Speeches

1NC
__________ is the kritik 1. The harms of the 1AC are produced by the state for consumption by American citizens calls for humanitarian intervention or assistance to the third world hide efforts to exacerbate poverty Baudrillard 94
Jean, French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism, The Illusion of the End, translated by Chris Turner, p. 66 -71, PE

[As] we have long denounced the capitalistic, economic exploitation of the poverty of the 'other half of the world' [['autre monde]. We must today denounce the moral and sentimental exploitation of that poverty - charity cannibalism being worse than oppressive violence. The extraction and humanitarian reprocessing of a destitution which has become the equivalent of oil deposits and gold mines. The extortion of the spectacle of poverty and, at the same time, of our charitable condescension: a worldwide appreciated surplus of fine sentiments and bad conscience. We should, in fact, see this not as the extraction of raw materials, but as a waste-reprocessing enterprise. Their destitution and our bad conscience are, in effect, all part of the waste-products of history- the main thing is to recycle them to produce [is] a new energy source. We have here an escalation in the psychological balance of terror. World capitalist oppression is now merely the vehicle and alibi for this other, much more
ferocious, form of moral predation. One might almost say, contrary to the Marxist analysis, that material exploitation is only there to extract that spiritual raw material

the misery of peoples, which serves as psychological nourishment for the rich countries and media nourishment for our daily lives. The 'Fourth World' (we are no longer dealing with a 'developing' Third World) is once again beleaguered, this time as a
that is catastrophe-bearing stratum. The West is whitewashed in the reprocessing of the rest of the world as waste and residue. And the white world repents and seeks absolution - it, too, the waste-product of its own history. The South is a natural producer of raw materials, the latest of which is catastrophe. The North, for its part, specializes in the reprocessing of raw materials and hence also in the reprocessing of catastrophe. Bloodsucking protection, humanitarian interference, Medecins sans frontieres, international solidarity, etc. The last phase of colonialism: the New Sentimental Order is merely the latest form of the New World Order. Other

people's destitution becomes our adventure playground. Thus, the humanitarian offensive aimed at the Kurds - a show of repentance on the part of the Western powers after allowing Saddam Hussein to crush them - is in reality merely the second phase of the war, a phase in which charitable intervention finishes off the work of extermination. We are the consumers of the ever delightful spectacle of poverty and catastrophe, and of the moving spectacle of our own efforts to alleviate it (which, in fact, merely function to secure the conditions of reproduction of the catastrophe market); there, at least, in the order of moral profits, the Marxist analysis is wholly applicable:
we see to it that extreme poverty is reproduced as a symbolic deposit, as a fuel essential to the moral and sentimental equilibrium of the West. In our defence, it might be said that this extreme poverty was largely of our own making and it is therefore normal that we should profit by it. There can be no finer proof that the distress of the rest of the world is at the root of Western power and that the spectacle of that distress is its crowning glory than the inauguration, on the roof of the Arche de la Defense, with a sumptuous buffet laid on by the Fondation des Droits de l'homme, of an exhibition of the finest photos of world poverty. Should we be surprised that spaces are set aside in the Arche d' Alliance. for universal suffering hallowed by caviar and champagne? Just as the economic crisis of the West will not be complete so long as it can still exploit the resources of the rest of the world, so the symbolic crisis will be complete only when it is no longer able to feed on the other half's human and natural catastrophes (Eastern Europe, the Gulf, the Kurds, Bangladesh, etc.).

2NC
First, go to the kritik Think about the kinds of things that make the news: natural disasters, shooting, suicides, anything that reminds us that somebody else has it worse than us. This is the true nature of the 1AC we export death, destruction, and poverty to import its image, drawing satisfaction from others poverty and the knowledge that only we have the power to save them from it And, this turns case despite the solvency claims of the 1AC, it is not in the government's best interest to actually solve the problems they present. A perfect example is Iraq the U.S. gives weapons to Saddam, creates this terrible image of his regime to justify U.S. intervention and, once we remove him, we leaves behind drugs, prostitution, and violence on a grander scale than before we go involved in the first place with the media watching all the while And, if you do buy their solvency claims, that recreates their impacts in other places, only faster and worse Baudrillard 94
Jean, French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism, The Illusion of the End, translated by Chris Turner, p. 66 -71, PE Just as the economic crisis of the West will not be complete so long as it can still exploit the resources of the rest of the world, so the symbolic crisis will be complete only when it is no longer able to feed on the other half's human and natural catastrophes (Eastern Europe, the Gulf, the Kurds, Bangladesh, etc.). We need this drug, which serves us as an aphrodisiac and hallucinogen. And the poor countries are the best suppliers - as, indeed, they are of other drugs. We provide them, through our media, with the means to exploit this paradoxical resource, just as we give them the means to exhaust their natural resources with our technologies. Our whole culture lives off this catastrophic cannibalism, relayed in cynical mode by the news media, and carried forward in moral mode by our humanitarian aid, which is a way of encouraging it and ensuring its continuity, just as economic aid is a strategy for perpetuating under-development. Up to now, the financial sacrifice has been

when the catastrophe market itself reaches crisis point, in accordance with the implacable we run out of disasters from elsewhere or when they can no longer be traded like coffee or other commodities, the West will be forced to produce its own catastrophe for itself, in order to meet its need for spectacle and that voracious appetite for symbols which characterizes it even more than its voracious appetite for food. It will reach the point where it devours itself. When we have finished sucking out the destiny of others, we shall have to invent one for ourselves. The Great Crash,
compensated a hundredfold by the moral gain. But logic of the market, when distress becomes scarce or the marginal returns on it fall from overexploitation, when the symbolic crash, will come in the end from us Westerners, but only when we are no longer able to feed on the hallucinogenic misery which comes to us from the other half of the world. Yet they do not seem keen to give up their monopoly. The Middle East, Bangladesh, black Africa and Latin America are really going flat out in the distress and catastrophe stakes, and thus in providing symbolic nourishment for the rich world. They might be said to be overdoing it: heaping earthquakes, floods, famines and ecological disasters one upon another, and finding the means to massacre each other most of the time. The 'disaster show' goes on without any let-up and our sacrificial debt to them far exceeds their economic debt. The misery with which they generously overwhelm us is something we shall never be able to repay. The sacrifices we offer in return are laughable (a tornado or two, a few tiny holocausts on the roads, the odd financial sacrifice) and, moreover, by some infernal logic, these work out as much greater gains for us, whereas our kindnesses have merely added to the natural catastrophes another one immeasurably worse: the demographic catastrophe, a veritable epidemic which we deplore each day in pictures. In short, there is such distortion between North and South, to the symbolic advantage of the South (a hundred thousand Iraqi dead against casualties numbered in tens on our side: in every case we are the losers), that one day everything will break down. One day, the West will break down if we are not soon washed clean of this shame, if an international congress of the poor countries does not very quickly decide to share out this symbolic privilege of misery and catastrophe. It is of course normal, since we refuse to allow the spread of nuclear weapons, that they should refuse to allow the spread of the catastrophe weapon. But it is not right that they should exert that monopoly indefinitely. In any case, the under-developed are only so by comparison with the Western system and its presumed success. In the light of its assumed failure, they are not under-developed at all. They are only so in terms of a dominant evolutionism which has always been the worst of colonial ideologies. The argument here is that there is a line of objective progress and everyone is supposed to pass through its various stages (we find the same eyewash with regard to the evolution of species and in that evolutionism which unilaterally sanctions the superiority of the human race). In the light of current upheavals, which put an end to any idea of history as a linear process, there are no longer either developed or under-developed peoples. Thus, to encourage hope of evolution - albeit by revolution - among the poor and to doom them, in keeping with the objective illusion of progress, to technological salvation is a criminal absurdity. In actual fact, it is their good fortune to be able to escape from evolution just at the point when we no longer know where it is leading. In any case, a majority of these peoples, including those of Eastern Europe, do not seem keen to enter this evolutionist modernity, and their weight in the balance is certainly no small factor in the West's repudiation of its own history, of its own utopias and its own modernity. It might be said that the routes of violence, historical or otherwise, are being turned around and that the viruses now pass from South to North, there being every chance that, five hundred years after America was conquered, 1992 and the end of the century will mark the comeback of the defeated and the sudden reversal of that modernity. The sense of pride is no longer on the side of wealth but of poverty, of those who - fortunately for them - have nothing to repent, and may indeed glory in being privileged in terms of catastrophes. Admittedly, this is a privilege they could hardly renounce, even if they wished to, but natural disasters merely reinforce the sense of guilt felt towards them by the wealthy by those whom God visibly scorns since he no longer even strikes them down. One day it will be the Whites themselves who will give up their whiteness. It is a good bet that repentance will reach its highest pitch with the five-hundredth anniversary of the conquest of the Americas. We are going to have to lift the curse of the defeated - but symbolically victorious - peoples, which is insinuating itself five hundred years later, by way of repentance, into the heart of the white race. No solution has been found to the dramatic situation of the under-developed, and none will be found since their drama has now been overtaken by that of the overdeveloped, of the rich nations. The psychodrama of congestion, saturation, super abundance, neurosis and the breaking of blood vessels which haunts us - the drama of the excess of means over ends calls more urgently for attention than that of penury, lack and poverty. That is where the most imminent danger of catastrophe resides, in the societies which have run out of emptiness.

Artificial catastrophes, like the beneficial aspects of civilization, progress much more

quickly than natural ones. The underdeveloped are still at the primary stage of the natural, unforeseeable catastrophe. We are already at the second stage,
that of the manufactured catastrophe - imminent and foreseeable - and we shall soon be at that of the pre-programmed catastrophe, the catastrophe of the third kind, deliberate and experimental. And, paradoxically, it is our pursuit of the means for averting natural catastrophe - the unpredictable form of destiny - which will take us

there. Because it is unable to escape it, humanity will pretend to be the author of its destiny. Because

it cannot accept being confronted with an end which is uncertain or governed by fate, it will prefer to stage its own death as a species. And, weve got an epistemology disad Baudrillard 94
Jean, French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism, The Illusion of the End, translated by Chris Turner, p. 55-58, PE In the case of the Romanian revolution, it was the faking of the dead in Timisoara which aroused a kind of moral indignation and raised the problem of the scandal of 'disinformation' or, rather, of information itself as scandal. It

was not the dead that were the scandal, but the corpses being pressed into appearing before the television cameras, as in the past dead souls were pressed into appearance in the register of deaths. It was their being taken hostage, as it were, and our being held hostage too, as mystified TV viewers. Being blackmailed by violence and death, especially in a noble and revolutionary cause, was felt to be worse than the violence itself, was felt to be a parody of history. All the media live off the presumption of catastrophe and of the succulent imminence of death. A photo in Liberation, for example, shows us a convoy of refugees 'which, some time
after this shot was taken, was to be attacked by the Iraqi army'. Anticipation of effects, morbid simulation, emotional blackmail. It was the same on CNN with the arrival of the Scuds. Nothing is news if it does not pass through that horizon of the virtual, that hysteria of the virtual - not in the psychological sense, but in the sense of a compulsion for what is presented, in all bad faith, as real to be consumed as unreal. In the past, to show something up as a fake, we said: 'It's just play-acting', 'It's all romance!', 'It's put on for the cameras!'. This time, with Romania and the Gulf War, we were able to say, 'It's just TV!' Photographic or cinema images still pass through the negative stage (and that of projection), whereas the TV image, the video image, digital and synthetic, are images without a negative, and hence without negativity and without reference. They are virtual and the virtual is what puts an end to all negativity, and thus to all reference to the real or to events. At a stroke, the

contagion of images, engendering themselves without reference to a real or an imaginary, itself real object is wiped out

becomes virtually without limits, and this limitless engendering produces information as catastrophe. Is an image which refers only to itself still an image? However this may be, that image raises the problem of its indifference to the world, and thus of our indifference to it - which is a political problem. When television becomes the strategic space of the event, it sets itself up as a deadly self-reference, it becomes a bachelor machine. The by news not merely alienated, but abolished. All that remains of it are traces on a monitoring screen. Many Romanian eyewitness accounts speak of being dispossessed of the event in this way, deprived of the lived experience they have of it by being submerged in the media network, by being placed under house arrest in front of their television screens. Spectators then become exoterics of the screen, living their revolution as an exoticism of images, themselves exogenous, touristic spectators of a virtual history. From the moment the studio becomes the strategic centre, and the screen the only site of appearance, everyone wants to be on it at all costs, or else gathers in the street in the glare of the cameras, and these, indeed, actually film one another. The street becomes an extension of the studio, that is, of the non-site of the event, of the virtual site of the event. The street itself becomes a virtual space. Site of the definitive confusion of masses and medium, of the real-time confusion of act and sign. There is no will to communicate in all this. The only irresistible drive is to occupy this non-site, this empty space of representation which is the screen. Representation (political representation too) is currently a trough of depression - meteorological depression - which the media fill up with their turbulences, with the same consequences as occur when any kind of space is suddenly depressurized. The highest pressure of news corresponds to the lowest pressure of events and reality [Ie reel]. The same unrealism in the Ceausescu trial. It is not the judicial procedure itself which is scandalous but the video tape, unacceptable as the only, bloodless trace of a bloody event. In the eyes of the whole world, this will remain an event forever suspect, for the sole reason of its - strangely obscene - scenic abduction. This hidden jury, its voice striking out against the accused, these defendants we are forced to see even though they are virtually dead, these dead prisoners shot a second time to meet the needs of news. One might even wonder whether the actors in this staged event were not deliberately trying to make themselves seem suspect in the eyes of world opinion, as though playing at sabotaging their image. At the same time, the Ceausescu trial was pulled off perfectly as a video production, betraying a sharp sense of the image function, the blackmail-function, the deterrence- function. Deep down, the intuitive grasp of these things has grown more sophisticated over there, in the shadow of dictatorship, than it has with us. We have nothing to teach them. For, if the Romanians themselves got high on this media speculation which served them as a revolutionary aphrodisiac, they also dragged all the Western media into the same news demagogy. By manipulating themselves, they caused us spontaneously to swallow their fiction. We bear the same responsibility as they do. Or, rather, there is no responsibility anywhere. The question of responsibility cannot even be raised. It is the evil genius of news which promotes such staging. When information gets mixed in with its source, then, as with sound waves, you get a feedback effect - an effect of interference and uncertainty. When demand is maximal (and everywhere today the demand for events is maximal), it short-circuits the initial situation and produces an uncontrollable response effect. That is, ultimately, why we do the Romanians an injustice when we accuse them of manipulation and bad faith. No one is responsible. It is all an effect of the infernal cycle of credibility. The actors and the media sensed obscurely that the events in Eastern Europe had to be given credibility, that that revolution had to be lent credibility by an extra dose of dead bodies. And the media themselves had to be lent credibility by the reference to the people. Leading to a vicious circle of

credibility, the result of which is the decredibilizing of the revolution and

the events themselves. The logical sequence of news and history turns back against itself, bringing, in its cyclical movement, a kind of deflation of historical
consciousness. The Americans did just the same in the Gulf War. By the excessive nature of their deployment and stagecraft, by putting their power and news control so extravagantly to the test, they decredibilized both war and news. They were the Ubus of their wn power, just as the Romanians were the Ubus of their own mpotence. Excess itself engenders the parody which invalidates the facts. And, just as the principle of economics is wrecked by financial speculation, so the principle of

politics [Ie politique] and history is wrecked by media speculation. And, this is especially true for their impact evidence even if their warrants are true, the media has to make it seem like a more substantial impact because thats what the viewers want

Links

Link Demo, Rights, Values

We have a specific link exporting values means they lose their uniqueness and therefor all value to __________ turns the __________ advantage and inevitably leads to violent lash-outs Baudrillard 96
Jean, March 16, The Global and the Universal, French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism

Globalisation and universality are not equivalent terms; in fact they could be considered to mutually exclude one another. Globalisation
pertains to techniques, the market, tourism, information. Universality pertains to values, human rights, freedoms, culture, democracy. Globalisation seems to be irreversible, the universal on the other hand appears to be almost an endangered species. At least in so far as it constitutes a system of values for Western modernity with no counterpart in any other culture. No word for a value system which claims to speak with a single voice for all cultures and their difference, but which, paradoxically, does not think of itself as relative and sees itself quite ingenuously as the ultimate transcendent goal of all the others. We do not imagine for one moment that the universal might refer only to localised Western thought, a product that is specific to the West, which, original though it may be, is in the final analysis, every bit as difficult to export as any other local product. Yet that is exactly how the Japanese see the universal, as something specifically Western, and far from adopting this abstract concept, they take what for us is universal and, in a curious reversal, make it relative and incorporate it into their own singularity. Any culture worthy of the name loses itself in the universal. Any

culture that makes itself universal loses its singularity and, gradually dies. This is the case for

the cultures we have destroyed by assimilating them by force, but it is also the case for our own, in its claim to be universal. The difference is that the others have died of their singularity and that is a noble death whereas we are dying from the loss of all singularity, from the extermination of our values, and that is not a noble death. We think that the destiny of any single value is its elevation to the universal without taking heed of the mortal danger that this promotion represents. Rather than an elevation, it is a reduction or shall we say an elevation to a degree zero of value. At the time of the Enlightenment, universalisation was a top down affair, in a process of continuous advancement. Today, it is bottom up and involves a neutralisation of values as a result of their proliferation and their endless dispersal. And so it is for human rights, for democracy, etc., they expand according to the law of the lowest common denominator, to a point of maximum entropy. The Xerox degree of value. In fact, the universal perishes with globalisation. When the dynamic of the universal as transcendence, as ideal, and as utopia becomes a reality, it ceases to exist as transcendence, as ideal, as utopia. The gobalisation of exchange puts an end to the universality of values. It is the triumph of monothought over universal thought. What is globalised is first of all the market, the promiscuity of exchange of anything and everything, the perpetual movement of money. Culturally speaking, this is the anything goes promiscuity of the signifier and of values; in other words, pornography. The endless stream flooding the net with anything and everything, this is pornography. No need for sexual indecency, the simple existence of this interactive copulation is all it takes. At theend of this process, there is no longer any difference between the global and the universal. The

universal is itself globalised, democracy, [and] human rights circulate in exactly the same way, through exactly the same channels as any global product: like oil or capital. What
happens with the passage from the universal to the global is at once a homogenisation and an infinite fragmenting of the system. The global interconnection of networks is doubled by a dislocation of the fragments moving further and further apart from each other - like a sky rocket that explodes and shatters at its highest point then scatters in a thousand fragments. What takes the place the central is not the local, it's the dis-located. What takes the place of the cencentric is not the de-centered but the offcenter. Disintegration of the universal. Virtual totalitarianism: "www:// ization of the world" and fragmentation. Globalisation is both homogenisation and increasing discrimination. Marginalisation

and exclusion, are no accident: they are in the very logic of globalisation which, unlike

the universal, breaks apart the existing structures, all the better to assimilate them. On every level the gaps grow wider, become irreversible. A little like the universe where the galaxies are moving away from one another at such prodigious speeds. If this is the case, one might well ask whether the universal hasn't already succumbed under the weight of its own critical mass, whether it ever had any real existence other than in official discourse and moral codes. In any event, for us, the mirror of the universal is shattered (one could even see it as a kind of mirror stage of humanity). But this is perhaps a good thing because,

in the

fragments of this shattered mirror of the universal, all singularities reemerge. Those that we believed threatened are surviving;
those we believed had disappeared are coming back to life. Japan, once again, is a remarkable case in point. Japan, better than any other country, has made a success of globalisation (technical, economic, financial) without going through the phase of the universal (the succession of middle-class ideologies and forms of political organisation) and without losing anything of its singularity, despite what is said to the contrary. One could even say that it is precisely because Japan was never lumbered with the concept of the universal that it succeeded so well technically and globally, by bringing together the singular (the power of tradition) and the global (the power of the virtual, that is, the internet revolution ). Behind the increasingly fierce resistance to globalisation, social and political resistance which can seem like an archaic refusal of modernity at all costs, one cannot but read a reaction against the domination of the universal, a kind of painful revisionism in respect to the achievements of modernity, and in respect to the idea of progress and of History, a rejection not only of the (in)famous global techno-structure, but of the underlying monoculturalism, the mental structure that places all cultures, from every continent under the one sign of the universal. This resurgence, or, one might even say, this "insurrection" of singularity can take on violent, anomalous, irrational forms from the perspective of (so-called) "enlightened" thought; ethnic, religious, linguistic, but also on an individual level, forms of neurosis and personality disorder. But it would be a monumental error (the same error which can be seen in the moralistic orchestration of political correctness common to all power structures and the majority of "intellectuals") to write off these movements of revolt as populist, archaic, or even terrorist. Every event that makes its mark in the world today, does so in reaction to this abstract universality (including the antagonism of Islam towards Western values - it is because Islam is the most violent critic of this Western globalisation that Islam is public enemy number one today). If we refuse to understand this, we will exhaust ourselves in an endless contest between a universal thought sure of its power and sure of its rightness, and an ever increasing number of irreducible singularities. Even in our societies, which are thoroughly acculturated to the universal, it is clear that nothing that has been sacrificed to this concept has truly disappeared. It has simply gone underground. And what is being played out in reverse today is an entire history supposedly progressivist, an entire evolutionism cristallised around its ultimate end, which, moreover, has been completely lost sight of in the meantime. Today this utopia is dislocated, and its dislocation at the deepest levels is proceeding even faster than its imposition by force. What we are dealing with here is a complex three level process: the globalisation of exchange, the universality of values and the singularity of forms (languages, cultures, individuals, character types, but also chance, accident etc.- everything the universal is bound to reject as exception or anomaly). But, the situation is changing and is becoming more and more extreme as universal values lose their authority and legitimacy. As long as they were accepted as mediating values, they succeeded (more or less) in integrating singularities as differences within a universal culture of difference. But today they are no longer able to do so because globalisation triumphant is razing to the ground every difference and every value, generating a perfectly indifferent

And all that is left, once the universal is gone, is the all-mighty global techno-structure on the one hand and singularities abandoned to their own wild devices on the other. The universal has had its day in history. But today, caught between a monolithic global order, an unconditional globalisation, and the stubborn insurrection of singularities erratic, concepts of freedom, democracy and human rights pale into insignificance, mere ghosts of a lost universal. And it is difficult to imagine that they could be reborn from their ashes by the mere
(non)culture. play of the political - which is caught up in the same process of deregulation and whose foundations are almost as flimsy as those of moral and intellectual authority. But the die has not yet been cast, even if for universal values, all bets are definitely off The stakes have risen and globalisation is by no means a sure winner. Everywhere its dissolving and homogenising force is being challenged by emerging forces heterogeneous in nature, which are not only different but antagonistic and

irreducible. What may emerge, out of the shattering of the global system, are singularities. Now, these singularities are neither negative nor positive. They are not an alternative to global order, they are on a different scale. They are not subject to value judgements; so they can be either the best or the worst. Their one absolute saving grace is to allow us to break out of the straitjacket of totality. They cannot be federated in a single historical move. They are the despair of every would-be dominant monothought. But they are not a monocounterthought. They invent their own rules of the game, and their most likely fate is the fate of heresies: to be eradicated by global orthodoxy. This is what the Fourth World War will be about, and it will be the only truly world war, since its stakes are globalisation itself. Culture itself started off as a singularity. That is, an incomparable, irreducible, inexchangeable form. Then came the concept of universal culture. Then the current globalisation of a culture which had become a global product. I would like to talk a little more about this "fate of culture" which poses for each of us, within the context of the global, the problem of cultural identity.

And, empirics prove this argument Iraqs democratic revolution was unsuccessful because it was unnatural when the U.S. gets involved in __________ promotion it inevitably leads to social fragmentation

Impacts

Turns Case Terror

The K turns their terror advantage U.S. perceived superiority through the media is the reason for proportional terrorist backlash Baudrillard 3
Jean, French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism, October, The Mind of Terrorism All the speeches and commentaries made since September 11 betray a gigantic post-traumatic abreaction both to the event itself and to the fascination that it exerts. The

moral condemnation and the sacred union against terrorism [is] are directly proportional to the prodigious jubilation felt at having seen this global superpower destroyed, because it was this insufferable superpower that gave rise both to the violence now spreading throughout the world and to the terrorist imagination that (without our knowing it) dwells within us all. That the entire world
without exception had dreamed of this event, that nobody could help but dream the destruction of so powerful a hegemon-this fact is unacceptable to the moral conscience of the West, and yet it is a fact nonetheless, a fact that resists the emotional violence of all the rhetoric conspiring to erase it. In the end,

it was they

who did it but we who wished it. If we do not take this fact into account, the vent loses all symbolic dimension; it becomes s a purely arbitrary act, the
murderous phantasmagoria of a few fanatics that we need only repress. But we know well that such is not tie case. Without our profound complicity the event would not have reverberated so forcefully, and in their strategic symbolism the terrorists knew they could count on this unconfessable complicity. It goes well beyond the hatred that the desolate and the exploited-those who ended up on the wrong side of the new world order-feel toward the dominant global power. This malicious desire resides n the hearts of even those who've shared in the spoils. The allergy to absolute order, to absolute power, is universal, and the two towers of the World Trade Center were, precisely because of their ideaticality, the perfect incarnation of this absolute order. Countless disaster films have borne witness to these fantasies, and the universal appeal of the images shows just how close the fantasies always are to being acted out: the

closer the entire system gets to perfection or to omnipotence, the stronger the urge to destroy it grows. When the world has been so thoroughly monopolized, when power has been so
formidably consolidated by the technocratic machine and the dogma of globalization, what means of turning the tables remains besides terrorism? In dealing all the cards to itself, the system forced the Other to change the rules of the game. And the new rules are ferocious, because the game is ferocious. Terrorism is the act that restores an irreducible singularity to the heart of a generalized system of exchange. All those singularities (species, individuals, cultures) that have been sacrificed to the interests of a global system of commerce avenge themselves by turning the tables with terrorism. Terror against terror-this is no longer an ideological notion. We have gone well beyond ideology and politics, The energy that nourishes terror, no ideology, no cause, not even an Islamic one, can explain. The terrorists are not aiming simply to transform the world. Like the heretics of previous times, they aim to radicalize the world through sacrifice, whereas the system aims to convert: it into money through force. Terrorists, like viruses, are everywhere. There is no longer a boundary that can hem terrorism in; it is at the heart of the very culture it's fighting with, and the visible fracture (and the hatred) that pits the exploited and underdeveloped nations of the world against the West masks the dominant system's internal fractures. It is as if every means of domination secreted its own antidote. Against this almost automatic from of resistance to its power, the system can do nothing. Terrorism is the shock wave of this silent resistance. It is a mistake, then, to characterize this as a clash of civilizations or of religions. It goes well beyond Islam aria' America, on which one aright be tempted to concentrate in order to create the illusion of a confrontation resolvable by force. There is a fundamental antagonism at work. but it transcends the phantom of America (which is perhaps the epicenter though not the incarnation of globalization) as well as the phantom of Islam (which likewise is not the incarnation of terrorism). This

is the clash of triumphant globalization at war with

itself. In this sense, it is accurate to speak of this as a world war-no: the third but the fourth-and the only one that is truly global, since what's at stake is globalization
itself. The first put an end to European supremacy and to the era of colonialism; the second put an end to Nazism; and the third to Communism. Each one brought us progressively closer to the single world order of today, which is now nearing its end, everywhere opposed, everywhere grappling with hostile forces. This is a war of fractal complexity, waged worldwide against rebellious singularities that, in the manner of antibodies, mount a resistance in every cell. These confrontations are so imperceptible that it is occasionally necessary to resuscitate the idea of war by staging spectacular scenes such as those in the Persian Gulf and now in Afghanistan. But World War IV happens elsewhere too. It haunts all expressions of world order, all forms of hegemonic domination-if Islam were dominating the world, terrorism would rise up against Islam. The globe itself is resistant to globalization. Terrorism is immoral. The occurrence at the World Trade Center, this symbolic act of defiance, is immoral, but it was in response to globalization, which is itself immoral. We are therefore immoral ourselves, so if we hope to understand anything we will need to get beyond Good and Evil. The crucial point lies in precisely the opposite direction from the Enlightenment philosophy of Good and Evil. We naively believe in the progress of Good, that its ascendance in all domains (science, technology, democracy, human rights) corresponds to the defeat of Evil. No one seems to have understood that Good and Evil increase in power at the same time -and in the same way. The triumph of one does not result in the obliteration of the ether; to the contrary. We tend to regard Evil, metaphysically, as an accidental smudge, but this axiom is illusory. Good does not reduce Evil, or vice versa; they are at once irreducible, the one and the other, and inextricably linked. In the end,

Good cannot vanquish Evil except by denying to be Good, since,

in monopolizing global power, it entails a backfire of proportional violence. In the traditional universe, there remained a balance of Good and Evil, a dialectical relationship that guaranteed, for better or worse, the tension and equilibrium of the moral universe. This balance was lost as soon as there was a total extrapolation of Good-the hegemony of the positive over every form of negativity. From that moment, the equilibrium was broken, and Evil returned to an invisible autonomy, increasing exponentially. Relatively speaking, this is a bit like what happened to the political order after Communism disappeared and neoliberal forces triumphed worldwide. It was then that a phantom enemy arose, percolating throughout the planet, rising up through all the cracks in power. Islam. But Islam. is merely the crystallized form of this antagonism. The antagonism is everywhere, and it is in each of us. Hence, terror against terror. But it is asymmetrical terror, and it is this asymmetry that leaves the absolute global power disarmed. It can do nothing but strike at its own rationale for the balance of power, without being able to compete on the playing field of symbolic defiance and of death, having deleted that playing field from its own culture. Until now, this integrating power had succeeded in absorbing and reabsorbing every attack, every negativity, and in doing so created a thoroughly hopeless situation (not only for the wretched o' the earth but also for the privileged and well-to-do in their radical comfort). But the terrorists have started using their own deaths offensively and effectively, based on a strategic intuition, a sense of their adversary's immense fragility, of the system's quasi-perfection, of the explosion that would erupt at the slightest spark. They succeeded in turning their deaths into an ultimate weapon against a system devoted to the ideal of zero losses. Any system of zero losses is a zero-sum game. And all methods of deterrence and destruction can do nothing against an enemy who has already turned his death into a counteroffensive weapon. (" Who cares about the American bombing! Our men are as eager to die as the Americans are eager to live!") Thus the imbalance of more than 3,000 deaths inflicted in one fell swoop against a system of zero losses. Here, everything depends upon death, not only upon the brutal irruption of death live and in real time but upon the irruption of a death much more than real: a symbolic and sacrificial deathwhich is to say, the absolute, ultimate, unappealable event.

And, U.S. involvement magnifies this turn the more terrorist groups can see America's power the more they want to humble that power