern subjectivity in which truth is a measure of the adequation of the correspondence between the thinking subject’s assertions and entities themselves. (Such that: ‘For representational thinking everything comes to be a being’. Even Being.) Hence, the absolute centrality of the subject in the modern age. For a flakey subject — riven with Otherness and bearing difference within itself — becomes an absolute abhorrence to truth itself when truth and knowledge demand a secure and reliable subject for their certain foundation: ‘But not every way of being a self is subjectivity. ‘ Heidegger’s entire corpus of thinking is tenaciously devoted to uncovering metaphysics’ missed ontology not only in the various projects (‘ontology’, epistemology, phenomenology) — and the core concept (correctness), method (logic) and epistemological ambition (theory, or the report of the sight of the truth)— of Western thought, but also in the very life of the ‘West’ itself (technicity). Show Heidegger a thinker, a thought, a practice or a way of life and he will go after the ontology — ontic (metaphysical) as well as fundamental — sequestered there. In this respect, his lecture course, Basic Questions of Philosophy. Selected ‘Problems’ of ‘Logic’, is a virtual text book on the way he habitually proceeds. In every epistemology, too, there is an ontology. Because we are as we understand and think, in our modern political practices as well as in our ‘political science’ — or knowledge of politics where a well-founded modesty about scientific pretensions is expressed — there therefore lurks the ontology of metaphysics. Heidegger’s deconstruction of metaphysics consequently leads to the following chain of thought, in which we must also never lose sight of the mutually disciosive two fold duality of Being and beings. Thrown, we exist. Existing, we project and understand. Existing, understanding and projecting as thrown we are obliged to think. Thinking we think Being. Thinking Being, we have not only come to think (‘ontologically’) the Being of beings, but also the Being of Being as an, albeit Supreme, being (‘onto-theo logy’). Thrown into existing as understanding and thinking we inhabit worlds. The world we inhabit expresses the ways in which we have come to understand and think. The end of the way that we think — metaphysics — is technology. Technology is the mounting oblivion of the aletheic truth of the Being of human being, and the radical impoverishment of human being’s capacity to create and live in a world, a condition globalised by the ballistic power of technology’s trajectory. We, therefore, think the political in the way that we do because of the way that we think. Thinking the political in the way that we do because of the way that we think, the political too has become technologised such that politics threatens to become identical with technicity. The political problematic of the modern age, as Heidegger might have expressed it, is the globalisation of technology as politics and the globalisation of politics as technology.<P84-86>

37/65


REPRESENTATIONS KEYRepresentations are key – American Exceptionalism is maintained or debunked through the representations surrounding political actors. Only by challenging the representations implied by this rhetoric can we move away from American Exceptionalism

Shafer 99Byron, Nuffield College, Oxford University, Oxford, Annual Review of Political Scientist, Vol. 2: 445-463, http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev.polisci.2.1.445?cookieSet=1

Within the realm of practical politics, exceptionalism is real or not, true or false, depending on its motive impact. If political actors believe in it or, indeed, if they are agnostic but can nevertheless use the symbolism of difference—to move public opinion, to influence public policy, or to shape the policy process—then exceptionalism is a genuine and confirmedly empirical phenomenon. The accuracy or inaccuracy, the truth or falsity, of the propositions allegedly constituting this exceptionalism are not important. It is the use of the theme, and its successful motive impact, that matters. Much of the remainder of the exceptionalist debate is, alas, definitional. Proponents make assertions that cannot be falsified. Opponents focus on indicators that cannot produce qualitative difference. But the realm of practical politics is one with specifiable empirical referents, where exceptionalism could be falsified or confirmed.

38/65


WEST GOODBLAMING THE WEST FOR IMPERIALISM MAKES ALL MORALITY TEMPORARY AND LEGITIMATES THE WORST FORMS OF POLITICAL OPPRESSION

Pascal Bruckner, 1986 Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt, pg. 20-1

Imperialism has transformed the planet into a gigantic world market, in which each part complements the other. The battle, therefore, must be waged everywhere. Others are fighting for us at the other end of the earth; here we must fight for them. There is a strict clockwork that governs all these struggles, and whatever helps the liberation of mankind in Vientian, Peking, or Bamako reinforces liberty in Paris. Every time the white man is kicked out, driven away, or eliminated, humanity regains a little of its independence. Wherever the native is oppressed, our dignity is reduced and wherever he raises his head, we regain a reason for living. Even in his smallest gesutures, everyone must demonstrate in favor of the side he has chosen. Refusal to take sides is still the choice of the stronger, and is tantamount to complicity with evil. This political viewpoint makes all morality termporary and even irrelevant in the face of the Promethean confrontation that is tearing the earth into two factions. Being European or being supported by a European power is enough to make one suspect. The bloody messes in banana republics, and butchery of political opposition and the dictatorial lunacy by their petty chieftains are all brushed aside. Such trifles will not restrain the progress of the these peoples toward socialism. What seems criminal in Cuba, Angola, and Guinea has the real purpose of washing away the far greater crime of colonialism. Against every kind of oral reservation, then, there is a guilty conscience that can paralyze any thought of criticism. For this generation, which saw colonialism in its worst moments and for which it has a deep disgust, guilt lives on long after the circumstances that gave rise to it. And the severity of the judge is in inverse proportion to the distance of the country in question. The farther away the country is from European shores, the greater is its claim to total freedom from condemnation. The slightest scuffle with the police in the streets of Paris, Berlin, or Milan proves the monstrous nature of the capitalist system. Every year, some magazine or pundit predicts the return of fascism in France, Germany, or Italy. In contrast, hangings by the dozen in some Near Eastern country, the almost systematic use of torture beyond the Mediterranean, and “reeducation camps” in socialist countries are looked upon either as negligible or as ideologically justified. South of the Equator, assassination is a humanitarian act and repression a historical necessity. The remorseless and self-righteous critic who endlessly denounces the deceptions of parliamentary democracy is suddenly rapt with admiration before the atrocities committed in the name of the Koran, the Vedas, the Great Helmsman, or negritude. Because perfect democracy does not exist anywhere, the imperfect democracies of the West can be damned and the worst forms of political power

39/65


WEST GOODTHE NEGATIVE IS USING ACCUSATIONS OF IMPERIALISM TO CREATE VICTIMS AND SERVE THEIR OWN IDEOLOGICAL DESIRES. THEY ATTEMPT TO MAKE THE WEST RESPONSIBLE FOR THE PROBLEMS OF THE AFRICAN PEOPLE. THEIR CRITICISM DEMONSTRATES THAT THEY ARE PROPHETS OF GUILTY CONSCIENCE. THIS WILL ULTIMATELY BOTH GLORIFY THE WEST AND LEAD TO ITS DESTRUCTION.William Beer, 1996 (introduction) Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt

The Tears of the White Man is a critique of “Third-Worldism”, a set of attitudes toward underdeveloped countries and the West that has flourished, mainly among left-wing intellectuals and journalists, over the last 20 years. It is based on a conviction that the countries of the Third World—countries as different as Costa Rica and Libya, and the Phillipines and Cambodia—have long been victims of the West. They have had their resources stolen by imperial colonialists or multinational corporations, their cultures destroyed by commercialism and exploitation, their pastoral sensitivity toward nature corrupted by industry and pollution. But Bruckner’s thesis is that it is the passionate Third-Worldist who is most often exploiting poor nations. Starving people are carefully chosen or ignored, depending on whether they can be portrayed to suit specific political programs. Bruckner, himself active in a humanitarian relief organization, argues that the much-touted compassion of most Third-Worldists is really a form of contempt, because they use the suffering of others for their own ideological purposes. As soon as these miserable folks have served their purpose, or begin to act in ways that contradict Third-Worldist fantasies, they are promptly forgotten

40/65


WEST GOODTHEY ATTEMPT TO MAKE THE WEST RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL OPPRESSION. THEY ARE PROPHETS OF A GUILTY CONSCIENCE THIS ULTIMATELY WILL BOTH GLORIFY THE WEST AND LEAD TO ITS DESTRUCTION.Pascal Bruckner 1986 Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt.

The west is the great and only guilty party to all the evils of the world. In sum, we are inhuman and criminal because we do not want others to exist, and the causes of famine lie before us cannot be proven. Guilt is an easy way of bridging distinctions and doing away with the intermediaries, because it draws a pitiless red line between their poverty and our sated appetites. Remorse comes before wrongdoing, because our error is not in sinning but in existing. The mania of suspicion makes us guilty before the fact for the disintegration of Ghanaian society, for empty stores in Angola, for the rising prices in Central America, for clouds of locusts in black in black Africa, for hurricanes in the Caribbean, tribal warfare in New Guinea, and so on. Every study, every book on the Third World, whatever its subject, says the same thing. The guilt of the accused is confirmed, and more evidence is accumulated against him. They are like a storekeeper’s books, where the long list of the evils of the Old World is neatly spelled out, while the merits of the southern hemisphere stand out from the details of an implicit frame of reference that is never questioned. They are an exercise in malediction, which is supposed to make our horror grow as it convinces us all-salaried workers, professors, lawyers, laborers, truck drivers-of our fundamental thievery. The reader himself is a conventional scoundrel…

Obsessive repetition takes the place of a concern for precision, because we have to make our own breast-beating offering for the suffering of the world. Duty, that nameless and insatiable goddess, conducts a Kafkaesque trial against Europeans. This is the bad faith of bad consciences-unable to give solace for one scourge or another in any real way, we accuse ourselves of being the cause. The old relationship between colonizer and colonized is endlessly atoned for, and we search for aftereffects of imperialism everywhere. We can thus mortify our flesh with delight because we know how rotten we are. The conclusion is that our very existence is an insult to the human race. We have only one duty-to wipe ourselves off the face of the earth. The future of the west is self-destruction.

41/65


WEST GOOD

THE CRITICISM ENGAGES IN AN OVERARCHING CRITICISM OF THE WEST WHICH IS NOT BASED IN FACT. US INTERVENTIONS AND PROGRESS HAVE BEEN GOOD FOR COUNTRIES, THE MORE LIKE THE WEST COUNTRIES BECOME THEY MORE LIKELY THEY ARE TO BE SUCCESSFUL.

Bruce S. Thornton (writes for The New Individualist), 2006 The Indictment of the West http://victorhanson.com/articles/thornton021006.html

The constant criticism of the West and its values is not based on fact, and the claim of Western evil founders on the reality that no poor Westerners migrate to the non-West, whereas millions of non-Westerners, including Muslims, risk their lives daily to try to reach a supposedly oppressive culture. As Pascal Bruckner puts it in The Temptation of Innocence, “The tepid hell of our countries that are ‘infected with well-being’ is a heavenly dream for millions.”[xxxii]

Am I then claiming that Western culture is perfect? Of course not. But the evils of the West are evils known to humans everywhere at all times. The peculiar cultural advantages of the West, science and technology, have merely magnified their effects. But on the other hand, the goods of the West have been its invention alone: secular rationalism, rather than tradition or superstition, is the source of knowledge; individuals are valuable as individuals and possess inalienable rights regardless of their clan or sect or tribe; and all people are worthy of freedom and autonomy and the political power to shape their own lives according to their vision of the good. And that same science and technology have magnified the effects of these goods, too — which is why the average Westerner today lives a life freer and more prosperous than 99% of the humans who have ever occupied this planet.[xxxiii] To be sure, some people use that freedom and prosperity to live merely for appetite and pleasure, and no one can argue that the jihadist indictment of our widespread cultural vulgarity and spiritual debasement is not based on reality. But giving people freedom does not guarantee that they will use that freedom wisely or well. It just means that they are responsible for their choices. After all, we are all free to be as spiritual as we wish, and to reject the vulgarity and hedonism so widespread in Western culture — if thy television offend thee, pluck it out of thy house. Any alternative to leaving it up to individuals to choose how to use their freedom ultimately leads to control by some elite, and history shows us that this is a recipe for tyranny and oppression, whether that elite comprises the Communist Party or Islamist mullahs. For as the Roman poet Juvenal put it, “Who will guard the guardians?”

Whatever the basis of their obsessive criticism, then, Occidentalists — whether Western or Islamist — cannot attribute it to the facts. An honest appraisal of human existence in times past and outside the West today shows that the more Western the world becomes, the better off the average human being will be.

42/65

http://victorhanson.com/articles/thornton021006.html

http://www.objectivistcenter.org/navigator/index.asp


WEST GOODBLAMING THE WEST LEADS TO ANTI-AMERICANISM AND A VACUUM OF MORAL AUTHORITYShelby Steele Wall Street Journal May 2 2006 Western Guilt

The collapse of white supremacy–and the resulting white guilt–introduced a new mechanism of power into the world: stigmatization with the evil of the Western past. And this stigmatization is power because it affects the terms of legitimacy for Western nations and for their actions in the world. In Iraq, America is fighting as much for the legitimacy of its war effort as for victory in war. In fact, legitimacy may be the more important goal. If a military victory makes us look like an imperialist nation bent on occupying and raping the resources of a poor brown nation, then victory would mean less because it would have no legitimacy. Europe would scorn. Conversely, if America suffered a military loss in Iraq but in so doing dispelled the imperialist stigma, the loss would be seen as a necessary sacrifice made to restore our nation’s legitimacy. Europe’s halls of internationalism would suddenly open to us.Because dissociation from the racist and imperialist stigma is so tied to legitimacy in this age of white guilt, America’s act of going to war can have legitimacy only if it seems to be an act of social work–something that uplifts and transforms the poor brown nation (thus dissociating us from the white exploitations of old). So our war effort in Iraq is shrouded in a new language of social work in which democracy is cast as an instrument of social transformation bringing new institutions, new relations between men and women, new ideas of individual autonomy, new and more open forms of education, new ways of overcoming poverty–war as the Great Society.This does not mean that President Bush is insincere in his desire to bring democracy to Iraq, nor is it to say that democracy won’t ultimately be socially transformative in Iraq. It’s just that today the United States cannot go to war in the Third World simply to defeat a dangerous enemy.White guilt makes our Third World enemies into colored victims, people whose problems–even the tyrannies they live under–were created by the historical disruptions and injustices of the white West. We must “understand” and pity our enemy even as we fight him. And, though Islamic extremism is one of the most pernicious forms of evil opportunism that has ever existed, we have felt compelled to fight it with an almost managerial minimalism that shows us to be beyond the passions of war–and thus well dissociated from the avariciousness of the white supremacist past.

Anti-Americanism, whether in Europe or on the American left, works by the mechanism of white guilt. It stigmatizes America with all the imperialistic and racist ugliness of the white Western past so that America becomes a kind of straw man, a construct of Western sin. (The Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons were the focus of such stigmatization

campaigns.) Once the stigma is in place, one need only be anti-American in order to be “good,” in order to have an automatic moral legitimacy and power in relation to America. (People as seemingly desperate as President Jacques Chirac and the Rev. Al Sharpton are devoted pursuers of the moral high ground to be had in anti-Americanism.) This formula is the most dependable source of power for today’s international left. Virtue and power by mere anti-Americanism. And it is all the more appealing since, unlike real virtues, it requires no sacrifice or effort–only outrage at every slight echo of the imperialist past.

Today words like “power” and “victory” are so stigmatized with Western sin that, in many quarters, it is politically incorrect even to utter them. For the West, “might” can never be right. And victory, when won by the West against a Third World enemy, is always oppression. But, in reality, military victory is also the victory of one idea and the defeat of another. Only American victory in Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic extremism. But in today’s atmosphere of Western contrition, it is impolitic to say so.

America and the broader West are now going through a rather tender era, a time when Western societies have very little defense against the moral accusations that come from their own left wings and from those vast stretches of nonwhite humanity that were once so disregarded.Europeans are utterly confounded by the swelling Muslim populations in their midst. America has run from its own mounting immigration problem for decades, and

even today, after finally taking up the issue, our government seems entirely flummoxed. White guilt is a vacuum of moral authority visited on the present by the shames of the past. In the abstract it seems a slight thing, almost irrelevant, an unconvincing proposition. Yet a society as enormously powerful as America lacks the authority to ask its most brilliant, wealthy and superbly educated minority students to compete freely for college admission with poor whites who lack all these things. Just can’t do it.

43/65

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008318


WEST GOODCRITICISM OF WESTERN VALUES LEADS TO MURDER, DOMINATION, AND OPPRESSION Ketels, 1996 (“the annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science”) American intellectuals bought into the utopian promises of communism, too. In spite of evidence that [*67] nowhere on the globe had communism been established without the most hideous record of persecution and murder, and ruthless suppression of human and civil rights, intellectuals rationalized to protect the purity of Marxist ideals, which have not yet been tried. Disillusion came too slowly. The influence of the French intellectuals took hold in the United States, and with it came the undermining of linguistic content and destructive assaults on values as inventions of bourgeois ideology. It still prevails, despite growing identification of its covert hostility to human rights and democratic institutions. From the safety of those institutions, theorists continue to argue the impotence of language, while its raw power, exploding from the propaganda arsenals of political opportunists, foments violence across the world and seeks sanctions for it afterward. While we quibble about the efficacy of speech, as if silence or nonverbal signifiers were preferable, murderers recast familiar words to erase geography, rewrite history, and disguise human exterminations. Distracted by lexemes, paroxytones, and phenomenological subjectivisms, we mindlessly neglect the connection between language and power. It really does matter that intellectuals undermine confidence in words. In the real world, words are means to power and powerful catalysts to action. When we are convinced that we cannot hold the word to account or take it at face value, we are muddled about what is going on in our own lives as well as in the larger human community. Yes, we must qualify inferences by all the variables we can bring to bear. But without a sense that language can be decipherable, we will not know what we know or be able to pass it on. The relation of language to "the murderous falsehoods it has been made to articulate and hallow in certain totalitarian regimes and to the great load of vulgarity, imprecision and greed it is charged with in a mass-consumer democracy" are problems Steiner wrestles with in Language and Silence . They are more disturbing now than when he raised them at the end of World War II. His consciousness was possessed "by the barbarism in modern Europe"; his anguish was deepened because the unanswered cries of the murdered "sounded in earshot of universities." n90 Is our consciousness less acute, our anguish immunized?

The United States is the only country often willing and able to prevent horrible atrocities History proves that when the U.S. leads the world will follow. When the U.S. does not act, nothing happens.

Koh 93 Harold, Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law, Yale Law School, Stanford Law Review, 55 Stan. L. Rev. 1479

Having focused until now on the negative faces of American exceptionalism, I must address a fifth, much-overlooked dimension in which the United States is genuinely exceptional in international affairs. Looking only at the half-empty part of the glass, I would argue, obscures the most important respect in which the United States has been genuinely exceptional, with regard to international affairs, international law, and promotion of human rights: namely, in its exceptional global leadership and activism. To this day, the United States remains the only superpower capable, and at times willing, to commit real resources and make real sacrifices to build, sustain, and drive an international system committed to international law, democracy, and the promotion of human rights. Experience teaches that when the United States leads on human rights, from Nuremberg to Kosovo, other countries follow. [*1488] When the United States does not lead, often nothing happens, or worse yet, as in Rwanda and Bosnia, disasters occur because the United State does not get involved. 31

44/65



EUROCENTRISM GOOD

EUROCENTRISM KEY TO PRESERVE PEACE.

J.R. Nyquist , author of “Origins of the Fourth World War: And the Coming Wars of Mass Destruction”, contributor to Financial Sense. “Going Nowhere,”

www.financialsense.com. 2006.

Looking back to the squalor of the 10th century, to the near-universal poverty of ancient Greece and Rome, it is astounding to see the prosperity of the modern world. In this context, the poverty of Africa or Latin America is hardly shocking. By historical standards, poverty is normal. Wealth and freedom are abnormal – the unique achievement of certain European peoples. But West European culture is under assault. The culture of freedom is giving way to a despotic multiculturalism. The desire for universal equality promises to put an end to freedom. With our own hands we destroy our civilization’s root identity. To preserve a delicate and impossible peace between the tribes and sects of mankind, we embrace a series of fabrications. All tribes, we say, can live together in peace. All sects can live together in harmony. What has happened to previous generations won’t happen to us. Economic decline and destructive war cannot happen here. And so, realistic policies are shelved. Wishful thinking takes the helm, and sails off the edge of Thomas Friedman’s flat earth .

45/65

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374292884/sr=1-1/qid=1146229957/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-5060107-1730549?_encoding=UTF8&s=books/financialsenseon

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374292884/sr=1-1/qid=1146229957/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-5060107-1730549?_encoding=UTF8&s=books/financialsenseon

http://www.financialsense.com/


PERM SOLVENCYA BLANKET REJECTION OF HEGEMONIC IDEALS ALSO REJECTS THE ONLY HOPE FOR ENDING OPPRESSION. WE SHOULD COMBINE WESTERN ENLIGHTENMENT WITH THE ALTERNATIVE. Michael Thompson, 2003 “Iraq, Hegemony, and the Question of the American Empire” accessed online http://www.logosjournal.com/thompson_iraq.htm

Hegemony in international terms without some kind of competing force, such as the Soviets, can clearly lead to the abuse of power and a unilateralist flaunting of international institutions that do not serve at the imperium's whim. But this should not mean that hegemony itself is a negative concept. Although empire is something rightfully reviled, hegemony may not be as bad as everyone thinks. We need to consider what is progressive and transformative in the ideas and values of the western republican and liberal traditions. We need to advocate not an anti-hegemonic stance in form, but an anti-hegemonic and anti-imperialist stance in content, one that advocates the particular interests of capital of the market in more broad terms rather than the universal political interests of others. Rather than choose between western hegemony on the one hand and political and cultural relativism on the other, we need to approach this problem with an eye toward cosmopolitanism and what the political theorist Stephen Eric Bronner has called "planetary life." Simple resistance to American "imperial" tendencies is no longer enough for a responsible, critical and rational left. Not only does it smack of tiers-mondisme but at the same time it rejects the realities of globalization which are inexorable and require a more sophisticated political response. The real question I am putting forth is simply this: is it the case that hegemony is in itself inherently bad? Or, is it possible to consider that, because it can, at least in theory, consist of the diffusion of western political ideas, values and institutions, it could be used as a progressive force in transforming those nations and regions that have been unable to deal politically with the problems of economic development, political disintegration and ethnic strife?

It is time that we begin to consider the reality that western political thought provides us with unique answers to the political, economic and social problems of the world and this includes reversing the perverse legacies of western imperialism itself. And it is time that the left begins to embrace the ideas of the Enlightenment and its ethical impulse for freedom, democracy, social progress and human dignity on an international scale. This is rhetorically embraced by neoconservatives, but it turns out to be more of a mask for narrower economic motives and international realpolitik, and hence their policies and values run counter to the radical impulses of Enlightenment thought. Western ideas and institutions can find affinities in the rational strains of thought in almost every culture in the world, from 12th century rationalist Islamic philosophers like Alfarabi, Avicenna (Ibn Sinna) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd) to India's King Akbar and China's Mencius. The key is to find these intellectual affinities and push them to their concrete, political conclusions. Clearly, the left's problem with the idea of the spread of western political ideas and institutions is not entirely wrong. There was a racist and violent precedent set by the French and English imperial projects lasting well into the 20th century. The problem is in separating the form from the content of western hegemonic motives and intentions. And it is even more incorrect to see the occupation of Iraq as a symptom of western ideas and Enlightenment rationalism. Nothing could be further from the case and the sooner this is realized, the more the left will be able to carve out new paths of critique and resistance to a hegemony that is turning into empire. And it is precisely for this reason why, in institutional terms, the UN needs to be brought back in. Although there are clearly larger political and symbolic reasons for this, such as the erosion of a unilateralist framework for the transition from Hussein's regime, there is also the so-called "effect of empire" where Iraq is being transformed into an instrument of ideological economics. The current U.S. plan for Iraq, one strongly supported by Bremer as well as the Bush administration, will remake its economy into one of the most open to trade, capital flows and foreign investment in the world as well as being the lowest taxed. Iraq is being transformed into an neo-liberal utopia where American industries hooked up to the infamous "military-industrial complex" will be able to gorge themselves on contracts for the development of everything from infrastructure to urban police forces.

46/65

http://www.logosjournal.com/thompson_iraq.htm


As time moves on, we are seeing that Iraq provides us with a stunning example of how hegemony becomes empire. It is an example of how the naïve intention of "nation building" is unmasked and laid bare, seen for what it truly is: the forceful transformation of a sovereign state into a new form suited to narrow western (specifically American) interests. Attempts to build a constitution have failed not from the lack of will, but from the lack of any political discourse about what form the state should take and about what values should be enshrined in law. Ruling bodies have become illegitimate almost immediately upon their appointment because there exists almost complete social fragmentation, and the costs of knitting it together are too great for America to assume. In the end, America has become, with its occupation of Iraq and its unilateralist and militaristic posture, an empire in the most modern sense of the term. But we should be careful about distinguishing empire from a hegemon and the implications of each. And since, as Hegel put it, we are defined by what we oppose, the knee-jerk and ineffectual response from the modern left has been to produce almost no alternative at all to the imperatives that drive American empire as seen in places such as Iraq. To neglect the military, economic and cultural aspects of American power is to ignore the extent to which it provokes violent reaction and counter-reaction. But at the same time, to ignore the important contributions of western political ideas and institutions and their power and efficacy in achieving peace and mutual cooperation, whether it be between ethnic communities or whole nations themselves, is to ignore the very source of political solutions for places where poverty, oppression and dictatorships are the norm and remain stubbornly intact.

47/65


PERM SOLVENCYCritical approaches to international relations are doomed to failure because they can not produce practical strategies. Realism provides the best framework for solving problems and sustaining stability.

Alastair Murray, 1997 Reconstructing Realism, p. 184

Now, if this is directed at realism, as it would seem to be, it seriously misinterpien its approach. First, as we have seen, the ‘logic of anarchy’ that realism portrays not a material phenomenon, but the intersubjective emanation of cumulative choices, albeit choices rooted in a material account of human nature. If reals maintains that this logic represents a relatively entrenched structure, it neverthela holds that it is, potentially at least, malleable by judicious statecraft. If it takes d state to be the principal focus of this logic in contemporary world politics, then is no sense that this is permanent or final — indeed, no sense that it is eva unproblematic. Second, the notion that realism ignores the clash

between nw individual’s simultaneous identification as both man and citizen mistakes the enta thrust of its work. If realism is age of interdependence and nuclear weapons, a stable international order could ultimately only be built on some broader sense of community than that which existed in states alone, and was thus centrally concerned with the extension of community in international relations.32 Linklater seems to go some way towards acknowledging this in Beyond Realism and Marxism, recognising Morgenthau’s commitment, in contrast to neorealism, to widening community beyond the nation-state. What he now suggests, however, is that ‘[wihat realism offers is an account of historical circumstances which human subjects have yet to bring under their collective control. What it does not possess is an account of the modes of political intervention which would enable human beings to take control of their international history.’33 The issue becomes less a matter of what realism does, than what it does not do, less the way it constructs the problem, than its failure to solve it. Yet Linklater concedes that ‘it is not at all clear that any strand of social and political thought provides a compelling account of “strategies of transition”. 34 Indeed, where he has attempted to engage with this issue himself, he has proved manifestly unable to provide such an account. Although he has put forward some ideas of what is needed — a fundamental reorganisation of political relations, establishing a global legal order to replace the sovereign state, and a fundamental rearrangement of economic relations, establishing an order in which all individuals have the means as well as the formal rights of freedom — his only suggestion as to how such objectives should be achieved seems to be that ‘js]ocial development entails individuals placing themselves at odds with their societies as they begin to question conventional means of charactensing outsiders and to criticise customary prohibitions upon individual relations with them’. His critical theoretical ‘transitional strategies’ amount to little more than the suggestion that individuals must demand recognition for themselves as men as well as citizens, must demand the right to enter into complex interstate relations themselves, and must act in these relations as beings with fundamental obligations to all other members of the species.35 More recently, he has proposed a vision in which ‘subnational and transnational citizenship are strengthened and in which mediating between the different loyalties and identities present within modern societies is one central purpose of the post-Westphalian state’. 36 Such an objective is to be reached by a discourse ethics along the lines of that proposed by Habermas. Yet such an ethics amounts to little more than the suggestion ‘that human beings need to be reflective about the ways in which they include and exclude others from dialogue’, scarcely going beyond Linklater’s earlier emphasis on individuals acting as men as well as

citizens.37 Realism does at least propose tangible objectives which, whilst perhaps lacking the visionary appeal of Linklater’s proposals,

ultimately offer us a path to follow, and it does at least suggest a strategy of realisation, emphasising the necessity of a restrained, moderate diplomacy, which, if less daring than Linklater might wish, provides us with some guidance. It is this inability to articulate practical strategies which suggests the central difficulty with such critical theoretical approaches. The progressive urge moves a concerned with the duties owed to the state, it a only for the conflict that this produces with the cosmopolitan moral obliganica which fall upon men. Third, if realism insisted that change must be compauhe with the national interests of the state, it also recognised that, particularly in a stage further here, leading them to abandon almost entirely the problem of establishing some form of stable international order at this level in favour of a

continuing revolution in search of a genuine cosmopolis. It generates such an emphasis on the pursuit of distant, ultimate objectives that they prove incapable of furnishing us with anything but the most vague and elusive of strategies, such an emphasis on moving towards a post-Westphalian, boundary-less world that they are incapable of telling us anything about the problems facing us today. If, for theorists such as Linklater, such a difficulty does not constitute a failure for critical theory within its own terms of reference, this position cannot be accepted uncritically. Without an ability to address contemporary problems, it is unable to provide strategies to overcome even the immediate obstacles in the way of its objective of a genuinely cosmopolitan society. And, without a

guarantee that such a cosmopolitan society is even feasible, such a critical theoretical perspective simply offers us the perpetual redefinition of old problems in a new context and the persistent creation of new problems to replace old ones, without even the luxury of attempting to address them.

48/65


The plan can be used as a vehicle for reinterpretation of U.S. values abroad that imply less of a view of Exceptionalism.

Barnett, Professor of Political Science, University of MinnesotaInternational Herald Tribune, May 23, 2007

But the truth is: We are truly exceptional! With few exceptions, other established democracies neither want our political, social or economic institutions, nor wish to export their own to other countries. But we need to treat current U.S. public opinion as a constraint, at least in the medium term. Therefore it is quite reasonable to propose a strategy of reinterpreting U.S. values in a way that implies humbler policies. Rather than convincing Americans that our values are hypocritical or venal, shouldn't we seek to convince them that such values have been misinterpreted abroad?

49/65


ALT FAILS

The critique will lead to endless epistemological discussion. We must look at real world policies along with our rethinking of thinking in order to craft meaningful theory about the world

Jarvis, senior lecturer @ University of Australia, 2K (D.S.L. International Relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism )

There are, of course, problems with ontologically derived forms of the ory . Postmodemists naturally dismiss this conception of theory and are not entirely wrong for doing so. Realism is not above criticism, and structural-realism even more so.58 But then again, neither is postmodernism! But this is not the point. I am not here attempting to defend realism against postmodcrnism or to dismiss postmodernism entirely from the purview of Inter national Relations. Rather, what I am attempting to do is defend the institution of theory against postmodemism which, in its more virulent forms, aims at its deconstruction and obliteration. So too am I attempting to defend the ontological aspect of theory against those who would engage exclusively in epistemological debate. For there to be theory in International Relations, ontological description must be the first order of things; without first defining the domain of international politics, identifying those entities and things we wish to explain and understand, epistemological debate would be altogether pointless. Save for this, the discipline threatens to transpose itself into philosophy and not International Relations, to be condemned to perpetual metaphysical reflection but without reference to the social world we are attempting to understand. Of course, this does not exonerate us from previous mistakes. International Relations, largely because of the dominance of positivism in the discipline, has, in the past, been apt to ontological description in the absence of epistemological reflection. Practitioners in the discipline have rarely seen a need to question the epistemological basis of their scholarship as Thomas Biersteker forcefully acknowledged.59 Yet, as he also reminds us, developing theory and generating knowledge requires judi cious use of both ontological description and epistemological explanation. These are not mutually exclusive dimensions of theoretical discourse, but the elemental ingredients necessary to the construction of discourse itself. The exclusive focus upon one dimension to the detriment of the other probably explains why, according to William Kreml and Charles Kegley, “Interna tional relations research today. . . has failed to reach agreement about several fundamental issues. . . (1) the central questions to be asked, (2) the basic units of analysis (e.g., states or nonstate actors), (3) the levels of analysis at which various questions should be explored, (4) the methods by which hypotheses should be tested and unwarranted inferences prevented, (5) the criteria by which theoretical progress is to be judged, and (6) how inquiry should be organized in order to generate the knowledge that will lead to international peace, prosperity, and justice.”

50/65


ALT FAILS

The critique ignores the practical side of life. We must be able to use logic and rationality in order to solve the basic problems of our society. The criticism would leave us in endless questioning over meaning.Jarvis, senior lecturer @ University of Australia, 2K (D.S.L. International Relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism )

To what end these approaches will prove beneficial, however, to what end their concerns and depictions of current realities prove accurate remains problematic. What does seem obvious, though, is the continuing desire for understanding, the need to examine, comprehend, and make sense of events and, consequently, the need for theoretical endeavor. Despite “nihilistic despair” or charges of epochal change, most of us will wake up tomorrow confronted by a world much the same as today, one that experiences the recurring problems of inequality, injustice, war, famine, violence, and conflict. Various problems will emerge and solutions to them will be sought. These, surely, cannot be deconstructed as the sub versive postmodernists insist, but only reinscribed as new questions. And while we might problematize current knowledge and interpretations, question our faith in science, reason, and logic, or reinscribe questions in new contexts, to suppose these endeavors contrary to the activity of the ory and the search for meaning and understanding seems plainly absurd. If we abandon the principles of logic and reason, dump the yardsticks of objectivity and assessment, and succumb to a blind relativism that privi leges no one narrative or understanding over another, how do we tackle such problems or assess the merits of one solution vis-à-vis another? How do we go about the activity of living, making decisions, engaging in trade, deciding on social rules or making laws, if objective criteria are not to be employed and reason and logic abandoned? How would we construct research programs, delimit areas of inquiry or define problems to be studied if we abandon rationalist tools of inquiry?

51/65


CONSEQUENTIALISM GOODMorality demands saving the most lives

Wasserman and Strudler 2003 Philosophy and Public Affairs 31.1

In making choices about saving people from death, what moral significance should attach to the fact that one choice involves saving more people than another? Consequentialists typically have an easy time with such questions because they believe that the morally best choice produces the best consequences and that, other things being equal, more lives saved is a better consequence than fewer lives saved. The consequentialist position involves what might be called the compensation assumption: the proposition that other things equal, the gain that comes from saving a larger group of people somehow more than compensates for the loss that occurs by not saving some other, smaller group of people. If numbers have the moral importance that consequentialists suppose, then it should be at least presumptively right to sacrifice a person to save others; for example, it is unclear why one may not simply kill an innocent person and harvest his organs if doing so is the only available way of saving the lives of people who will die without those organs. In fact, however, the prospect of saving the lives of those people seems to provide no reason, or an exceedingly weak one, for killing an innocent person, even if there is no other way to acquire needed organs. One might respond in many ways to the apparent harshness of the consequentialist approach to choices among lives. Most obviously, one might seek to qualify or constrain consequentialist reasoning by adopting a pluralist moral theory that mixes or integrates consequentialist and nonconsequentialist elements. We cannot canvass pluralistic theories in this article, but we must acknowledge that some of them are complex and ingeniou~.~ Still, we suspect that they are doomed attempts to breed species that are in essence incompatible. If one shares our doubts about the prospects for modifying or constraining consequentialism, it makes sense to look to nonconsequentialist approaches to choices among lives-approaches that do not rely directly or indirectly on the claim that more people saved is a better consequence. The nonconsequentialist approaches we consider treat the failure to save the group with the greater number as a failure to respect the value or equality of the individual lives in that group. We argue that despite their initial appeal, these approaches do not succeed, and we conclude that there does not yet exist a cogent nonconsequentialist answer to the question of numbers. We begin with an important early attempt by Gregory Kavka because an analysis of its weaknesses suggests the moral complexity of choices among lives and the distinctive character of more recent efforts to understand these choices.

52/65


CONSEQUENTIALISM GOODNonconsequentialist theories disregard value and equality of life. Consequentialism is best because it preserves the most lives.Wasserman and Strudler 2003 Philosophy and Public Affairs 31.1

In making choices about saving people from death, what moral significance should attach to the fact that one choice involves saving more people than another?

Consequentialists typically have an easy time with such questions because they believe that the morally best choice produces the best consequences and that, other things being equal, more lives saved is a better consequence than fewer lives saved. The consequentialist position involves what might be called the compensation assumption: the proposition that other things equal, the gain that comes from saving a larger group of people somehow more than compensates for the loss that occurs by not saving some other, smaller group of people. If numbers have the moral importance that consequentialists suppose, then it should be at least presumptively right to sacrifice a person to save others; for example, it is unclear why one may not simply kill an innocent person and harvest his organs if doing so is the only available way of saving the lives of people who will die without those organs. In fact, however, the prospect of saving the lives of those people seems to provide no reason, or an exceedingly weak one, for killing an innocent person, even if there is no other way to acquire needed organs. One might respond in many ways to the apparent harshness of the consequentialist approach to choices among lives. Most obviously, one might seek to qualify or constrain consequentialist reasoning by adopting a pluralist moral theory that mixes or integrates consequentialist and nonconsequentialist elements. We cannot canvass pluralistic theories in this article, but we must acknowledge that some of them are complex and ingeniou~.~ Still, we suspect that they are doomed attempts to breed species that are in essence incompatible. If one shares our doubts about the prospects for modifying or constraining consequentialism, it makes sense to look to nonconsequentialist approaches to choices among lives-approaches that

do not rely directly or indirectly on the claim that more people saved is a better consequence. The nonconsequentialist approaches we consider treat the failure to save the group with the greater number as a failure to respect the value or equality of the individual lives in that group. We argue that despite their initial appeal, these

approaches do not succeed, and we conclude that there does not yet exist a cogent nonconsequentialist answer to the question of numbers. We begin with an important early attempt by Gregory Kavka because an analysis of its weaknesses suggests the moral complexity of choices among lives and the distinctive character of more recent efforts to understand these choices.

53/65


REALISM INEVITABLE

THE WORLD IS REALIST, DEBATE WON’T CHANGE THAT

Mearsheimer, 2001 (accessed online http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/fall01/002025excerpt.htm)

The optimists' claim that security competition and war among the great powers has been burned out of the system is wrong. In fact, all of the major states around the globe still care deeply about the balance of power and are destined to compete for power among themselves for the foreseeable future. Consequently, realism will offer the most powerful explanations of international politics over the next century, and this will be true even if the debates among academic and policy elites are dominated by non-realist theories. In short, the real world remains a realist world. States still fear each other and seek to gain power at each other's expense, because international anarchy—the driving force behind great-power behavior—did not change with the end of the Cold War, and there are few signs that such change is likely any time soon. States remain the principal actors in world politics and there is still no night watchman standing above them. For sure, the collapse of the Soviet Union caused a major shift in the global distribution of power. But it did not give rise to a change in the anarchic structure of the system, and without that kind of profound change, there is no reason to expect the great powers to behave much differently in the new century than they did in previous centuries. Indeed, considerable evidence from the 1990s indicates that power politics has not disappeared from Europe and Northeast Asia, the regions in which there are two or more great powers, as well as possible great powers such as Germany and Japan. There is no question, however, that the competition for power over the past decade has been low-key. Still, there is potential for intense security competition among the great powers that might lead to a major war. Probably the best evidence of that possibility is the fact that the United States maintains about one hundred thousand troops each in Europe and in Northeast Asia for the explicit purpose of keeping the major states in each region at peace. These relatively peaceful circumstances are largely the result of benign distributions of power in each region. Europe remains bipolar (Russia and the United States are the major powers), which is the most stable kind of power structure. Northeast Asia is multipolar (China, Russia, and the United States), a configuration more prone to instability; but fortunately there is no potential hegemon in that system. Furthermore, stability is enhanced in both regions by nuclear weapons, the continued presence of U.S. forces, and the relative weakness of China and Russia. These power structures in Europe and Northeast Asia are likely to change over the next two decades, however, leading to intensified security competition and possibly war among the great powers.

one realist country remaining locks in the system—in other words, one realist apple will spoil the bunch (Randall Schweller, jan 1999, review of international studies, p150, “referring to Alexander Wendt’s…other-regarding behaviour”)

Referring to Alexander Wendt’s constructivist challenge to neorealist theory,Linklater writes: ‘Neo-realism regards the learned and alterable behaviour of themajor powers as inherent features of an immutable anarchy. But as an influentialformulation correctly maintains, anarchy is what states make of it: the propensity forinter-state violence is not inherent in anarchy itself but is a function of how stateshave responded to inernational anarchy by constituting themselves as exclusionaryand egotistical units’ (p. 18). Wendt’s claim that power politics is not a necessaryconsequence of anarchy is far less persuasive than Linklater suggests, however. Intheory, Wendt is correct. An anarchic realm composed solely of angels, all with thecertain knowledge that every other member is also a true angel and cannot beotherwise, might indeed be governed by other-regarding rather than self-regardingbehaviour. If we introduce to this world the possibility of predation (a devil indisguise, so to speak), or one or two powerful undisguised devils, or a history ofpredation, self-regarding behaviour associated with power politics quickly emergesand drives out other-regarding behaviour. Wendt himself admits that a few badapples will spoil the whole barrel. In practice, therefore, it is highly improbable thatanarchy will ever lead to other-regarding behaviour.

54/65

http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/fall01/002025excerpt.htm


55/65


REALISM GOODK can’t overcome realism – perm best – realism = stable balance of power

Alastair Murray, 1997 (Reconstructing Realism, p. 188)

If realism does contain the potential to address changes in base conditions, the central argument with which Ashley is left is that it actively seeks to avoid doing so. He suggests that, because the balance of power scheme involves what is effectively an acceptance of the traditional ‘rules of the game’, it actively reproduces, by its very success, the traditional statist terms of the game, such that realism becomes complicit in a conservative perpetuation of an iniquitous statist order by its endorsement of

it.6 Ashley would, of course, like to treat this as design, and end the matter there. Yet this is to equate implication with purpose. If the balance of power scheme implies the reproduction of the state, this does not prove its dedication to this objective. Realism advocated a scheme for an interstate balance of power not because of any concern to reproduce the state, but because its analysis of contemporary empirical conditions indicated that such a strategy offered the best available fulfilment of moral principles: if states represent the principal receptacles of power in th,Anodern environment, the best level of justice can be achieved by establishing some equilibrium of power between states.47 Consequently, its position not only moves beyond the state, de-privileges it, and demands its compliance in principles which privilege the individual, but, furthermore, this position is open to the possibility of progress beyond it towards some more universal order. If the state must be employed as the principal agent of international justice and international change, it is only

because of its current centrality to international politics. Ashley’s critique thus boils down to a judgement as to the potentialities for change in the current situation and how best to exploit them. It amounts to the difference between a progressive philosophy which regards systemic transformation as imminent, and one which remains more sceptical. In ‘Political realism and human interests’, for instance, realism’s practical strategy ultimately appears illegitimate to Ashley only because his own agenda is emancipatory in nature. His disagreement with realism depends on a highly contestable claim — based on Hen’s argument that, with the development of global threats, the conditions which might produce some universal consensus have arisen — that its ‘impossibility theorem’ is empirically problematic, that a universal consensus is achievable, and that its practical strategy is obstructing its realisation.4 In much the same way, in ‘The poverty of neorealism’, realism’s practical strategy is illegitimate only because Ashley’s agenda is inclusionary. His central disagreement with realism arises out of his belief that its strategy reproduces a world order

organised around sovereign states, preventing exploration of the indeterminate number of — potentially less exclusionary — alternative world orders.49 Realists, however, would be unlikely to be troubled by such charges. Ashley needs to do rather more than merely assert that the development of global threats will produce some universal consensus, or that any number of less exclusionary world orders are possible, to convince them. A universal threat does not imply a universal consensus,

merely the existence of a universal threat faced by particularistic actors. And the assertion that indeterminate numbers of potentially less exclusionary orders exist carries little weight unless we can specify exactly what these alternatives are and just how they might be achieved. As such, realists would seem to be justified in regarding such potentialities as currently unrealisable ideals and in seeking a more proximate good in the fostering of mutual understanding and, in particular, of a stable balance of power. Despite the adverse side-effects that such a balance of power implies, it at least offers us something tangible rather than ephemeral promises lacking a shred of support. Ultimately, Ashley’s demand that a new, critical approach be adopted in order to free us from the grip of such ‘false’ conceptions depends upon ideas about the prospects for the development of a universal consensus which are little more than wishful thinking, and ideas about the existence of potentially less exclusionary orders which are little more than mere assertion.5° Hence his attempts, in ‘Political realism and human interests’, to conceal these ideas from view by claiming that the technical base of realism serves only to identify, and yet not to reform, the practical, and then, in ‘The poverty of neorealism’, by removing the technical from investigation altogether by an exclusive reliance on a problem of hermeneutic circularity.

56/65


your alternative won’t work – states will never submit to higher ethical principles because the international system is anarchic – they will not place their survival in the hands of other states

Mearsheimer ‘95John J., professor of political science at the University of Chicago. “The False Promise of International Institutions.” International Security, Vol. 19, No. 3., Winter 94/95.

There are two major flaws in collective security theory, and both concern the all-important component of trust. Collective security IS an incomplete theory because it does not provide a satisfactory explanation for how states overcome their fears and learn to trust one another. Realists maintain that states fear one another because they operate in an anarchic world, have offensive military capabilities, and can never be certain about other states' intentions. Collective security is largely silent about the first two realist assumptions, as the theory says little about either anarchy or offensive capability. (102) However, it has something to say about intentions, because the theory's first two norms call for states not to aggress, but only to defend. States, in other words, should only have benign intentions when contemplating the use of military force. However, the theory recognizes that one or more states might reject the norms that underpin collective security and behave aggressively. The very purpose of a collective security system, after all, is to deal with states that have aggressive intentions. In effect, collective security admits that no state can ever be completely certain about another state's intentions, which brings us back to a realist world where states have little choice but to fear each other. There is a second reason why states are not likely to place their trust in a collective security system: it has a set of demanding requirements--I count nine--that are likely to thwart efforts to confront art aggressor with preponderant power. Collective security, as Claude notes, "assumes the satisfaction of an extraordinarily complex network of requirements." (103) First, for collective security to work, states must be able to distinguish clearly between aggressor and victim, and then move against the aggressor. However, it is sometimes difficult in a crisis to determine who is the troublemaker and who is the victim. (104) Debates still rage about which European great power, if any, bears responsibility for starting World War I. Similar disputes have followed most other wars. Second, the theory assumes that all aggression is wrong. But there are occasionally cases where conquest is probably warranted. For example, there are good reasons to applaud the 1979 Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, since it drove the murderous Pol Pot from power. Third, some states are especially friendly for historical or ideological reasons. Should a state with close friends be labeled an aggressor in a collective security system, its friends are probably going to be reluctant to join the coalition against it. For example, it is difficult to imagine the United States using military force against Britain or Israel, even if they were branded aggressors by the international community. Fourth, historical enmity between states can also complicate collective security efforts. Consider that a European collective security system would have to depend heavily on Germany and Russia, the two most powerful states on the continent, to maintain order. However, the idea of Germany, which wrought murder and destruction across Europe in 1939-45, and Russia, which was the core of the Soviet empire, maintaining order in Europe is sure to meet significant resistance from other European states. Fifth, even if states agree to act automatically and collectively to meet aggression, there would surely be difficulty determining how to distribute the burden. States will have strong incentives to pass the buck and get other states to pay the heavy price of confronting an aggressor. (105) During World War I, for example, Britain, France, and Russia each tried to get its allies to pay the blood price of defeating Germany on the battlefield. (106) Rampant buck-passing might undermine efforts to produce the preponderant military power necessary to make collective security work. Sixth, it is difficult to guarantee a rapid response to aggression in a collective security system. Planning beforehand is problematic because "it is impossible to know what the alignment of states will be if there is an

57/65


armed conflict." (107) There are also significant coordination problems associated with assembling a large coalition of states to fight a war. Rapid response becomes even more problematic if the responsible states must deal with more than one aggressor. It took more than six months for the United States to put together a coalition to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. As impressive as the American effort was, threatened states are not likely to have much faith in a security system that tells them help is likely to come, but will only arrive months after they have been conquered. Seventh, states are likely to be reluctant to join a collective security effort because the system effectively transforms every local conflict into art international conflict. States that see conflict around the globe wilt surely be tempted to cordon off the troubled area and prevent further escalation, as the West has done in the former Yugoslavia. (108) Collective security, however, calls for escalation, even though it is intended for peaceful purposes. Eighth, the notion that states must automatically respond to aggression impinges in fundamental ways on state sovereignty, and will therefore be difficult to sell. States, especially democracies, are likely to guard jealously their freedom to debate whether or not to fight an aggressor. War is a deadly business, especially if great powers are involved, and few countries want to commit themselves in advance to paying a huge blood price when their own self-interests are not directly involved. Ninth, there is some contradiction concerning attitudes towards force that raises doubts about whether responsible states would actually come to the rescue of a threatened state. Collective security theory is predicated on the belief that war is a truly horrible enterprise, and therefore states should renounce aggression. At the same time, the theory mandates that states must be ready and willing to use force to thwart troublemakers. However, responsible states find war so repellent that they would renounce it; this raises doubts about their willingness to go to war to stop aggression. Indeed, most advocates of collective security prefer "creative diplomacy and economic sanctions" to military force when dealing with an aggressor state. (109) In sum, states have abundant reasons to doubt that collective security will work as advertised when the chips are down and aggression seems likely. Should it fail, potential victims are likely to be in deep trouble if they have ignored balance-of-power considerations and placed their faith in collective security. Recognizing this, states are not likely to place their fate in the hands of other states, but will prefer instead the realist logic of self-help.

58/65


abandoning realism risks a transition to fascism


Nevertheless, critical theorists occasionally point to particular factors that might lead to changes in international relations discourse. In such cases, however, they usually end up arguing that changes in the material world drive changes in discourse. For example, when Ashley makes surmises about the future of realism, he claims that "a crucial issue is whether or not changing historical conditions have disabled longstanding realist rituals of power." Specifically, he asks whether "developments in late capitalist society," like the "fiscal crisis of the state," and the "internationalization of capital," coupled with "the presence of vastly destructive and highly automated nuclear arsenals [has] deprived statesmen of the latitude for competent performance of realist rituals of power?" (157) Similarly, Cox argues that fundamental change occurs when there is a "disjuncture" between "the stock of ideas people have about the nature of the world and the practical problems that challenge them." He then writes, "So me of us think the erstwhile dominant mental construct of neorealism is inadequate to confront the challenges of global politics today." (158) It would be understandable if realists made such arguments, since they believe there is an objective reality that largely determines which discourse will be dominant. Critical theorists, however, emphasize that the world is socially constructed, and not shaped in fundamental ways by objective factors. Anarchy, after all, is what we make of it. Yet when critical theorists attempt to explain why realism may be losing its hegemonic position, they too point to objective factors as the ultimate cause of change. Discourse, so it appears, turns out not to be determinative, but mainly a reflection of developments in the objective world. In short, it seems that when critical theorists who study international politics offer glimpses of their thinking about the causes of change in the real world, they make arguments that directly contradict their own theory, but which appear to be compatible with the theory they are challenging. (159) There is another problem with the application of critical theory to international relations. Although critical theorists hope to replace realism with a discourse that emphasizes harmony and peace, critical theory per se emphasizes that it is impossible to know the future. Critical theory according to its own logic, can be used to undermine realism and produce change, but it cannot serve as the basis for predicting which discourse will replace realism, because the theory says little about the direction change takes. In fact, Cox argues that although "utopian expectations may be an element in stimulating people to act...such expectations are almost never realized in practice." (160) Thus, in a sense, the communitarian discourse championed by critical theorists is wishful thinking, not an outcome linked to the theory itself. Indeed, critical theory cannot guarantee that the new discourse will not be more malignant than the discourse it replaces. Nothing in the theory guarantees, for example, that a fascist discourse far more violent than realism will not emerge as the new hegemonic discourse.

59/65


only realism has empirical support – other theories are simply not supported in practice


Three points are in order regarding the critical theorists' interpretation of history. First, one cannot help but be struck by the sheer continuity of realist behavior in the critical theorists' own account of the past. Seven centuries of security competition and war represents an impressive span of time, especially when you consider the tremendous political and economic changes that have taken place across the world during that lengthy period. Realism is obviously a human software package with deep-seated appeal, although critical theorists do not explain its attraction. Second, a close look at the international politics of the feudal era reveals scant support for the claims of critical theorists: Markus Fischer has done a detailed study of that period, and he finds "that feudal discourse was indeed distinct, prescribing unity, functional cooperation, sharing, and lawfulness." (166) More importantly, however, he also finds "that while feudal actors observed these norms for the most part on the level of form, they in essence behaved like modern states." Specifically, they "strove for exclusive territorial control, protected themselves by military means, subjugated each other, balanced against power, formed alliances and spheres of influence, and resolved their conflicts by the use and threat of force." (167) Realism, not critical theory, appears best to explain international politics in the five centuries of the feudal era. Third, there are good reasons to doubt that the demise of the Cold War means that the millennium is here. It is true that the great powers have been rather tame in their behavior towards each other over the past five years. But that is usually the case after great-power wars. Moreover, although the Cold War ended in 1989, the Cold War order that it spawned is taking much longer to collapse, which makes it difficult to determine what kind of order or disorder will, replace it. For example, Russian troops remained in Germany until mid-1994, seriously impinging on German sovereignty, and the United States still maintains a substantial military presence in Germany. Five years is much too short a period to determine whether international relations has been fundamentally transformed by the end of the Cold War, especially given that the "old" order of realist discourse has been in place for at least twelve centuries.

60/65


AT: ONTOLOGY FIRST Preventing widespread death through the aff takes precedence to ontological questioning

Arnold I. Davidson, coeditor of Critical Inquiry, Assoc Prof of Philosophy, U of Chicago, Critical Inquiry, Winter 1989. p.426

I understand Levinas’ work to suggest another path to the recovery of the human, one that leads through or toward other human beings: “The dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face… Hence metaphysics is enacted where the social relation is enacted- in our relations with men… The Other is not the incarnation of God, but precisely by his face, in which he is disincarnate, is the manifestation of the height in which God is revealed. It is our relations with men… that give to theological concepts the sole signification they admit of.” Levinas places ethics before ontology by beginning with our experience of the human face: and, in a clear reference to Heidegger’s idolatry of the village life of peasants, he associated himself with Socrates, who preferred the city where he encountered men to the country with its trees. In his discussion of skepticism and the problem of others, Cavell also aligns himself with this path of thought, with the recovery of the finite human self through the acknowledgement of others: “As long as God exists, I am not alone. And couldn’t the other suffer the fate of God?… I wish to understand how the other now bears the weight of God, shows me that I am not alone in the universe. This requires understanding the philosophical problem of the other as the trace or scar of the departure of God [CR, p.470].” The suppression of the other, the human, in Heidegger’s thought accounts, I believe, for the absence, in his writing after the war, of the experience of horror. Horror is always directed toward the human; every object of horror bears the imprint of the human will. So Levinas can see in Heidegger’s silence about the gas chambers and death camps “a kind of consent to the horror.” And Cavell can characterize Nazis as “those who have lost the capacity for being horrified by what they do.” Where was Heidegger’s horror? How could he have failed to know what he had consented to? Hannah Arendt associates Heidegger with Paul Valery’s aphorism, “Les evenements ne sont que l’ecume des choses’ (‘Events are but the foam of things’).” I think one understands the source of her intuition. The mass extermination of human beings, however, does not produce foam, but dust and ashes; and it is here that questioning must stop.

It’s impossible to determine an answer to being – ontological questioning results in an infinite regress and total political paralysis

Emmanuel Levinas, professor of philosophy, and Philippe Nemo, professor of new philosophy, Ethics and Infinity, 1985, pg. 6-7

Are we not in need of still more precautions? Must we not step back from this question to raise another, to recognize the obvious circularity of asking what is the “What is . .?“ question? It seems to beg the question. Is our new suspicion, then, that Heidegger begs the question of metaphysics when he asks “What is poetry?” or “What is thinking?”? Yet his thought is insistently anti-metaphysical. Why, then, does he retain the metaphysical question par excellence? Aware of just such an objection, he proposes, against the vicious circle of the petitio principi, an alternative, productive circularity: hermeneutic questioning. To ask “What is. . .?“ does not partake of onto-theo-logy if one acknowledges (1) that the answer can never be fixed absolutely, but calls essentially, endlessly, for additional “What is . . .?“ questions. Dialectical refinement here replaces vicious circularity. Further, beyond the openmindedness called for by dialectical refinement, hermeneutic questioning (2) insists on avoiding subjective impositions, on avoiding reading into rather than harkening to things. One must harken to the things themselves, ultimately to being, in a careful attunement to what is. But do the refinement and care of the hermeneutic question — which succeed in avoiding ontotheo-logy succeed in avoiding all viciousness? Certainly they convert a simple fallacy into a productive inquiry, they open a path for thought. But is it not the case that however much refinement and care one brings to bear, to ask what something is leads to asking what something else is, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum? What is disturbing in this is not so much the infinity of interpretive depth, which has the virtue of escaping onto-theo-logy and remaining true to the way things are, to the phenomena, the coming to be and passing away of being. Rather, the problem lies in the influence the endlessly open horizon of such thinking exerts on the way of such thought. That is, the problem lies in what seems to be the very virtue of hermeneutic thought, namely, the doggedness of the “What is . . .?“ question, in its inability to escape itself, to escape being and essence.

61/65


AT: REPRESENTATIONS FIRSTRepresentational violence is not the same as actual violenceElana Gomel, Post Identity, Winter 1999 http://ids.udmercy.edu/pi/2.1/PI21_24-70.pdf

The universal Man of the Enlightenment has beenreconceptualized as the universal killer, armed with the mostpotent of weapons—representation. In their Introductionto the collection typically entitled Violence of RepresentationArmstrong and Tennenhouse offer the basic formulaof this approach: “The violence of representation is thesuppression of difference” (8).In this particular reading of Foucault the discursiveconstructedness of identity is directly responsible for corporealviolence inflicted by some (post)modern subjectsupon others. In his recent book Serial Killers and in theseries of articles that preceded it Mark Seltzer applies thisinsight to the fascinating and grisly phenomenon of serialkilling, variously identified also as “stranger killing” andsometimes “lust murder”. For Seltzer the enigma of theserial killer’s personality consists in “an experience of typicalityat the level of the subject”:The serial killer, I will be arguing, is in part definedby such a radicalized experience of typicalitywithin. Simply put, ‘murder by numbers’ (as serialmurder has been called) is the form of violenceproper to statistical persons. (30–1)Violence of representation, representation of violence andviolence per se smoothly link into an unbroken chain, leadingfrom statistics to mayhem and from typology of subjectsto fingertyping of putrefying bodies. My goal in thisessay is to put a hitch into this chain, to question the easyfit between discursive moulds of identity and the individualself-experience of serial killers, and to suggest that representationmay be not so much the cause of violence as apost factum defence against it.I do not imply, however, that violence in general orserial murder in particular are totally free from the constraintsof discourse or that the identity of the serial killeris not constructed using the building blocks of culturalnarratives (though the narratives in question are more variegatedthan Seltzer suggests). Rather, I would claim thatthe serial “form of violence” is conditioned not so muchby the monolithic coherence of representation as by itsbreakdown.

62/65


AFF FRAMEWORKA. Interpretation:

Debate is about deciding if the resolution is right or wrong; since the affirmative can only win by proving its right through endorsement and defense of a topical example, the negative can only win if it proves a competitive policy option is preferable to the plan.

B. Reasons to prefer:

1.) Affirmative choice – the affirmative is obligated to speak first and also has the burden to prove the status quo should be changed so it gets to pick the framework. If the negative prefers a different framework, they must present it in the 1NC or else comply by ours because deferring to later speeches hurts the 2AC and 1AR and eliminates the 1AC.

2.) Predictable limits – the resolution is objective and decides who gets to say what. The burden of rejoinder mandates that they disprove the desirability of our topical plan. Alternatives or discursive charges that lie outside topic literature discourage clash and disadvantage the affirmative

3.) Topic education – prefer it to general education because annual changes ensure deep knowledge through focused research. Policy comparison is most real-world and switching sides fosters full expression of resolution arguments.

C. It’s a voter

Debate is a game so fair parameters is biggest voter. Rules and competition insulate debate from questions of personal conviction so that we can compare options relevant to the resolution. Presenting arguments in the wrong forum is a reason to reject the team for skewing equity of time and competition.

63/65


FRAMEWORK EXTENSIONSThere are limitless contexts or avenues through which they could purport to advocate the plan. Our interpretation limits debate to promote politically relevant dialogue and structured communication.

Donald S. Lutz (Professor of Polisci at Houston) 2000 Political Theory and Partisan Politics p. 39-40

Aristotle notes in the Politics that political theory simultaneously proceeds at three levels—discourse about the ideal, about the best possible in the real world, and about existing political systems.4 Put another way, comprehensive political theory must ask several different kinds of questions that are linked, yet distinguishable. In order to understand the interlocking set of questions that political theory can ask, imagine a continuum stretching from left to right. At the end, to the right, is an ideal form of government, a perfectly wrought construct produced by the imagination. At the other end is the perfect dystopia, the most perfectly wretched system that the human imagination can produce. Stretching between these two extremes is an infinite set of possibilities, merging into one another, that describe the logical possibilities created by the characteristics defining the end points. For example, a political system defined primarily by equality would have a perfectly inegalitarian system described at the other end, and the possible states of being between them would vary primarily in the extent to which they embodied equality. An ideal defined primarily by liberty would create a different set of possibilities between the extremes. Of course, visions of the ideal often are inevitably more complex than these single-value examples indicate, but it is also true that in order to imagine an ideal state of affairs a kind of simplification is almost always required since normal states of affairs invariably present themselves to human consciousness as complicated, opaque, and to a significant extent indeterminate. t A non-ironic reading of Plato's Republic leads one to conclude that the creation of these visions of the ideal characterizes political philosophy. This is not the case. Any person can generate a vision of the ideal. One job of political philosophy is to ask the question "Is this ideal worth pursuing?" Before the question can be pursued, however, the ideal state of affairs must be clarified, especially with respect to conceptual precision and the logical relationship between the propositions that describe the ideal. This pre-theoretical analysis raises the vision of the ideal from the mundane to a level where true philosophical analysis, and the careful comparison with existing systems can proceed fruitfully. The process of pre-theoretical analysis, probably because it works on clarifying ideas that most capture the human imagination, too often looks to some like the entire enterprise of political philosophy.5 However, the value of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's concept of the General Will, for example, lies not in its formal logical implications, nor in its compelling hold on the imagination, but on the power and clarity it lends to an analysis and comparison of actual political systems. Among other things it allows him to show that anyone who wishes to pursue a state of affairs closer to that summed up in the concept of the General Will must successfully develop a civil religion. To the extent politicians believe theorists who tell them that pre-theoretical clarification of language describing an ideal is the essence and sum total of political philosophy, to that extent they will properly conclude that political philosophers have little to tell them, since politics is the realm of the possible not the realm of logical clarity. However, once the ideal is clarified, the political philosopher will begin to articulate and assess the reasons why we might want to pursue such an ideal. At this point, analysis leaves the realm of pure logic and enters the realm of the logic of human longing, aspiration, and anxiety. The analysis is now limited by the interior parameters of the human heart (more properly the human psyche) to which the theorist must appeal. Unlike the clarification stage where anything that is logical is possible, there are now definite limits on where logic can take us. Appeals to self-destruction, less happiness rather than more, psychic isolation, enslavement, loss of identity, a preference for the lives of mollusks over that of humans, to name just a few possibilities, are doomed to failure. The theorist cannot appeal to such values if she or he is to attract an audience of politicians. Much political theory involves the careful, competitive analysis of what a given ideal state of affairs entails, and as Plato shows in his dialogues the discussion between the philosopher and the politician will quickly terminate if he or she cannot convincingly demonstrate the connection between the political ideal being developed and natural human passions. In this way, the politician can be educated by the possibilities that the political theorist can articulate, just as the political theorist can be educated by the relative success the normative analysis has in "setting the hook" of interest among nonpolitical theorists. This realm of discourse, dominated by the logic of humanly worthwhile goals, requires that the theorist carefully observe the responses of others in order not to be seduced by what is merely logical as opposed to what is humanly rational. Moral discourse conditioned by the ideal, if it is to be successful, requires the political theorist to be fearless in pursuing normative logic, but it also requires the theorist to have enough humility to remember that, if a non-theorist cannot be led toward an ideal, the fault may well lie in the theory, not in the moral vision of the non-theorist

64/65


Exploding predictable limits neutralizes the discursive benefits to debate and renders their advocacy meaningless – only our interpretation preserves the revolutionary potential of a deliberative activity

Ruth Lessl Shively (Assoc Prof Political Science at Texas A&M) 2000 Political Theory and Partisan Politics p. 180

Thus far, I have argued that if the ambiguists mean to be subversive about anything, they need to be conservative about some things. They need to be steadfast supporters of the structures of openness and democracy: willing to say "no" to certain forms of contest; willing to set up certain clear limitations about acceptable behavior. To this, finally, I would add that if the ambiguists mean to stretch the boundaries of behavior—if they want to be revolutionary and disruptive in their skepticism and iconoclasm—they need first to be firm believers in something. Which is to say, again, they need to set clear limits about what they will and will not support, what they do and do not believe to be best. As G. K. Chesterton observed, the true revolutionary has always willed something "definite and limited." For example, "The Jacobin could tell you not only the system he would rebel against, but (what was more important) the system he would not rebel against..." He "desired the freedoms of democracy." He "wished to have votes and not to have titles . . ." But "because the new rebel is a skeptic"—because he cannot bring himself to will something definite and limited— "he cannot be a revolutionary." For "the fact that he wants to doubt everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything" (Chesterton 1959,41). Thus, the most radical skepticism ends in the most radical conservatism. In other words, a refusal to judge among ideas and activities is, in the end, an endorsement of the status quo. To embrace everything is to be unable to embrace a particular plan of action, for to embrace a particular plan of action is to reject all others, at least for that moment. Moreover, as observed in our discussion of openness, to embrace everything is to embrace self-contradiction: to hold to both one's purposes and to that which defeats one's purposes—to tolerance and intolerance, open-mindedness and close-mindedness, democracy and tyranny. In the same manner, then, the ambiguists' refusals to will something "definite and limited" undermines their revolutionary impulses. In their refusal to say what they will not celebrate and what they will not rebel against, they deny themselves (and everyone else in their political world) a particular plan or ground to work from. By refusing to deny incivility, they deny themselves a civil public space from which to speak. They cannot say "no" to the terrorist who would silence dissent. They cannot turn their backs on the bullying of the white supremacist. And, as such, in refusing to bar the tactics of the anti-democrat, they refuse to support the tactics of the democrat. In short, then, to be a true ambiguist, there must be some limit to what is ambiguous. To fully support political contest, one must fully support some uncontested rules and reasons. To generally reject the silencing or exclusion of others, one must sometimes silence or exclude those who reject civility and democracy.

65/65

similar “complex” template with a headerv.web.umkc.edu/vegam/2007sdi/american...

Documents