Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Notes
Ill make the notes short. The af argues that islamophobia and a fear of
terrorism securitize/shape our surveillance policies in a bad way because
terrorism really isn't a threat and Muslims (or other brown people)
shouldnt be blamed for it because theyre Muslim or brown. The af would
establish a strict scrutiny standard based on religion and color
(race/national origin/ethnicity are GENERALLY already protected under it
but the af says wed apply it to surveillance too).
Sachin Mahajan
1AC (Security)
Advantage
Welcome to the modern security apparatus, a militaristic police
state, a world where mass scrutinizing surveillance on millions of
innocent people runs rampant, a world where the identifying as
Muslim necessitates racist violence and police brutality regardless
of your skin color. Yet given the topic and the iniquities of the state,
the modern surveillance regime, can be atoned for through negative
state action, therefore we conclude that: The United States federal
government should establish a strict scrutiny standard for domestic
surveillance based on race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, and
color.
Ghughunishvili 10 (Irina Ghughunishvili, Masters in International Relations and European Studies from
the Central European University, Securitization of Migration in the United States after 9/11: Constructing Muslims
and Arabs as Enemies, 2010, SMahajan)
way relationship between the speech act, the audience and securitizing actor, where politicians use the speech act
first to justify exceptional measures, has been criticized by scholars, such as Balzacq. According to him, the onedirectional relationship between the three factors, or some of them, is not the best approach. To fully grasp the
dynamics, it will be more beneficial to "rather than looking for a one-directional relationship between some or all of
the three factors highlighted, it could be profitable to focus on the degree of congruence between them.26 Among
other aspects of the Copenhagen School's theoretical framework, which he criticizes, the thesis will rely on the
criticism of the lack of context and the rejection of a 'one-way causal relationship between the audience and the
Bigo uses
migrants)
been established, it is important to turn to how the theory and its adjustments are helpful in explaining the
amalgam of between securitization of migration and terrorism in speech act and policies and every-day practices.
The question addressed in the following part is whether anti-terrorist agenda proved to be a tool for more austere
forms of migration control and how the threat was constructed in the European context. This will provide a basis to
expand the theoretical framework to the United States case. 1.3 Securitization, Migration and Terrorism Nexus in
the European Union As mentioned in the introduction, securitization of migration and its connection with terrorism
Unlike
in the United States, which is proud to present itself as the 'a country of
migrants' and thus frame the issue as only effecting 'social problems and not identity, the
securitization of migration to the European Union has been observed for
decades now and has been constructed both as a threat to the identity as
has been analyzed extensively in the European context and to a very limited extent in the United States.
that in the EU 9/11 attacks did not initiate new insecurities, or uncertainties in connection with the migration policy,
but the actions and the framing was the continuation of the trend that existed prior to the attacks/' In line with this
argument, but stressing the continuous nature of security construction in the EU before and after 9/11, Christina
Boswell argues that the link was short- lived. Looking at securitization of migration after 9/11 in the European
context, Boswell contends the orthodox notion that there was a tight link between migration and terrorism.40
According to her, several factors served as obstacles in connecting irregular migrants and new entrants to
terrorism, since an overview of public debate and policy practice remained unchanged by the anti-terrorist agenda.
The same thing could be said about what was taking place on a policy level. There was an attempt at establishment
of counter-terrorism agenda through, for example, data gathering of migrants, both on the EU and national
levels.41 The policy has been the most prevalent in the establishment of monitoring and gathering data on
migrants. She points out that, paradoxically, migration policy has been used for fighting terrorism than other way
around.42 Andrew Neal has a similar point when addressing the issue of securitization and risk at the EU border. He
argues that European external borders agency FRONTEX, is not the manifestation of institutionalization of linkage
between migration and terrorism after 9/11 and subsequent bombings in Madrid and London, but rather the failure
of making such an association.43 How can this be explained? Firstly, Boswell finds the answer in that the most of
the terrorist suspects were EU nationals and thus there was little possibility to associate them with migrants. In a
of the differentiation between system of politics (political parties concerned with legitimizing and mobilizing people
for state action) and administration (policy practice).44 The first point refers to the Bigo's and Anastassia Tsoukala's
idea that political parties and politicians are power-maximizers necessarily driven by self-interest, of increasing their
power by creating the illusion that they are providers of security and protection.4"1 The second point that she
criticizes is that in the process of legitimizing their action, politicians try to avoid scrutiny, or 'freeing themselves
from the requirement of public legitimization' thus there is no necessity of justification of all the measures taken in
resistance to securitization within parts of the administration could make politics cautious about adopting
securitization discourse, as this could create unmanageable public expectations.'47 Lastly, Andrew Neal also
criticizes causality between speech act and practice, as, 'much of what is done in the EU in the name of security is
quiet, technical and unspectacular, in and just as much does not declare itself to be in the name of security at all
'48 The perceptions of the dynamics proposed by the Boswell and Neal will In the further assessment of the
dynamics between the audience and the securitizing actor in the United States. 1.4 Terrorism and Migration in the
United States In his opening chapter of his latest book The Maze of Fear, John Tirman quotes Oscar Handlin, who in
his 1951 succinctly summarized the nature of migration to the United States, identifying it with the American
identity. In his 1951 book, Vie Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that made the American People' he
writes: 'Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America/ he wrote. 'Then I discovered that the
securitization after 9/11, but they are not addressing the link between the two. Tirman describes the ways in which
the conception of migration changes, since the 9/11 attacks.
it
was considered to be a
threat to "social' security , (jobs, welfare, housing, etc.) After the attacks, however,
terrorism was framing the discourse and practices about migration . He
underlines: 'The fear-thus far, unfounded-that al Qaeda will sneak across the
'unguarded' 2,000 mile border accounts for the urgency. In fact, the House bill is
called the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration
Control Act of 2005. Immigration to the United States and the connection with terrorism has not been
broadly the discussed in the light of securitization theory. There are few who address the issue of securitization after
9/11, but they are not directly addressing the link between securitization, migration and terrorism. Although not
of them were in the United States on temporary visas, three of which had expired. All of them were from the Middle
East, mostly Saudi and Egyptian, and
bugged ( recorded ),
on mosque-goers,
the most pernicious attribute of this terror expert industry , the aspect that
requires much more attention, is its pretense to non-ideological, academic
But
experts deserves to be put in quotation marks is not as some ad hominem insult (something the mavens of the
terror expert clique are incapable of understanding, as they demonstrated with their ludicrously personalized
outrage when I applied this critique to one of their industrys most cherished Patron Saints, Will McCants). Rather,
been used that way ever since. The best scholarship on this issue, in my view, comes from Remi Brulin, who
teaches at NYU and wrote his PhD dissertation at the Sorbonne in Paris on the discourse of Terrorism. When I
historically and presently . That still has not been figured out, which is why there is no fixed,
accepted definition of the term, and certainly no consistent application. Brulin details the well-known game-playing
with the term: in the 1980s, Iraq was put on the U.S. list of Terror states when the U.S. disliked Saddam for being
aligned with the Soviets; then Iraq was taken off when the U.S. wanted to arm Saddam to fight Iran; then they were
put back on again when the U.S. wanted to attack Iraq. The same thing is happening now with the ME
K: now
that theyre a pro-U.S. and pro-Israel Terror group rather than a Saddam-allied one, they are magically no longer
use of socalled death squads (often off-duty or plain-clothes security or police officers) in conjunction
with blatant intimidation of political opponents , human rights and aid workers, student
groups, labor organizers, journalists and others has been a prominent feature of the rightwing military dictatorships that took power in Argentina, Chile and Greece
during the 1970s and even of elected governments in El Salvador, Guatemala,
Colombia and Peru since the mid-1980s. But these state-sanctioned or explicitly
ordered acts of internal political violence directed mostly against domestic
populations that is, rule by violence and intimidation by those already in power against their own citizenry
are generally termed terror in order to distinguish that phenomenon
from terrorism, which is understood to be violence committed by non-state entities. (Bruce Hoffman,
Inside Terrorism, 27). Sadly, Hoffman does not tell his readers who at the time termed acts by death squads
terror, or who wishes to do so in order to distinguish this phenomenon from terrorism. Not only is this
argument rather less than convincing, but most crucially no one in Washington, at the time, ever used this
argument, and this for obvious reasons. Indeed, as Hoffman himself notes, the death squads, even in elected
governments like El Salvador, were state-sanctioned, precisely what the Reagan administration kept denying at
the time. Furthermore, Hoffmans argument makes no sense in the historical context: can one imagine the Reagan
administration defending US aid to El Salvador as part of the fight against terrorism while stating that the ties
between that State and the death squad posed no problem because they merely fell under the concept of
terror? Thus, the role of terrorism experts cannot simply be described as blindly accepting of the official
inconsistencies that have been at its heart from the very beginning . Finally,
one will note that Hoffman, in Inside Terrorism, makes no mention of the Contras and their support by the Reagan
administration. This is a difficult decision to explain, since aid to the Contras falls under the concept of state
sponsored terrorism, the validity of which is accepted by all experts. Here, Hoffman uses the technique used by so
many other terrorism experts in this case: he simply decides to not write about it, with no explanation given.
The entire field is one huge efort to legitimize U.S. state violence and
delegitimize the violence by its enemies
Hood shooter Nidal Hasan began today, and I asked earlier today on Twitter whether this attack constituted
Terrorism given that it targeted a military base and soldiers of a nation at war. My mere asking of this question
sparked all sorts of intense outrage from the predictable natsec D.C. mavens: Of course its Terrorism, as Hasan
killed unarmed people including one civilian, exclaimed people who would never, ever dare apply the Terrorism
label to the civilian-devastating U.S. attack on Iraq or the use of American drones and cluster bombs to kill innocent
civilians by the dozens; that is the discourse of Terrorism: violence by Muslims against a U.S. military base during a
time of war qualifies, but violence by the U.S. Government against thousands of innocent Muslim civilians never
could). Brulin is far from alone among scholars in recognizing the true purpose of this sham discipline. Harvards
Lisa Stampnitzky, whom I interviewed several months ago, is also a leading scholar on the exploitation of Terrorism
and the field that calls itself terrorism experts. In a superb journal article in Qualitative Sociology, she documents
that Terrorism has proved to be a highly problematic object of expertise; in particular, Terrorism studies fails to
conform to the most common sociological notions of what a field of intellectual production ought to look like, and
has been described by participants and observers alike as a failure. She notes that the harshest condemnations
have come from those who work in this academic discipline: Terrorism researchers have characterized their field as
stagnant, poorly conceptualized, lacking in rigor, and devoid of adequate theory, data, and methods. That includes
Bruce Hoffman himself, who, she notes, wrote: Fifteen years ago, the study of terrorism was described by perhaps
the worlds preeminent authority on modern warfare as a huge and ill-defined subject [that] has probably been
responsible for more incompetent and unnecessary books than any other outside the field of sociology. It attracts
phonies and amateursas a candle attracts moths [T]errorism research arguably has failed miserably.
Stampnitzky adds: More than 15 years after this assessment, descriptions of the field are rife with similar claims.
Indeed, her forthcoming book from Cambridge University Press is entitled Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented
Terrorism and, in her words, it explains how political violence became terrorism, and how this transformation led
to the current war on terror. For that reason, she argues in her dissertation, those who would address terrorism
as a rational object, subject to scientific analysis and manipulation, produce a discourse which they are unable to
control, as attempts at scientific discourse are continually hybridized by the moral discourse of the public sphere, in
which terrorism is conceived as a problem of evil and pathology. Indeed, she explains in her journal article, One of
the most oft-noted difficulties has been the inability of researchers to establish a suitable definition of the concept
of terrorism itself. In a recently published journal article in International Security, entitled The Terrorism
Delusion, Professors John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart (cited by Walt) extensively document what a fraud the
concept of Terrorism has become over the last decade. Specifically, the
exaggerations of the
threat presented by terrorism and then on the distortions of perspective
these exaggerations have inspired distortions that have in turn inspired
a determined and expensive quest to ferret out, and even to create, the
nearly nonexistent. Richard Jackson is a Professor at the The National Centre for Peace and Conflict
Studies in New Zealand. He has written volumes on the fraud of terrorism expertise and the propagandistic
purpose of this field of discipline. He has documented that most self-proclaimed terrorism experts simply ignore
the primary cause of the violence they claim to study: most
whatever the wielder of the term wants it to mean: something that cannot be the subject of legitimate expertise.
* * * * * There is no term more potent in our political discourse and legal landscape than Terrorism.
It
shuts down every rational thought process and political debate the
minute it is uttered. It justifies torture
process-free- assassinations
(the Government cant disclose what its doing or have courts rule on its legality
because the Terrorists will learn of it), and it sends people to prison for decades (material supporters of Terrorism).
whatever those with power to shape discourse want it to mean . And no faction
has helped this process along as much as the group of self-proclaimed terrorism experts that has
attached itself to think tanks, academia, and media outlets. They enable pure political
propaganda to masquerade as objective fact, shining brightly with the
veneer of scholarly rigor . The industry itself is a fraud, as are those who
profit from and within it.
whole host of other groups. So it's true that this idea sort of concentrated within those ranks. But in fact
Islamophobia is far more systemic than that . That is to say, the idea of a
Muslim enemy, the idea of a terrorist enemy is one that actually goes back
a couple of decades but was brought to light after 9/11 by the political
elite, by our political leaders. So in fact it is built into the system of U.S. foreign policy
in this country. And to simply look at the far right and to ignore the fact
that it has larger implications in terms of justifying U.S. foreign policy
would be really to have only an incomplete picture of what is at work in
this form of racism. DESVARIEUX: Okay. Let's talk about the mass media and how they depict Islam since
9/11. Can you describe for us how the mass media has depicted Islam? KUMAR: Well, basically, the trauma
of 9/11, the fact that, you know, 3,000 Americans died meant that it enabled the U.S. media to
actually draw on stereotypes that have been, you know, propped up by
Hollywood, by the news media, and so on for a few decades before that. And
that was the idea that these are crazy, irrational people. They are all
apparently driven by Islam to violence. And so we should lock them up, we
should be suspicious of them, we should detain them at airports, and so
on and so forth. And so that's what you saw in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. And this show called 24,
which your viewers may know, is--it's about a lot of things [incompr.] that it's about
justifying the building of a national security state and justifying
practices like torture and so on and so forth.
day, of course, is Syria, and everyone's attention is drawn to Syria. Can you describe for us just how does
Islamophobia play a role in any of the arguments for intervention in Syria, really? KUMAR: Okay. It doesn't play a
direct role in that. It is--the
narrative, which has a long history, combined with this language of clash
of civilizations.
DESVARIEUX: Okay. And how does this fit into domestic policy? How do they work
Islamophobia into domestic policy? KUMAR: Right. I mean, the comparison I make in the book and that I'm actually
terrorist enemy , which justified wars all over the world in order to gain
the U.S.'s interest in [incompr.] particularly in the oil-rich region in the Middle
East. You asked me about domestic politics. Always there was a reflection of the domestic in terms of the
international threat. And so what you've seen is innocent Muslims--and often actually not even Muslims, people
from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, some of them Sikhs, some some of them Hindus, some of them
Christians, and so on, being racially profiled because that is the logic that comes out of this. I have a whole chapter
in the book about how the legal system has been reworked so as to justify things like indefinite detention, things
like torture, things like deportation. And, frankly, the infiltration of agents into our schools, into my school, into
colleges, and so forth. So, you know,
Americans and people who look Muslim have been demonized since 9/11.
mediate way possible: its use, by political and military leaders, leads
directly to violence in the form of war, mass murder (including genocide),
the physical destruction of human communities, and the devastation of
the natural environment. Indeed, if the world ever witnesses a nuclear
holocaust, it will probably be because leaders in more than one country have
succeeded in convincing their people, through the use of political
language, that the use of nuclear weapons and, if necessary, the
destruction of the earth itself, is justifiable. From our perspective, then, every act of
political violencefrom the horrors perpetrated against Native Americans to the murder of political
dissidents in the Soviet Union to the destruction of the World Trade Center, and now the bombing of Afghanistan
is intimately linked with the use of language. Partly what we are talking about
here, of course, are the processes of manufacturing consent and shaping
peoples perception of the world around them; people are more likely to
support acts of violence committed in their name if the recipients of the
violence have been defined as terrorists, or if the violence is presented
as a defense of freedom.
the corrosive effects that this kind of process has on the political culture of supposedly democratic societies. At the
risk of stating the obvious, however, the most fundamental effects of violence are those that are visited upon the
Yet the surveillance its self isn't the only issue, the paranoid
mindset driving U.S policies creates a drive for certainty and eternal
security which causes endless global warfare.
Burke, 7 (Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of New South Wales at Sydney, Anthony,
Johns Hopkins University Press, Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason, Project Muse)
the causes of war -- and thus aims to generate lines of action and
based either on a given sequence of events,
threats, insecurities and political manipulation, or the play of institutional, economic or political
interests (the 'military-industrial complex'). Such factors are important to be sure, and should not be
discounted, but they flow over a deeper bedrock of modern reason that has not only
This essay develops a theory about
come to form a powerful structure of common sense but the apparently solid ground of the real itself. In this light,
the two 'existential' and 'rationalist' discourses of war-making and justification mobilised in the Lebanon war are
am thinking of ontology in both its senses: ontology as both a statement about the nature and ideality of being (in
this case political being, that of the nation-state), and as a statement of epistemological truth and certainty, of
methods and processes of arriving at certainty (in this case, the development and application of strategic
knowledge for the use of armed force, and the creation and maintenance of geopolitical order, security and national
survival). These derive from the classical idea of ontology as a speculative or positivistic inquiry into the
fundamental nature of truth, of being, or of some phenomenon; the desire for a solid metaphysical account of
things inaugurated by Aristotle, an account of 'being qua being and its essential attributes'.17 In contrast, drawing
on Foucauldian theorising about truth and power, I see ontology as a particularly powerful claim to truth itself: a
claim to the status of an underlying systemic foundation for truth, identity, existence and action; one that is not
essential or timeless, but is thoroughly historical and contingent, that is deployed and mobilised in a fraught and
conflictual socio-political context of some kind. In short, ontology is the 'politics of truth'18 in its most sweeping and
in the truth of being, in the truth of truth as such. The second is its intimate relation with violence: the dual
we are
witness to an epistemology of violence (strategy) joined to an ontology of
violence (the national security state). When we consider their relation to war, the two
ontologies are especially dangerous because each alone (and doubly in combination) tends
both to quicken the resort to war and to lead to its escalation either in
scale and duration, or in unintended efects. In such a context violence is not so much a
ontologies represent a simultaneously social and conceptual structure that generates violence. Here
tool that can be picked up and used on occasion, at limited cost and with limited impact -- it permeates being. This
essay describes firstly the ontology of the national security state (by way of the political philosophy of Thomas
Hobbes, Carl Schmitt and G. W. F. Hegel) and secondly the rationalist ontology of strategy (by way of the
geopolitical thought of Henry Kissinger), showing how they crystallise into a mutually reinforcing system of support
and justification, especially in the thought of Clausewitz. This creates both a profound ethical and pragmatic
words of one famous Cold War strategist -- can be thought of as a 'power to hurt'.19 The pragmatic problem arises
because force so often produces neither the linear system of effects imagined in strategic theory nor anything we
could meaningfully call security, but rather turns in upon itself in a nihilistic spiral of pain and destruction. In the era
of a 'war on terror' dominantly conceived in Schmittian and Clausewitzian terms,20 the arguments of Hannah
Arendt (that violence collapses ends into means) and Emmanuel Levinas (that 'every war employs arms that turn
against those that wield them') take on added significance. Neither, however, explored what occurs when war and
being are made to coincide, other than Levinas' intriguing comment that in war persons 'play roles in which they no
longer recognises themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance'. 21 What I am
trying to describe in this essay is a complex relation between, and interweaving of, epistemology and ontology. But
it is not my view that these are distinct modes of knowledge or levels of truth, because in the social field named by
security, statecraft and violence they are made to blur together, continually referring back on each other, like
charges darting between electrodes. Rather they are related systems of knowledge with particular systemic roles
and intensities of claim about truth, political being and political necessity. Positivistic or scientific claims to
epistemological truth supply an air of predictability and reliability to policy and political action, which in turn support
larger ontological claims to national being and purpose, drawing them into a common horizon of certainty that is
one of the central features of past-Cartesian modernity. Here it may be useful to see ontology as a more totalising
and metaphysical set of claims about truth, and epistemology as more pragmatic and instrumental; but while a
distinction between epistemology (knowledge as technique) and ontology (knowledge as being) has analytical
value, it tends to break down in action.
realist analysis critical of Israel and the Bush administration's 'war on terror' Reframing such concerns in
on a one-sided interpretation of Clausewitz that seeks to disentangle strategic from existential reason, and to open
up choice in that way. However without interrogating more deeply how they form a conceptual harmony in
Clausewitz's thought -- and thus in our dominant understandings of politics and war --
tragically violent
'choices' will continue to be made The essay concludes by pondering a normative problem that
arises out of its analysis: if the divisive ontology of the national security state and
or superiority of military and political power, lest the other side take
advantage of our weakness". This argument does not address the
distinction between the enemy threat and one's own contribution to that
threat -by distortions of perception, provocative words, and actions. In short, the enemy is real,
but we have not learned to understand how we have created that
enemy, or how the threatening image we hold of the enemy relates to
its actual intentions. "We never see our enemy's motives and we never labor to
assess his will, with anything approaching objectivity ".[6] Individuals may have little to do
with the choice of national enemies. Most Americans, for example, know only what has been reported in the
have been, inevitably, real grievances that are grounds for enmity. But the attitude of one people towards
another is usually determined by leaders who manipulate the minds of citizens for domestic political reasons
in times of
conflict between nations historical accuracy is the first victim. [8] The Image
of the Enemy and How We Sustain It Vietnam veteran William Broyles wrote: " War begins in the
which are generally unknown to the public. As Israeli sociologist Alouph Haveran has said,
mind, with the idea of the enemy. "[9] But to sustain that idea in war and
peacetime a nation's leaders must maintain public support for the massive
expenditures that are required. Studies of enmity have revealed
susceptibilities, though not necessarily recognized as such by the governing elites that provide raw
material upon which the leaders may draw to sustain the image of an
enemy.[7,10] Freud[11] in his examination of mass psychology identified
the proclivity of individuals to surrender personal responsibility to the
leaders of large groups. This surrender takes place in both totalitarian and democratic societies,
and without coercion. Leaders can therefore designate outside enemies and take actions against them with little
psychologist Sam Keen asks why it is that in virtually every war "The enemy is seen as less than human? He's
faceless. He's an animal"." Keen tries to answer his question: " The
Two
independent sets of professional analysts at the Second International Congress on Forecasting were asked to rate,
respectively, the probability of "A complete suspension of diplomatic relations between the USA and the Soviet
Union, sometime in 1983" or "A Russian invasion of Poland, and a complete suspension of diplomatic relations
between the USA and the Soviet Union, sometime in 1983". The second set of analysts responded with
significantly higher probabilities. (Tversky and Kahneman 1983.) In Johnson et. al. (1993), MBA students at
Wharton were scheduled to travel to Bangkok as part of their degree program. Several groups of students were
asked how much they - 6 - were willing to pay for terrorism insurance. One group of subjects was asked how
much they were willing to pay for terrorism insurance covering the flight from Thailand to the US. A second group
of subjects was asked how much they were willing to pay for terrorism insurance covering the round-trip flight. A
third group was asked how much they were willing to pay for terrorism insurance that covered the complete trip to
Thailand. These three groups responded with average willingness to pay of $17.19, $13.90, and $7.44
prevent nanotechnological warfare by China, than for an engineering project to defend against nanotechnological
attack from any source. The second threat scenario is less vivid and alarming, but the defense is more useful
because it is more vague. More valuable still would be strategies which make humanity harder to extinguish
without being specific to nanotechnologic threats - such as colonizing space, or see Yudkowsky (this volume) on AI.
Security expert Bruce Schneier observed (both before and after the 2005 hurricane in New Orleans) that the U.S.
government was guarding specific domestic targets against "movie-plot scenarios" of terrorism, at the cost of
taking away resources from emergency-response capabilities that could respond to any disaster. (Schneier 2005.)
Overly detailed reassurances can also create false perceptions of safety: "X is not an existential risk and you don't
need to worry about it, because A, B, C, D, and E"; where the failure of any one of propositions A, B, C, D, or E
potentially extinguishes the human species. "We don't need to worry about nanotechnologic war, because a UN
commission will initially develop the technology and prevent its proliferatin until such time as an active shield is
developed, capable of defending against all accidental and malicious outbreaks that contemporary nanotechnology
probability that many individual events will all go right (there will be sufficient funding, competent employees,
customers will want the product) while also considering the likelihood that at least one critical failure will occur (the
bank refuses - 7 - a loan, the biggest project fails, the lead scientist dies). This may help explain why only 44% of
entrepreneurial ventures3 survive after 4 years. (Knaup 2005.) Dawes (1988) observes: 'In their summations
lawyers avoid arguing from disjunctions ("either this or that or the other could have occurred, all of which would
none of us foresaw. Yet for a futurist, disjunctions make for an awkward and unpoetic-sounding prophecy.
Constructivist scholars
reject the dominant assumption of contemporary IR theory that the interests
of states and other actors are formed prior to social interaction. Instead, constructivists
claim that identity formation is relational and occurs before , or at least
II. The Emergence of Constructivist Thought in International Relations Theory
concurrently with, interest formation (Hurd 2008). Interests are therefore defined
both in material and non-material terms. While acknowledging the importance of power and
material interests, constructivists focus attention upon the role that culture,
ideas, institutions, discourse, and social norms play in shaping identity
and influencing behaviour . For this reason, constructivist thought is especially
compelling when seeking to explain the constitution of actors, institutions
and social structures, and their change over considerable periods of time (Ruggie 1986).
Constructivism emerged in IR scholarship as a reaction, as a means of
incorporating learning from cognate disciplines and as an expression of hope. The
reaction was to the powerful strains of neo-realism and neo-liberalism in
American IR theory. According to John Ruggie, these two dominant strains share a
commitment to neo-utilitarian explanations of behaviour . For neo-utilitarians,
ideational factors, when they are examined at all, are rendered in strictly
instrumental terms , useful or not to self-regarding individuals (units) in the pursuit
of typically material interests, including efficiency concerns (1998: 855). For constructivists, ideas
and norms seemed to have more salience, and a diferent pattern of influence,
than the neo-utilitarians would allow. Contemporaneously, critical and post-modern scholars in
international relations began to draw upon philosophical approaches and social theories that were influential in
other social science disciplines. These included the language turn in philosophy (especially Foucault, Derrida, Rorty,
and Searle) and structuration in sociology (especially Giddens). In an influential 1988 publication, Keohane grouped
all adherents to critical and post-modern approaches together as reflectivists and contrasted them to
rationalists (1988). However, at roughly the same time, Kratochwil and Ruggie showed that neo-utilitarians
regime
theory claimed that regimes were composed of principles, norms, rules,
and decision-making procedures. Principles, norms, and rules are all ideas that must be
shared, Kratochwil and Ruggie argued, and for IR to address them it had to incorporate,
at least to some degree, a theory of how ideas exist and a methodology focused on interpretation
(1986). Constructivists attempted to bridge the divide between neo-utilitarians and their critics, and
show in methodologically-robust ways how ideas and identities matter in
themselves were incorporating idea-focused explanatory elements into their approaches. In particular,
international politics.
no
has produced some of the most influential explorations of the relationship between rationalism and constructivism.
mobilization of domestic and international pressure. Checkel then identified conditions that could lead to persuasion
and learning rather than the strategic adoption of norms (2001). He has also suggested that there are three generic
mechanisms for socialization, which include strategic calculation as well as role-playing and moral suasion (2005).
The hope associated with constructivism derives from its emergence just as the Cold War was ending and the future
international change
proved a more efective catalyst of theoretical change than the dialectical
interplay of competing theoretical perspectives (1998: 265). These events may have assisted constructivisms
rise, but we argue that constructivism is not uncritically hopeful , and that it has survived the
Smit argue, [t]hough critical theorists had been making their case well before,
pessimistic turn in world affairs linked to the events of September 11, 2001. The term constructivism was coined
by Nicholas Greenwood Onuf (1989), but some of the key tenets of the constructivist worldview were present as
early as the 1950s in the security communities work undertaken by Karl Deutsch and his students (1957).
Constructivism also finds deep roots in broader social theory, especially the work of Max Weber. From Weber,
Searle, building on Weber, has also been influential. Searle argues that facts are not all material, instead
distinguishing amongst brute facts, social facts and institutional facts. For Searle institutional
facts
exist only within systems of constitutive rules (1995: 28). In a constitutive rule, a new
status is assigned to something (e.g. paper becomes money). Because the material features are
insufficient to guarantee success in function paper does not declare itself to be money
there must be continued collective acceptance or recognition of the validity of
the assigned function; otherwise the function cannot be successfully performed
(1995: 45). In society, Searle describes a Background that shapes all decision making. Constructivists sometimes
call this Background shared understandings (Ruggie 1998), habitus (Kratochwil 1989) or habits (Hopf
2010). The work of sociologist Anthony Giddens (1984) and other structurationists has been extremely influential
through interaction with the other . Both structure and agency are created in
large measure by ideas, not only by material facts. As argued by Alexander Wendt, all
social structures are inseparable from the reasons and selfunderstandings that agents bring to their actions (1987: 359). One of the major
theoretical controversies within constructivism today relates to the power of shared understandings to shape the
perceptions and decisions of social actors. How does one understand the balance between the explanatory power of
structure, including structures of ideas and discourse, and of agency? Do people retain significant agency over their
own behavior, or do they tend to replicate intersubjective habits, discursive patterns, or pre-existing practices?
Commonly in the literature, disagreements over these questions are phrased in terms of competing logics. At
first, the contrast was made, borrowing from the work of March and Olsen (1998: 952), between logics of
consequences (instrumentalism) and appropriateness (morality and ethics). More recently, scholars have described
logics of arguing (rational oppositional discourse) (Risse 2000), of practicality (practice) (Pouliot 2008), of purposive
role playing (Checkel 2005), of habit (unreflective action) (Hopf 2010), and of emotion (Mercer 2010). The logic of
arguing is one example of constructivist work that draws on the thinking of Jrgen Habermas. Constructivists have
used Habermas concepts of communicative action and discourse ethics to test the existence of genuine
persuasion and moral decision-making in international politics (see Price 2008; Deitelhoff and Mller 2005). While
early contributions to constructivist thought focused primarily upon the evolution of intersubjective understandings
cannot exist without instantiation in practices, but they did not explain what counts as practice, or how we should
study such practices (Wendt 1994). They suggested only that practice should encompass both material acts and
rhetorical commitments (Kratochwil 1989; Onuf 1982). The focus on practice was influenced by American
Bourdieu who
argued against rational choice theory, suggesting instead that social agents
act through implicit practical logica practical sense (1977). Bourdieus insights have been pursued
philosophical pragmatism (Dewey 1988; Rorty 1989), and by the work of social theorist Pierre
most systematically by Emanuel Adler, who focuses attention upon communities of practice (2005: 15-27),
furthering the work of social learning theorists Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (Wenger 1998). For Adler,
it is through their
participation in social practice that actors generate and maintain
(2005: 52-53; Adler and Pouliot 2011). Inherent in this account is the proposition that
collective understandings
social structures
constrain , enable and constitute actors in their choices, and thus help to
shape world politics (Ruggie 1998: 869). The resistance to direct causal explanation of behaviour is
shared knowledge, and social norms operate as direct causes of action. Rather,
one of the reasons that constructivists and other IR theorists sometimes engage in dialogues of the deaf. For
realists and rational institutionalists cause and hence prediction are the very points of theorizing. But
Sikkink 1998). Most recently, a new generation of empiricists has explored constructivist political economy,
examining cases that reveal how ideas and identities shape the global economy (Hall 2008; Weaver 2008; Abdelal,
Blyth and Parsons 2010).
already knew that the greatest events 'are not our loudest
but our stillest hours.' This is why he stressed that the world revolves 'not
around the inventors of new noise, but around the inventors of new
values.' And this is why, for Foucault too, the crucial site for political
investigations are not institutions, even though they are often the place
where power is inscribed and crystallized. The fundamental point of
anchorage of power relations, Foucault claims, is always located outside
institutions, deeply entrenched within the social nexus. Hence, instead of
looking at power from the vantage point of institutions, one must analyse
institutions from the standpoint of power relations (Foucault, 1982, 219-222).
Nietzsche (1982b, 243)
Case Backlines
stopped, and slept, and thought, because of the election, he might have gone to a friends home, to watch the
results. [His] mum of course could not sleep. At seven in the morning, we reported to the police station that our
movement. Ahmed reflected: We never thought he would go back home, from where we fled civil war and chaos.
The
family spent the following months working closely with the FBI to try to
locate Burhan and facilitate his return to the US . Osman Ahmed appeared on national
That never came to our mind, that one day he would go back to Somalia and start fighting. It was a surprise.1
television to draw attention to the case and in March 2009 testified at a US Senate Homeland Security Committee
Cities between 2007 and 2009 to attend training camps in Somalia run by al-Shabaab, which was designated a
foreign terrorist organization by the US State Department in February 2008. Recruits from Minneapolis were
In October,
Shirwa Ahmed, a twenty-six-year-old former college student in
Minneapolis, carried out a suicide attack in northern Somalia, killing
twenty-two peoplewhich the FBI claimed was the first time a US citizen had
carried out a terrorist suicide bombing. Mohamoud Hassan, who had studied engineering at
reported to have been involved in an ambush of Ethiopian troops in the summer of 2008.
the University of Minnesota and been vice president of the Minnesota Somali Student Union, was reported killed in
September 2009, ten months after traveling to Somalia; he was the fifth from Minneapolis to die. He was twentythree years old.5 He was buried alongside his friend, Troy Kastigar, who had also been killed fighting for al-Shabaab.
Kastigar was a young white man who grew up in suburban Hennepin County, became friendly with Somalis in
Minneapolis, converted to Islam, and called himself Abdirahman.
In response to the
But the
available
exclusively focused on the regional war in East Africa , and its foreign recruits were
useful for local propaganda purposes rather than as potential perpetrators of terrorist attacks in the West. Asked
about the possibility of an al-Shabaab attack on the US,
agents in the Minneapolis field office responsible for investigating terrorist threats from the Horn of Africa,
told me: "There's no real information, no credible intelligence that it is in
the works, or imminently in the plans, or it's going to take place ."7
Nevertheless, many attempted to talk up the threat. Tellingly, Congressman Peter King
told a committee hearing on Muslim radicalization in July 2011 that to think of al-Shabaab as only engaging in
attacks in East Africa was "a failure of imagination"; the ability to conjure fear scenarios was prized above evidencebased analysis.8 Counterterrorism officials refer to the period immediately following a terrorist attack, when
investigators rush to identity the perpetrators and prevent any follow-up incidents, as the "postboom" moment.
From late 2008 onward federal agents were in postboom mode regarding
Somali Americans, even though there had been no incidents within the US .
The Somali communities of Minneapolis and St. Paul were besieged.9 Those who had volunteered
to fight in Somalia may have been combatants only in a distant civil war ,
with no intention of attacking the US, but under American law they were guilty of
terrorism, because al-Shabaab was a proscribed organization. By extension, anyone assisting
others to travel to Somalia to volunteer for al-Shabaab by, for example, giving them
money, could face charges of material support for terrorism . On this basis, federal
agents claimed a wide-ranging pretext to place themselves everywhere
that young Somalis gatheredon college campuses and in high schools, shopping malls, and
librariesto question them about those who had disappeared. Agents talked their way
into homes without warrants, staked out mosques, and sought to recruit
informants . Somali students reported being approached by FBI agents in
campus libraries or receiving phone calls from agents instructing them to
leave classes in order to answer questions.10 To students at the University of Minnesota it
appeared that FBI agents were compiling a list of Muslim students on campus
and questioning them one by one about their identities, religious beliefs,
and political opinions.11 Somali Americans were stopped at airports and
questioned for hours by officials of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). In
2010, an of-duty TSA officer assaulted a Somali man in Minneapolis, saying
that he hated Muslims and that Somalis should go back to Africa . He had
threatened another Somali man with a loaded gun on a separate
occasion.12 A few miles south of Minneapolis, at the Mall of America, where young Somalis often
Minnesota "are beginning to feel the wall and feel that they can't advance
and move up ... It's like they're learning what institutional racism is."
That racism also takes violent forms . Shortly after 9/11, a sixty-six-yearold Somali man was assaulted while waiting at a bus stop, and later died
in the hospital.17 As the federal investigation into the missing young men developed, dozens of friends and
associates of those who had disappeared were subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury. The mass
questioning by federal investigators gave rise to an atmosphere of fear,
uncertainty, and confusion among Somalis in the Twin Cities. Nimco Ahmed, a SomaliAmerican community organizer who now works for the Minneapolis City Council, remembers a group of young
college students she knew who were subpoenaed. They just didn't know what to do. These kids were just in school.
A lot of them knew that some of their friends ended up in Somalia, but they just didn't know how, when, why.
People had a big phobia about what the FBI is. All of a sudden we became the
target of the country. We were just the center of all investigation , and all types
of people were told they had to talk to the FBI. So it was just a moment where everybody was just
scared.18 Technically, most of the FBI interviews were voluntary, but those targeted were led to believe they
were compulsory. The vague parameters of the legislation on material support of
terrorism meant it was difficult to know whether speaking openly about
contacts with the missing Somalis might be self-incriminating, and giving
misleading information to the FBI could itself result in a conviction for the
Community activists had been trying to address these issues for years ,
But,
unsurprisingly, suspicion of law enforcement agencies remained high .22
force.
using the conventional community liaison channels, and some progress had been made.
The re-emergence of racial profiling in the federal law enforced after 9/11 ,
according to Tumlin, has been the core of the immigration and immigrants policy. Not all citizens are
equally considered to be suspect of terrorist acts, immigrants from
nations with purported ties to al Qaeda.* This type of profiling merges
immigration with nationality, religion and terrorism and targets
immigrants from nations with sizable Muslim populations for selective
enforcement of immigration laws. The combination of Muslim/Arab identity
and immigrant status already signifies danger of terrorism ; 'immigration status
alone, without these nationality or religion plus factors, does not trigger heightened scrutiny/126 Conclusion It is
Huysmans, the public discourse, and to some extend institutional practices was not include the linkage of migration
from the discourse. Even more, President Bush on many- occasions tried to de-securitize the Muslim 'other,' in
reference to ethnicity and religion, and urged the public to do the same. How can this development be explained by
mark. In the context considered dint the thesis, the dynamics between the audience and the actor do not play out
in this one-way causal relationship. What we have witnessed in the case of Muslim and Arab non-citizens is that
there is a gap between the speech acts (where the linkage of Arab/Muslim migrants to terrorism was absent) and
the policies targeting Arab and Muslim immigrants and framing them as potential terrorists are contradictory. This
required re-conceptualization of the securitization theory of the Copenhagen School. In order to understand the
absence of speech act, it might be necessary to consider the context, which according to Matt Macdonald remains
under-theorized by the Copenhagen School. It should also kept in mind how the American identity and the shift in
more liberal understanding of what being American means, influences how much can be articulated about *the
as mentioned by Balzacq,
practices without a prior green light from political discourse, as indeed the case of data utilization at EU level
implies.'12'' Thus, Copenhagen School's securitization theory should be extended to look at more flexible way of
it will be helpful
it the theory will look closely at how one issue for example migration leads
to securitization of another issue (Muslim/Arab identity), because as the
case demonstrated, especially in liberal democratic societies, the actor will try and avoid targeting
specific type of migrants explicitly, but can perform securitization in practice.
threat construction that is available among the second generation theorists. In addition,
views the Muslim community as a national security threat . The government does
not seek cooperation from a perceived enemy. Nor does it seek cooperation from a perceived untrustworthy source.
the . . .. civil rights movement has engendered the intense resentment and opposition of the politically dominant
The government
groups, and Muslim American leaders are all calling for the end of such a
practice . n171 Choosing to spy on Muslims simply because [*605] they are
Muslim and attend a mosque is based upon a faulty n172 and invidious
presumption that terrorist threats only come from Muslims , and namely those
Muslims who are more "religious." n173 Such a presumption must be retracted in order
for the government's approach to be narrowly tailored. Moreover, the current
surveillance techniques have not proved efective in achieving their
stated goals . In 2012, Assistant Chief Thomas Galati of the NYPD himself attested under oath that
during the more than six years of its implementation, the surveillance
program did not yield a single lead, nor did it spark the need to initiate
any terror investigations. n174 There are also limits to how useful a tool surveillance can be for crime
prevention. n175 Myers argues that gang injunctions, which literally criminalize
associative behaviors such as walking down the street or riding in a car with
another individual who is suspected to be a gang member, are unconstitutional for
the same reasons that Muslim surveillance is: there are other reasonable alternatives to
achieving the government's goal of fighting gang violence. n176 The criteria that law enforcement use to label
someone a gang member has been seen as too subjective, arbitrary, and burdensome of expressive rights, such as
the ability to wear a certain colored t-shirt, sport a tattoo, or speak with another person on the street. n177
These are much like the [*606] "indicators" law enforcement use to label
Muslims as terrorist threats because of their garb, physical appearance, or
political ideologies. Thus, Myers's call for "tighter and more definite
standards, like beyond a reasonable doubt" for law enforcement to meet
before subjecting an individual to closer scrutiny within the gang injunction context also
applies to Muslim surveillance. n178 In the early 1990s, Irving A. Spergel, an expert on gangs, also
suggested that gang intervention programs for youth should focus on those who "are already engaged in lawviolating behaviors." n179 The latter idea is key in implementing a successful approach, for then it means the
Such
a standard, albeit simple, does not infringe upon free exercise,
association, or speech rights, but still does ofer a basic minimum
standard to follow, creating something closer to a "bright line" rule.
Approaches such as the ones suggested for the gang context may equally apply to the Muslim
surveillance issue, for the government should operate upon more than an
individual's mere adherence to Islam to target them. This will also be more
narrowly tailored to achieve the government's purpose of protecting
government's method will truly be narrowly tailored to achieve the government's national security interest.
will essentially focus on the effects of a regulation on speech when a specific group is targeted by the government
government action, courts will provide a framework for which they can work through their First Amendment
to explore diferent ideas other than those the government makes readily
available. n339 The government's actions discussed above, such as dealing with speech at a
protest, n340 forcing a woman to remove her hijab in prison, n341 and revoking
the visas of foreign scholars n342 serve as examples. These actions appear
to be neutral; however, the efects of the actions unevenly target one
particular group: Muslims and those perceived as Muslim . n343 It is
important that the courts look beyond the language of the laws or
government actions in order to gauge whether the government is in fact
practicing viewpoint discrimination and violating the First Amendment
right to receive information for Americans. n344 When looking at the effects of government
actions: A law [may] not discriminate against a particular viewpoint on its
face, and there [may be] no evidence of an improper legislative purpose in
enacting the law. Within that framework of facial neutrality, however, we must examine
restrictions on speech with particular care when their efects fall unevenly
on diferent viewpoints and groups in society. n345 Looking at the efects of
regulation on speech is something that the Supreme Court itself has taken
into consideration when looking at the right to receive information . n346 As
determined in Martin v. Struthers, n347 the Court explained that, " in considering legislation which
thus limits the dissemination of knowledge, we must "be astute to
examine the efect of the challenged legislation' and must "weigh the
circumstances and appraise the substantiality of the reasons advanced in
support of the regulation.'" n348 Courts have taken a similar stance in other cases. n349 The [*501]
bottom line is: courts must look at the efects of government regulations
because laws that have a disparate impact on one viewpoint run the risk
of being viewpoint-based . n350 As in the case of Islamophobia, it is easy to
target a specific group because some Americans automatically associated
the 9/11 hijackers with all Muslims and those perceived as Muslim . n351
Similarly, in the interest of national security, the government at times partook
in practices that people may view as discriminatory. The government
failed to protect the free speech rights of Muslims as a targeted group, and these
actions subsequently harmed the right to receive information for
Americans. Although the government's purpose in enforcing the laws
discussed in this Note was not to close of Muslim ideas, the efects may show
otherwise. n352 Justice Antonin Scalia stated, "the vice of content-based legislation - what renders it
deserving of the high standard of strict scrutiny - is not that it is always
used for invidious, thought-control purposes, but that it lends itself to use
for those purposes." n353 "Unavoidable targeting" stemming from a government regulation
is included within this "vice of content-based legislation." This phenomenon may
shine light on what has occurred following the 9/11 attacks. By employing an efects test in the
First Amendment analysis, courts will more efficiently investigate whether
there is viewpoint discrimination afecting the right to receive information
since the courts must first establish if a government action falls
disproportionately on a specific group. n354 [*502] VI. Conclusion Surely, the government has
a highly supported interest in protecting the United States at all times. However, protection should not
The argument is divided into two parts. The first identifies a number of
moments in the history of national security surveillance in North America,
tracing its imbrication with race, empire, and capital, from the settlercolonial period through to the neoliberal era. Our focus here is on how
race as a sociopolitical category is produced and reproduced historically in
the United States through systems of surveillance. We show how
throughout the history of the United States the systematic collection of
information has been interwoven with mechanisms of racial oppression .
From Anglo settler-colonialism, the establishment of the plantation system, the postCivil War reconstruction era,
the US conquest of the Philippines, and the emergence of the national security state in the post-World War II era, to
period took different forms from the racialization of African Americans. Further, the dominant construction of
Blackness under slavery is different from the construction of Blackness in the neoliberal era; these ideological shifts
the politics of the War on Terror shape national security surveillance practices. The intensive surveillance of Muslim
Americans has been carried out by a vast security apparatus that has also been used against dissident movements
such as Occupy Wall Street and environmental rights activists, who represent a threat to the neoliberal order. This is
not new; the process of targeting dissenters has been a constant feature of American history. For instance, the Alien
and Sedition Acts of the late 1790s were passed by the Federalist government against the Jeffersonian
sympathizers of the French Revolution. The British hanged Nathan Hale because he spied for Washingtons army in
the American Revolution. State surveillance regimes have always sought to monitor and penalize a wide range of
Our
focus here is on the production of racialized others as security threats
and the ways this helps to stabilize capitalist social relations.
dissenters, radicals, and revolutionaries. Race was a factor in some but by no means all of these cases.
What
became clear was that the NSA was involved in the mass collection of
online material. Less apparent was how this data was actually used by the
NSA and other national security agencies. Part of the answer came in July 2014 when Glenn
Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain published an article that identified specific targets of NSA
surveillance and showed how individuals were being placed under surveillance
despite there being no reasonable suspicion of their involvement in
criminal activity.1 All of those named as targets were prominent Muslim
Americans. The following month, Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux published another story for The
Snowden material provided a detailed account of the massive extent of NSAs warrantless data collection.
Intercept, which revealed that under the Obama administration the number of people on the National
Counterterrorism Centers no-fly list had increased tenfold to 47,000. Leaked classified documents showed that
2AC Framing
Institutional structures of domination create everyday holocausts
you should reject singular focused impacts in favor of working
against the ongoing extinctions of people of color This is the only
ethical question and controls the proximity and conditions for all of
their impacts.
Omolade 89 (1989, Barbara Omolade is a historian of black women for the past twenty years and an
organizer in both the womens and civil rights/black power movements, We Speak for the Planet in Rocking the
ship of state : toward a feminist peace politics, pp. 172-176)
eforts by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan to limit nuclear
testing, stockpiling, and weaponry, while still protecting their own arsenals and selling arms to
countries and factions around the world, vividly demonstrate how "peace" can become an
abstract concept within a culture of war. Many peace activists are similarly
Recent
blind to the constant wars and threats of war being waged against people
of color and the planet by those who march for "peace" and by those they
march against. These pacifists , like Gorbachev and Reagan, frequently want
people of color to fear what they fear and define peace as they define it.
They are unmindful that our lands and peoples have already been and are
being destroyed as part of the "final solution" of the "color line." It is
difficult to persuade the remnants of Native American tribes , the
starving of African deserts , and the victims of the Cambodian "killing
fields" that nuclear war is the major danger to human life on the planet
and that only a nuclear "winter" embodies fear and futurelessness for
humanity . The peace movement sufers greatly from its lack of a historical
and holistic perspective, practice, and vision that include the voices and
experiences of people of color; the movement's goals and messages have
therefore been easily coopted and expropriated by world leaders who
share the same culture of racial dominance and arrogance . The peace
movement's racist blinders have divorced peace from freedom, from
feminism, from education reform, from legal rights, from human rights,
from international alliances and friendships, from national liberation,
from the particular
core of the inseparable struggles for world peace and social betterment.
The Achilles heel of the organized peace movement in this country has always been its whiteness. In this multiracial and racist society, no allwhite movement can have the strength to bring about basic changes. It is axiomatic
that basic changes do not occur in any society unless the people who are oppressed move to make them occur. In
our society it is people of color who are the most oppressed. Indeed our entire history teaches us that when people
of color have organized and struggled-most especially, because of their particular history, Black people-have moved
in a more humane direction as a society, toward a better life for all people.1 Western man's whiteness, imagination,
enlightened science, and
Integrity , ships that carried millions of African men, women, and children
chained and brutalized across the ocean to the "New World." We must
remember the Arawaks, the Taino, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the
Narragansett, the Montauk, the Delaware, and the other Native American
names of thousands of U.S. towns that stand for tribes of people who are
no more. We must remember the holocausts visited against the Hawaiians,
the aboriginal peoples of Australia, the Pacific Island peoples, and the
women and children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki . We must remember the
slaughter of men and women at Sharpeville, the children of Soweto, and
the men of Attica. We must never, ever, forget the children disfigured, the
men maimed, and the women broken in our holocausts-we must
remember the names, the numbers, the faces, and the stories and teach
them to our children and our children's children so the world can never
forget our sufering and our courage. Whereas the particularity of the Jewish holocaust under the Nazis is
over, our holocausts continue . We are the madres locos (crazy mothers) in the
Argentinian square silently demanding news of our missing kin from the
fascists who rule. We are the children of El Salvador who see our mothers
and fathers shot in front of our eyes . We are the Palestinian and
Lebanese women and children overrun by Israeli, Lebanese, and U.S.
soldiers . We are the women and children of the bantustans and refugee
camps and the prisoners of Robbin Island . We are the starving in the
Sahel , the poor in Brazil , the sterilized in Puerto Rico.
sisters of Grenada who carry the seeds of the New Jewel Movement in our hearts, not daring to speak of it with our
lipsyet. Our holocaust is South Africa ruled by men who loved Adolf Hitler, who have developed the Nazi techniques
of terror to more sophisticated levels. Passes replace the Nazi badges and stars. Skin color is the ultimate badge of
persecution. Forced removals of women, children, and the elderly-the "useless appendages of South Africa"-into
barren, arid bantustans without resources for survival have replaced the need for concentration camps. Black sexsegregated barracks and cells attached to work sites achieve two objectives: The work camps destroy black family
and community life, a presumed source of resistance, and attempt to create human automatons whose purpose is
to serve the South African state's drive toward wealth and hegemony. Like other fascist regimes, South Africa
disallows any democratic rights to black people; they are denied the right to vote, to dissent, to peaceful assembly,
to free speech, and to political representation. The regime has all the typical Nazi-like political apparatus: house
arrests of dissenters such as Winnie Mandela; prison murder of protestors such as Stephen Biko; penal colonies
such as Robbin Island. Black people, especially children, are routinely arrested without cause, detained without
limits, and confronted with the economic and social disparities of a nation built around racial separation. Legally
and economically, South African apartheid is structural and institutionalized racial war. The Organization of African
Unity's regional intergovernmental meeting in 1984 in Tanzania was called to review and appraise the
achievements of the United Nations Decade for Women. The meeting considered South Africa's racist apartheid
regime a peace issue. The "regime is an affront to the dignity of all Africans on the continent and a stark reminder
of the absence of equality and peace, representing the worst form of institutionalized oppression and strife."
Pacifists such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi who have used nonviolent resistance charged that
those who used violence to obtain justice were just as evil as their oppressors. Yet all successful revolutionary
movements have used organized violence. This is especially true of national liberation movements that have
obtained state power and reorganized the institutions of their nations for the benefit of the people. If men and
women in South Africa do not use organized violence, they could remain in the permanent violent state of the slave.
Could it be that pacifism and nonviolence cannot become a way of life for the oppressed? Are they only tactics with
specific and limited use for protecting people from further violence? For most people in the developing communities
and the developing world consistent nonviolence is a luxury; it presumes that those who have and use nonviolent
weapons will refrain from using them long enough for nonviolent resisters to win political battles. To survive,
peoples in developing countries must use a varied repertoire of issues, tactics, and approaches. Sometimes arms
are needed to defeat apartheid and defend freedom in South Africa; sometimes nonviolent demonstrations for
justice are the appropriate strategy for protesting the shooting of black teenagers by a white man, such as
happened in New York City.
directly from the 9/11 attacks.171 Professor Christopher Allen stated, "Islamophobia is undeniably 'rooted' in the
historical inheritance of a conflictual relationship that has developed over many centuries involving the overlap of
religion, politics and warfare."'' 72 There has been a constant conflict between the "West" and Islam.173 This
conflict spans over several events including the threat to Christendom prior to the eleventh century, followed by the
Crusades and colonialism. 1 74 However, contemporary Islamophobia in the United States presented itself as early
as the 1990s.175 A report prepared for the UN Commission on Human Rights in 1999 showed that Muslims in
America "felt there was both latently and openly a form of Islamophobia and racial and religious intolerance in
American society.' ' 176 Hostility led to "stereotyped and distorted" portrayals of Islam in the news prompted by
events like the 1990 Gulf War against Iraq and the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993.77 Some Muslims felt
the worst discrimination emerged from entertainment media, which depicted Muslims as terrorists.178 Furthermore,
Muslims reported several incidents of hate crimes during 1996 and 1997: the American-Arab AntiDiscrimination
Committee reported twenty-two incidents of hate crimes, fifty-five cases of workplace discrimination, and twenty-
Islamophobia became
more prevalent following the 9/11 attacks. 180 In response to the attacks,
President Bush launched the "war on terror," which he described as a
crusade. 8' This characterization presented the issue in a religious light
and negatively portrayed Islam. 1 82 Muslims or those perceived as
Muslim, mainly Sikhs and South Asians, became scapegoats for 9/11
because people viewed this group as having a shared nationality or
religion with the hijackers and Al-Qaeda members. 183 This was very easy
to do since Muslims in America are generally structurally excluded , due to
two cases of discrimination relating to government agencies. 179 Nonetheless,
AT: Util
Traditional risk assessment strips us of our relations to others and
our dignitythis obscures how structural violence contributes to
large-scale destruction
OBrien 2kPhD, environmental scientist and activist (Mary, 2000, MIT Press,
Making Better Environmental Decisions: An Alternative to Risk Assessment,
Gigapedia, p. xvii-xviii,)
AT: Thayer
Thayer exaggerates and misinterprets scientific evidence
Busser 06 (Mark Busser, Master's Candidate Dept of Poli Sci York University, YCISS Working Paper No. 40 The
Evolution of Security: Revisiting the Human Nature Debate in International Relations, August 2006)
altruism and nepotism can be explained through the concept of inclusive fitness, wherein natural selection favours
specific genes that cause individuals to act on behalf of their gene pool. The authors use complex mathematical
experiments to construct models of evolutionary humankind and explain its likely behaviours as individualistic
To prove
classical realisms theory of a natural human tendency towards domination, Thayer
points to the dominance hierarchies observed in many social animals. The ubiquity of
rational choices.The second argument in Thayers essay deals with domination and hierarchy.
hierarchical, alpha-male-dominated social orders suggests to Thayer that such a pattern of organization contributes
to fitness because the alternative is perpetual conflict over resources. Dominance hierarchies, he argues, avoid
conflict because weaker members submit resources to dominant members instead of engaging in costly conflicts.37
According to Edward O. Wilson, humans naturally evolve a mental framework for engaging in dominance
hierarchies. Human beings, Wilson suggests, Are absurdly easy to indoctrinate they seek it.38 Thayer suggests
that survival in a hostile world produces a fear of ostracism and a desire for the protection of a group, and argues
that conformity to a dominance hierarchy lowers conflict and keeps groups together. This, in turn, results in the
suggests that xenophobia and ethnocentrism would have been helpful attributes to groups seeking to protect
limited resources, and concludes that given the contribution of xenophobia and ethnocentrism to fitness during
human evolution, ethnic conflict is likely to be a recurring social phenomenon. Therefore ethnic conflict, like war and
peace, is part of the fabric of international politics.39 While Thayer acknowledges that culture and religion can
dampen or exacerbate xenophobia and ethnocentrism, he still argues that these phenomena are an integral part of
an evolved biological human nature. In this he follows Edward O. Wilson, who has argued that war as we know it is
the evolutionary result of a phenomenon known as kin selection. This refers to the particular selective mechanism
whereby genetic relatives affect each others evolutionary fitness through interactions that make survival of the
relatives as well of the gene or trait encouraging such interactions more likely. According to Wilson, the continual
processes of kin selection have encouraged warlike behaviours because of various competitive advantages to
violent ethnocentrism.40 With this starting point, Thayer, Shaw and Wong attempt to explain a human propensity
for warfare in terms of central tendencies in aggression and lethal conflict, which [they] maintain have been
adapted to serve humans in hunter/gatherer groups for 99 percent of humanitys existence.41 To prove this claim,
Shaw and Wong attempt to formalize a cost-benefit analysis model supported by the concept of inclusive fitness.
Theoretical decisions are mapped out in terms of mathematical probabilities to show how aggressive tendencies
would lend individuals communities relative fitness and encourage such traits to be passed along. Responding
arguments that incorporate sociobiological arguments into examinations of modern political life, the authors say, is
the argument that knowing humankinds basic genetic programming will help to solve the resulting social problems,
Too firm a
focus on sociobiological arguments about natural laws draws attention away from
humanitys potential for social and political solutions that can counteract and
mediate any inherent biological impulses, whatever they may be. A revived classical
realism based on biological arguments casts biology as destiny in a manner that
parallels the neo-realist sentiment that the international sphere is doomed to
everlasting anarchy. Jim George quotes the English School scholar Martin Wight as writing that hope is not
terms of conclusions that assert what must be because of biologicallyingrained constraints.47
a political virtue: it is a theological virtue.48 George questions the practical result of traditional realsist claims,
arguing that the suggestion that fallen mans sinful state can only be redeemed by a higher power puts limitations
on what is considered politically possible. Thayers argument rejects the religious version of the fallen man for a
scientific version, but similar problems remain with his scientific conclusions. (9-13)
AT: Booth
Booths emancipation essentializes politics and ignores theory
Waever 11 -- Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political
Science, University of Copenhagen, and director of Centre for Advanced Security
Theory (Ole, 10/21/2011, "Politics, security, theory," Security Dialogue 42(4-5),
Sage)
One version of the politics of theorizing argues that a particular theory should take a stance on various issues or
provide standards of judgement for specific cases. Within new security theories, this is a position most strongly
with critical security studies (Booth, 2005, 2007), where the aspiration is to
produce in terms of emancipation a standard for measuring various concrete policies and actions.
Such an approach is problematic for at least two reasons: First, it reduces politics to
associated
programme. It is only after a vision of how to improve the human lot has been constructed that the political
stance of the theory is derived (for such a political programme a very attractive one, I might add see Booth,
2AC Stuf
Definiton
Surveillance is government eforts to gather information about
people prefer its in context of the Af
Shahabuddin 2/16 cites Cristopher Slobogin, PhD and law professor at the
University of Florida (Madiha; February 16, 2015; The More Muslim You Are, the
More Trouble You Can Be: How Government Surveillance of Muslim Americans2
Violates First Amendment Rights;
https://www.chapman.edu/law/_files/publications/clr-18-shahabuddin.pdf)//CC
Professor Christopher Slobogin defines surveillance as government eforts to
gather information about people from a distance, usually covertly and
without entry into private spaces. 21 Surveillance as a general phenomenon is then
broken down into three categories: 1) communications surveillance, which is
the real-time interception of communications; 2) physical surveillance, which is the real-time
observation of physical activities; and 3) transaction surveillance, which is the accessing [of]
recorded information about communications, activities, and other transactions. 22 According to
Slobogin, since 9/11, the United States government has been obsessed, as
perhaps it should be, with ferreting out national security threats , but more than
occasionally it has also visited significant intrusion on large numbers of
law-abiding citizens sometimes inadvertently, sometimes not. 23 Within the context of
national security, intelligence gathering24 of pattern occurrences in
neighborhoods and communities is intended to analyze broad or
meaningful trends as a means of assessing the validity and likelihood of a national
security threat.25
Counterplans
Top level
AT: Process CP
Focusing on process rather than the content of our af creates
necessarily exclusionary and authoritarian politics
Kulynych 97 (Kulynych, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Winthrop University, 1997 [Jessica,
Performing Politics," Polity, Winter, v.XXX, n.2, p. 315-330)
Habermas and Foucault describe the impact of the conditions of postmodernity on the possibility for efficacious
political action in remarkably similar ways. Habermas describes a world where the possibilities for efficacious
political action are quite limited. The escalating interdependence of state and economy, the expansive increase in
state is forced to take an ever larger role in directing a complex global, capitalist, welfare state economy, the scope
of administration inevitably grows. In order to fulfill its function as the manager of the economy, the administrative
state must also manage the details of our lives formerly considered private. Yet, as the state's role in our "private"
lives continues to grow, the public has become less and less interested in government, focusing instead on personal
and social mores, leisure, and consumption. Ironically, we have become less interested in politics at precisely the
same moment when our lives are becoming increasingly "politicized" and administered. This siege of private life
and the complicity of this ideology of "civil privatism" in the functioning of the modern administrative state makes a
mockery of the idea that there exist private interests that can be protected from state intervention.4 Correlatively,
the technical and instrumental rationality of modem policymaking significantly lessens the possibility for public
is exacerbated by the
added complexity of a political system structured by hierarchical gender
and racial norms. Nancy Fraser uses Habermas's analysis of the contemporary situation to demonstrate
how the infusion of these hierarchical gender and racial norms into the functioning
of the state and economy ensures that political channels of
communication between citizens and the state are unequally structured
and therefore cannot function as mechanisms for the equal protection of
interests.' Accordingly, theorists are much less optimistic about the
possibilities for citizens to acquire or develop feelings of autonomy
and efficacy from the attempt to communicate interests to a system
that is essentially impervious to citizen interests, eschews discussion of
influence on state policy.5 The difficulty of participation in Habermas's world
of power that cannot be adequately characterized in terms of the intentions of those who possess it. Colonization is
not the result of conscious intention, but is rather the unintended consequence of a multitude of small adjustments.
The gender and racial subtexts infusing the system are not the results of conscious intention, but rather of implicit
gender and racial norms and expectations infecting the economy and the state. Bureaucratic power is not a power
that is possessed by any individual or agency, but exists in the exercise of decisionmaking. As Iris Young points out,
we must "analyze the exercise of power [in contemporary societies] as the effect of often liberal and humane
practices of education, bureaucratic administration, production and distribution of consumer goods, medicine and
so on."' The very practices that Habermas chronicles are exemplary of a power that has no definitive subject. As
Young explains, "the conscious actions of many individuals daily contribute to maintaining and reproducing
oppression, but those people are simply doing their jobs or living their lives, and do not understand themselves as
agents of oppression."" Colonization and bureaucratization also fit the pattern of a power that is not primarily
repressive but productive. Disciplinary technologies are, as Sawicki describes, not ... repressive mechanisms ...
[that] operate primarily through violence ... or seizure ... but rather [they operate] by producing new objects and
subjects of knowledge, by inciting and channeling desires, generating and focusing individual and group energies,
and establishing bodily norms and techniques for observing, monitoring and controlling bodily movements,
processes, and capacities. The very practices of administration, distribution, and decisionmaking on which
Habermas focuses his attention can and must be analyzed as productive disciplinary practices. Although these
practices can clearly be repressive, their most insidious effects are productive. Rather than simply holding people
back, bureaucratization breaks up, categorizes, and systemizes projects and people. It creates new categories of
knowledge and expertise. Bureaucratization and colonization also create new subjects as the objects of
bureaucratic expertise. The social welfare client and the consumer citizen are the creation of bureaucratic power,
not merely its target. The extension of lifeworld gender norms into the system creates the possibility for sexual
harassment, job segregation, parental leave, and consensual corporate decisionmaking. Created as a part of these
subjectivities are new gestures and norms of bodily behavior, such as the embarrassed shuffling of food stamps at
the grocery checkout and the demeaning sexual reference at the office copier. Bodily movements are monitored
and regularized by means of political opinion polls, welfare lists, sexual harassment protocols, flex-time work
schedules, and so forth. Modern disciplinary power, as described by Foucault and implied by Habermas, does not
merely prevent us from developing, but creates us differently as the effect of its functioning. These disciplinary
techniques not only control us, but also enable us to be more efficient and more productive, and often more
powerful. Focusing on the disciplinary elements of the Habermasian critique opens the door for exploring the
postmodern character of Habermasian politics. Because Habermas does describe a disciplinary world, his
prescription for contemporary democracy (discursive politics) ought to be sensitive to, and appropriate for, a
disciplinary world. Foucault's sensitivity to the workings of disciplinary power is central to the articulation of a
plausible, postmodern version of discursive politics. In the following discussion I will argue for a performative
redefinition of participation that will reinvigorate the micro-politics demanded by Foucault, as well as provide a
more nuanced version of the discursive politics demanded by Habermas. III. Habermas and Discursive Participation
Habermas regards a public sphere of rational debate as the only possible foundation for democratic politics in the
contemporary world. For Habermas, like Schumpeter, democracy is a method. Democracies are systems that
achieve the formation of public opi nion and public will through a correct process of public communication, and
then "translate" that communicative power into administrative power via the procedurally regulated public spheres
of parliaments and the judiciary. The extent to which this translation occurs is the measure of a healthy
constitutional democracy. Thus, the "political public sphere" is the "fundamental concept of a theory of democracy."
In this discursive definition of democracy, political participation takes on a new character. Participation equals
discursive participation; it is communication governed by rational, communicatively achieved argument and
negotiation. Habermas distinguishes two types of discursive participation: problem-solving or decision-oriented
deliberation, which takes place primarily in formal democratic institutions such as parliaments and is regulated or
governed by democratic procedures; and informal opinion-formation, which is opinion-formation "uncoupled from
decisions ... [and] effected in an open and inclusive network of overlapping, subcultural publics having fluid
temporal, social and substantive boundaries."" In many ways this two-tiered description of discursive participation
is a radically different understanding of political participation, and one better suited to the sort of societies we
currently inhabit. Habermas moves the focus of participation away from policymaking and toward redefining
legitimate democratic processes that serve as the necessary background for subsequent policymaking. While only a
limited number of specially trained individuals can reasonably engage in decisionmaking participation, the entire
populous can and must participate in the informal deliberation that takes place outside of, or uncoupled from,
formal decisionmaking structures. This informal participation is primarily about generating "public discourses that
uncover topics of relevance to all of society, interpret values, contribute to the resolution of problems, generate
good reasons, and debunk bad ones."" Informal participation has two main functions. First, it acts as a "warning
system with sensors that, though unspecialized, are sensitive throughout society."" This system communicates
problems "that must be processed by the political system."" Habermas labels this the "signal" function. Second,
informal participation must not only indicate when problems need to be addressed, it must also provide an
"effective problematization" of those issues; As Habermas argues, from the perspective of democratic theory, the
public sphere must, in addition, amplify the pressure of problems, that is, not only detect and identify problems but
also convincingly and influentially thematize them, furnish them with possible solutions, and dramatize them in
such a way that they are taken up and dealt with by parliamentary complexes." Informal participation is crucial
because it is the source of both legitimacy and innovation in formal decisionmaking. As long as decisionmaking is
open to the influence of informal opinion-formation, then state policies are legitimate because they are grounded in
free and equal communication that meets the democratic requirement of equal participation. Informal participation
originating in the public sphere is also the resource for innovative descriptions and presentations of interests,
preferences, and issues. If they ignore informal participation, state decisionmakers have no connection to the
center of democracy: the political public sphere. Habermas's description of discursive participation is also novel and
effective due to its broad construal of the participatory act. Participation is defined very broadly because the
concept of the public sphere remains quite abstract. The public sphere is a "linguistically constituted public space."
16 It is neither an institution nor an organization. Rather, it is a "network for communicating information and points
of view [which are] ... filtered and synthesized in such a way that they coalesce into bundles of topically specified
public opinions." ''' Public spheres are defined not by a physical presence but rather by a "communication
structure." According to Habermas, "the more they detach themselves from the public's physical presence and
extend to the virtual presence of scattered readers, listeners, or viewers linked by public media, the clearer
becomes the abstraction that enters when the spatial structure of simple interactions is expanded into a public
sphere." 'I In other words, actually being present in a "concrete locale" is unnecessary for the existence of a public
sphere, and hence unnecessary for active participation. Participation is not limited to large, organized discussions in
formal settings; it also includes "simple and episodic encounters" in which actors "reciprocally [attribute]
communicative freedom to each other."19 This abstraction makes participation easier and extremely inclusive. As
Habermas describes, "every encounter in which actors do not just observe each other but take a second-person
attitude, reciprocally attributing communicative freedom to each other, unfolds in a linguistically constituted public
space." 20 Thus, the concerns that political scientists have had about unequal resource distribution and its effect on
one's capability to act are mitigated in Habermas's broad definition of discursive participation. Even though limited
resources may prevent active interventions in decisionmaking and policymaking processes, for Habermas the
"communicative structures of the public sphere relieve the public of the burden of decision-making."" In a similar
vein, Habermas does not limit participation to a specific set of activities, but defines it procedurally or contextually.
Participation is not limited to traditional activities such as voting, campaigning, or letter-writing, but is instead
designated by the discursive quality of the activity. In other words, it is not the intent to influence policy that
defines participation, but rather the communication structure in which the activity takes place. That communication
structure must be equitable and inclusive, social problems must be openly and rationally deliberated, and they
must be thematized by people potentially affected. However, Habermas's discursive formulation is inadequate
primarily because it does not explicitly and rigorously attend to the disciplinary effects of contemporary societies
explained so creatively by Foucault. Habermas has been routinely criticized for ignoring the productive nature of
contemporary power. His juxtaposition of system and lifeworld in The Theory of Communicative Action relies on a
separation of good power from bad (communicative power v. steering media), and posits an ideal speech situation
freed from the distortions of power." More importantly, Habermas's theorization of discursive participation is
exceedingly abstract and does not adequately attend to the ways in which power informs discourse. A number of
benefit from the Habermasian requirement that all positions and issues be made " `public' in the sense of making
[them] accessible to debate, reflection, action and moral-political transformation."" The "radical proceduralism of
the discourse model makes it ideally suited to identify inequities in communication because it precludes our
a definition of
citizenship based on participation in an ideal form of interaction can
affectation could be defined as deviant or immature communicators. Therefore,
easily become a tool for the exclusion of deviant communicators from the
category of citizens. This sort of normalization creates citizens as subjects of
rational debate. Correlatively, as Fraser explains, because the communicative
action approach is procedural it is particularly unsuited to address issues
of speech content." Therefore, by definition, it misses the relationship
between procedure and content that is at the core of feminist and
deconstructive critiques of language. A procedural approach can require
that we accommodate all utterances and that we not marginalize speaking
subjects. It cannot require that we take seriously or be convinced by the
statements of such interlocutors. In other words, a procedural approach does
not address the cultural context that makes some statements convincing
and others not . I would suggest that Habermas recognizes this problem, but has yet to explicitly theorize
it. As I noted above, Habermas requires that informal discursive participation not only identify problems but also
"convincingly and influentially thematize them." A thematization is legitimate, Habermas argues, only when it
stems from a communicative process that "develops out of communication taking place among those who are
potentially affected."" Thus, the extent to which a position is convincing seems to rely primarily on whether the
affected parties have had a say in its articulation (a procedural requirement). What Habermas does not explicitly
recognize is that whether a problem is convincingly thematized is not just a matter of utilizing corect procedure.
I have a recurring dream: I am lost at sea. Murderous waves crash down, a gale howls. Barely able
to stay afloat, I thrash about, panic-stricken. Without direction, I have no idea how to get
to safety. The feeling is utter chaos. Desperate, Im bailing like a madman,
trying to empty the ocean with a bucket. I am, as Alice would say, running twice as hard as I
can to stay exactly where I am. Through my confusion and despair, I hear whispered words, Lord help me for my
boat is so small and your sea is so immense. This is the point when I inevitably wake up. Naturally, I am
greatly relieved that it has only been a dream, until it dawns on me that theres not much difference between my
joball the variables of my life rushing toward me in flood of chaotic uncertainty. This is not my beautiful life.
Where are the security and order that was promised me? All my carefully
constructed truths, everything I have counted on and identified with,
seems suddenly false or lost or changing. And when I pick up the morning newspaper, theres
more. Not only my life but the whole world seems to be deconstructing. Im back in
my dreamdrowning in a sea of uncertainty. Having practiced for many years as a
psychotherapist, I have good reason to believe that I am not alone in my anxiety; it is common to a great majority
of those of us living in the modern industrialized world. In Care of the Soul, one of the most widely read books of the
past decade, psychologist Thomas Moore (1992) lists emptiness, a loss of core values, and the general malaise of
meaninglessness as hallmarks of our culture. It is hard to deny Moores assertion. Only pick up a copy of Time
May (1977) stated that totalitarianism may be viewed as serving a purpose on a cultural scale parallel to that in
which a neurotic symptom protects an individual from a situation of unbearable anxiety (p. 12). His further
any particular product they happened to create. While the employees fitted the system of
production better than ever before, they were more than ever detached from the
product that this system was meant to realize in the first place . Here we see
the quintessential movement expressed by the concept of interpassivity : an
increased amount of 'interactivity', that is to say, an optimized interaction between human and system functions in
the production process, is accompanied by a loss of involvement and interest in the product itself. 33.
This
understanding of interpassivity differs from, but accords well with the views espoused by Zizek
and Pfaller. For instance, it fits Zizek's observation of the loss of 'substance ': series of
products are nowadays deprived of their 'malignant properties', that is to say of their substance,
the hard resistant kernel of the Real: cofee without cofeine, cream
without fat, beer without alcohol, politics as expert administration, that is,
without politics.15 My account also confirms Pfallers and Zizeks thesis that interpassivity implies an
increase in activity. In interpassive 'mode' we do indeed exhibit increased activity ,
but this activity expresses a shift of involvement , or 'interest', from product to
process. In its radical form, interpassivity even implies that the product is
being replaced (we might say 'negated') by the process. The product, once the original goal
and purpose of the process, has become superfluous; it is no longer especially
needed or valued. What is valued, on the contrary, is the ability to be involved in the
production process. 34. The whole notion of 'involvement', however, has itself been affected by this
development. The commitment has become procedural rather than substantial .
To a certain extent, this is inherent in the flexibility they are expected to exhibit. Skills are no longer connected to
specific products; the most important skill of modern workers is the ability to 'interact', or be interactive', in a
variety of different processes. 35. Let me summarize my theses concerning the way interpassivity affects our
(inter-)activity in the process of production. Third, the process of interactivity itself suffices; the reception and
appreciation of the product is taken over, or preempted, by the process of production, or 'provision'.
AT: FISC CP
2AC
CP doesnt solve the af but strict scrutiny means that FISC cant
circumvent the af
Greenwald and Hussain 14 (Glenn Greenwald, Glenn Greenwald is a former Constitutional and
civil rights litigator and is the author of three New York Times Bestselling books: two on the Bush administration's
executive power and foreign policy abuses, and his latest book, With Liberty and Justice for Some, an indictment of
America's two-tiered system of justice. Greenwald was named by The Atlantic as one of the 25 most influential
political commentators in the nation. He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent
Journalism, and is the winner of the 2010 Online Journalism Association Award for his investigative work on the
arrest and oppressive detention of Bradley Mannin, Murtaza Hussain, Journalist @ the intercept MEET THE MUSLIMAMERICAN LEADERS THE FBI AND NSA HAVE BEEN SPYING ON, https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/09/undersurveillance/, 2014, SMahajan)
The FISA process was enacted in 1978 in response to disclosures that J. Edgar
Hoover and a long line of presidents from both parties had used U.S. intelligence
agencies to spy on dissidents and political enemies. Intended to allow
authorities to covertly investigate suspected spies or terrorists on U.S. soil, the
surveillance is often used simply to gather intelligence , not to build a criminal case.
The law was revised in 2008in part to place limits on the controversial
program of warrantless wiretaps initiated by George W. Bush after 9/11, and in part to
legalize the programs warrantless eavesdropping on Americans when
they speak with foreign surveillance targets. Under current law, the NSA may
directly target a U.S. person (an American citizen or legal permanent resident) for
electronic surveillance only with a warrant approved by the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court. Because the FISC operates in complete
secrecyonly the Justice Department and the FBI are permitted to attend
its proceedings on domestic surveillanceit is impossible to assess how
the court applies the standard of probable cause in cases of suspected
terrorism or espionage. But its rulings are notoriously one-sided: In its 35year history, the court has approved 35,434 government requests for
surveillance, while rejecting only 12. Law enforcement officials familiar with the FISA process
told The Intercept that the FISCs high approval rate is the result of a thorough vetting process that weeds out weak
applications before they reach the court. The system, they added, seeks to balance what they consider to be the
essential role of surveillance in protecting national security with the civil liberties of potential targets. The NSA
issued a statement that reads in part: No U.S. person can be the subject of FISA surveillance based solely on First
Amendment activities, such as staging public rallies, organizing campaigns, writing critical essays, or expressing
the process contains too many internal checks and balances to serve as a rubber stamp on surveillance of
Americans. But the former official, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about FISA matters,
overreach. There are serious weaknesses, the former official says. The lack of transparency and adversarial
processthats a problem. Indeed, the governments ability to monitor such high-profile
Muslim-Americanswith or without warrantssuggests that the most
alarming and invasive aspects of the NSAs surveillance occur not
because the agency breaks the law, but because it is able to exploit the
laws permissive contours . The scandal is what Congress has made legal, says Jameel Jaffer, an
ACLU deputy legal director. The
with the laws is just a distraction from more urgent questions relating to
the breadth of the laws themselves .
Top Level
Framework
Our advocacy is important in this space---interrogating
Islamophobia in educational settings establishes a critical
consciousness that enables larger political projects
Housee 12 (Shirin Housee, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Jan. 4, works at the School of Humanities,
Languages and Social Sciences, University of Wolverhampton, UK Whats the point? Anti-racism and students
voices against Islamophobia, Volume 15, Issue 1)
Having reflected on the two seminar sessions on Islamophobia and the student
comments, I am convinced that the work of anti-racism in university classrooms is
fundamentally important . As one student said racism is real. Through racism people
sufer physically, psychologically, socially, educationally and politically.
Our work in university classrooms is just the beginning of this challenge
against racisms and other oppressions. Classroom discussions and general
teaching form a very important contribution to this work of anti racism in
education. There are no short cuts or painless cuts; the work of anti-racism is a difficult
one. As educators we should make use of classroom exchanges; students
engaged learning could be the key to promoting anti-racism in our class. My goal is
to teach in a way that engages students and leads them to reflect on the socio-economic political/religions issues
that surrounds theirs (our) lives. This article argues for making anti-racist thinking possible in class.
The
physically attacked
therefore,
is to rise to the anti-racist challenge , and for me, a place to start this
Chow
2AC Frontline
Just because we cant know what it feels like to be the other doesnt
mean we cant understand the experiences of the other
much of Young's argument here is predicated upon the view that advo-cates of symmetry and reciprocity think that
imagining oneself in the position of others is sufficient.17 But this is, of course, precisely what motivated Habermas,
for example, to dialogize Kantian ethics. If the other is not talking back, what else can I do but project?
their force from the outside, from the swirling winds over the rotating planet, the troubled ocean currents, the
clouds hovering over depths of empty outer space, the continental plates shifting and creaking EVectively, Lingis
333334) sense of the: bottomless, endless connections andthe indeWnitely articulated regress of the beginning
pushed to its logical outcome. And just as the generosities of intercorporeality keep their secrets, their
incalculable remainder, so too would it seem that the gifts of materiality retain their enigma, their elemental
it might be said
that when a you and an I face each over the insuperable divide of the
tsunami or any other disaster, large or small we not only enact
something entirely novel, we also each bring with us the residue of our
past calamities. We are the storms we have weathered, the quaking of the
earth we have ridden out, the infections we have stomached. We are an
immensity of small sedimentary changes, punctuated by episodes of upheaval. And we are also the
bodying forth of all the guidance and help that has allowed us to live
through the tsunami, droughts, fires and hurricanes of our past,
generosities that may have enabled some of us to live on at the expense
obscurity (Diprose, 2002, p. 54; Iyer, 2002, p. 10). Taking our cues from Lingis, then,
of others.
It is not simply that these traces may be too deeply buried to unearth, too snarled to tease out
and untangle. It is also that they are as much about what is not there, what will never be, as they are about truths
hidden within.
Listening assumes a willingness to accept that others' stories affect one's life. In our
rapid-paced world, the art of listening, hearing, and attending to each other has
diminished; it is an art that needs to be restored. We should never assume we know
people's needs without listening to their stories . Arendt wrote strongly, "Compassion speaks only
to the extent that it has to reply directly to the sheer expressionist sound and gestures through which suffering
becomes audible and visible" (1973, 86). However, she suggested that the cry of suffering requires swift, direct
action, so political processes of persuasion, negotiation, and compromises are inappropriate. I disagree with Arendt
here.
All those
working in refugee rights, whether in advocacy groups, political parties, law reform, NGOs, or the
attentive. It does not presuppose empathy, but it does require us to be open to "the possibility that what we hear
the mercy of unseaworthy vessels, or self-harm as detainees, often despair deeply of being heard without resorting
to desperate measures or horrific acts. Within multicultural democracies, there is a responsibility to listen and to
The duty to listen includes being exposed to "unsavoury views like religious
beliefs we disagree with, cultural practices we do not understand, and stories of
torture and suffering that are painful to absorb. The duty to respond includes replies
to uncomfortable findings like the Amnesty International Human Rights' criticism of Australia's detention,
respond.
particularly of children" (Porter 2003b, 14).28 Refugee advocacy groups have ongoing contact with asylum seekers
and engage in regular dialogue with government departments. These groups demonstrate capacities for empathy,
who is not cared for in the world will force us to explore the role of social relations and structural constraints in
when the UN Security Council should authorize overriding a state's sovereignty in order to assist the plight of
people suffering from a dictatorship, political tyranny, genocide, or "ethnic cleansing." As Robinson (1999) also
intervention. The means of intervention has degrees of morality, where "clearly persuasion is preferable to
coercion, positive sanctions to negative ones, diplomatic pressure to embargoes and blockades, economic sanctions
to war, warning shots, or attacks on criminal leaders to indiscriminate bombing on their population" (Hassner 1998,
move us emotionally. Political care is the hallmark of a decent society that accepts the moral responsibility to
protect the dignity of all citizens and persons within its borders. Political care is the demonstration of compassionate
decency by committed citizens, political representatives, and political leaders who collectively strive for an inclusive
polity that is responsive to peoples' needs. While this perspective strives to improve the well-being of all people, not
only women, it is distinctively feminist in stressing the relational aspects of politics and in building on women's
traditional experience of compassionate care. For example, despite the awful situation in detention camps in
Australia, the suggestion by men and women to accommodate people in community housing while their claims are
compassion was disproportionate and, given the atrocities happening elsewhere in the world, racist. Her response is
(Klein 2002, 148). Kathleen Barry (2002) also argues for the importance of "non-selective compassion." By this, she
the lesson we should learn from 9/11 is attentiveness to the plight of all
who are victims through no fault of their own. For people living in occupied
territories, areas of armed conflict, or violently divided societies, everyday life is full
of terror, fear, violence, shootings, and bombings . For asylum seekers living in detention camps,
means that
everyday life also is miserable. Whenever we feel some of their pain, we empathetically imagine a little of what it
might be like to be a sufferer because of political harshness, and we have begun the process of compassion.
Whenever governments, states, and international organizations resist revenge attacks, preemptive strikes, and
state-sponsored terrorism, or refuse to sell arms, they move closer to some understanding of what minimizing
suffering entails. A humane yet rigorous asylum policy can balance state security and the need to protect borders,
with human security and the need to protect refugee conventions.
Gender
the
radicalization model claims to be able to predict which individuals are not
terrorists now but might be at some later date. Behavioral, cultural, and
ideological signals are assumed to reveal who is at risk of turning into a
terrorist at some point in the future.59 For example, in the FBIs radicalization model, such
indicators of extremism and potential violence. Following the preventive logic discussed above,
things as growing a beard, starting to wear traditional Islamic clothing, and becoming alienated from ones former
life are listed as indicators, as is increased activity in a pro-Muslim social group or political cause.60 Thus,
Perm do both: our criticism covers the politics of empire that enact
the gendered securitization of arab women- no reason why we
cannot accommodate a feminist criticism
Kundnani and Kumar 11 [Arun Kundnani writes about race, Islamophobia, political
violence, and surveillance. Author ofThe Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, extremism, and
the domestic War on Terror, Teaches at NYU, PHD. From LMU, Deepa Kumar is an associate
professor of Media Studies and Middle East Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author
of Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, Race, surveillance, and empire Sept. 2011, via
ISR, Issue 96] N.H
immigrants has been achieved through the building of a militarized wall between Mexico and the United States,
hugely expanding the US border patrol, and programs such as Secure Communities, which enables local police
departments to access immigration databases. Secure Communities was introduced in 2008 and stepped up under
Obama. It has resulted in migrants being increasingly likely to be profiled, arrested, and imprisoned by local police
officers, before being passed to the federal authorities for deportation. Undocumented migrants can no longer have
any contact with police officers without risking such outcomes. There is an irony in the way that fears of illegal
immigration threatening jobs and the public purse have become stand-ins for real anxieties about the neoliberal
collapse of the old social contract: the measures that such fears lead to racialization
and
criminalization of migrantsthemselves serve to strengthen the neoliberal
status quo by encouraging a precarious labor market. Capital, after all,
does not want to end immigration but to profit from a vast exploitable
labor pool that exists under precarious conditions, that does not enjoy the
civil, political and labor rights of citizens and that is disposable through
Wilderson
2AC Wilderson
1. Framework -- the af should be able to weigh the benefits of
implementation otherwise it moots the 1AC and kills topic
education
2. Their revolution fails
Flaherty 05 (http://cryptogon.com/docs/pirate_insurgency.html USC BA in International Relations, researcher
in political affairs, activist and organic farmer in New Zealand In order to understand the national security
implications of militant electronic piracy, an examination of conventional insurgency against the American
Corporate State is necessary.)
traditional insurgency tactics . - Political Activism and the ACS Counterinsurgency Apparatus
The ACS employs a full time counterinsurgency infrastructure with
resources that are unimaginable to most would be insurgents. Quite simply,
violent insurgents have no idea of just how powerful the foe actually is.
Violent insurgents typically start out as peaceful, idealistic, political activists. Whether or
not political activists know it, even with very mundane levels of political activity, they are engaging in low intensity
conflict with the ACS. The U.S. military classifies political activism as low intensity conflict. The scale of warfare
(in terms of intensity) begins with individuals distributing anti-government handbills and public gatherings with antigovernment/anti-corporate themes. In the middle of the conflict intensity scale are what the military refers to as
Operations Other than War; an example would be the situation the U.S. is facing in Iraq. At the upper right hand
side of the graph is global thermonuclear war. What is important to remember is that the military is concerned with
ALL points along this scale because they represent different types of threats to the ACS. Making distinctions
between civilian law enforcement and military forces, and foreign and domestic intelligence services is no longer
political activism is viewed by the corporate state's counterinsurgency apparatus as a useful and necessary
component of political control. Letters-to-the-editor... Calls-to-elected-representatives... Waving banners... Third
party political activities... Taking beatings, rubber bullets and tear gas from riot police in free speech zones...
Political activism amounts to an utterly useless waste of time, in terms of tangible power, which is all the ACS
understands. Political activism is a cruel guise that is sold to people who are dissatisfied, but who have no concept
honeypot that accomplishes nothing and wastes their time. The corporate state knows that some small percentage
of the peaceful, idealistic, political activists will eventually figure out the game. At this point, the clued-in activists
will probably do one of two things; drop out or move to escalate the struggle in other ways. If the clued-in activist
drops his or her political activities, the ACS wins. But what if the clued-in activist refuses to give up the struggle?
Feeling powerless, desperation could set in and these individuals might become increasingly radicalized.
Justice Thomas's belief in the "moral and constitutional equivalence" between Jim Crow laws and race preferences,
and his tragic assertion that "Government cannot make us equal [but] can only recognize, respect, and protect us
as equal before the law." 281 For Thomas, there is no meaningful difference between laws designed to entrench
African Americans have been at the forefront of the struggle to end racism
and white supremacy in the United States since individual free black immigrants and the larger body of enslaved blacks first landed here. Even
though much of that struggle has been directly concerned with the plight
of black people, all gains received from civil rights work have had
tremendous positive impact on the social status of all non-white groups in this
country. Bonding between enslaved Africans, free Africans, and Native Americans is well documented. Freedom fighters from all groups (and certainly there were many traitors in all
three groups who were co-opted by rewards given by the white power structure) understood the importance of solidarity-of struggling against the common enemy, white supremacy.
The enemy was not white people. It was white supremacy . Organic freedom
fighters, both Native and African Americans, had no difficulty building coalitions with those
white folks who wanted to work for the freedom of everyone. Those early
models of coalition building in the interest of dismantling white
supremacy are often forgotten . Much has happened to obscure that history. The construction of reservations (many of which were and are
located in areas where there are not large populations of black people) isolated communities of Native Americans from black liberation struggle. And as time
passed both groups began to view one another through Eurocentric
stereotypes, internalizing white racist assumptions about the other . Those
early coalitions were not maintained . Indeed the bonds between African Americans struggling to resist racist domination, and all
other people of color in this society who suffer from the same system, continue to be fragile, even as we all remain untied by ties, however frayed and weakened, forged in shared antiracist struggle.
Collectively,
resist white supremacy when we build coalitions . Since white supremacy emerged here within the context of
colonization, the conquering and conquest of Native Americans, early on it was obvious that Native and African Americans could best preserve their cultures by resisting from a
by the complicity of both groups. Native American artist and activist of the Cherokee people Jimmie Durham, in his collection of essays A Certain Lack of Coherence, talks about the
1960s as a time when folks tried to regenerate that spirit of coalition: In the 1960s and 70s American Indian, African American and Puerto Rican activists said, as loudly as they could,
This country is founded on the genocide of one people and the enslavement of another. This statement, hardly arguable, was not much taken up by white activists. As time passed, it
was rarely taken up by anyone. Instead the fear that ones specific group might receive more attention has led to greater nationalism, the showing of concern for ones racial or ethnic
through acts of discrimination and assault that register their contempt for and disregard of black people and darker-skinned immigrants mimic this racist behavior in their interactions
with black folks. In her editorial On the Backs of Blacks published in a recent special issue of TIME magazine Toni Morrison discusses the way white supremacy is reinscribed again and
again as immigrants seek assimilation: All immigrants fight for jobs and space, and who is there to fight but those who have both? As in the fishing ground struggle between Texas and
Vietnamese shrimpers, they displace what and whom they canIn race talk the move into mainstream America always means buying into the notion of American blacks as the real
aliens. Whatever the ethnicity or nationality of the immigrant, his nemesis is understood to be African AmericanSo addictive is this ploy that the fact of blackness has been abandoned
for the theory of blackness. It doesnt matter anymore what shade the newcomers skin is. A hostile posture toward resident blacks must be struck at the Americanizing door. Often
people of color, both those who are citizens and those who are recent immigrants, hold black people responsible for the hostility they encounter from whites. It is as though they see
blacks as acting in a manner that makes things harder for everybody else. This type of scapegoating is the mark of the colonized sensibility which always blames those victimized rather
than targeting structures of domination. Just as many white Americans deny both the prevalence of racism in the United States and the role they play in perpetuating and maintaining
white supremacy, non-white, non-black groups, Native, Asian, Hispanic Americans, all deny their investment in anti-black sentiment even as they consistently seek to distance
themselves from blackness so that they will not be seen as residing at the bottom of this societys totem pole, in the category reserved for the most despised group. Such
jockeying for white approval and reward obscures the way allegiance to
the existing social structure undermines the social welfare of all people of
color . White supremacist power is always weakened when people of color
bond across diferences of culture, ethnicity, and race . It is always
strengthened when we act as though there is no continuity and overlap in
the patterns of exploitation and oppression that afect all of our lives. To
ensure that political bonding to challenge and change white supremacy will not be cultivated among diverse groups of people of color, white ruling groups pit us against one another in a
no-win game of who will get the prize for model minority today. They compare and contrast, affix labels like model minority, define boundaries, and we fall into line. Those rewards
coupled with internalized racist assumptions lead non-black people of color to deny the way racism victimizes them as they actively work to disassociate themselves from black people.
Even though progressive people of color consistently critique these standpoints, we have yet to build a
contemporary mass movement to challenge white supremacy that would
draw us together. Without an organized collective struggle that
consistently reminds us of our common concerns, people of color forget.
This will to disassociate is a gesture of racism.
Sadly forgetting common concerns sets the stage for competing concerns. Working within the system of white supremacy, non-black people of color often feel as though they must
compete with black folks to receive white attention. Some are even angry at what they wrongly perceive as a greater concern on the part of white of the dominant culture for the pain of
black people. Rather than seeing the attention black people receive as linked to the gravity of our situation and the intensity of our resistance, they want to make it a sign of white
generosity and concern. Such thinking is absurd. If white folks were genuinely concerned about black pain, they would challenge racism, not turn the spotlight on our collective pain in
ways that further suggest that we are inferior. Andrew Hacker makes it clear in Two Nations that the vast majority of white Americans believe that members of the black race represent
an inferior strain of the human species. He adds: In this view Africans-and Americans who trace their origins to that continent-are seen as languishing at a lower evolutionary level than
members of other races. Non-black people of color often do not approach white attention to black issues by critically interrogating how those issues are presented and whose interests
the representations ultimately serve. Rather than engaging in a competition that sees blacks as winning more goodies from the white system than other groups, non-black people of
color who identify with black resistance struggle recognize the danger of such thinking and repudiate it. They are politically astute enough to challenge a rhetoric of resistance that is
based on competition rather than a capacity on the part of non-black groups to identify with whatever progress blacks make as being a positive sign for everyone. Until non-black people
of color define their citizenship via commitment to a democratic vision of racial justice rather than investing in the dehumanization and oppression of black people, they will always act
as mediators, keeping black people in check for the ruling white majority. Until racist anti-black sentiments are let go by other people of color, especially immigrants, and complain that
these groups are receiving too much attention, they undermine freedom struggle. When this happens people of color war all acting in complicity with existing exploitative and oppressive
bonding between people of color is the institutionalization of multiculturalism. Positively, multiculturalism is presented as a corrective to a Eurocentric vision of model citizenship
wherein white middle-class ideals are presented as the norm. Yet this positive intervention is undermined by visions of multiculturalism that suggest everyone should live with and
identify with their own self contained group. If white supremacist capitalist patriarchy is unchanged then multiculturalism within that context can only become a breeding ground for
narrow nationalism, fundamentalism, identity politics, and cultural, racial, and ethnic separatism. Each separate group will then feel that it must protect its own interests by keeping
outsiders at bay, for the group will always appear vulnerable, its power and identity sustained by exclusivity. When people of color think this way, white supremacy remains intact.
For even though demographics in the United States would suggest that in the
future the nation will be more populated by people of color, and whites
will no longer be the majority group, numerical presence will in no way
alter white supremacy if there is no collective organizing, no eforts to
build coalitions that cross boundaries . Already, the white Christian Right is targeting large populations of people of color to
ensure that the fundamentalist values they want this nation to uphold and represent will determine the attitudes and values of these groups. The role Eurocentric Christianity has played
in teaching non-white folks Western metaphysical dualism, the ideology that under girds binary notion of superior/inferior, good/bad, white/black, cannot be ignored. While progressive
organizations are having difficulty reaching wider audiences, the white-dominated Christian Right organizes outreach programs that acknowledge diversity and have considerable
influence. Just as the white-dominated Christian church in the U.S. once relied on biblical references to justify racist domination and discrimination, it now deploys a rhetoric of
multiculturalism to invite non-white people to believe that racism can be overcome through a shared fundamentalist encounter. Every contemporary fundamentalist white maledominated religious cult in the U.S. has a diverse congregation. People of color have flocked to these organizations because they have felt them to be places where racism does not exist,
where they are not judged on the basis of skin color. While the white-dominated mass media focus critical attention on black religious fundamentalist groups like the Nation of Islam, and
in particular Louis Farrakhan, little critique is made of white Christian fundamentalist outreach to black people and other people of color. Black Islamic fundamentalism shares with the
white Christian Right support for coercive hierarchy, fascism, and a belief that some groups are inferior and others superior, along with a host of other similarities. Irrespective of the
standpoint, religious fundamentalism brainwashes individuals not to think critically or see radical politicization as a means of transforming their lives. When people of color immerse
themselves in religious fundamentalism, no meaningful challenge and critique of white supremacy can surface. Participation in a radical multiculturalism in any form is discouraged by
other groups. It is this perversion of solidarity the authors of Night Vision address when they assert: While there are different nationalities, races and genders in the U.S., the supposedly
different cultures in multiculturalism dont like to admit what they have in common, the glue of it all-parasitism. Right now, theres both anger among the oppressed and a milling
A based identity
politics of solidarity that embraces both a broad based identity politics
around, edging up to the next step but uncertain what it is fully about, what is means. The key is the common need to break with parasitism.
The year 1492 marked a major turning point in the trajectory of Western
Civilization. Elementary age children are taught this as the year Columbus famously crossed the Atlantic. An equally
significant event that year, was the Spanish conquest of al-Andalusa Moorish
province on the southern Iberian peninsula established eight centuries earlierand more
importantly, the last major Muslim stronghold on the European continent.
Critical race scholars have argued that these two events would not only
shift the geopolitical balance of power from the Orient to the Occident,
but fundamentally alter conceptions about religious and racial identity .
According to Nelson Maldonado-Torres, of the University of California, Berkeley, the expulsion of
the Moors from continental Europe marked a transition from an age of
imperial relations between Christian and Muslim empires, to an age of
European colonial expansion throughout the known world . The discovery of godless
natives in the Americas would also inspire the great debates between Las Casas and Seplveda in 1550 on the nature of the human
not simply an extension of some historical bias against blacks , but rather,
is an amalgam of old-world Islamophobia linked to the history of the
Iberian peninsula, and to the notion of souless beings embodied in popular
conceptions about the indigenous natives of the Americas. These beliefs
would contribute to an ideological basis for, and justification of, colonial conquests
in the name of cultural and religious conversion, as well as pave the way
for the enslavement and human trafficking of sub-Saharan Africans.
Elias's analysis suggests them to be. Racial formation theory allows us to see that there are contradictions in racial oppression. The
Typically what I mean when I ask myself whether or not people will like or accept my reading, what I'm really trying
to say to myself whether or not people will like or accept me and this is a difficult thing to overcome especially for a
we are not just black writers, we are black people and as black
people we live every day of our lives in an anti-black world. A world that
defines itself in a very fundamental ways in constant distinction from us,
we live everyday of our lives in a context of daily rejection so its
understandable that we as black writers might strive for acceptance and
appreciation through our writing, as I said this gets us tangled up in the result. The lessons we have
black writer because
to learn as writers resonate with what I want to say about literature and political struggle. I am a political writer
is not one of causality but one of accompaniment , when I write I want to hold my
political beliefs and my political agenda loosely. I want to look at my political life the way I might look at a solar
anti-black world. Its anti black in places I hate like apartheid South Africa and apartheid America and its anti-black
forbidden territory, the unspoken demands that the world come to an end, the thing that I cant say when I am
trying to organize maybe I can harness the energy of the political movement to make breakthroughs in the
imagination that the movement can't always accommodate, if its to maintain its organizational capacity.
8. Pessimism DA:
a. Rejecting political activism ignores successful black
movements and destroys black agency
Driver 11 (Justin is an Assistant Professor, University of Texas School of Law. In 2004, he graduated from
Harvard Law School, where he was an Articles Editor and Book Reviews Chair of the Harvard Law Review. Driver
served as a law clerk to Judge Merrick B. Garland, United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit,
and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor (ret.) and Justice Stephen Breyer, Supreme Court of the United States. His
principal research interests include constitutional law, constitutional theory, and the intersection of race with legal
institutions, Rethinking the Interest-Convergence Thesis, 105 Northwestern University Law Review 149,
http://www.law.northwestern.edu/lawreview/v105/n1/149/LR105n1Driver.pdf)
the interest-convergence thesis simultaneously diminishes the culpability of white judges who exercise their
authority to maintain the existing racial hierarchy and denies the credit owed to white members of the judiciary who
challenge that hierarchy. 1. Black Citizens.-The
Even in the context of the brutally dehumanizing institution of slavery, black people were able to exercise various modes of re-sistance
and exert at least some control within their thoroughly unenviable environments .'45
More recently, the civil rights movement-with both its legal component conceived of by Charles
gyroscopes. Nor are they potted plants.
Hamilton Houston" and the di-rect action component principally identified with Martin Luther King Jr. ' 4 7-
demonstrates that black people can assert their rights and succeed in bringing
about real racial change even in the face of stifling racial oppres-sion. Rather than
waiting for fortune to smile upon them, these black people-and many more over the
centuries-took fortune into their own hands and helped bend history to their will.
Viewing African-Americans as mere "fortuitous beneficiaries" who are trapped in a "preplanned equili-brium"
improperly suggests that the decisions and actions of black people are far less important, tending toward the
irrelevant, in comparison with what whites deem permissible. In this manner, an absolutist conception of interest
The interest-convergence
theory's minimization of black agency also may have the regrettable effect of
convergence may place an artificial limit upon what black people can achieve.
undermining the achievement of individ-ual blacks . In the event that a black person should
achieve distinction in the professional world, interest convergence suggests that the white establish-ment permitted
that black person's achievement as a small concession ne-cessary to advance white interests and maintain racial
order.'48 "Successful blacks serve white interests by providing the rationalizing link between the nation's espousal
of racial equality and its practice of racial dominance," Professor Bell has written. "The unspoken and totally
facetious maxim is that with self-improvement, the opportunity is available for all blacks to be successful."' 49 While
it would certainly go too far to suggest that black people exercise no control whatsoever regarding their
occupational fates under the interest-convergence theory, the talent of the black individuals, say, in the laboratory
or in the archives would appear to be relatively incon-sequential in comparison to the white interests that select a
convergence theory puts forth a severely crabbed understanding of what black individuals and other advocates of
black advancement can do to achieve racial uplift. Appealing to interest-convergence sentiments is surely a
Bell wishes to wake us from the "We have a dream" mentality of the
1960s." It is obvious that he uses this lan- guage to challenge both the false
consciousness of the black community and the Civil Rights Movement. But it is not at all
clear who suffers from this illusion, or even what the illusion is. Bell argues most force- fully against
formal equality and abstract legal principles. But he does not try to show--nor do I believe he can
show--that there is wide- spread attachment to such concepts in the black community. Certainly the black
community does not believe in the inevitability of equality. Its members live the
statistics that Bell cites. Racial Realism, then, would strip away the idea of equality-but it would still leave un- touched the structure--and presence-of racism that
dominates black life. "Do the Right Thing,"43 Spike Lee's film, captures the sense of the black community's
equality. Professor
attitude toward rights in America. During one scene, there is a confrontation in a lower-middle-class black community, between Buggin Out, one of the local blacks, and Cliton, a white yuppie who is unknown in the neighborhood.
The yuppie accidentally rolls his bicycle over Buggin Out's new, hip Air Jordan sneakers. When Buggin Out
challenges Cliton and asks him why he has a house in Bug- gin Out's neighborhood, and on his side of the block,
Cliton answers that this is a free country and he can live where he pleases. Buggin Out's response: "A free country?
Bell's perception, blacks are viewed as simply ineffective and un- able to influence their own lives. We can never
hope to be more than simple pawns in the hands of powerful whites. The efforts by blacks to change this situation
How
can this be a message of hope? In fact, this conception is disempowering . Bell
greatly exaggerates the power of whites and undervalues the power of blacks . While it
are absorbed by whites, who merely appear to accommodate these efforts without changing the status quo."
is undoubtedly true that conservative whites, and the Republican Party in particular, have used racism to
consolidate power for their own interest, it is not true that blacks are powerless or that whites are all powerful .
Indeed, the example Bell gives of the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the
Supreme Court-to demonstrate blacks' lack of power-can eas- ily be re-interpreted
as an indication of blacks' affirmative power. The nomination of Thomas by
President Bush was a cynical move that nonetheless recognized that blacks could
influence the outcome of these events. Thomas' judicial record on civil rights was
sparse. But piecing together Thomas' writing and speeches, it seems clear he will
not be sympathetic to many civil rights claims. I agree with Bell that Thomas does
not have the interest of blacks at heart. During the Sen- ate confirmation hearings, Thomas went to
great lengths to obscure his stance on key civil rights issues. Without clarifying his position, he ulti- mately was
confirmed by the Senate to the Supreme Court--by the smallest margin in history. Almost everyone recognized that
the posi- tion the black community took on the nomination would be important. It seems fairly obvious that one of
The black
community supported Thomas' nomination by almost two-to-one. The support from
the black community was critical to his success. I believe that if there had been a
consensus in the black community in opposi- tion, as there was with Bork, there
would be no Justice Thomas today. Bell might be able to show that blacks either
misused their power to support Thomas or that blacks were manipulated. But even
the ac- knowledgement that the White House felt the need to manipulate sug- gests
the recognition of power.46 Because Bush and other powerful conservative whites
won in the Thomas nomination, Bell can argue that blacks would have been powerless to stop Bush. However, this position is incorrect. " There are many examples of
blacks influencing events to defeat conservative white interests. A recent example
is the passage of the 1991 Civil Rights Bill." Despite strong and vocal opposition
from conservative whites, including President Bush, blacks were able to prevail in
getting the 1991 Civil Rights Bill passed." While it is true that racism is often used
both to resolve white conflicts and to resist change that would benefit blacks, it is
wrong to suggest that blacks are merely pawns in the hands of powerful whites.
Blacks in America may not be able to control their destiny, but often we have been able to influence
events to our advantage in the face of powerful white opposition. Even as slaves,
the reasons Thomas obscured his position on civil rights was to avoid losing black support."
blacks were able to influence events central to their lives. At the beginning of
the Civil War, for example, Lincoln was determined to limit the war issue to
preservation of the Union. But black slaves and freed blacks were able to undermine
this effort and to commit the country to a position on slavery ." To the freed slave and the
slave master, this cannot be dismissed as an "irrelevance." It cannot be proven through
a mere litany of examples that blacks one day will be treated as equals in America.
Indeed, Bell has tried to anticipate any counter-examples to his position that there
will be no improvement in the status quo by dismissing any apparent victory as "no
more than temporary peaks of progress, short lived victories that slide into
irrelevance."51 Racial Realism attributes to blacks what one writer calls "surplus powerlessncss."52 But
there is something urgently wrong with the position Racial Realism suggests-that
blacks are pow- erless. It is not only wrong, it is a position of despair, robbing blacks
of all hope53 of changing the conditions of subjugation and domination. And Bell's
insistence that history supports his position is false.54 Though historically the power
equation between blacks and whites has not been even close to "equal ,""55 blacks
have influenced and even de- feated powerful white interests. There is a tension, if not a
contradiction, between Bell's claim that blacks are powerless and that the condition of domination has not changed
and will not change, and his assertion that the attachment to equality has limited the struggle against racial
domination. The impli- cation of the second proposition is that, in some way, there must be a method of successful
struggle against racial domination. If blacks give up the attachment to equality, Bell seems to suggest that this
might produce an improvement in the black condition. The contradiction is not avoided, however, by calling for a
shift in the psychological state of blacks, by reducing their "despair." As one nears the end of Racial Realism,
Professor Bell takes a surprising turn. His analysis pushes toward despair, cynicism and apa- thy. While he accepts
the immutability of the bleak status quo, he is not ready to accept apathy. He calls for continued struggle based on
a qualified existentialism. He challenges blacks to continue to struggle without what he sees as the false hope of
woman, who struggles against rich, powerful, racist white men. Without the hope of change she continues her
struggle, but as she puts it. "I am an old woman. I lives to harass white follks."56 There is something appealing
about Mrs. McDonald, but it is not that she lives to harass white people. It is that she is harassing power- ful, rich,
racist white men. Indeed, if Bell had told us of a powerful black who lived to harass weak, vulnerable, white
replaced.
But although Adorno and Horkheimer as individuals would almost certainly have rejoiced in the downfall of the
the
relativism
are prone. By arguing that there are no grounds to choose between different accounts of reality, poststructuralists are inevitably
forced to accept that all accounts of a given reality are true. They can make no judgment on these claims that is not arbitrary (Norris
false,
society should attempt to face the world with a combination of pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. This position
has much to commend it given the propensity of radicals to view society with rosetinted glasses. However, the limitations of this
the pessimism is so
thoroughgoing that it becomes absolutely debilitating. Any attempt to
challenge the status quo already stands condemned as futile . The logical
outcome of this attitude is resignation and passivity . Adorno attempted to make a virtue of
position are nowhere better illustrated than in Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which
the detached attitude that he and Horkheimer adopted toward the political struggles of their own age by claiming: If one is
concerned to achieve what might be possible with human beings, it is extremely difficult to remain friendly towards real people.
However, considering that it is only real people who can bring about a better society, Adornos complex form of misanthropy
ultimately leads only to quiescence (Wiggershaus 1994: 268). Thus, despite the clear similarities in the influences and interests of
Schopenhauer than to that adopted by the Sardinian Marxist Gramsci, even as he languished in a fascist prison. In view of the
traditional Marxist emphasis on the unity of theory and practice, it is hardly surprising that Adorno and Horkheimers rejection of any
attempt to orient their work toward political activity led to bitter criticism from other radical intellectuals. Perhaps the most famous
such condemnation was that of Lukcs, who acidly commented that the members of the Frankfurt School had taken up residence in
the Grand Hotel Abyss. The inhabitants of this institution enjoyed all the comforts of the bourgeois lifestyle while fatalistically
surveying the wreckage of life beyond its doors. Whereas Lukcss own apologias for Stalinism point to the dangers of subordinating
theoretical activity to the exigencies of daytoday practical politics, Adorno and Horkheimer sunder theory and political practice
ill suited to
any social theory that aspires to realworld relevance . Furthermore, the critical
theorists position on political practice is based on an underestimation of
the potential for progressive change that exists even in the most administered societies. It is
completely, impoverishing the theoretical activity itself. Their stance leads to an aridity and scholasticism
instructive to contrast the attitude of Adorno and Horkheimer with that of Raymond Williams, who delivers the following broadside
against high culture Marxists such as the members of the Frankfurt School: When the Marxists say that we live in a dying culture,
and that the masses are ignorant, I have to ask them... where on earth they have lived. A dying culture, and ignorant masses, are
not what I have known and see. (R. Williams 1989: 8) As I will discuss in Chapter 6, the evidence suggests that Williams is closer to
the truth.
social movements
Americans, for instance, during the settler-colonial period took different forms from the racialization of African
attention to the current conjuncture in which the politics of the War on Terror shape national security surveillance
against the Jeffersonian sympathizers of the French Revolution. The British hanged Nathan Hale because he spied
More Specific ev
Perm do both: the systems of mass surveillance we critique overlap
with other racialized security surveillances
Smith 2013 [Andrea Smith, Proffessor of Media and Cultural Studies at University of Cal Riverside,
intellectual, feminist, activist, co-founder of INCITE and focuses on Women of Color particularly Native American
Women; The Problem With Privilege; August 14th http://andrea366.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/the-problem-withprivilege-by-andrea-smith/] N.H
movement in the South, the campus protests, and the Black insurrections in northern cities were the result of a
National security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski commented in 1970 that technology would make it possible to assert
almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date files, containing even personal
The expansion
of the surveillance state in the twentieth century was one aspect of a
wider penetration of the state into the lives of Americans. Working class struggle
had somewhat unexpectedly driven this expansion: the state responded by taking on a
mediating role between labor and capital, ofering a measure of protection
from the ravages of a market economy through Keynesian economics and the creation of a
welfare state after the New Dealalbeit one that was underdeveloped compared to Western Europe. State
managers sought to stabilize capitalism by imposing a degree of
rationality on the system through regulating the economy and providing social services, all of
which required a greater penetration of the state into civil society.48 In the new era of neoliberal
capitalism that began in the 1970s, ruling elites sought to break this social
contract, which rested on the premise that, if the working class played by
the rules, it could see increases in wages and living conditions. From the 1970s onwards, this arrangement
information about the . . . behavior of the citizen, in addition to the more customary data.47
was undone. Alongside, there were also the beginnings of a contraction of the social wage of welfare provisions,
public housing, education, and healthcare. The end result was growing inequality and a new regime of the one
rights era
we have real social problems of deprivation and poverty which, in part, can
only be solved by state action. This does not make me a statist, but
rather an anti-anti-statist. By opposing such intervention because they
are carried out by the state, anarchists are tacitly lining up with the
neo-liberals. Even worse, refusing even to vote for the left, they
acquiese to rule by neo-liberal parties. I deeply admire direct action
movements. I was a radio pirate and we provide server space for anti-roads and environmental
movements. However, this doesn't mean that I support political
abstentionism or, even worse, the mystical nonsense produced by Hakim Bey. It is great for artists and
Europe,
others to adopt a marginality as a life style choice, but most of the people who are economically and socially
marginalised were never given any choice. They are excluded from society as a result of deliberate policies of
During the
'70s, I was a pro-situ punk rocker until Thatcher got elected. Then we learnt the hard way that
voting did change things and lots of people sufered if state power was
withdrawn from certain areas of our life, such as welfare and employment. Anarchism can be a
deregulation, privatisation and welfare cutbacks carried out by neo-liberal governments.
viewpoints find avatars in this recently-viral debate between comedian Russell Brand and journalist Jeremy Paxman.
Brand argues that to vote is to be complicit in a system that does not care about common people, while Paxman
continually returns to the point that voting is just how democracy works.
practical and realistic, the other beautiful and revolutionary) and simultaneously easy to denounce (one represents
drone-like assimilation into a harmful system, the other pie-in-the-sky abstract idealism). And both sides are flawed.
it boils down to strategy vs. tactics. If you care about , for example,
environmental justice, or the prison industrial complex, or combating poverty, voting for the right
For me,
candidate is not a winning strategy. Challenging massive, entrenched systems takes mass movements
encompassing an array of tacticseducational campaigns, media campaigns, direct action, marches, rallies,
important opportunities. First, theyre winnable. Even small victories are something concrete and energizing, which
helps sustain larger movements (when these victories are put in a means-to-an-end context and not treated as
ends themselves). Second, theyre a great media force-multiplier: because so many people still see voting as the
primary way to get involved, a specific candidate can sometimes spread the word about an issue further than a
broader activist campaign can; they may even be able to mobilize people who wouldnt otherwise get involved.
Finally, elections can put good people into positions of power. Were not just talking
about the president herethis is about school boards, city councils, state reps and more. Local elections are a
power bottleneck, and
control of our homes. Voting can matter. Getting good people into office can matter. Neither Moore himself nor
Occupy Homes MN are nave enough to believe that getting Moore elected will be any kind of magic key; but they
can see the possibilities. And those possibilities are worth fighting for. Voting by itself is never going to change the
world, but neither is anything by itself. Movements are big, complex, multi-layered organisms. If we care about
creating change, we have to reject the narrow views of how change happens, and embrace every opportunity to
make our communities and our world better.
AT: Sexton
Sexton is wrong---Anti-blackness as the root of all oppression is selfreferential and requires ignoring mass evidence to the contrary--critiques of multiculturalism are a reason to be weary of its
dangers, not a reason to focus on blackness to the exclusion of
other forms of violence
Paul Spickard 9, University of California, Santa Barbara, Amalgamation Schemes:
Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (review) American Studies - Volume
50, Number 1/2, Spring/Summer 2009, pp. 125-127
One of the major developments in ethnic studies over the past two decades has been the idea (and sometimes the advocacy) of
multiraciality. From a theoretical perspective, this has stemmed from a post-structuralist attempt to deconstruct the categories
created by the European Enlightenment and its colonial enterprise around the world. From a personal perspective, it has been driven
by the life experiences in the last half-century of a growing number of people who have and acknowledge mixed parentage. The
leading figures in this scholarly movement are probably Maria Root and G. Reginald Daniel, but the writers are many and include
figures as eminent as Gary Nash and Randall Kennedy. A small but dedicated group of writers has resisted this trend: chiefly Rainier
Spencer, Jon Michael Spencer, and Lewis Gordon. They have raised no controversy, perhaps [End Page 125] because their books are
not well written, and perhaps because their arguments do not make a great deal of sense. It is not that there is nothing wrong with
the literature and the people movement surrounding multiraciality. Some writers and social activists do tend to wax rhapsodic about
the glories of intermarriage and multiracial identity as social panacea. A couple of not-very-thoughtful activists (Charles Byrd and
Susan Graham) have been coopted by the Gingrichian right (to be fair, one must point out that most multiracialists are on the left).
And, most importantly, there is a tension between some Black intellectuals and the multiracial idea over the lingering fear that, for
some people, adopting a multiracial identity is a dodge to avoid being Black. If so, that might tend to sap the strength of a
monoracially-defined movement for Black community empowerment. With Amalgamation Schemes, Jared Sexton is trying to
stir up some controversy. He presents a facile, sophisticated, and theoretically informed intelligence, and he picks a fight from the
start. His title suggests that the study of multiraciality is some kind of plot, or at the very least an illegitimate enterprise. His tone is
angry and accusatory on every page. It is difficult to get to the grounds of his argument, because the cloud of invective is so thick,
problem with his insistence on monoraciality. For Sexton and the others, one cannot be mixed or multiple; one must choose ever and
ignores the history of how modern racial ideas emerged . Sexton does
point out, as do many writers, the flawed tendencies in multiracial advocacy mentioned in the
second paragraph above. But he imputes them to the whole movement and to the subject of
study,
and that is not a fair assessment . The main problem is that Sexton argues from
conclusion to evidence, rather than the other way around . That is, he begins with the
conclusion that the multiracial idea is bad, retrograde, and must be resisted. And then
he cherry-picks his
evidence to fit his conclusion. He spends much of his time on weaker writers such as Gregory Stephens and
Stephen Talty who have been tangential to the multiracial literature. When he addresses stronger figures like Daniel, Root, Nash, and
Kennedy, he carefully selects his quotes to fit his argument, and misrepresents their positions by doing so. Sexton also makes some
pretty outrageous claims. He takes the fact that people who study multiracial identities are often studying aspects of family life
(such as the shaping of a child's identity), and twists that to charge them with homophobia and nuclear family-ism. That is simply
not accurate for any of the main writers in the field. The same is true for his argument by innuendo that scholars of multiraciality
somehow advocate mail-order bride services. And
Neolib/Cap
2AC Neolib
We the surveillance that we critique
Smith 2013 [Andrea Smith, Proffessor of Media and Cultural Studies at University
of Cal Riverside, intellectual, feminist, activist, co-founder of INCITE and focuses on
Women of Color particularly Native American Women; The Problem With Privilege;
August 14th http://andrea366.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/the-problem-withprivilege-by-andrea-smith/] N.H
Further, the current system of
commonality of interest . For instance, Frank Valdes has noted that Latinos and Asians share a
common interest in legal issues that involve "immigration, family, citizenship, nationhood, language, expression,
culture, and global economic restructuring."216
cooperation as it afects all the major minority groups . I will use it for illustrative
purposes in the remainder of this section, even though it is only one of various issues that could be the basis for
coalition building. Asian scholars have noted how both the recent mistreatment of Chinese American scientist Dr.
DA
Generic Ks of DA
2AC Bilgin
Focus on short-term impacts is epistemologically bankrupt greater
attention to structural conditions and root causes is key.
Bilgin & Morton 4 (Pinar, Associate Professor of International Relations at Bilkent University, & Adam
David, Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Lancaster University, Politics, 24(3),
From Rogue to Failed States? The Fallacy of Short-termism, p. 176-178)
Calls for alternative approaches to the phenomenon of state failure are often met with the
criticism that such alternatives could only work in the long term whereas
something needs to be done here and now . Whilst recognising the need for immediate action,
it is the role of the political scientist to point to the fallacy of shorttermism in the conduct of current policy. Short-termism is defined by Ken Booth (1999, p. 4) as
approaching security issues within the time frame of the next election, not the next generation. Viewed as such, shorttermism is the enemy of true strategic thinking. The latter requires
policymakers to rethink their long-term goals and take small steps
towards achieving them. It also requires heeding against taking steps that
might eventually become self-defeating. The United States has presently fought three wars against
two of its Cold War allies in the post-Cold War era, namely, the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Both
were supported in an attempt to preserve the delicate balance between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War policy
of supporting client regimes has eventually backfired in that US policymakers now have to face the instability they have caused.
Hence the need for a comprehensive understanding of state failure and the role Western states have played in failing them through
varied forms of intervention. Although some commentators may judge that the road to the existing situation is paved with good
this line of argument further, reflection on different socially relevant meanings of state failure in relation to different time
increments shaping policy-making might convey alternative considerations. In line with John Ruggie (1998, pp. 167170), divergent
issues might then come to the fore when viewed through the different lenses of particular time increments. Firstly, viewed through
the lenses of an incremental time frame, more immediate concerns to policymakers usually become apparent when linked to
precocious assumptions about terrorist networks, banditry and the breakdown of social order within failed states. Hence relevant
players and events are readily identified (al-Qaeda), their attributes assessed (axis of evil, strong/weak states) and judgements
made about their long-term significance (war on terrorism). The key analytical problem for policymaking in this narrow and blinkered
domain is the one of choice given the constraints of time and energy devoted to a particular decision. These factors lead
Within an
epochal time frame an agenda still in the making appears that requires a
shift in decision-making, away from a conventional problem-solving mode
wherein doing nothing is favoured on burden-of-proof grounds, towards a risk-averting mode, characterised by prudent
contingency measures. To conclude, in relation to failed states, the latter time frame entails
reflecting on the very structural conditions shaping the problems of failure
shape current trajectories. Shifting attention to a third temporal form draws attention to still different dimensions.
raised throughout the present discussion, which will demand lasting and delicate attention from practitioners across the academy
and policymaking communities alike.
2AC Complexity
Complexity means make linear predictions fail
Taleb & Blythe 11 (Nassim Taleb, Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York Universitys
Polytechnic Institute. Mark Blythe, Professor of International Political Economy at Brown University, The Black Swan
of Cairo How Suppressing Volatility Makes the World Less Predictable and More Dangerous,
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67741/nassim-nicholas-taleb-and-mark-blyth/the-black-swan-of-cairo,
May/June 2011)
surprise the permanent condition of the U.S. political and economic elite? In 20078,
when the global financial system imploded, the cry that no one could have
seen this coming was heard everywhere, despite the existence of
numerous analyses showing that a crisis was unavoidable. It is no surprise that one
hears precisely the same response today regarding the current turmoil in the Middle East. The critical
Why is
issue
that
Such environments
were in their initial volatile state . Indeed, the longer it takes for the blowup
to occur, the worse the resulting harm
restrict variability seems to be good policy (who does not prefer stability to chaos?), so it is with very good
intentions that policymakers unwittingly increase the risk of major blowups . And it
is the same misperception of the properties of natural systems that led to both the economic crisis of 20078 and
goes the Latin saying. Just as a robust economic system is one that encourages early failures (the concepts of fail
small and fail fast), the U.S. gov- ernment should stop supporting dictato- rial regimes for the sake of
pseudostability and instead allow political noise to rise to the surface. Making an economy robust in the face of
business swings requires allowing risk to be visible; the same is true in politics. SEDUCED BY STABILITY Both the
recent financial crisis and the current political crisis in the Middle East are grounded in the rise of complexity,
interdependence, and unpredictability. Policymakers in the United Kingdom and the United States have long
promoted policies aimed at eliminating fluctuation no more booms and busts in the economy, no more Iranian
surprises in foreign policy. These policies have almost always produced undesirable outcomes. For example, the
U.S. banking system became very fragile following a succession of pro- gressively larger bailouts and government
interventions, particularly after the 1983 rescue of major banks (ironically, by the same Reagan administration that
trum- peted free markets). In the United States, promoting these bad policies has been a bipartisan eort
throughout. Republicans have been good at fragilizing large corpora- tions through bailouts, and Democrats have
been good at fragilizing the government. At the same time, the financial system as a whole exhibited little volatility;
it kept get- ting weaker while providing policymakers with the illusion of stability, illustrated most notably when Ben
Bernanke, who was then a member of the Board of Gover- nors of the U.S. Federal Reserve, declared the era of the
great moderation in 2004. Putatively independent central bankers fell into the same trap. During the 1990s, U.S.
Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan wanted to iron out the economic cycles booms and busts, and he sought to
control economic swings with interest-rate reductions at the slightest sign of a downward tick in the economic data.
Furthermore, he adapted his eco- nomic policy to guarantee bank rescues, with implicit promises of a backstopthe
now infamous Greenspan put .
realm of economics, price con- trols are designed to constrain volatility on the grounds that stable prices are a good
thing. But although these controls might work in some rare situations,
whose
cleanup
seemingly stable, are no dierent, in the long run, from those of an artificially controlled price. Such attempts to
institutionally engineer the world come in two types: those that conform to the world as it is and those that attempt
to reform the world. The nature of humans, quite reasonably, is to in- tervene in an eort to alter their world and the
crisis, Inside Job, which blames the crisis on the malfea- sance and dishonesty of bankers and the incompetence of
regulators. Although it is morally satisfying, the film naively over- looks the fact that humans have always been
dishonest and regulators have always been behind the curve. The only dierence this time around was the
unprecedented magnitude of the hidden risks and a mis- understanding of the statistical properties of the system.
What is needed is a system that can prevent the harm done to citizens by the dishonesty of business elites; the
limited competence of forecasters, economists, and statisticians; and the imperfections of regulation, not one that
aims to eliminate these flaws. Humans must try to resist the illusion of control: just as foreign policy should be
intelligence-proof (it should minimize its reliance on the competence of information-gathering organizations and the
predictions of experts in what are inherently unpredictable domains), the economy should be regulator-proof,
given that some regulations simply make the system itself more fragile. Due to the complexity of markets, intricate
regulations simply serve to generate fees for lawyers and profits for sophisticated derivatives traders who can build
complicated financial products that skirt those regulations. DONT BE A TURKEY The life of a turkey before
Thanksgiving is illustrative: the turkey is fed for 1,000 days and every day seems to confirm that the farmer cares
for ituntil the last day, when confidence is maximal. The turkey problem occurs when a naive analysis of
stability is derived from the absence of past variations. Likewise, confidence in stability was maximal at the onset of
the financial crisis in 2007. The turkey problem for humans is the result of mistaking one environment for another.
Humans can predict a solar eclipse and the trajectory of a space vessel,
but not the stock market or Egyptian political events. All man-made complex systems
have commonalities and even universalities. Sadly, deceptive calm (followed by Black Swan surprises) seems to be
one of those properties. THE ERROR OF PREDICTION As with a crumbling sand pile, it would be foolish to attribute
the collapse of a fragile bridge to the last truck that crossed it, and even more foolish to try to predict in advance
of the crisis, not its underlying cause. Likewise, Obamas blaming bad intelligence for his administrations failure to predict the crisis in Egypt is symptomatic of both
the misunderstanding of complex systems and the bad policies involved .
Obamas mistake illustrates the illusion of local causal chainsthat is,
confusing catalysts for causes and assuming that one can know which
catalyst will produce which eect.
for all observers, especially those involved. As such, blam- ing the ciais as foolish as funding it to forecast such
events. Governments are wasting billions of dollars on attempting to predict events that are produced by
interdependent systems and are therefore not statistically understandable at the individual level. As Mark
Abdollahian of Sentia Group, one of the contractors who sell predictive analytics to the U.S. government, noted
regarding Egypt, policymakers should think of this like Las Vegas. In blackjack,
focus . It is telling that the intelligence analysts made the same mistake as the risk-management systems that
failed to predict the economic crisisand oered the exact same excuses when they failed. Political and economic
tail events are unpredictable, and their probabilities are not scientifically measurable. No matter how many
explanations being oered for the current turmoil in the Middle East follow the catalysts as causes confusion. The
riots in Tunisia and Egypt were initially attributed to rising commodity prices, not to stifling and unpopular
dictatorships. But Bahrain and Libya are countries with high gdps that can aord to import grain and other
commodities. Again, the focus is wrong even if the logic is comforting.
fragility, not events, that must be studied what physicists call percolation theory, in
which the proper- ties of the terrain are studied rather than those of a single element of the terrain.
When
Dierentiating between two types of countries is useful. In the first, changes in government do not lead
to meaningful dierences in political outcomes (since political tensions are out in the open). In the second type,
changes in govern- ment lead to both drastic and deeply unpredictable changes. Consider that Italy, with its muchmaligned cabinet instability, is economi- cally and politically stable despite having had more than 60
governments since World War II (indeed, one may say Italys stability is because of these switches of government).
Similarly, in spite of consis- tently bad press, Lebanon is a relatively safe bet in terms of how far governments can
jump from equilibrium; in spite of all the noise, shifting alliances, and street protests, changes in government there
tend to be comparatively mild. For exam- ple, a shift in the ruling coalition from Christian parties to Hezbollah is not
such a consequential jump in terms of the countrys economic and political stability. Switching equilibrium, with
control of the government changing from one party to another, in such systems acts as a shock absorber. Since a
single party cannot have total and more than temporary control, the possibility of a large jump in the regime type is
constrained. In contrast, consider Iran and Iraq. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and Sad- dam Hussein both
impossible to predict ahead of time due to the nature of the system itself.
What can be said, however, is that
better than doing nothing ). This leads to the desire to impose man-made
solutions.
Greenspans actions were harmful, but it would have been hard to justify inaction in a democracy
where the incentive is to always promise a better outcome than the other guy, regard- less of the actual, delayed
cost. Variation is information. When there is no variation, there is no information. This explains the cias failure to
predict the Egyptian revolution and, a generation before, the Iranian Revolutionin both cases, the revolutionaries
themselves did not have a clear idea of their relative strength with respect to the regime they were hoping to
topple. So rather than sub- sidize and praise as a force for stability every tin-pot potentate on the planet, the U.S.
government should encourage countries to let information flow upward through the transparency that comes with
political agitation. It should not fear fluc- tuations per se, since allowing them to be in the open, as Italy and
Lebanon both show in dierent ways, creates the stability of small jumps. As Seneca wrote in De clementia,
Repeated punishment, while it crushes the hatred of a few, stirs the hatred of all . . . just as trees that have been
trimmed throw out again countless branches. The
level officials rather than the people themselves prevents any peace
treaty signed from being robust . The Romans were wise enough to know that only a free man
under Roman law could be trusted to engage in a contract; by extension, only a free people can be trusted to abide
by a treaty. Treaties that are negotiated with the consent of a broad swath of the populations on both sides of a
conflict tend to survive.
As Jean-Jacques Rousseau put it, A little bit of agitation gives motivation to the soul, and
what really makes the species prosper is not peace so much as freedom. With freedom comes some unpredictable
fluctuation. This is one of lifes packages:
Our fundamental absurdity is disclosed when the mad rush called life stops ,
when our eyes pierce thru the fog of busyness, and our spirits rebel against the cardboard explanations of the
rocks in the river, may tear our rubber rafts of illusion, sinking us into bottomless despair. However, such
deep change. We only know that once we were distorted by absurdity, shaken by insecurity, and drowning in
despair. But now we are resting harmoniously in peace and inner coherence, relying confidently on our new-found
strength, stability, and security, and floating serenely on a surprising hope and joy.
understandable on the part of the military, the gravity of their exercise and the discourse of their "strategy" are at
but it is precisely at this level that there are no strategic stakes. The
whole originality of the situation lies in the improbability of destruction.
Deterrence precludes war - the archaic violence of expanding systems.
Deterrence itself is the neutral, implosive violence of metastable systems
or systems in involution. There is no longer a subject of deterrence, nor an
adversary nor a strategy - it is a planetary structure of the annihilation of
stakes. Atomic war, like the Trojan War, will not take place. The risk of
nuclear annihilation only serves as a pretext, through the sophistication of
weapons (a sophistication that surpasses any possible objective to such
an extent that it is itself a symptom of nullity), for installing a universal
security system, a universal lockup and control system whose deterrent
efect is not at all aimed at an atomic clash (which was never in question,
except without a doubt in the very initial stages of the cold war, when one
still confused the nuclear apparatus with conventional war) but, rather, at
the much greater probability of any real event, of anything that would be
an event in the general system and upset its balance. The balance of
terror is the terror of balance. Deterrence is not a strategy, it circulates
and is exchanged between nuclear protagonists exactly as is international
capital in the orbital zone of monetary speculation whose fluctuations
suffice to control all global exchanges. Thus the money of destruction
(without any reference to real destruction, any more than floating capital
has a real referent of production) that circulates in nuclear orbit suffices
to control all the violence and potential conflicts around the world. What is
stake),
the measuring instruments. It is neither the strong form nor the degree zero of war, but the weak or phthisical [sic]
the asymptotic form which allows a brush with war but no encounter,
the transparent degree which allows war to be seen from the depths of
the darkroom. We should have been suspicious about the disappearance
of the declaration of war, the disappearance of the symbolic passage to
the act, which already presaged the disappearance of the end of
hostilities, then of the distinction between winners and losers (the winner
readily becomes the hostage of the loser: the Stockholm syndrome), then
of operations themselves. Since it never began, this war is therefore interminable. By dint of
dreaming of pure war, of an orbital war purged of all local and political peripeteias,
we have fallen into soft war, into the virtual impossibility of war which
translates into the paltry fantasia where adversaries compete in deescalation, as though the irruption or the event of war had become
obscene and insupportable, no longer sustainable, like every real event
moreover. Everything is therefore transposed into the virtual, and we are
confronted with a virtual apocalypse, a hegemony ultimately much more
dangerous than real apocalypse. The most widespread belief is in a logical progression from
degree,
virtual to actual, according to which no available weapon will not one day be used and such a concentration of force
AT: Environment DA
Environmental apocalypticism causes eco-authoritarianism and
mass violence against those deemed environmental threats also
causes political apathy which turns case
Buell 3 Frederickcultural critic on the environmental crisis and a Professor of English at Queens College and
the author of five books, From Apocalypse To Way of Life, pages 185-186
more often, however, it helps keep merely dysfunctional authority in place. It thus leads, Barry suggests, to the
it depoliticizes people
belief that only elite- and expert-led solutions are possible.56 At the same time
, inducing them to accept
their impotence as individuals; this is something that has made many people today feel, ironically and/or passively, that since it makes no difference at
all what any individual does on his or her own, one might as well go along with it. Yet another pitfall for the full and sustained elaboration of
environmental crisis is, though least discussed, perhaps the most deeply ironic. A problem with deep cultural and psychological as well as social effects,
about nature (ones that range from organic farming techniques to the different departments of ecological science), and traditions of nature-based
crisis discourse as a whole has significantly changed since the 1970s. They remain inducements to look away from serious reflection on environmental
crisis only if one does not explore how environmental crisis has turned of late from apocalypse to dwelling place. The apocalyptic mode had a number of
prominent features: it was preoccupied with running out and running into walls; with scarcity and with the imminent rupture of limits; with actions that
promised and temporally predicted imminent total meltdown; and with (often, though not always) the need for immediate
total
solution . Thus doomsterism was its reigning mode; eco-authoritarianism was a grave
temptation; and as crisis was elaborated to show more and more severe deformations of nature,
temptation increased to refute it, or give up, or even cut of ties to clearly
terminal nature.
doctrine of linear progress , on which Gore bases his belief in the success of a
scientific/technological solution to global warming and environmental problems in general. "Professional
ecologists such as Frank Egler have countered that
[6]'". I
believe that a
reparation when it comes to environmental degradation, no longer can be promoted as a viable behavioral
and does not clearly advocate a science and technology that serves nature as first priority.
This can
Cultural transformation
for sustainability requires a new epistemological basis that recognizes
productions, concerning which science and technology play a vital role.
This ecological rootedness to a place, to its place-character or genius loci as the key to ecological
bounded praxes, must be accomplished without the fascist tendencies of
race/nation imperialisms of the past , which are avoidable through the
political tactics of decentralization and networking and the value of
diversity within local-bounds. Gore champions the democratic process but really offers no
proposals that would restructure political bodies in a way that would support the implementation of
sustainability. A society that culturally and politically does not attune its practices to place-bound ecologies and
to call into
question the geography of automobility requires thinking about how the
task to de-structure automobility might show us how to re-structure life
toward the goal of sustainability. There is still another point germane to the issue of
automobility which shows the non-viability of Gore's shallow ecology. Peak oil theorists are
issuing very serious warnings concerning non-renewable energy consumption [9].
Hypothetically, if we could immediately solve the global warming (climate
change) problem in Gore's shallow, technological sense, then we would
nevertheless still be in the most utterly grave circumstances concerning
energy. Even if it were possible to solve the problem of global warming
with the use of alternative energy sources, there still would remain an
energy crisis both in terms of shortages and implementations that carry
many unwanted so-called side-efects. A policy of sustainability would
entail tackling the energy crisis directly, not because of its link to the
their interrelations does not merit the accolade of supporting sustainability. As I will show,
forms of life, but these are merely a function of , or the requirement for,
theimplementation of technologies that will save us and the planet . In this
way his thinking remains within the modern scientistic attitude that in a
deep or foundational sense has led to the predicament in which we find
ourselves [10]. The eforts to dominate nature, dominations implemented
through modern technological praxes, have led to drastic changes to
the planet as a whole in an extremely short time. We now see that those changes, based on
considering our needs only (the mentality of natural resources to be ordered about on our terms),
are
questions about war that are of interest to feministsincluding how large-scale, state-sponsored violence afects women and members
of other oppressed groups; how military violence shapes gendered, raced,
and nationalistic political realities and moral imaginations; what such violence consists of and
why it persists; how it is related to other oppressive and violent institutions
and hegemonies- cannot be adequately pursued by focusing on events.
These issues are not merely a matter of good or bad intentions and identifiable
decisions. In "Gender and 'Postmodern' War," Robin Schott introduces some of the ways in which war is
currently best seen not as an event but as a presence (Schott 1995). Schott argues
and agents of states. But many of the
that postmodern understandings of persons, states, and politics, as well as the high-tech nature of much
contemporary warfare and the preponderance of civil and nationalist wars, render an event- based conception of
war inadequate, especially insofar as gender is taken into account. In this essay, I will expand upon her argument
by showing that accounts of war that only focus on events are impoverished in a number of ways, and therefore
feminist consideration of the political, ethical, and onto- logical dimensions of war and the possibilities for
resistance demand a much more complicated approach. I take Schott's characterization of war as presence as a
point of departure, though I am not committed to the idea that the constancy of militarism, the fact of its
omnipresence in human experience, and the paucity of an event-based account of war are exclusive to
institutions help construct gendered and national identity, and because they justify the destruction of natural
motherhood, media violence, and current ideological gravitations to military solutions for social problems. Ethical
approaches that do not attend to the ways in which warfare and military practices are woven into the very fabric of
life in twenty-first century technological states lead to crisis-based politics and analyses. For any feminism that
aims to resist oppression and create alternative social and political options,
politics are problematic because they distract attention from the need for
sustained resistance to the enmeshed, omnipresent systems of
domination and oppression that so often function as givens in most people's
lives. Neglecting the omnipresence of militarism allows the false belief
that the absence of declared armed conflicts is peace, the polar opposite of war. It is
particularly easy for those whose lives are shaped by the safety of privilege, and who do not regularly encounter
the realities of militarism, to maintain this false belief. The belief that militarism is an ethical, political concern only
regarding armed conflict, creates forms of resistance to militarism that are merely exercises in crisis control.
Antiwar resistance is then mobilized when the "real" violence finally occurs,
or when the stability of privilege is directly threatened, and at that point it is difficult not to respond in ways that
ways in which war is part of a presence allows consideration of the relationships among the events of war and the
following: how militarism is a foundational trope in the social and political imagination; how the pervasive presence
and symbolism of soldiers/warriors/patriots shape meanings of gender; the ways in which threats of statesponsored violence are a sometimes invisible/sometimes bold agent of racism, nationalism, and corporate
interests; the fact that vast numbers of communities, cities, and nations are currently in the midst of excruciatingly
violent circumstances. It also provides a lens for considering the relationships among the various kinds of violence
that get labeled "war." Given current American obsessions with nationalism, guns, and militias, and growing hunger
for the death penalty, prisons, and a more powerful police state, one cannot underestimate the need for
philosophical and political attention to connections among phenomena like the "war on drugs," the "war on crime,"
and other state-funded militaristic campaigns. I propose that the constancy of militarism and its effects on social
reality be reintroduced as a crucial locus of contemporary feminist attentions, and that feminists emphasize how
wars are eruptions and manifestations of omnipresent militarism that is a product and tool of multiply oppressive,
in contemporary life we need not neglect the importance of addressing the specific qualities of direct, large-scale,
of declaring and fighting wars miss these connections, and also miss the ways in which even
declared military conflicts are often experienced as omnipresent horrors. These approaches also leave
unquestioned tendencies to suspend or distort moral judgment in the face of
what appears to be the inevitability of war and militarism. Just-war theory is a
prominent example of a philosophical approach that rests on the assumption that
wars are isolated from everyday life and ethics. Such theory, as developed by St. Augustine,
Thomas Aquinas, and Hugo Grotius, and as articulated in contemporary dialogues by many philosophers, including
Michael Walzer (1977), Thomas Nagel (1974), and Sheldon Cohen (1989), take the primary question concerning the
and about the awful choices that are now being thrust upon us. These remarks have been stimulated
recent events , which have ancient roots , but have taken on a new shape since the collapse
of the Soviet Union, the rise of the second Bush administration, and the inception of the so-called War on Terror.
any other state such as Iraq is involved. It is quite probable that this administration will go to war
in Iraq, inasmuch as certain very powerful people crave it. But it is not necessarily the case, given the fact that the
war against Iraq is such a lunatic proposal that many other people in high places are against it and too many people
And while war against Iraq is a very serious matter that needs
to be checked by massive popular resistance, equally serious are the structures now in
place in the United States dictating that whether or not the war in Iraq
takes place, there will be another war to replace it , and others after that, unless
are marching against it.
some very basic changes take place. America Has Become a War-Making
Machine The United States has always been a bellicose and expansive
country, built on violent conquest and expropriation of native peoples. Since the forming of the
American republic, military interventions have occurred at the rate of about once a year. Consider the case of
Nicaragua, a country utterly incapable of being any kind of a threat to its giant northern neighbor. Yet prior to the
Sandinista revolution in 1979 (which was eventually crushed by us proxy forces a decade later), our country had
invaded Nicaragua no fewer than 14 times in the pursuit of its imperial interests. A considerable number of
contemporary states, such as Britain, South Africa, Russia, and Israel, have been formed in just such a way. But one
of the special conditions of the formation of America, despite its aggressivity, was an inhibition against a military
without very much in the way of fixed military institutions. However, after WWII a basic change set in. War-weary
America longed for demobilization, yet after a brief beginning in this direction, the process was halted and the
propounded by the British economist John Maynard Keynes, to the effect that capitalist societies could ameliorate
chronic [economic] crises by infusions of government spending. The Great War had certified this wisdom, and
These
factors crystallized into the Cold War, the nuclear arms race, and , domestically,
into those structures that gave institutional stability and permanence to the
system: the military-industrial complex (mic). Previously the us had used militarism to secure
economic advantage. Now, two developments greatly transformed our militarism: the exigencies of global
hegemony and the fact that militarism became a direct source of economic advantage, through the triangular
relations of the mic with the great armament industries comprising one leg, the military establishment another, and
the state apparatus the third, profits, power, and personnel could flow through the system and from the system.
Clearly, this arrangement had the potential to greatly undermine American democracy. It was a national security
state within the state but also extended beyond it into the economy and society at large, virtually insulated from
popular input, and had the power to direct events and generate threats. Another conservative war hero-become-
It was a
terrible war whose immense sufering took place largely outside the view
bipolar imperial camps, directed by gigantic superpowers that lived off each others hostility.
diminish Americas imperial appetite: it removed inhibitions on its internally driven expansiveness. As a result,
enhanced war-making has replaced the peace dividend. The object of this machine
has passed from dealing with Soviet Communism to a more complex and dispersed set of oil wars (Iraq I and now
II), police actions against international miscreants (Kosovo), and now the ubiquitous War Against Terror, aimed
variously at Islamic fundamentalists, Islam as a whole, or anybody irritated enough with the ruling order to take up
those of Romes allies. And if Rome had no allies existed, the allies would be invented. The fight was always
invested with the order of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbors.
The logic of
constant threat meshes with that of ruthless expansion , which we see everywhere
in this epoch of unipolar world dominion. Currently, the military budget of the us is 334 billion dollars. The budget
for the next fiscal year is 379 billion dollars- an increase of more than 10 percent. By 2007, the projected military
budget of the us is to be an astounding 451 billion dollars: almost half a trillion dollars, without the presence of
anything resembling a conventional war.
sum of all other military budgets. In fact, it is greater than the entire
federal budget of Russia, once America's immortal adversary, and comprises more than
half - 52 percent of all discretionary spending by the us government. (By comparison,
education accounts for 8 percent of the federal budget.) A considerable portion of this is given over to "military
Keynesianism," according to the well-established paths of the mic. Thus, although in the first years after the fall of
the ussr certain firms like General Dynamics, which had played a large role in the nuclear arms race, suffered
setbacks, that problem has been largely reversed for the entire class of firms fattening at the trough of militarism. It
is fair to say, though, that the largesse is distributed over a wider scale, in accordance with the changing pattern of
armaments. us Armies Taking Root Everywhere From having scarcely any standing army in 1940, American armies
now stand everywhere. One feature of us military policy since WWII is to make war and then stay where war was
made, rooting itself in foreign territory.
countries , with 11 new ones formed since the beginning of the War Against Terror. The us now has bases in
Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kurdistan,
military tension.
On these bases, the us military has erected some 800,000 buildings. Imagine that:
And America
still maintains large forces in Germany, Japan, and Korea, with tens of
thousands of troops permanently on duty (and making mischief, as two us servicemen
800,000 buildings in foreign countries that are now occupied by us military establishments.
recently ran over and killed two Korean girls, provoking massive demonstrations). After the first Gulf War the us
military became installed in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, in which latter place it currently occupies one quarter of the
country - 750 square miles devoted to military activity. This huge investment is no doubt determined by proximity
to Iraq. Again, after going to war in Kosovo, the us left behind an enormous base in a place called Bondsteel.
president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe, the us authorized the use of 1.7 billion dollars in military aid hitherto limited to
anti-drug operations for direct attacks on deeply entrenched farc guerrillas. This redirection of aid came after
Colombian officials and their American supporters in the Congress and Bush administration argued that the change
was needed as part of the global campaign against terrorism. Within this overall picture, American armed forces are
undergoing a qualitative shift of enormous proportion. In words read by President Bush: Our forces in the next
century must be agile, lethal, readily deployable, and must require a minimum of logistical support. We must be
able to project our power over long distances in days or weeks rather than months. On land our heavy forces must
be lighter, our light forces must be more lethal. All must be easier to deploy. Crossing Weapons Boundaries - Both
Nuclear and Conventional As a result, many boundaries and limits of the bipolar era have been breached. For
example, the distinction between nuclear and conventional weapons had always constituted a radical barrier. The
standoff between the us and the ussr was epitomized by mind-numbing hydrogen bomb-missiles facing each other
in a scenario called Mutual Assured Destruction.In short, a strategic condition of deterrence prevailed, which
deterrence no longer
inhibits us nuclear weaponry, and the weapons themselves have
made nuclear weapons seem unthinkable. With the demise of the ussr,
being U-238 created in the extraction of U-235 from naturally occurring uranium ore). Over 500,000 tons of deadly
du have accumulated and 4-5,000 more tons are being produced every year. Like all products of the nuclear power
industry, du poses immense challenges of disposal. It has this peculiar property of being almost twice as dense as
lead and it is radioactive with a half-life of 4.5 billion years. Wherever depleted uranium is used, it has another
peculiar property of exploding, vaporizing at 56 degrees centigrade, which is just like a little more than half the way
weapons, and between the peaceful and militaristic uses of atomic technology, we need to add those between
The administration is
poised to realize the crackpot and deadly schemes of the Reagan administration to militarize space
and to draw the rest of the world into the scheme , as client and victim. In November
earth and its lower atmosphere on the one hand, and space on the other.
2002, Bush proposed that nato allies build missile defense systems, with components purchased, needless to add,
from Boeing, Raytheon, etc, even as Congress was approving a fiscal 2003 defense budget containing $7.8 billion
authorization for missile defense research and procurement, as part of the $238 billion set aside for Star Wars over
the next 20 years. The administration now is poised to realize the crackpot and deadly schemes of the Reagan
administration to militarize space and to draw the rest of the world into the scheme, as client and victim.
A new
missile defense system bureaucracy has risen. It is currently developing such wild items
as something called brilliant pebbles which involves the release of endless numbers of mini satellites into outer
space. All of this was to protect the world against the threat of rogue states such as North Korea. As the Seattle
Times reported, the us expects the final declaration to, express the need to examine options to protect allied
forces, territories, and population centers against the full range of missile threats. As an official put it, "This will
establish the framework within which nato allies could work cooperatively toward fielding the required capabilities.
With the us withdrawal this year from the anti-ballistic treaty with Russia, it is no longer a question of whether
missile defenses will be deployed. The relevant questions are now what, how, and when. The train is about to pull
out of the station; we invite our friends, allies, and the Russian Federation to climb on board." The destination of this
train is defensive only in the Orwellian sense, as the missiles will be used to defend us troops in the field. In other
words, they will be used to defend armies engaged in offensive activities. What is being defended by the Strategic
Defense Initiative (sdi), therefore, is the initiative to make war everywhere. Space has now become the ultimate
battlefield. And not just with use of these missiles. The High Frequency Active Aural Research Program (haarp) is
The chief
feature is a network of powerful antennas capable of creating controlled local modifications of the ionosphere and
hence producing weather disturbances and so forth. All of these technical interventions are accompanied by many
kinds of institutional and political changes. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, nasa, for instance,
is now a partner in the development of this strategic defense initiative. The very way in which the United Nations
was drawn into the resolution in the war against Iraq is a breach and a violation of the original un Charter, which is
to never make war, never to threaten to make war on any member state. The un was a peacemaking institution, but
now the Super power has forced it into its orbit. The scrapping of the abm and other elements of the treaty
structure (non- proliferation, test-ban) that had organized the world of the Cold War is one part of a process of
whose parallel we have to go back to the Alien and Sedition acts of the 1790s, or Trumans loyalty oaths of 1947.
There
is no doubt, in this regard, that the machine runs on natural resources (which have to be secured by economic,
political, and military action), and that it is deeply embedded in the ruling corporate order. There is no contradiction
here, but a set of meshing parts, driven by an insensate demand for fossil fuel energy. As a man from Amarillo,
Texas put it when interviewed by npr as to the correctness of Bushs plan to go to war in Iraq: I agree with the
government is front-loaded with oil magnates is another part of the machine. It is of interest, therefore, that Unocal,
for example, celebrated Condoleezza Rices ascendancy to the post of National Security Advisor by naming an oil
tanker after her. Or that Dick Cheney, originally a poor boy, became a rich man after the first Gulf War, when he
switched from being Secretary of Defense, in charge of destroying the Kuwait oil fields, to ceo of a then-smallish
company, Halliburton, in charge of rebuilding the same oil fields. Or that G.W. Bush himself, aside from his failed
venture with Harken Oil, is scion of a family and a dynasty that controls the Carlyle Group, founded in 1987 by a
former Carter administration official. Carlyle is now worth over $13 billion and its high officials include President
Bush I, his Secretary of State (and fixer of the coup that put Bush II in power) James Baker, Reagans Secretary of
Defense Frank Carlucci, former British Prime Minister John Major, and former Phillipine President Fidel Ramos,
among others. The Carlyle Group has its fingers everywhere, including defense, where it controls firms making
vertical missile launch systems currently in use on us Navy ships in the Arabian sea, as well as a range of other
weapons delivery systems and combat vehicles. And as a final touch which the worlds people would be much
better off for knowing, there are very definite connections between Carlyle and the family of Osama bin Laden - a
Saudi power whose fortunes have been fused with those of the United States since the end of World War II. Thus the
military-industrial complex lives, breathes, and takes on new dimensions. There is a deep structural reason for the
present explosion of us militarism, most clearly traceable in the activities of Vice President Cheney, made clear in
the energy report that he introduced with the generous assistance of Enron executives in May 2001. According to
the report, American reliance on imported oil will rise by from about 52 percent of total consumption in 2001 to an
estimated 66 percent in 2020. The reason for this is that world production, in general, and domestic production in
particular are going to remain flat (and, although the report does not discuss this, begin dropping within the next 20
years). Meanwhile consumptionwhich is a direct function of the relentless drive of capitalism to expand commodity
productionis to grow by some two- thirds. Because the usage of oil must rise in the worldview of a Cheney, the us
will actually have to import 60 percent more oil in 2020 to keep itself going than it does today. This means that
imports will have to rise from their current rate of about 10.4 million barrels per day to about 16.7 million barrels
per day. In the words of the report: The only way to do this is persuade foreign suppliers to increase their
production to sell more of their output to the us. The meaning of these words depends of course on the
interpretation of persuade, which in the us lexicon is to be read, I should think, as requiring a sufficient military
machine to coerce foreign suppliers. At that point they might not even have to sell their output to the us, as it
would already be possessed by the superpower. Here we locate the root material fact underlying recent us
expansionism. This may seem an extravagant conclusion. However an explicit connection to militarismand
Iraqhad been supplied the month before, in April 2001, in another report prepared by James Baker and submitted
to the Bush cabinet. This document, called Strategic Energy Policy Challenges for the 21st Century, concludes
with refreshing candor that the us remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma, Iraq remains a destabilizing influence
to the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East, Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a
willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export program to manipulate oil markets,
therefore the us should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq, including military, energy, economic, and
political diplomatic assessments. Note the absence of reference to weapons of mass destruction, or aid to
the
fundamental structural dilemma driving the military machine pertains to
terrorism, convenient rationalizations that can be filled in later. Clearly, however things turn out with Iraq,
there is no
recourse except the ever-widening resort to force. But this, the military monster
itself, ever seeking threats to feed upon, becomes a fresh source of
danger, whether of nuclear war, terror, or ecological breakdown. The
situation is plainly unsustainable, a series of disasters waiting to happen.
unending resistance and the latter crashes against the finitude of the material world,
It can only be checked and brought to rationality by a global uprising of people who
demand an end to the regime of endless war. This is the only possible
path by which we can pull ourselves away from the abyss into which the
military machine is about to plunge, dragging us all down with it.
Terror DA
2AC Generic
Discourse of terrorism is constructed and creates a self fullfiling
prophecy that turns the DA
Jackson 07 (Richard, Centre for International Politics University of Manchester Religion, Politics and
Terrorism: A Critical Analysis of Narratives of Islamic Terrorism,
http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/disciplines/politics/researchgroups/cip/publications/documents/Jackson_
000.pdf, 2007)
University, University of Connecticut Department of Psychology Intergroup Relations Lab. Milan Obaidi, Ph.D.
Student at the Department of Social & Political Science, European University Institute, Florence. Support for
asymmetric violence among Arab populations: The clash of cultures, social identity, or counterdominance?
http://gpi.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/04/27/1368430215577224.full.pdf+html, 2/3/15, SMahajan)
support for terrorist violence against the United States was associated
with disapproval of American foreign policy and domestic political
institutions that supported this policy
not to their
Nesser, 2006; but see Neuberg et al., 2014). Sidanius et al. (2004) found that Lebanese university students
interpreted the 9/11 attacks as having been motivated by antidominance rather than clash of civilizations concerns.
In a study across several Arab nations, Mostafa and Al-Hamdi (2007) found
evidence strongly supportive of the antidominance thesis rather than the
clash of civilizations thesis. Moreover, in a comprehensive empirical study of
suicide terrorism, Pape
suicide attacks is
(2006)
antidominance perspective .
support for
attacks but rather creates them, then publicly praises itself for stopping
its own plots. First, they target a Muslim: not due to any evidence of
intent or capability to engage in terrorism, but rather for the radical
political views he expresses . In most cases, the Muslim targeted by the
FBI is a very young (late teens, early 20s), adrift, unemployed loner who has shown no signs of mastering
basic life functions, let alon
e carrying out a serious terror attack, and has no known
involvement with actual terrorist groups. They then find another Muslim
who is highly motivated to help disrupt a terror plot : either because theyre
being paid substantial sums of money by the FBI or because (as appears to be the
case here) they are charged with some unrelated crime and are desperate to
please the FBI in exchange for leniency (or both). The FBI then gives the
informant a detailed attack plan, and sometimes even the money and other instruments to carry
it out, and the informant then shares all of that with the target . Typically, the
informant also induces, lures, cajoles, and persuades the target to agree to carry out the FBI-designed plot. In
some instances where the target refuses to go along, they have their
informant ofer huge cash inducements to the impoverished target. Once they
finally get the target to agree, the FBI swoops in at the last minute, arrests
the target, issues a press release praising themselves for disrupting a
dangerous attack (which it conceived of, funded, and recruited the operatives for), and the DOJ and
federal judges send their target to prison for years or even decades (where they are
kept in special GITMO-like units). Subservient U.S. courts uphold the charges by applying such a broad and
permissive interpretation of entrapment that it could almost never be successfully invoked. Once again,
we
should all pause for a moment to thank the brave men and women of the
FBI for saving us from their own terror plots . One can, if one really wishes, debate
whether the FBI should be engaging in such behavior. For reasons I and many others have repeatedly argued,
bad
political views
they have expressed . They end up sending young people to prison for decades for crimes which even
their sentencing judges acknowledge they never would have seriously considered, let alone committed, in the
absence of FBI trickery. Its hard to imagine anyone thinking this is a justifiable tactic, but Im certain there are
Were
constantly bombarded with dire warnings about the grave threat of homegrown terrorists, lone wolf extremists and ISIS . So intensified are these official
people who believe that. Lets leave that question to the side for the moment in favor of a different issue.
warnings that The New York Times earlier this month cited anonymous U.S. intelligence officials to warn of the
growing ISIS threat and announce the prospect of a new global war on terror. But
how serious of a
threat can all of this be, at least domestically, if the FBI continually has to
resort to manufacturing its own plots by trolling the Internet in search of
young
drifters
not, by
hyped and insubstantial this threat actually is ? Shouldnt there be actual plots, ones
that are created and fueled without the help of the FBI, that the agency should devote its massive resources to
allies to employ these same entrapment tactics in order to create their own terrorists, who can then be paraded
it is not difficult to
tactics involved are legally authorized , particularly after Congress and successive
administrations relaxed restrictions on law enforcement and intelligence agencies for counterterrorism, they
suggest that
when
asked in their first debate to identify the single greatest threat to the
national security of the United States, both presidential candidates agreed
it was the atomic bomb: Senator Kerry put it in the context of "nuclear proliferation," while President
Bush stated the greatest danger to the United States was nuclear
weapons "in the hands of a terrorist enemy."1 In the new century, nuclear
insecurity once again formally linked the foreign and the domestic under
the sign of apocalyptic nuclear risk, creating a political space in which
anything seemed possible. National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, for example, made a case
speculations from the DHS and FBI about possibly imminent catastrophic attacks. By the fall of 2004,
for war with Iraq simply by stating that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."2 In doing so, she
these
psychosocial strategies reveal the American cultural tradition of
approaching the bomb either as a banal object, not worthy of attention, or as a hysterical
the decidedly non-nuclear September 11 attacks, and is part of the same structural logic:
inevitability of the spread of nuclear terrorism and of a successful terrorist attack have been taken for granted.48 Coherent
policies to reduce the risk of a nonstate actor using nuclear weapons clearly need to be developed. In particular, the rise of the
Abdul Qadeer Khan nuclear technology network should give pause.49 But again, the news is not as grim as nuclear alarmists
would suggest. Much has already been done to secure the supply of nuclear materials, and relatively simple steps can produce
further improvements. Moreover,
type of alarmism, writes Levi, impedes the development of thoughtful strategies that could deter, prevent, or
mitigate a terrorist attack: Worst-case estimates have their place, but the possible
failure-averse, conservative, resource-limited ve-foot-tall nuclear
terrorist, who is subject not only to the laws of physics but also to
Murphys law of nuclear terrorism, needs to become just as central to our
evaluations of strategies.54 A recent study contends that al-Qaidas
interest in acquiring and using nuclear weapons may be overstated . Anne
Stenersen, a terrorism expert, claims that looking at statements and
activities at various levels within the al-Qaida network, it becomes clear
that the networks interest in using unconventional means is in fact much
lower than commonly thought.55 She further states that CBRN [chemical, biological, radiological, and
nuclear] weapons do not play a central part in al-Qaidas strategy.56 In the
1990s, members of al-Qaida debated whether to obtain a nuclear device.
Those in favor sought the weapons primarily to deter a U.S. attack on alQaidas bases in Afghanistan. This assessment reveals an organization at
odds with that laid out by nuclear alarmists of terrorists obsessed with
using nuclear weapons against the United States regardless of the
consequences. Stenersen asserts, Although there have been various
reports stating that al-Qaida attempted to buy nuclear material in the
nineties, and possibly recruited skilled scientists, it appears that al-Qaida
central have not dedicated a lot of time or efort to developing a high-end
CBRN capability.... Al-Qaida central never had a coherent strategy to
obtain CBRN: instead, its members were divided on the issue, and there
was an awareness that militarily efective weapons were extremely
difficult to obtain .57 Most terrorist groups assess nuclear terrorism through the lens of their political goals and
may judge that it does not advance their interests.58 As Frost has written, The risk of nuclear
terrorism, especially true nuclear terrorism employing bombs powered by
nuclear fission, is overstated , and that popular wisdom on the topic is
significantly fiawed .59
development of global computer networks and communications, cyber-threats would be difficult to imagine except
as science fiction. Notions of cyber-threats have originated in both the private and public sphere, among military as
well as civilian actors. In the business community and within the police, cyber-crime has become a particularly
salient threat image. Within the military-bureaucratic establishment, perceived threats have been framed as
information warfare, information operations, cyber terrorism, and cyber-war. Among computer scientists,
technicians, and network operators, threat images are usually much narrower, with an emphasis on computer
network attacks, exploits, and disruptions (implying an adversary) and on structural vulnerabilities such as software
conflicts and other bugs which can lead to systems crashes (for example, the Year 2000 or 'Y2K" computer bug).
Images of cyber-threats typically involve a very broad range of adversaries and targets, including both state and
non-state actors (Campen et al., 1996; Erbschloe, 2001; Furnell, 2002; Henry and Peartree, 1998; Herd, 2000;
Khalilzad et al., 1999; O'Day, 2004; Polikanov, 2001; Schwartau, 1996; Yourdon, 2002). States are still typically seen
as the single most important type of potential enemy, able to neutralize effectively the critical infrastructures of
another country (for example, by shutting down telecommunications), but non-state actors are gaining attention as
well. A study by the National Research Council argues that "Tomorrow's terrorist may be able to do more with a
keyboard than with a bomb" (Bendrath, 2001; Denning, 2001a: 282).5 Former US Homeland Security Director Tom
Ridge (2002) observed that "Terrorists can sit at one computer connected to one network and can create world
havoc - [they] don't necessarily need bombs or explosives to cripple a sector of the economy, or shutdown a power
becoming more reliable with respect to information technology, they are also becoming more vulnerable to all sorts
Smith, 1998).6 According to the "electronic Pearl Harbor" scenario, phone systems could collapse, subway cars
suddenly stop, and the money of thousands of people become inaccessible as banks and automatic teller machines
adopted in the US media and in certain circles of policy makers (Bendrath, 2003). Former Deputy Defense Minister
John Hamre argued that "We're facing the possibility of an electronic Pearl Harbor ...
There is going to be
an electronic attack on this country some time in the future " (CNN, 1997). Some
commentators have argued that the "electronic Pearl Harbor" scenario is highly unlikely, and is more about fear-
cyber-terrorism, defined as
is extremely unlikely.7 Few, if any,
cyber-attacks could be characterized as acts of terrorism. Even the US Naval War
College, in cooperation with the Gartner Group, concluded that an "electronic Pearl Harbor,"
although theoretically possible, was highly unlikely: "There are far simpler and less costly ways to attack
mongering than sober analysis. For example, Denning (2001b) argues that
digital attacks causing physical destruction and human deaths,
critical infrastructure, from hoax phone calls to truck bombs and hijacked airliners" (The Economist, 2002: 19).
Information operations are seen not merely as a means of improving or complementing physical attack, but as a
means of replacing physical destruction with electronic (Denning, 1999; Harshberger and Ochmanek, 1999: 12;
O'Day, 2004). Denial-of-service attacks and the defacing of web pages certainly can have material consequences.
For firms operating with online transactions, the result can be huge financial losses.8 Nevertheless, the major
impact is symbolic and the main effect is humiliation. To a large degree, cyber-attacks are attacks with and against
symbols and images. Net-defacing, in particular, is a means for attacking symbols, something which is being done
on an everyday basis by "hacktivists" on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the China-Taiwan conflict, and
the Protestant-Catholic conflict in Northern Ireland.9 Most observers focus on the transnational and network-based
character of cyber-threats (Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 1999, 2001; Deibert and Stein, 2003; Henry and Peartree, 1998;
particular, network actors capable of using such means can resort to "asymmetric warfare" (Applegate, 2001;
Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 2001; De Borchgrave et al., 2000; Erbschloe, 2001; Herd, 2000; O'Day, 2004; Sofear and
they
can inflict serious damage by attacking and exploiting the vulnerabilities of
information systems by resorting to cyber-attacks (Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 1999, 2001; Cordesman, 2002).
Goodman, 2001). Although they might be incapable of engaging states in a conventional military conflict,
The widely acknowledged framing of cyber-threats implies that boundaries are dissolved between the international
and the domestic, between civil and military spheres, between the private and public, and between peace and war.
(Everard, 2000; Fountain, 2001; Giacomello, 2005; Giacomello and Mendez, 2001; Rosecrance, 1999). Cyber-threats
challenge primarily internal sovereignty (effec tive control of the national territory and of the people living within it),
but not necessarily external sovereignty (the formal recognition of independence by other states) (compare
Philpott, 2001). At stake are not only the tangible and intangible values of information, but also the ability of
governments to control the course of events. In conclusion, while there is a growing body of specialized literature
dealing with the manifold aspects of digital-age security,
literature. Furthermore, this literature is policy oriented and hardly ever involves the application or
development of theory.
The dread that the prospect of bioterrorism elicits thus not only compounds the
distinction between actual and imagined threat, but also challenges the
conventional spatio-temporal relationship between threat and security,
in that it reinforces a sense of imminence and pervasiveness of possible
attack. Its imperceptible nature means that insecurity can exist
independent of an actual attack occurring, the mere threat of infection and
contagion carrying the capacity to evoke a heightened sense of fear long
before and well after an attack has been identified as ever having taken place. In the absence of
fact about a threat that deliberately evades detection, the demand on
governments to act proactively has become all the more salient, and
providing for security has taken a precautionary turn. Strategies aimed at
mitigating the threat of bioterrorism have thus involved attempts at
delineating security through spatio-temporal techniques that involve
intervening in the present in order to avoid the potential for serious and
irreversible damage in the future. They constitute an attempt at
rearticulating the boundary between secure and insecure space
through the active act of anticipation. Inherent in such an anticipatory logic,
however, is an in-built vulnerability, in that this logic is necessarily informed by
the subjective insecurities that the threat of bioterrorism elicits. It
simultaneously functions within and constitutes a product of the dread
that the threat of bioterrorism evokes, and accordingly does not so much serve
to reduce the threat of bioterrorism as it serves to mitigate the efects of what
is considered an inevitable occurrence. It there- by runs the risk of
perpetuating insecurity to the extent that it facilitates threat through its
enactment. Engaging with the threat of bioterrorism, then, neces- sarily requires
recognizing how the same logic that informs the dread that bioterrorism
elicits also serves to inform the security practices pursued to confront it .
Just as the molecular body is no longer conceptualized as a unified whole, so too is Europe less a self-contained
argues that it is by conceptualizing bioterrorism through the notion of dread risk that this self-perpetuation of
vulnerability and threat can be exposed and the necessary inroads provided by which to engage more critically with
the threat of bioterrorism, its produc- tion and perpetuation, as well as with the constitution of security itself.
The governmental
discourse on terrorism has been adopted and reframed by political
leaders in diferent areas of the world with several efects. The more or less
explicit association of terrorism with everything in some way related to
Islam(ism) and Muslim occurring in the discourse has had efects for instance in the
way members of Islamist movements and parties have been looked at and
identified as risk groups to be kept under control . Furthermore, the discourse
has been adopted by several states, such as Morocco, the U.S., and Spain, to further
domestic agendas, in terms of security enhancement and territorial expansion ,
and to control dangerous groups and individuals . Around the world, states have
been used the mentioned discourse to target internal opponents and disrupt
individuals and groups by linking them to the terrorism scare. Indicative examples are
discussed in this article to be further addressed in future research. In the U.S. and elsewhere, the
discourse on terrorism has allowed an increase in the power of the commander-in-chief and a
dramatic reduction in possibilities of dissent . Mayer reports that under the Bush
administration, only a few in the Congress wanted to run the political risk of
opposing the administration on an issue that could make them appear to be pro-terrorism (2008, 315). Far
stronger measures have then been invoked and tolerated in the name of
states. They empower themselves by defining who is their terrorist enemy, their bin Laden.
Targets of this discourse have been those that in some way were
perceived as a potential or real threat to their governments: such as Islamists, Muslims,
political opponents and immigrants. Effects toward Muslims In the United States, Muslims, already
vulnerable to racism and political discrimination prior to the September 11, 2001 events,
became even greater targets of harassment: in the following three days, more than 200
violent attacks against Muslim Americans were recorded (Gerges 2003, 80). Communities ended up
being divided between moderates and radicals, friends and enemies, a problematic division because
(Anderson 2003, 35).
in practice, the dividing line between extremists and moderates is not only context specific but also highly
porous (Jackson 2007, 413). According to public opinion polls, a large percentage of Americans supported the idea
Reports of the
harassment of Muslims (and those resembling them) and attacks on mosques began
almost immediately. In some cases, Sikhs were killed. They had been mistaken, because of their beards and
that Islam encouraged violence more than other religions (Woods 2007, 7).
turbans, for Muslims (see also Stoddard and Cornwell 2002). Immediately after the attacks, there were personal
verbal and physical attacks against Muslims, Muslim Americans and those who looked Arab or Muslim Distrust
and suspicion were also cast on recent arrivals who entered the United States, legally or illegally, from Mexico,
Bosnia, Somalia, Russia and eastern European countries (Brunn 2003, 3). Anti-Muslim bias clearly emerged when
noted legal personalities advocated the official use of torture in dealing with Muslims (Ahmed 2003, 40).
Furthermore, Arabs have continued to be associated with Muslims. Brunn (2003, 4) reports that the number of
violent incidents against Arab Americans (or those perceived as such) was 172 in the year before 11 September and
over 600 the following year, and Collins and Glover (2002, 5) point out that by early November, the U.S.
Government had arrested over a thousand people, virtually all of whom were either Arab or Muslim, in most cases
Statistics
Statistics go af radical Muslim violence kills less people than nonmuslim violence.
Shane 6/24 (Scott Shane, American journalist for the new York times, Homegrown Extremists Tied to
Deadlier Toll Than Jihadists in U.S. Since 9/11, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/us/tally-of-attacks-in-uschallenges-perceptions-of-top-terror-threat.html?_r=0, 6/24/15, SMahajan)