Terror Talk

William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney

Terror Talk
Terror Talk....................................................................................................................................................................................................1
Very Short 1NC............................................................................................................................................................................................2
1NC..............................................................................................................................................................................................................3
1NC..............................................................................................................................................................................................................5
1NC..............................................................................................................................................................................................................7
1NC..............................................................................................................................................................................................................9
1NC............................................................................................................................................................................................................10
Sweet 2NC Card.........................................................................................................................................................................................11
Link / Impact – Homogenization...............................................................................................................................................................12
Link – Us/Them.........................................................................................................................................................................................13
Link – Dehumanization..............................................................................................................................................................................14
Framework / Impact ..................................................................................................................................................................................15
Framework / Impact...................................................................................................................................................................................17
Impact / AT: Ethics.....................................................................................................................................................................................18
Turns Case..................................................................................................................................................................................................19
Turns Case..................................................................................................................................................................................................20
Turns Case..................................................................................................................................................................................................22
Impact – All Violence................................................................................................................................................................................23
Impact – Biopolitics / Imperialism............................................................................................................................................................24
Impact – Imperialism.................................................................................................................................................................................25
AT: Alt Doesn’t Solve................................................................................................................................................................................26
AT: Alt Doesn’t Solve................................................................................................................................................................................27
Aff..............................................................................................................................................................................................................28
Aff..............................................................................................................................................................................................................29
Aff..............................................................................................................................................................................................................30
Aff..............................................................................................................................................................................................................31
AT: Terror Impacts.....................................................................................................................................................................................32

Note: The short 1NC is if you want a one-minute K to read, the regular one shouldn’t include that Zulaika
card that’s in the very short one.
Most of the cards make a link, impact, or framework claim even if they’re not explicitly labeled as such.
The argument that their authors are all cheating biased liars is also in these cards.

-1-
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney

Very Short 1NC

The totalizing us-them nature of terrorism discourse prevents effective measures to stop the violence,
requiring an infinite mimetic war to “win” – only by problematizing our totalizing view can we prevent
endless cycles of violence.
Joseba Zulaika, (Professor, Center for Basque Studies), Radical History Review, Issue 85 (winter 2003),
ebsco
The events of September 11 are not immune to the possibility that counterterrorism is complicit in creating the very thing it
abominates. We mentioned earlier that Sheik Omar, condemned to a New York prison for the rest of his life as the mastermind of the
1993 attack on the WTC, was directly a product of the CIA that recruited him for Reagan’s anti-Soviet crusade in Afghanistan and
gave him visas to come to the United States. The same pattern fits Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. The United States initially
trained and armed them. When the Taliban became a pariah regime, the United States’ main ally in the Arab world, Saudi Arabia, gave
them primary support. But the blame game leads us at once into what Slavoj Zˇizˇek has labeled “the temptation of a double
blackmail.”21 Namely, either the unconditional condemnation of Third World evil that appears to endorse the ideological position of
American innocence, or drawing attention to the deeper sociopolitical causes of Arab extremism, which ends up blaming the victim.
Each of the two positions prove one-sided and false. Pointing to the limits of moral reasoning, Zˇ izˇ ek resorts to the dialectical
category of totality to argue that “from the moral standpoint, the victims are innocent, the act was an abominable crime; however, this
very innocence is not innocent—to adopt such an ‘innocent’ position in today’s global capitalist universe is in itself a false
abstraction.”22 This does not entail a compromised notion of shared guilt by terrorists and victims; “the point is, rather, that the two
sides are not really opposed, that they belong to the same field. In short, the position to adopt is to accept the necessity of the fight
against terrorism, BUT to redefine and expand its terms so that it will include also (some) American and other Western powers’
acts.”23 As widely reported at the time, the Reagan administration, led by Alexander Haig, would self-servingly “confuse terrorism
with communism.”24 As the cold war was coming to an end, terrorism became the easy substitute for communism in Reagan’s black-
and-white world. Still, when Haig would voice his belief that Moscow controlled the worldwide terrorist network, the State
Department’s bureau of intelligence chief Ronald Spiers would react by thinking that “he was kidding.”25 By the 1990s, the Soviet
Union no longer constituted the terrorist enemy and only days after the Oklahoma City bombing, Russian president Yeltsin hosted
President Clinton in Moscow who equated the recent massacres in Chechnya with Oklahoma City as domestic conflicts. We should be
concerned as to what this new Good-versus-Evil war on terror substitutes for. Its consequences in legitimizing the repression of
minorities in India, Russia, Turkey, and other countries are all too obvious. But the ultimate catastrophe is that such a categorically ill-
defined, perpetually deferred, simpleminded Good-versus-Evil war echoes and re-creates the very absolutist mentality and
exceptionalist tactics of the insurgent terrorists. By formally adopting the terrorists’ own game—one that by definition lacks rules of
engagement, definite endings, clear alignments between enemies and friends, or formal arrangements of any sort, military, political,
legal, or ethical—the inevitable danger lies in reproducing it endlessly. One only has to look at the Palestinian-Israeli or the Basque-
Spanish conflicts to see how self-defeating the alleged “victories” against terrorism can be in the absence of addressing the causes of
the violence. “A war against terrorism, then, mirrors the state of exception characteristic of insurgent violence, and in so doing it
reproduces it ad infinitum. The question remains: What politics might be involved in this state of alert as normal state? Would this
possible scenario of competing (and mutually constituting) terror signify the end of politics as we know it?”27 It is either politics or
once again the self-fulfilling prophecy of fundamentalist crusaders who will never be able to entirely eradicate evil from the world.
Our choice cannot be between Bush and bin Laden, nor is our struggle one of “us” versus “them.” Such a split leads us into the ethical
catastrophe of not feeling full solidarity with the victims of either side—since the value of each life is absolute, “the only appropriate
stance is the unconditional solidarity with ALL victims.” 28We must question our own involvement with the phantasmatic reality of
terrorism discourse, for “now even the USA and its citizens can be regulated by terrorist discourse. . . . Now the North American
territory has become the most global and central place in the new history that terrorist ideology inaugurates.”29 Resisting the
temptation of innocence regarding the barbarian other implies an awareness of a point Hegel made and that applies to the
contemporary and increasingly globalized world more than ever: evil, he claims, resides also in the innocent gaze itself, perceiving as
it does evil all around itself. Derrida equally holds this position. In reference to the events of September 11, he said: “My
unconditional compassion, addressed to the victims of September 11, does not prevent me from saying it loudly: with regard to this
crime, I do not believe that anyone is politically guiltless.”30 In brief, we are all included in the picture, and these tragic events must
make us problematize our own innocence while questioning our own political and libidinal investment in the global terrorism
discourse.

-2-
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney

1NC
The horrific image of “terroristic violence” contributes to the escalation of violent images that are the root
of all violence. The exceptionalism of 9-11 demands moral complicity in violence in the name of the
Crusade against terror.
James Der Derian, Research Professor of International Relations, Brown University; Professor of Political
Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2002 www.ssrc.org/sept11/essays/der_derian_text_only.htm
Before 9.11 and after 9.11: all social scientists, save perhaps the most recalcitrant positivists waiting for more data points to come in, must now survey international as well as domestic politics
by this temporal rift. Yet we seem stuck, it is uncertain for how long, in a dangerous interim that thwarts scholarly inquiry.
After terrorist hijackers transformed three
commercial jetliners into highly explosive kinetic weapons, toppled the twin towers of the World Trade Center, substantially damaged the Pentagon, killed over five
thousand people, and triggered a state of emergency - and before the dead are fully grieved, Osama bin Laden’s head is brought on a platter, justice is perceived as done,
and information is no longer a subsidiary of war - there is very little about 9-11 that is safe to say. Unless one is firmly situated in a patriotic,
ideological, or religious position (which at home and abroad are increasingly one and the same), it is intellectually difficult and even politically
dangerous to assess the meaning of a conflict that phase-shifts with every news cycle, from ‘Terror Attack’ to ‘America Fights Back’;
from a ‘crusade’ to a ‘counter-terror campaign’; from ‘the first war of the 21st century’ to a fairly conventional combination of
humanitarian intervention and remote killing; from infowar to real war; from kinetic terror to bioterror.
Under such conditions, I believe the immediate task of the social scientist and all concerned individuals is to uncover what is dangerous to think and say. Or as Walter Benjamin put it best, ‘in
times of terror, when everyone is something of a conspirator, everybody will be in a situation where he has to play detective.’
Detective work and some courage is needed because questions about the root causes or political intentions of the terrorist act have been
either silenced by charges of ‘moral equivalency’, or, rendered moot by claims that the exceptional nature of the act does not require
explanation. It quickly became accepted wisdom, from President Bush on down, that evil was to blame, and that the appropriate political and
intellectual focus should be on how best to eradicate evil. Even sophisticated analysts like Michael Ignatieff downplayed the significance of
social or political inquiry by declaiming the exceptionality of the act:
What we are up against is apocalyptic nihilism. The nihilism of their means - the indifference to human costs - takes their actions not only out of the realm of politics, but even out of
the realm of war itself. The apocalyptic nature of their goals makes it absurd to believe they are making political demands at all. They are seeking the violent transformation of an irremediably
sinful and unjust world. Terror does not express a politics, but a metaphysics, a desire to give ultimate meaning to time and history through ever-escalating acts of violence which culminate in
a final battle between good and evil.1
By funneling the experience through the image of American exceptionalism, 9.11 quickly took on an exceptional ahistoricity. For the
most part, history was only invoked - mainly in the sepia tones of the Second World War - to prepare America for the sacrifice and suffering that lay
ahead. The influential conservative George Will wrote that there were now only two time zones left for the United States:
America, whose birth was mid-wived by a war and whose history has been punctuated by many more, is the bearer of great responsibilities and the focus of myriad resentments. Which is why
for America, there are only two kinds of years, the war years and the interwar years.2
the best
Under such forced circumstances, of being beyond experience, outside of history, and between wars, 9.11 does not easily yield to philosophical, political or social inquiry. I believe
the academician can do is to thickly describe, robustly interrogate, and directly challenge the authorized truths and official actions of
all parties who are positing a world view of absolute differences in need of final solutions. I do so here by first challenging the now common assumption
that 9.11 is an exceptional event beyond history and theory, especially those theories tainted, as Edward Rothstein claimed in the New York Times, by ‘postmodernism’ and ‘post-colonialism’.3
Second, I examine the representations, technologies, and strategies of network wars that have eluded mainstream journalism and traditional social science. I finish by uncovering what I
consider to be the main dangers presented by the counter/terror of 9-11.
An Exceptional Act?
On the question of exceptionalism, consider a few testimonials, the first from an editorial in The New York Times:
If the attack against the World Trade Center proves anything it is that our offices, factories, transportation and communication networks and infrastructures are relatively vulnerable to skilled
terrorists…Among the rewards for our attempts to provide the leadership needed in a fragmented, crisis-prone world will be as yet unimagined terrorists and other socio-paths determined to
settle scores with us.4
Another from a cover story of Newsweek:
The explosion shook more than the building: it rattled the smug illusion that Americans were immune, somehow, to the plague of terrorism that torments so many countries.5
And finally, one from the London Sunday Times:
He began the day as a clerk working for the Dean Witter brokerage on the 74th floor of the World Trade Center in New York and ended it as an extra in a real-life sequel to Towering Inferno…
6
quotes taken from 1993, the first and much less deadly terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. They are presented here as
It might surprise some to learn that these are all
a caution, against reading terrorism only in the light - the often-blinding light - of the events of September 11. Obviously the two WTC events
differ in the scale of the devastation as well as the nature of the attack. 9-11/WTC defied the public imagination of the real – not to mention, as just about every public official and media
authority is loathe to admit, the official imagination and pre-emptive capacity of the intelligence community, federal law enforcement, airport security, military, and other governmental
But surely it
agencies. Shock and surprise produced an immediate and nearly uniform reading of the event that was limited to discourses of condemnation, retribution, and counterterror.
is a public responsibility to place 9.11 in an historical context and interpretive field that reaches beyond the immediacy of personal
tragedy and official injury. Otherwise 9-11 will be remembered not for the attack itself
but for the increasing cycles of violence that follow.
If 9-11 is not wholly new, what is it? We have a better sense of what it is not than what it is: from the President and Secretary of Defense and on down the food-

-3-
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney
chain of the national security hierarchy,
we have heard that this will not be a war of states against states; it will not be the Gulf War or Kosovo; and it will not be Vietnam or
Mogadishu. And they’re probably right – certainly more right than commentators from both the Right (it’s Pearl Harbor) and Left (it’s an

-4-
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney

1NC
anti-imperialist struggle) who have relied on sloppy ideological analogies to understand the event. In my view 9-11 is a combination of
new and old forms of conflict, including: the rhetoric of holy war from both sides; a virtual network war in the media and on the
internet; a high-tech surveillance war overseas but also in our airports, our cities, and even our homes; and a dirty war of counter-
terrorism and counter-insurgency, using an air campaign and limited special operations to kill the leadership and to intimidate the
supporters of al Qaeda and the Taliban.
I call this new hybrid conflict, virtuous war.8 It has evolved from the battlefield technologies of the Gulf War and the aerial campaigns of Bosnia and Kosovo; it draws on just war
doctrine (when possible) and holy war (when necessary); it clones the infowar of global surveillance and the networked war of multiple media. In the name of the holy trinity of
international order – global free markets, democratic sovereign states, and limited humanitarian interventions - the U.S. has led the
way in a revolution in military affairs (RMA) which underlies virtuous war. At the heart as well as the muscle of this transformation is the
technical capability and ethical imperative to threaten and, if necessary, actualize violence from a distance – but again, with minimal casualties
when possible.
Using networked information, global surveillance, and virtual technologies to bring ‘there’ here in near real-time and with near-verisimilitude, virtuous war emerged before 9-11. But it now
looks to be the ultimate means by which the U.S. intends to re-secure its borders, maintain its hegemony, and bring a modicum of order if not justice back to international politics. The
difference after 9-11 is that we now have an enemy with a face; with 22 faces in fact, all of them available on the FBI’s new website of most-wanted terrorists.9
Network Wars
From the start, it was apparent that 9-11 was and would continue to be a war of networks. Whether terrorist, internet, or primetime, most of the networks seemed equally adept at the
propagation of violence, fear, and disinformation. For a prolonged moment there was no detached point of observation: we were immersed in a network of tragic images of destruction and
loss, looped in 24/7 cycles, which induced a state of emergency and trauma at all levels of society. It was as if the American political culture experienced a collective Freudian trauma, which
could be re-enacted (endlessly on cable) but not understood at the moment of shock. This is what Michael Herr meant when he wrote about his own experience with the trauma of Vietnam: "It
took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did. The problem was that
you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in at all, it just stayed stored
there in your eyes." (Dispatches, New York: Avon Books, p. 20). And in a state of emergency, as in war, the first images stick. There was no initial
attempt by the media or the government to transform these images of horror into responsible discourses of reflection and action. Moving
at the speed of the news cycle and in a rush to judgment there was little time for deliberation, for understanding the motivations of the attackers, or for assessing the
potential consequences, intended as well as unintended, of a military response.
Networks are not merely nodes connected by wiring of one sort of another. They convey, mimic, and in some cases generate human attributes and intentions, as suggested by Wired founding
editor Kevin Kelly, who defined a network as ‘organic behavior in a technological matrix’. But 9-11 knocked akilter this always problematical relationship between meat and wire.
Technologically-driven events outpaced organic modes of comprehension, and human actions, whether out of trauma or information
overload, seemed increasingly to resemble machinic reflexes. Indeed, the first reaction by most onlookers and television reporters was
to deem the event an accident. The second attack destroyed the accidental thesis, and as well, it seemed, our ability to cognitively map the devastating
aftermath. Instead, into the void left by the collapse of the WTC towers and the absence of detached analysis, there rushed a host of metaphors, analogies, and
metonyms, dominated by denial (“It’s a movie), history (“It’s Pearl Harbor”), and non-specific horror (“It’s the end of the world as we
have known it”).
In our public culture, it is increasingly the media networks rather than the family, the community, or the government that provide the first, and, by its very speed and pervasiveness, most
powerful response to a crisis. Questions of utility, responsibility, and accountability inevitably arose, and as one would expect, the media’s pull-down menu was not mapped for the twin-
towered collapse of American invulnerability. Primetime networks did their best (Peter Jennings of ABC better than the rest) to keep up with the realtime crises. But fear, white noise, and
technical glitches kept intruding, creating a cognitive lag so profound between event and interpretation that I wondered if string theory had been proven right, that one of the 10 other
dimensions that make up the universe had suddenly intruded upon our own, formerly ordered one, exposing the chaos beneath.
Indeed, after the looped footage of the collapse of the towers began to take on the feeling of déjà vu, I seriously wondered if the reality principle itself had not taken
a fatal blow. Like Ignatieff, I discerned a nihilism at work, but of a different kind, of the sort vividly on display in the movie, The Matrix. It first appears
when some punky-looking customers in search of bootleg virtual reality software come to see Neo, the protagonist played by Keanu Reeves. He pulls from a shelf a green leather-bound book,
the title of which is briefly identifiable as Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. When he opens the hollowed-out book to retrieve the software, the first page of the last chapter appears:
‘On Nihilism’. Clearly an homage by the two directors, the Wachowsky brothers, it all happens very quickly, too quickly to read the original words of Baudrillard, but here they are:
‘Nihilism no longer wears the dark, Wagnerian, Spenglerian, fuliginous colors of the end of the century. It no longer comes from a weltanshauung of decadence nor from a metaphysical
radicality born of the death of God and of all the consequences that must be taken from this death.
Today’s nihilism is one of transparency, this irresolution is
indissolubly that of the system, and that of all the theory that still pretends to analyze it.10
With the toppling of WTC a core belief was destroyed: it could not happen here. Into this void the networks rushed, to provide transparency without depth, a simulacrum of horror, a much
purer form of nihilism than imagined by moralist commentators like Ignatieff or Rothstein.
In official circles, there was a concerted effort to fence off the
void: the critical use of language, imagination, even humor was tightly delimited by moral sanctions and government warnings. This
first-strike against critical thought took the peculiar form of a semantic debate over the meaning of ‘coward’. In the New Yorker and
on Politically Incorrect, the question was raised whether it is more cowardly to commandeer a commercial airliner and pilot it into the
World Trade Center, bomb Serbians from 15,000 feet, or direct a cruise missile attack against bin Laden from several thousand miles
away. The official response was swift, with advertisements yanked, talk-show condemnations, and Ari Fleischer, White House press
secretary, saying people like Bill Maher of Politically Incorrect ‘should watch what they say, watch what they do’.
Protected zones of language quickly began to take shape. When Reuters news agency questioned the abuse-into-meaningless of the term ‘terrorism’, George Will on
ABC Sunday News (September 30), retaliated by advocating a boycott of Reuters. Irony and laughter were permitted in some places, not in
others. At a Defense Department press conference Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld could ridicule, and effectively disarm, a reporter who dared to ask if anyone in the Department of Defense
will be authorized to lie to the news media.11 President Bush was given room to joke in a morale-boosting visit to the CIA, saying he’s ‘spending a lot of quality time lately’ with George

-5-
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney
Tenet, the director of the CIA. And then there was New York Times reporter Edward Rothstein, taking his opportunistic shot at postmodernists and postcolonialists, claiming that their irony and
relativism is ‘ethically perverse’ and produces a ‘guilty passivity’. Some of us were left wondering, where would that view place fervent truth-seekers and

-6-
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney

1NC
serious enemies of relativism and irony like bin Laden? Terrorist foe but epistemological ally?
The Mimetic War of Images
The air war started with a split-screen war of images: in one box, a desolate Kabul seen through a nightscope camera lens, in grainy-green pixels
except for the occasional white arc of anti-aircraft fire followed by the flash of an explosion; in the other, a rotating cast of characters, beginning with President Bush, followed over the course
of the day and the next by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Meyers, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, then progressively down the media food chain
of war reporters, beltway pundits, and recently retired generals. On the one side we witnessed images of embodied resolve in high resolution; on the other, nighttime shadows with nobody in
sight.
Strategic binaries were also legion in President Bush’s war statement, incongruously delivered from the Treaty Room of the White House: ‘as we strike
military targets, we will also drop food’; the United States is ‘a friend to the Afghan people’ and ‘an enemy of those who aid terrorists'; ‘the only way to pursue peace is to
pursue those who threaten it.’ And once more, the ultimate either/or was issued: ‘Every nation has a choice to make. In this conflict there is no
neutral ground.’
But the war programming was interrupted by the media-savvy bin Laden. Shortly after the air strikes began, he appeared on Qatar’s al-Jazeera television network (‘the Arab world’s CNN’) in a
pre-taped statement that was cannily delivered as a counter air-strike to the U.S. Kitted out in turban and battle fatigues,bin Laden presented his own bipolar view of the
world: ‘these events have divided the world into two camps, the camp of the faithful and the camp of infidels.’ But if opposition
constituted his worldview, it was an historical mimic battle that sanctioned the counter-violence: "America has been filled with horror
from north to south and east to west, and thanks be to God what America is tasting now is only a copy of what we have tasted."
Without falling into the trap of ‘moral equivalency’, one can discern striking similarities. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and others have made
much of the ‘asymmetrical’ war being waged by the terrorists. And it is indeed a canny and even diabolical use of asymmetrical tactics as well as strategies when
terrorists commandeer commercial aircraft and transform them into kinetic weapons of indiscriminate violence, and then deploy commercial media to counter the military strikes that follow.
Yet, a fearful symmetry is also at work, at an unconscious, possibly pathological level, a war of escalating and competing and imitative oppositions, a
mimetic war of images.
A mimetic war is a battle of imitation and representation, in which the relationship of who we are and who they are is played out along a
wide spectrum of familiarity and friendliness, indifference and tolerance, estrangement and hostility. It can result in appreciation or
denigration, accommodation or separation, assimilation or extermination. It draws physical boundaries between peoples, as well as metaphysical
boundaries between life and the most radical other of life, death. It separates human from god. It builds the fence that makes good
neighbors; it builds the wall that confines a whole people. And it sanctions just about every kind of violence.
More than a rational calculation of interests takes us to war. People go to war because of how they see, perceive, picture, imagine, and speak of
others: that is, how they construct the difference of others as well as the sameness of themselves through representations. From Greek tragedy and Roman gladiatorial
spectacles to futurist art and fascist rallies, the mimetic mix of image and violence has proven to be more powerful than the most rational discourse. Indeed, the medical definition
of mimesis is ‘the appearance, often caused by hysteria, of symptoms of a disease not actually present.’ Before one can diagnose a
cure, one must study the symptoms – or, as it was once known in medical science, practice semiology.
MIME-NET
It was not long before morbid symptoms began to surface from an array of terror and counter-terror networks. Al Qaeda members reportedly used
encrypted email to communicate; steganography to hide encoded messages in web images (including pornography); Kinko’s and public library computers to send messages; underground
banking networks called hawala to transfer untraceable funds; 24/7 cable networks like al-Jazeera and CNN to get the word out; and, in their preparations for 9-11, a host of other information
networks – from television primetime to internet realtime – delivered events with
technologies like rented cell phones, online travel agencies, and flight simulators. In general,
an alacrity and celerity that left not only viewers but decision-makers racing to keep up.
With information as the life-blood and speed as the killer variable of networks, getting inside the decision-making as well the image-making loop of the opponent became the central strategy of
Sluggish reactions were followed
network warfare. This was not lost on the U.S. national security team as it struggled after the initial attack to get ahead of the network curve.
by quicker pre-emptive actions on multiple networks. The Senate passed the Uniting and Strengthening America (USA) Act, which allowed for ‘roving
wiretaps’ of multiple telephones, easier surveillance of e-mail and Internet traffic, and the divulgence of grand jury and wiretap transcripts to intelligence agencies. National Security adviser
Condoleeza Rice made personal calls to heads of the television networks, asking them to pre-screen and to consider editing Al Qaeda videos for possible coded messages. Information about the
air campaign as well as the unfolding ground interventions were heavily filtered by the Pentagon. Information flows slowed to a trickle from the White House and the Defense
Department after harsh words and tough restrictions were imposed against leaks. Psychological operations were piggy-backed onto humanitarian interventions by the dropping of propaganda
leaflets and food packs. The Voice of America began broadcasting anti-Taliban messages in Pashto. After the 22 ‘Most Wanted Terrorists’ were featured on the FBI’s website, the popular TV
program ‘America’s Most Wanted’ ran an extended program on their individual cases.
Some of the most powerful networks are often the least visible, but when you add Hollywood to the mix, it’s hard to keep a secret. The entertainment industry journal Variety first broke the
news about a meeting between White House officials and Hollywood executives. The stated intention was ominous enough, to ‘enlist Hollywood in the war effort’:
The White House is asking Hollywood to rally 'round the flag in a style reminiscent of the early days of World War II. Network heads and studio chiefs heard that
message Wednesday in a closed-door meeting with emissaries from the Bush administration in Beverly Hills, and committed themselves to new initiatives in support of the war on terrorism.
These initiatives would stress efforts to enhance the perception of America around the world, to "get out the message" on the fight against terrorism and to mobilize
existing resources, such as satellites and cable, to foster better global understanding.12
Although some big media picked up this aspect of the story, none except for Newsweek took note of an earlier meeting organized by the military and the University of Southern California’s
Institute for Creative Technology.13 I knew about the ICT because I had covered its opening for Wired back in 1999, when the Army ponied up $43 million to bring together the simulation
talents of Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the U.S. military.14 Now it seemed that they were gathering top talent to help coordinate a new virtual war effort:
In a reversal of roles, government intelligence specialists have been secretly soliciting terrorist scenarios from top Hollywood filmmakers and writers. A unique ad hoc working group convened
at USC just last week at the behest of the U.S. Army. The goal was to brainstorm about possible terrorist targets and schemes in America and to offer solutions to those threats, in light of the
twin assaults on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Among those in the working group based at USC's Institute for Creative Technology are those with obvious connections to the
terrorist pic milieu, like "Die Hard" screenwriter Steven E. De Souza, TV writer David Engelbach ("MacGyver") and helmer Joseph Zito, who directed the features "Delta Force One,"

-7-
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney
"Missing in Action" and "The Abduction." But the list also includes more mainstream suspense helmers like David Fincher ("Fight Club"), Spike Jonze ("Being John Malkovich"), Randal
Kleiser ("Grease") and Mary Lambert ("The In Crowd") as well as feature screenwriters Paul De Meo and Danny Bilson ("The Rocketeer").15

-8-
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney

1NC
9-11 christened a new network: the military-industrial-media-entertainment network (MIME-NET). If Vietnam was a war waged in
It would appear that
the first and most likely the last battles of the counter/terror war are going to be waged on global networks that
the living-rooms of America,
reach much more widely and deeply into our everyday lives.
Counter/Terror Dangers
What lies ahead? In the spirit of the season, I think the best statement about what might follow 9-11 comes from that great philosopher and ballplayer, Yogi Bera, who famously said ‘the future
isn't what it used to be’. (He actually said ‘ain’t what it used to be’; it was the French poet Paul Valery who said ‘isn’t’, but Yogi wasn’t very big on footnotes). The point is made all the clearer
by the ambiguity of the statement: it’s hard to maintain let alone imagine a link between a happy past and a rosy future after a disaster, especially
one in which terrorist technologies of mass destruction are force-multiplied by media technologies of mass distraction. My greatest concern
is not so much the future as how past futures become reproduced, that is, how we seem unable to escape the feed-back loops of bad intelligence, bureaucratic
thinking, and failed imagination.
From my own academic experience, when confronted by the complexity and speed of networks, the fields of political science and international relations are not
much if at all better: as disciplines of thought they are just too narrow, too slow, too…academic. This leaves another intellectual void,
into which policy-makers and military planners are always ready to rush. Currently the RMA-mantra among the techno-optimists is to engage in their own form
of ‘network-centric warfare’. As first formulated by Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski (formerly President of the Naval War College and putatively picked by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld to
head-up the Pentagon’s military transformation), network-centric war is fought by getting inside the decision-making loop of the adversary’s network, and disrupting or destroying it before it
There seems to be little concern for what
can do the same to yours. In the rush to harden and to accelerate networks, all kinds of checks and balances are left behind.
organizational theorists see as the negative synergy operating in tightly coupled systems, in which unintended consequences produce
cascading effects and normal accidents, in which the very complexity and supposed redundancy of the network produce unforeseen
but built-in disasters. Think Three Mile Island in a pre-1914 diplomatic-military milieu. Think Paul Virilio’s ‘integral accident’.
My second concern is that social scientific theories are unsuited for the kind of political investigation demanded by the emergence of a military-industrial-media-entertainment
network. President Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address famously warned the US of the emergence of a ‘military-industrial complex’, and of
what might happen should ‘public policy be captured by a scientific and technological elite’. Now that Silicon Valley and Hollywood
have been added to the mix, the dangers have morphed and multiplied. Think Wag the Dog meets The Matrix. Think of C.Wright Mill’s power elite with much
better gear to reproduce reality.
So, for the near future, I believe virtuous war as played out by the military-industrial-media-entertainment network will be our daily bread and
nightly circus. Some would see us staying there, suspended perpetually, in between wars of terror and counterterror. How to break out of the
often self-prophesying circles? Are there theoretical approaches that can critically respond without falling into the trap of the interwar? One that
can escape the nullity of thought which equates the desire to comprehend with a willingness to condone terrorism? The use of sloppy analogies of resistance, as well as
petty infighting (pace [Christopher] Hitchens, [Noam] Chomsky and their polarized supporters) on the left does not give one much hope of a unified anti-
war movement. For the moment, we need to acknowledge that the majority of Americans, whether out of patriotism, trauma or apathy, think it best to leave matters in the hands of the
experts. I think for the immediate future the task will be to distinguish new from old dangers, real from virtual effects, and terror from counterterror in the network wars.

-9-
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney

1NC
The alternative is to reject such representations of violence. By viewing these as criminal rather than evil,
we can prevent totalizing violence and evaluate a more democratic perspective.
Robert L Ivie, Indiana University Communications Professor and Department Chair, 2003, “Evil Enemy
Versus Agonistic Other: Rhetorical Constructions of Terrorism”, Ebsco
If the rhetoric of fighting an evil enemy, especially when reinforced by U.S. military might, economic clout,
and presidential resolve, lowers the threshold of war, trumps arguments for pursuing peaceful resolutions,
and masks America’s complicity in the spiraling cycle of violence, what alternative to this tragic perspective might
prove to be a more serviceable response to terrorism? How can the debate be reframed to privilege the presumption
of peace consistent with democratic values, to shift the burden of proof back to the advocates of war, and
to increase the force of arguments for diplomacy and against pre-emption? What kind of a perspective might
motivate a higher degree of appreciation for the complexities of the human condition, more tolerance of differences, and greater
resistance to the legitimization of coerced consent? What conceptualization of the Other promotes the practice of democracy instead of
playing the trump card of an evil enemy to diminish and indefinitely defer democracy in the name of defending it? How can the
rhetoric of antagonism be transposed into the more constructive discourse of democratic agonistics? In the
simplest terms, what is being suggested here is that a basic shift of perspective, achieved by insisting on the primacy of
democracy, entails a wholly different order of priorities than the prevailing accent on evil. Rather than reducing democracy
to a convenient excuse for war—trading on it as a legitimizing symbol, protecting it as an imperiled and
vulnerable institution, restraining it as a risky practice in times of crisis, and promising it as the prize of
victory—advocates of pre-emption should be held squarely accountable to meeting the standard of democracy and all that it entails.
Similarly, those troubled by the prospect of war mutating into a routine instrument of statecraft and creating a “post-911” dystopia of
terror and counter-terror must rearticulate their arguments to feature democratic criteria, repositioning the most salient corollaries of a
robustly democratic ethic at the forefront of political consciousness and with sufficient presence to displace an otherwise disquieting
image of evil. Democracy, unlike a seamless political ideology of universal values, means, and ends, comprises a
multifaceted and situation-specific cluster of simultaneously overlapping and conflicting terms such as liberty, equality, self rule,
rights, pluralism, elections, debate, protest, and the rule of law. As Michael Walzer avers, big ideologies do not provide
sufficiently concrete and intimate knowledge of society and the world to prompt healthy criticism and
promote democratic rule in which delimited perspectives are held accountable to one another and thus
kept appropriately humble and suitably open to the force of evidence and the influence of deliberation.25 At
its best, democracy manages the human divide peacefully, channeling competing interests and differences
among groups of engaged citizens into a continuous struggle for one another’s qualified assent. Persuasion
is the paradigm of democratic communication in managing divisive relations. Within this paradigm,
adversaries are addressed as rivals who, in Mouffe’s words, “share a common symbolic space but . . . want
to organize [it] in a different way,” not as sheer enemies holding nothing in common.26 Sheer enemies hold
nothing in common, that is, except perhaps a shared propensity for engaging in rituals of victimization through which they transform
one another into convenient scapegoats, thereby alleviating social guilt at each other’s expense and ignoring their own culpability.27
Sheer enemies speak of one another as evil; democratic adversaries speak of one another as wrong, mistaken, and even stupid. Thus,
democracy is lost when the agonistic Other is rendered rhetorically into a diabolical enemy, and when democracy vanishes so, too, the
rule of law, liberty, respect for diversity, and accountability to the people wane. Put another way, addressing one’s adversary as
mistaken rather than evil is requisite to achieving and featuring a democratic perspective. If sharing symbolic space while competing
over its organization is the sine qua non of democracy among mortal beings, demonizing the Other is tantamount to throwing Satan
out of heaven—a heaven, it should go without saying, that neither exists on earth nor warrants making a living hell of earth. Just as the
rhetoric of evil promotes war, the rhetoric of identification, as Kenneth Burke calls it, enacts democracy and advances a positive
conception of peace among consubstantial rivals.28 Peace in this sense is not merely the absence of war, which is a hopelessly
negative notion of erasing the human divide and ending the struggle for advantage, but instead a positive strategy of crossing
conceptual boundaries and articulating common ground in a continuing context of competition, conflict, and division. Indeed, Ernesto
Laclau and Chantal Mouffe allow that “without conflict and division, a pluralist democratic politics would be impossible,” for any
democratically derived agreement is the result, not of universal truth and reason, but of a “hegemonic articulation” which is itself
incomplete, impermanent, and contingent upon rearticulation.29

- 10 -
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney

Sweet 2NC Card

Terrorism is inevitable, it’s only a question of how we respond to it. By retaliating, America has sowed the
seeds for its eventual destruction and perpetuated international outrage. However, we can change this by
rejecting the “us-versus-them,” “good versus evil” dichotomy proposed by the aff / neg.
Robert L Ivie, Indiana University Communications Professor and Department Chair, 3/25/02 “Profiling
Terrorism” http://www.indiana.edu/~ivieweb/profiling.htm
Caleb Carr warns, “warfare against civilians” must “never be answered in kind,” for it is a “failed tactic” that brings about “retaliation
in kind” and “perpetuates a cycle of revenge and outrage that can go on for generations,” planting “the seeds of our own eventual
downfall”; “a nation must never think that it can use . . . the agents of terror when convenient and then be rid of them when they are no
longer needed.”[25] So, given this counterproductive cycle of terror and counter-terror, why are such tactics used? What so strongly
motivates the political use of violence against civilians? What are the roots of terrorism? What makes them grow ever deeper? And
how have we become so thoroughly entangled in them? Terrorism is a problem, as Walter Laqueur notes, that “has rarely been absent
from history” and a threat, as Philip Heymann observes, that “cannot be completely eliminated.”[26] Its sources are intensely complex
in their political, economic, social, cultural, and religious dimensions of grievance, and they will never be fully resolved, for ethnic
conflict, nationalism, imperialism, revolutionary ideology, economic exploitation, poverty, religious fervor, and political alienation are
not finite problems, especially as they reassert themselves against the continuing presence of American empire in the post-Cold War
“power vacuums left by the collapse of the old order” of U.S.-Soviet rivalry.[27] One characteristic is constant, however: whether the
source of violence is cultural, ideological, religious, economic, or state terrorism, the “us-them” dichotomy is “paramount in the
thinking of terrorists” and counter-terrorists.[28] Herein lies the key to the terrorist trap and the problem of escalating violence insofar
as it is within our power to widen our circumference of understanding and develop a more serviceable attitude toward the problem at
hand. In its most extreme form, the form it has taken in our own time of defending Western civilization against Islamic revolution (and
vice versa), the dichotomization of “us vs. them” in a dramatization of “good vs. evil” is a call to cosmic war. This is no ordinary
political strategy or statement but instead a public performance of violence that serves as a symbolic assertion of empowerment. It is
what Mark Juergensmeyer calls “performance violence,” which must be understood and analyzed as symbol, ritual, and drama.

- 11 -
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney

Link / Impact – Homogenization

Terrorism discourse creates a motive to focus on killing as many as possible rather than identifying
differences between perpetrators of violence – extermination becomes necessary to stop the terrorists.
C. Douglas Lummis, Teaches at Tsuda College, PhD Poli Sci), January 19, 2004, Zmag,
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=4853
In the past several years, a new category of human being has been introduced into the public discourse: The Terrorist. Of course,
people have been called terrorists before, but with the beginning of the U.S. government's War on Terrorism, "terrorist" has come to
mean not simply a person who engages (or engaged) in a certain form of combat, but rather a separate human type.
The Terrorist is different from, for example, the criminal. We think of a criminal as a person who was born as an ordinary human
being, but has somehow "gone wrong." The criminal has committed a criminal act, but may still be capable of penitence, which is why
we put criminals in penitentiaries. But The Terrorist has not "gone wrong." As President Bush has so often told us, The Terrorist is
evil. The word "evil" is not a legal term; no court of law can convict a person of being "evil." Evil is a religious concept. The evil
person is not someone who has taken the wrong path, but rather someone who has come into this world for the very purpose of
causing pain and suffering. As you can see by putting a "d" at the beginning of the word, the evil person is here to carry out the
project of the Enemy of God. Repentance is out of the question: the misery that the evil person has brought about is exactly what was
intended.
In the new terrorist discourse, the issue, when a particular case is being discussed, is not what the person did, but what the person is.
When the case of John Walker Lind, the young man from California who was captured in Afghanistan, was being discussed in the
newspapers, the question was framed not in terms of what crimes, if any, he actually may have committed, but rather what category he
should be placed into: was he a terrorist, or was he an ordinary American boy gone wrong? If the former, he should be tried (the
papers said) by a military tribunal; if the latter, he should get an ordinary jury trial (as it happened, the latter position prevailed). The
terrorism discourse is based on a form of essentialism: once a person is categorized as a terrorist-in-essence, that person can be placed
in a separate legal category. The important thing is that this determination of what the person is takes place before a legal
determination is made (by trial) as to what the person did.
I wrote above that no court of law can make a judgment of what a person is (e.g., essentially good or evil), but there is another kind of
court that has claimed to make such judgments. That is the court used in witch trials, where the evidence as to what the accused person
did is only relevant insofar as it indicates whether that person is or is not a witch. Once the person is judged to be a witch, then what
he or she did is no longer relevant. The logic of the present terrorist discourse is witch-hunt logic.
In political cartoons and commentaries, The Terrorist has most often been depicted as a gutter rat. Not the white rat or the brown
country rat, but the plague rat, the one that is never displayed in zoos and that no one (except witches) ever keeps as pets. The plague
rat, like the cockroach, exists in popular imagination (though animal rights activists may disagree) as an animal to be killed on sight,
and exterminated if possible. And "extermination," a word that, outside of Nazi discourse, has not often been used in regard to a
category of human beings, is precisely the word being used in War-on-Terrorism propaganda today.
This characterization of The Terrorist revives the emotional content of racism without being, strictly speaking, racist. Anti-Terrorist
propaganda cannot be racist because The Terrorist, while a category, is not a race. The people the U.S. government calls terrorist
belong to a variety of nationalities and speak a variety of languages. Moreover, given the multi-ethnic makeup of the U.S. voting
population today, it is no longer politically wise for U.S. politicians to lay this kind of stereotype on a particular ethnic group. So
when government spokespeople say this is not a war against Muslims or Arabs, this should be taken seriously. What is happening is
that the stereotype that used to be projected onto this or that ethnic group is now being projected onto this new category: The
Terrorist. In classic racism, the discriminated people were depicted as incapable of education, enlightenment, or moral improvement,
so that it would be fruitless to put them in the same legal framework, and grant them the same rights, as the dominating group. There
is nothing for it but to place them in a separate legal category -- say slavery, or apartheid, or ghettoization, or legal segregation. And
today this is just what is happening: for the new human type called The Terrorist, a separate and unprecedented legal framework is
being established.

- 12 -
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney

Link – Us/Them
The word “terrorism” invokes a good and evil binary that results in characterizing all “terrorists” as evil and
“parasitic” and all Westerners as “patriots.” This fabricated binary reduces all other political questions to
this singular focus of good and bad making effective action impossible.
Robert L Ivie, Indiana University Communications Professor and Department Chair, 3/25/02 “Profiling
Terrorism” http://www.indiana.edu/~ivieweb/profiling.htm
The true patriot knows, according to this logic, that freedom must be sacrificed in some measure for an indefinite period of time in order to defend against the enemies of freedom and civilization. (At this point, you may be
wondering whether this kind of reasoning is a version of Nietzsche’s famous dictum that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger or, alternatively, the infamous adage of the Vietnam war that we had to destroy the village in
order to save it.) Given the persistence of the president’s theme of war, patriotism, and consumerism in the defense of freedom and civilization, it isn’t at all surprising that he opened his first state of the union address last
January by declaring “our nation is at war, our economy is in recession, and the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers.”[12] Since the “shock and suffering” of four months earlier, he continued, “our nation has
comforted the victims, begun to rebuild New York and the Pentagon, rallied a great coalition, captured, arrested, and rid the world of thousands of terrorists, destroyed Afghanistan’s terrorist training camps, saved a people
The terrorists who had survived our bombing campaign in Afghanistan were either occupying
from starvation, and freed a country from brutal oppression.”
cells at Guantanamo Bay or running for their lives. The women of Afghanistan were now free and no longer “captives in their own
homes.” America was “winning the war on terror” against a hateful and mad enemy that “laughed[ed] about the loss of innocent life”
while plotting to destroy American nuclear plants and poison public water supplies. The president’s aim was to “eliminate” these
“terrorist parasites” worldwide and to prevent the “axis of evil” regimes in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea from threatening the United
States, its friends, and allies with weapons of mass destruction. The war would continue indefinitely until an evil enemy that
embraces “tyranny and death” is defeated by those who “choose freedom and the dignity of every life. Not only did the president’s
state of the union address establish a focus of evil, but it also reduced all other political questions to this singular focus as extensions
of the war on terror which, he stressed, “is well begun, but it is only begun.” Just as September 11 had brought about the unity and resolve of America and Congress, “this
same spirit [would be] directed toward addressing problems here at home.” (As an aside, I should note that this same spirit of unity and resolve, we have learned, also means that any criticism of the president’s partisan
positions on economic, social or other political issues is likely to be equated with supporting terrorism and undermining the war effort.[13]) Not only did the president propose the largest increase in military spending in two
decades as the price of freedom and security, but he also requested new funding for homeland security to protect against bioterrorism, provide for emergency response, fund airport and border security, and enhance
intelligence gathering. Research on bioterrorism would yield knowledge to “improve public health.” Training and equipping “heroic police and firefighters” would mean “safer neighborhoods.” Stricter border enforcement
would “help combat illegal drugs.” And better intelligence meant depending “on the eyes and ears of alert citizens.” Moreover, to revitalize the economy, the president’s budget, or what he referred to as his “economic
security plan,” would run a “small and short-term” deficit, “so long as Congress restrains spending and acts in a fiscally responsible manner” that eventually enables unemployed American workers to earn paychecks instead
of receiving unemployment checks. Good jobs, he continued, begin with good schools and depend on reliable and affordable energy production along with expanded trade, new world markets, and tax relief that will “grow
the economy by encouraging investment in factories and equipment.” “Health security” and “retirement security” were further measures of the nation’s “true character” in this “time of testing,” in this time for “courage and
compassion, strength and resolve.” Each American patriot was called upon to dedicate 4,000 hours to public service over the rest of his or her
lifetime, thus proving that our enemies who believed us to be weak, divided, and materialistic “were as wrong as they are evil.”
“Through the gathering momentum of millions of acts of service and decency and kindness,” the president stressed again, “I know we
can overcome evil with greater good.” You may be wondering what is so troublesome about the language of evil as a profile of
terrorism. My answer is that the term isn’t entirely wrong for characterizing the heinous crime against humanity committed on September 11, but it isn’t the most serviceable term either for guiding our thinking about
how best to address the continuing problem of terrorism. Rather than bringing us together as a diverse and democratic people committed to respecting pluralism at home and abroad, the rhetoric of evil
constitutes us negatively through a ritual of victimization.

The delineation of terrorism constructs an absolute evil that must be eliminated at all costs. We end up
believing America is the world’s “indispensable nation,” a nation that must dominate and control disorder
legitimating pre-emptive strikes and mass violence against the “Axis of Evil.”
Robert L Ivie, Indiana University Communications Professor and Department Chair, 3/25/02 “Profiling
Terrorism” http://www.indiana.edu/~ivieweb/profiling.htm
Yes, terrorism today is firmly rooted in our past and specifically in the history of American empire since World War II. In an
important sense, it is what Chalmers Johnson has called Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. This is, for
the most part, an “unacknowledged” and “informal” empire, an “imperial project that the Cold War obscured” but the byproduct of
which is “reservoirs of resentment against all Americans . . . that can have lethal results.” America’s determination “to dominate the
global scene,” to project its military power and extend its social, political, and economic system throughout the world, is a
“triumphalist” act and attitude, Johnson argues, for which the United States and its citizens will continue to “pay a steep price” unless
and until we reassess our global role and become more conscious of how we look to others who hate us for our arrogance and hegemony. Even as we worry about how to
defend ourselves against “rogue states,” we must consider “whether the United States has itself become a rogue superpower.” We
have declared ourselves the world’s “indispensable nation” and the architect of “a new world order.” Now we must confront the
likelihood that when it comes to understanding terrorism, “empire is the problem,” at least to a significant degree.[3] Instead of reflecting carefully and judiciously on
America’s global presence, however, to consider how we might play our post-Cold War role more constructively, our greatest impulse in this time of crisis is to close ranks in
patriotic fervor, declare war on international terrorism, and vow triumph over evil. Should we succumb to this great temptation – Or
might I say more realistically, if we continue to submit to it too long and exclusively? – we risk falling ever more deeply into what
Jeffrey Simon has called “the terrorist trap,” that web of psychological, political, and social entanglement in the “dramas of
international violence” which will persist and worsen unless we learn to address the problem of terrorism comprehensively in its many
dimensions.[4] Thus, the purpose of my talk this evening is to focus attention on how our current image or profile of terrorism is a
- 13 -
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney
dangerous caricature of the enemy, a crude portrait of absolute evil which can only confound the quest for peace and security in a
global village where diversity resists conformity, tribalism confronts empire, and, in Benjamin Barber’s phrase, “Jihad vs.
McWorld.”[5]

Link – Dehumanization
The “terrorist” label dehumanizes those whom it is applied to and gives “freedom of action” to the
government paving the way toward violence.
Journal of Political and Military Sociology, Summer 2002, “The Rhetoric of ‘Terrorism’ and its
Consequences.” (http://animalliberationfront.com/ALFront/terrorism.htm)
The discriminatory applications of the terms ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ by the U. S. Government and mainstream American media
reveal that neither uses these terms with any real concern for consistency, completeness, and accuracy. If they did, and if the U.S.
Government really meant what it says it means when it proclaims a “war on terrorism,” then the United States would be declaring war
on itself, or, at the very least, upon its allies that have practiced or supported violence against civilians for political ends.
Instead, these terms are selectively used by governments and media to describe those who resort to force in opposing governmental
policies. This development is not entirely surprising. For example, we might expect that the U.S. State Department will be selective in
its catalog of terrorist incidents since it is an arm of a government pursuing its own political agenda. It is a bit more difficult to
understand why a free press should follow the Government’s lead, but some have tried to explain this phenomenon by pointing out
that the American media “support the existing social, political, and economic order in which they operate because they are part of and
benefit from that order, and the views they convey rarely stray far from the norm” (Picard 1993: 121).12

The American situation is not unique in this regard; other countries, including Israel, Great Britain, Russia, India and Egypt routinely
do the same, and so might any state in describing militant insurgents opposed to its policies, like the Nazis in describing resistance
fights in the Warsaw ghetto (Herman and O’Sullivan 1989: 261). There is a definite political purpose in so doing. Because of its
negative connotation, the ‘terrorist’ label automatically discredits any individuals or groups to which it is affixed; it dehumanizes
them, places them outside the norms of acceptable social and political behavior, and portrays them as people who cannot be reasoned
with.13 As a consequence, the rhetoric effectively,

• erases any incentive that an audience might have to understand the point of view of those individuals and groups so that it can
ignore the history behind their grievances;
• deflects attention away from one’s own policies that might have contributed to these grievances;
• repudiates any calls to negotiate with them;

paves the way for the use of force and violence in dealing with them, and in particular, gives a government “freedom of action” by
exploiting the fears of its own citizens and stifling any objections to the manner in which it deals with them.14

- 14 -
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney

Framework / Impact
The idea of a singular global “terrorist” organization ignores the multifaceted nature of its violence – our
singularly focused discourse inspires genocidal violence as we overreact to the perceived nature of
terrorism.
Joseba Zulaika, (Professor, Center for Basque Studies), February 1998, Social Identities, Vol. 4, Issue 1,
ebsco
'Type of warfare', 'ritual', 'pathology', 'social drama' -- these are some of the scholarly categories and poetic strategies (each equipped
with its own disciplinary literature and prominent authors) commonly applied to the study of terrorism. For the most part, these are
self-enclosed genres in which each author refuses to relinquish the vocabulary and premises of his or her discipline. Among the
various possible modes of formal argumentation within texts about terrorism, the causal one deserves primary attention: 'what are the
causes of terrorism?'. Most conferences and texts that focus on terrorism frame it in such terms. The very query creates the mirage that
this bizarre phenomenon may finally be reduced to a formulaic question, the answer to which holds out the promise of resolving the
riddle. The prospect of a Foucaultian inquiry for the 'genealogy' of the entire discourse as linked to power and situated in formations of
bodily violence is simply beyond such causal investigation. Yet, ironically, the causal perspective is employed to examine a
phenomenon that is ideal --typically portrayed as 'random' and 'indiscriminate' violence, that is, as non-causal by definition.
Since there is a political imperative for the students of terrorism to define it in pathological terms, the 'psychology of terrorism' is
another thriving subfield. The influence of terrorist ideologies and false beliefs in urging revolutionary terrorism is also stressed by
some. The favourite argumentative plot of the best-informed students of terrorism is that it is a type of warfare. This is also the
preferred perspective of the activists themselves. The argument of warfare -- with its polarities, its tension between tactics and
strategy, its rules of engagement, its goal orientation and ideology, its roles and expectations -- provides a powerful source of
narrativity for terrorism. Casting terrorism in this guise has a practical value: the typically unruly elements that characterise terrorist
activity can be tamed by conceptualising them as the work of a fully-fledged army against which an organised counteraction can be
mounted.
Treatises on terrorism regularly ask: what is it? The ontological question is implied by the very search for its 'causes and
consequences'. There is no such ding an sich. The quest for the quintessential distillation by which 'terror' could be encapsulated,
diagnosed under laboratory conditions, defined in precise terms, and then finally conquered and extinguished for the benefit of
mankind, is of course an academic illusion. Its 'unreality' derives from the referential circularity of terror, its logic of randomness, its
semantics of play and threat, its deceptive use of sign and symbol, and its enormous power for collective representation.
Terrorism has become a global discourse that purports to define and decipher political realities that are poles apart (Zulaika and
Douglass). As an instance, in 1985 an international panel of terrorism experts was convened to resolve the problem of Basque violence
permanently. The panel members sat in a London hotel for nine months (they were never seen in the Basque Country); at last, they
issued a report, with the conclusion that the violence was caused by nationalism. The public was amused by their sagacity. Two thirds
of the panel's report described other European 'terrorist groups' as supporting evidence to prove their main contention, namely, that
Basque violence is terrorism. The remaining one third presented a programme of consciousness-raising, advising every sector of
Basque society on how to banish the scourge of terrorism by tabooing the violent actors and their social context.
These experts could act so confidently because terrorism, despite a lack of consensus on how to define it (there are literally hundreds
of definitions) and on a frame to situate it, nonetheless has been globally accepted as a discourse central to contemporary politics. It
displays a literature and a legal-technical vocabulary that can make an 'expert' of anyone who writes a monograph on some insurgent
group, none of whose members, God forbid!, the writer has ever met. Thus, it is not surprising that some of the very same experts who
have been instrumental in diagnosing and framing the Basque case have also been influential in US counter-terrorism policy.
Terror and Taboo: From Guernica to the Nuclear Threat
The obfuscation generated by such global discourse is enormous. In the Basque case, for example, the violent actors and their
audience consider it part of their agenda 'to liberate' the symbolic oak of Guernica from foreign domination, while for those Basques
unsympathetic to their cause, and for the world at large, their politics is simply terrorism. Once again, the step from 'the native' to 'the
terrorist' is a short one.
Historically, encounters with natives have prompted a fetishistic response on the part of Europeans, who simultaneously turn these
peoples into terrifying monsters and quintessential objects of desire. The twentieth century response to the terrorist repeats this
tendency to create a culture of fetishisation and taboo: discourse of terrorism incurred the polluting intimacy of such men as Noriega,
Gadaffi, Arafat, Saddam Hussein and Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, who became at various moments either the West's most trusted
allies or its most frightening monsters. It is the US State Department, depending on the political expediency of the moment, which
endorses one identity over the other.
There was a moment when the previous generation's cast of 'terrorists' seemed to be fading away. Carlos the Jackal, Abimael Guzman,
and Sheik Omar are incarcerated. The hapless Saddam Hussein and Muamar Gadaffi, yesterday's bogeymen and today's international
- 15 -
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney
pariahs, maintain the lowest of profiles. Yassir Arafat and Gerry Adams are now visitors at the White House. The ANC is the ruling
party of South Africa. The Brigata Rossa and Baader Meinhof are but recent memories in a Western Europe increasingly preoccupied
with the revival of fascism and racist backlash against its political and economic refugees. A blinkered optimist might have been

- 16 -
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney

Framework / Impact
prepared to pronounce 'terrorism' itself dead. Yet, suddenly there is a new promised land for terrorism -- the United States. Its
apotheosis is expressed in the sealing off of Pennsylvania Avenue by a president besieged in his White House. What a triumph for
Timothy McVeigh -- to accomplish what all the horrors of the twentieth century could not!
'Terrorism' is an enormously efficacious stimulant of the collective imagination. The fate of a few hostages can rivet public attention
for months. As with other historical stereotypes -- the Jewish conspiracy, the witch craze, the red scare -- the collective representation
of terrorism has a resulted in a chimera so enveloping and so terrible that it blurs the distinction between fiction and reality. Like
shamans, witches, prophets, saints, madmen and the like, terrorists present in their remythification a 'formless' persona, that is, one
that appears to be immune from ordinary constraints. These representations of terrorists show 'an intrinsic vagrancy of the imagination'
(Needham, 1978, p. 64).
What makes the collective representation of terrorism so uniquely threatening is its symbiotic relationship to nuclearism -- a type of
energy that threatens to break all 'form'. The recent discovery of terrorism as a global discourse was simultaneous with the birth of the
real military taboo of our times -- atomic armaments. In the military imagination, the 'formless' powers of terrorism and nuclear terror
are easily linked. Once there is a nuclear capability, the possibility of its falling into the hands of a madman becomes unbearably real.
This explains why American administrations may turn terrorism into a major international problem. If the natives thought that they
were defending their symbolic tree, the experts and politicians know that what they are doing is endangering the Planet Earth.
The discourse of terrorism is overwhelmed by such 'reality effect'. As if to dispel any doubts about this reality, writers routinely begin
their works with some dreadful statistics. The shock value of statistics can, however, be turned against itself. As an example, during
the six-year period 1980-85, seventeen people were killed by acts of terrorism in the US -- less than three per year in a country whose
annual homicide rate is about 25,000. Yet, at various points over the same period, 80 per cent of Americans regarded terrorism as an
'extreme' danger. In April 1986, a national survey showed that terrorism was the most frequently mentioned problem facing the
country, 'the number one concern' (Hinkley, 1989, p. 388). During the four years 1989 to 1992, in which there was not a single fatality
caused by terrorism in the United States, American libraries catalogued 1,322 new book titles under the rubric 'terrorism' and 121
under 'terrorist'. As in the 'referential illusion' of the realist aesthetic of modern literature, 'the very absence of the signified ... becomes
the very signifier of realism' (Barthes, 1968, p. 148).
Ultimately, discourse requires reality. It was inevitable that terrorism would finally come 'home'. First, it was the World Trade Center
bombing in New York City, perpetrated by anti-Communist heroes of the Afghan war left without a mission after the collapse of the
Soviet Union. Then there was Oklahoma City's 'terror in the heartland', perpetrated by a former Gulf War hero. Thus distant, world-
menacing 'terrorism', so much abominated and promoted by successive US administrations, has come to America itself, ironically, the
weapon of Reagan's and Bush's ex-warriors. The triumphant concept of a New World Order, an idea for which they had fought so
valiantly, had itself become their worst conspiratorial nightmare.

- 17 -
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney

Impact / AT: Ethics

The ethics of fighting the evil of terrorism demand that we use any sort of violence to stop it, leading to
the inevitable abrogation of rights and justification of violence in any instance.
Joseba Zulaika, (Professor, Center for Basque Studies), February 1998, Social Identities, Vol. 4, Issue 1,
ebsco
There is a historical sequel to the present discourse of terrorism. The figure of the 'Terrorist' seems heir to the frightening and lawless
attributes of the figures of the 'Barbarian' during the classical Greek period and the 'Wild Man' during the Middle Ages. For Aristotle,
humanity was defined as the capacity to behave as 'a political animal' within the confines of the city (the definition was understood to
exclude women, slaves, and merchants). Those individuals living outside the city's borders could never claim full humanity because
they were beyond the law. In premodern thought, the myth of the Wild Man, in its many archetypal forms and variations, fascinated
Western civilisation. The great historical encounters with native savages forced Westerners to face their own alarming vagueness
concerning the definition of 'humanity'. With 'wildness' we get the closely related notions of 'savagery', 'madness', 'heresy', and
'barbarism'. That the second part of the twentieth century has added a new type -- the 'Terrorist' -- to this old myth testifies to its
enduring power.
The terrorist poses a frontal assault on any type of norm, whether tactical, political, legal, or moral. It is antinomy in its pure form. The
terrorist enemy, identified as international in scope and in a symbiotic relationship with the nuclear predicament, falls outside the
ordinary realm of humanity. Once attributed to the terrorist, this subhuman state then becomes the basis for several related premises:
that we cannot afford to be too humane when confronting terroristic inhumanity; that perhaps we should not be overly concerned with
law while combating evil itself; and, finally, that perhaps we too must practice a little terrorism, but of the 'right' kind, in order to
contain the malignancy. Confronted with the unmitigated evil of terrorism, should we not be prepared to break, or at least bend, any
rule in order to stop the repellent monster? This is the same way that myth worked in ancient cultures,
that is, as a projection of repressed desires and anxieties, as an example of a mode of thought in which the distinction between the
physical and the mental worlds has dissolved. (White, 1978, p. 154)
We may call this terrorist archetype, then, a 'remythification' of the Wild Man.
By first defining natives as subhuman, the European colonisers were able to justify the extermination, ownership, or subdual of these
'monstrous' populations. At the end of the twentieth century, similarly ironic predications between politically unequal countries are far
from extinct. In 1986, for instance, under US pressure after its raids on Libya, the twelve countries of the European Community
produced at the Tokyo summit a blacklist of nations in which almost all their poorer neighbours of Africa and the Middle East were
identified as terrorist (Lodge, 1988, pp. 248-49). This is reminiscent of Columbus's impudently ironic use of native inhumanity as
justification for European barbarism.
The myth of the Wild Man helped sustain the perception of 'dog-headed cannibals' when Europeans met American natives. Today
when the topic is terrorists, we find such canine imagery again in use. President Reagan, for example, prepared his attack on Gadaffi's
life in 1986 by first calling him 'mad dog'. Similarly, in the British press, 'Why the Dogs Had to Die' was a front-page headline in The
Sun's article on the unarmed IRA men killed at Gibraltar by the British police in March 1988. In the literature on terrorism, the literal
crudity of such animal analogies supports the call for a merciless hunt.
The anthropologist Edmund Leach has summarised the connections between those historical encounters and present terrorism:
The common link between my two stories are, as you can see, the themes of terroristic massacre, cannibalism by imaginary dog-
headed monsters, a political opportunism that makes your opponents virtuous or monstrous as a matter of convenience without any
regard for empirical facts of the case, and the principle that if the lack of shared moral values is so complete that the 'other' comes to
be categorised as a wild animal, then every imaginable form of terroristic atrocity is not only attributed to the other side but
becomes permissible for oneself. Indeed, counter terrorism becomes, in a bizarre sense, a religiously sanctioned moral duty.
(1977,p. 36)
The accuracy of these remarks may be verified by noting counter-terrorism's shoot-to-kill policy (as put into practice in Great Britain,
Germany, and Spain), its abrogation of due process, and its frequent resort to torture. All of these 'point to a central truth -- that there
are few areas of state activity in which the temptation to abandon important ethical norms is so strong and so pervasive' (Roberts,
1989, p. 62). Prominent counter-terrorism specialists in fact openly advocate co-opting terroristic strategy as part of 'indirect forms of
warfare'.

- 18 -
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney

Turns Case
The terrorist label destroys effective policy – by representing them as barbarians constructive engagement
that’s crucial to solve becomes impossible.
Tomis Kapitan, Professor of Philosophy, Northern Illionois University, 2003, “Terrorism and International
Justice”, http://www.niu.edu/phil/~kapitan/The%20Terrorism%20Of%20%27Terrorism%27.pdf
The American situation is not unique. Other countries, including Israel, Great Britain, Russia, India and Egypt routinely do the same,
and so might any state in describing militant insurgents opposed to its policies, e.g., as the Nazis did in describing resistance fighters
in the Warsaw ghetto (Herman and O’Sullivan 1989, p. 261). There is a definite political purpose in so doing. Because of its negative
connotation, the ‘terrorist’ label automatically discredits any individuals or groups to which it is affixed. It dehumanizes them, places
them outside the norms of acceptable social and political behavior, and portrays them as people who cannot be reasoned with (Picard
1993, p 10).13 By delegitimizing any individuals or groups described as ‘terrorist,’ the rhetoric,
• erases any incentive an audience might have to understand their point of view so that questions about the nature and origins of their
grievances and the possibility legitimacy of their demands will not even be raised;
• deflects attention away from policies that might have contributed to their grievances;
• repudiates any calls to negotiate with them;
• paves the way for the use of force and violence in dealing with them, and in particular, gives a government “freedom of action” by
exploiting the fears of its own citizens and stifling any objections to the manner in which it deals with them;14
• fails to distinguish between national liberation movements and fringe fanatics.
The general strategy is nothing new; it is part and parcel of the war of ideas and language that accompanies overt hostilities;
‘terrorism’ is simply the current vogue for discrediting one’s opponents before the risky business of inquiry into their complaints can
even begin. If individuals and groups are portrayed as irrational, barbaric, and beyond the pale of negotiation and compromise, then
asking why they resort to terrorism is viewed as pointless, needlessly accommodating, or, at best, mere pathological curiosity.
The language of ‘terror’ thereby fosters an unfortunate attitude, especially among those who are oblivious to its propagandistic
employment. Obviously, to point out the causes and objectives of particular terrorist actions is to imply nothing about their legitimacy
and justification—that is an independent matter—nor is it any sort of capitulation to terrorist demands. To ignore these causes and
objectives, on the other hand, is to seriously undermine attempts to deal intelligently with terrorism, since it leaves untouched the
factors motivating recourse to this type of violence. Far from contributing to a peaceful resolution of conflict, the rhetoric of ‘terror’
prepares the uncritical person to sanction a violent response.
More dramatically, the ‘terrorist’ rhetoric actually increases terrorism in four distinct ways. First, it magnifies the effect of terrorist
actions by heightening the fear among the target population. If we demonize the terrorists, if we portray them as arbitrary irrational
beings with a “disposition toward unbridled violence,” then we are amplifying the fear and alarm generated by terrorist incidents.
Second, those who succumb to the rhetoric contribute to the cycle of revenge and retaliation by endorsing terrorist actions of their own
government, not only against those who commit terrorist actions, but also against those populations from whose ranks the terrorists
emerge, for the simple reason that terrorists are frequently themselves civilians, living amid other civilians not so engaged. The
consequence has been an increase in terrorist violence under the rubric of ‘retaliation’ or ‘counter-terrorism’ 15 Third, short of
genocide, a violent response is likely to stiffen the resolve of those from whose ranks terrorists have emerged, leading them to regard
their foes as people who cannot be reasoned with, as people who, because they avail themselves so readily of the ‘terrorist’ rhetoric,
know only the language of force. As long as they perceive themselves to be victims of intolerable injustices and view their oppressors
as unwilling to arrive at an acceptable compromise, they are likely to answer violence with more violence. Fourth, and most
insidiously, those who employ the rhetoric of ‘terrorism’ for their own political ends, are encouraging actions that they understand will
generate or sustain further violence directed against civilians. Inasmuch as their verbal behavior is intended to secure political
objectives through these means, then it is an instance of terrorism just as much as any direct order to carry out a bombing of civilian
targets. In both cases, there is purposeful verbal action aimed at bringing about a particular result through violence against civilians.16

- 19 -
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney

Turns Case
Turns the case – the discourse of terrorism creates a false need to violently disrupt it, recreating the
reasons for such violence.
Begoña Aretxaga, Associate Professor of Anthropology at University of Texas-Austin, 2002, Anthropological
Quarterly 75.1, pp. 139-150
At the level of public representation, the double figure of martyr and state-like force, these two poles of identification were incarnated
in the figures of Osama bin Laden and his aide Sleiman Abou-Ghelth. While the first spoke of injustice and peace for Palestinians, the
second, in a more stately appearance, threatened a continuing "storm of airplanes."[ 4] The extreme craftiness at using modern
technology to tap and recreate anew an old cluster of religious images, contradicts the opinion that assigns to Islamic radicalism an
entrenchment in past tradition. The Taliban, like Osama bin Laden's brand of radicalism, does not represent the force of timeless
tradition, but a contemporary creation of tradition, a concomitant effect of modernity well known to students of nationalism. If the
"invention of tradition"[ 5] is not new to the students of political movements, neither are the tactics that bin Laden is using. The use of
an outrageous attack as a provocation for massive use of force, preferably employed indiscriminately, is typical of anti-colonial
guerrilla warfare. A brutally illustrative example of this tactic is Gillo Pontecorvo's now classic film, "The Battle of Algiers." State
force with its accompanying dirty wars, secret operations and special commandoes or death squads — that is, the use of terror to
combat 'terrorism' — reproduce the very terrorist practices they want to eliminate, creating a closed dynamic of mimetic violence that
can reproduce organized terror ad infinitum, narrowing if not closing the space for political engagements of other kinds.
At the level of the political imaginary we are aiding the discursive and military construction of Terrorism with a capital T, a political
figure that was in the making for some time, but which has finally made its world debut after September 11; it as an absolutized enemy
with a phantasmic character, rapidly becoming, in the midst of the anthrax scare, mystery and thrill, something like the figure of the
"Joker" in the film "Batman." Secretive by their very nature, terrorist organizations acquire reality as a political and social force not
only through the effects of their violence but also through the production of material culture: anagrams, seals, communiques,
uniforms, videos etc. But what counts as a terrorist organization for government institutions responds not to a single reality but to a
variety of very different historical and socio-political realities. Terrorism with capital T, however, is a fictional reality, the object of a
particular genre of popular novels and film thrillers. Thus, for example, what was initially a faceless attack, and then an organization,
has become a vast network of unknown proportions constituting what, according to The Nev/ York Times, an intelligence officer
called, "a global state"[ 6] (a characterization that incidentally appeared three days after the initial bombing and justifies what has been
called "America's New War"). Similarly, we have been seeing the emergence of some of the staple ingredients of the thriller genre of
terrorism: enigmatic documents, chilly manuals, horripilating bloody videos. The document encountered in the luggage of Mohamed
Atta, now believed to be the mastermind of the attacks might be a guide for preparing suicide operations. Yet its language sounds
stereotypical; it resonates all too much with the popular fiction of terrorism not to appear virtual, and perhaps because of that it has the
capacity to evoke a chilling terror.[ 7] Similarly, a manual for terror is also discovered, suggesting the brainwashed character of fanatic
terrorists. It is entitled: "Military Studies of the Jihad against Tyrants." The first mission stated in the manual is "to end the godless
regimes and substitute Islamic states for them."[ 8] And in Spain, the detention of an Islamic commando uncovers 32 videotapes
depicting bomb attacks, the slashing of throats, and training camps. For all we know, the videos might be genuine training material,
but they don't seem very different from the staple thrillers found at the average video-store. The headline of that news report: "The
Bloody Videos of the Sleepy Cell," signals the horror of a reality which is located midway between the fairy tale and the thriller
movie. It is the little details, such as the date on the videos ("September 1. 1999"), or the Arabic language of the documents, that
endows this fictional reality with the stamp of truth. In October 6, The New York Times published an article in its op-ed section that
drew a parallel between the war on terrorism and the Cold War against communism. The article was type-set around a large image of a
book with the title "The Terrorist Manifesto by Osama bin Laden," thus invoking old phantoms in a new light. In the middle of the
image there is the trademark of terrorism, a ski mask — even though Islamist radicals don't use ski masks.
This "material culture" — these "things" — has, like the fetish, the power to incarnate the absent presence of terrorism. Their power
resides in the capacity to evoke a threatening presence about which we have little knowledge, a presence whose reality is deeply
entangled in ideological and popular fantasy.[ 9] What we are witnessing now, I want to suggest, is the materialization of this fictional
reality of Terrorism, as an actual enemy of war: the displacement of this fictional reality from the screens of the movie theaters onto
the screens of the television newscasts. What we are assisting now, and experiencing, is the entrapment of political life into virtual
reality, at least at a new scale; or as The New York Times put it: the line between government and show business is being blurred.[ 10]
An indication of how deeply the reality of terrorism is embedded into the scenarios of fantasy is the recruitment of Hollywood by the
U.S. military "to brain storm about possible terrorist targets and schemes in America and to offer solutions to those threats."[ 11] The
virtual reality of Terrorism has the potential to become an actual reality. If Terrorism remains the overarching enemy without
organizational, cultural or historical distinctions, and which becomes the pretext for all kinds of policing and military practices, then
we might very well find ourselves with a phenomenon of violence characterized by dose links between different organizations that
- 20 -
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney
might not have collaborated before. So too may the scenarios of spectacular violence provide the amplifying voice and claim to fame
of otherwise obscure and marginal organizations. What I am suggesting is that the war on Terrorism might indeed create the very

- 21 -
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney

Turns Case
enemy it is seeking to eradicate; it might create Terrorism in a new way. setting the stage of war not as state of exception, but rather as
a permanent state of affairs in which the state of exception has become the juridical norm and the legitimating right of police and
military intervention.[ 12] This permanent state of exception does not eliminate practices of terror; rather it instrumentalizes terrorism
for new kinds of social, political and economic production.

- 22 -
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney

Impact – All Violence

The strict us/them dichotomy of the affirmative turns Americas struggle against terrorism into a cosmic
struggle that legitimates every form of violence
Robert L Ivie, Indiana University Communications Professor and Department Chair, 2003, “Evil Enemy
Versus Agonistic Other: Rhetorical Constructions of Terrorism”, Ebsco
Rather than allying us with democracy, the rhetoric of evil makes us complicit with terrorism, for terrorism is constituted in and
sustained by a discourse of evil, especially in an era of what Robin Wright calls “sacred rage,” Mark Juergensmeyer refers to as
“religious violence,” Rahul Mahajan identifies as America’s “new crusade,” and George W. Bush renders in apocalyptic overtones as
America’s “calling, as a blessed country,” to protect and preserve “God’s gift to humanity” from the “designs of evil men” who
threaten to destroy freedom, liberty, and civilization with weapons of mass destruction.5 “The president’s faith in faith [was] readily
apparent,” writes Laurie Goodstein, “in his determination to vanquish Saddam Hussein.”6 He sees himself as “an instrument of
Providence,” observes David Gergen from the perspective of a political veteran who has served Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and
Clinton.7 Such religious language and attitudes are dangerously divisive, warns Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton
University: “If there is an axis of evil, that obviously places [President Bush] in the axis of good, and also means that anyone who
disagrees with the policies he is advocating is placed on the other side.”8 To vow triumph over evil is to fall prey to what Jeffrey
Simon labels “the terrorist trap” and thus to become hopelessly entangled in self-perpetuating and escalating “dramas of international
violence” which, in turn, “erode our basic democratic values” and doom the people to death and destruction.9 As Bruce Hoffman
stresses, terrorism is “fundamentally and inherently political” and “ineluctably about power: the pursuit of power, the acquisition
of power, and the use of power to achieve political change.”10 Terrorism in our time exacerbates this already deadly politics of
power by operating under a rhetorical spell of sacred duties and diabolical enemies. One side’s devil is the other side’s saving
grace in these dueling discourses of good and evil. On both sides of the divide, the dialectic of rival religious visions transforms
the act of killing civilians and/or destroying life-sustaining infrastructures into a necessary and legitimate consequence of
exercising righteous force over a demonic antagonist. In this way, the rhetoric of evil masks the politics of terrorism, a politics of
coercion represented as a sacred mission, a secular politics of perpetrating physical assaults on civilians to advance political purposes
in the name of a higher order.11 The rhetorical mask of evil makes it difficult for either partner in this escalating dance of death to
detect the disturbing parallel between terror and counter-terror. Thus, for instance, the Bush administration identifies terrorism as
America’s enemy, even defining it as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents,” and then baldly
warns that preemptive strikes taken by the U.S. to prevent the hostile acts of its adversaries should not be used by the “enemies of
civilization” as a “pretext for aggression.”12 One side’s terror and aggression is the other side’s protective reaction. Yet “warfare
against civilians” when “answered in kind” has been a “failed tactic” throughout human history, writes Caleb Can, because it brings
about “retaliation in kind” that “perpetuates a cycle of revenge and outrage” and plants the seeds of the avenger’s eventual downfall,
for “a nation must never think that it can use . . . the agents of terror when convenient and then be rid of them when they are no longer
needed” in the pursuit of political ends.13 By masking the politics of terror, the rhetoric of evil perpetuates the performance of
violence. The ritual of demonizing the enemy symbolically transforms death into salvation, earthly battles into a cosmic struggle, and
escalations of violence into an extermination of the evil Other. Both sides perform rituals of violence in reciprocal acts of
demonization that mark everyone as legitimate targets because even civilians are considered to be consenting and contributing
members of one evil order or the other. Thus, for example, today’s terrorism is “blowback” from America’s “triumphalist” attitude and
moralistic determination “to dominate the global scene” by projecting its military power and extending its social, political, and
economic system throughout the world, according to Chalmers Johnson; it is the lethal byproduct, he argues, of “reservoirs of
resentment against all Americans” for their arrogance and hegemony.14 This is the kind of resentment, according to Michael Doran,
that motivated many Muslims inside and outside of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network to place the United States on a par with
Genghis Khan.And, Doran reasons, bin Laden’s strikes against satanic America have exploited existing resentment and fomented
potential Islamic revolution by prompting U.S. military responses that callously kill Muslims in a crusade against terrorism and thus
look a lot like terror itself to the victims on the ground.15 To speak of evil, then, or of vanquishing evil enemies, is to step into a circle
of reciprocal violence which supplants diplomacy and democracy with the method of terror. Within the narrow confines of this
moralistic circle, war gains a presumption that frames, constrains, and distorts efforts to debate its wisdom, necessity, prudence, ethics,
or consequences in any given case. Instead of war being conceived as the last resort of a beleaguered people reluctantly defending
themselves against an overt act of aggression or even a clear and imminent threat to their national security, war considered in the
context of terrorism presumes a pre-existing state of danger sufficient to warrant preemption as a routine instrument for managing
foreign affairs.

- 23 -
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney

Impact – Biopolitics / Imperialism

This representation of terrorism enables imperialist violence to create zones outside of the law in order to
kill the terrorists more effectively.
C. Douglas Lummis, Teaches at Tsuda College, PhD Poli Sci), January 19, 2004, Zmag,
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=4853
The U.S. government continues to insist that the people captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere and presently being held in prison cells
(made from containers) on the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are not prisoners of war. If they were POWs, they would
have the rights guaranteed under the Geneva Convention of 1949, and by the customary laws of war based on centuries of precedent.
In particular, it would be illegal to put them on trial unless there was evidence that they had committed specific violations of the laws
of war. However, the U.S. government has asserted that the Geneva Convention does not apply to them and that they will be subject to
trial.
But if they don't have the rights of POWs, they don't have the rights of criminal suspects either. They are placed in the new legal
category established by President Bush's Executive Order of 13 November, 2001 under which they may be tried by military tribunal.
(Of course, there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution or criminal law that gives the President the authority to establish such tribunals. It
seems that the President simply pulled the authority out of thin air.) The order states, "it is not practicable to apply in military
commissions under this order the principles of law and the rules of evidence generally recognized in the trial of criminal cases in the
United States district courts." (Section 1, f) That is, the basic rights of criminal suspects guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution and
U.S. criminal law and precedent are to be denied.
Among these are the right to be informed of what you are being detained for so you can contest this in court, the right of Habeas
Corpus (under which if the prosecutor is unable within a reasonable period to show evidence you have committed a crime, you must
be released), the right to confront and question witnesses (for government witnesses may be spies, and if they show their faces in court
they can't be used again), the right to see the evidence being used against you (some of it may be state secrets), the right to consult a
lawyer, the right to trial by a jury of your peers, the right to appeal to a higher court, the right to an open trial, and (as all these rights
are taken away before any judicial determination of guilt or innocence) the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. This last
is especially mind-boggling. The prisoners are trapped in a kind of backward tautology: they are placed in the category of "terrorist"
(or as U.S. officials have come to put it, "illegal combatant"). But how did they get put in that category? Through what legal
procedure, and under what evidence? Answer: there's no need to follow any legal procedure, or show any evidence. Why not?
Because they are terrorists.
Thus these prisoners are placed in an impossible position, much like that of Joseph K in Kafka's The Trial: "You are accused of being
guilty. We are not in a position to tell you, guilty of what, nor who your accusers are, nor when, if ever, your trial will take place.
Defend yourself as best you can."
When a human rights lawyer appealed to a judge to issue a writ of habeas corpus for the Guantanamo prisoners, the judge refused on
the ground that U.S. criminal law has no jurisdiction in Cuba.* With this we could understand why Guantanamo was selected for the
concentration camp. U.S. law doesn't apply there, Cuban law doesn't apply there, and the law of the prisoners' home countries doesn't
apply there. They have been brought into a space where no law exists for them at all. Occasionally we read hints in the newspapers
that other prisoners may be being held in other undisclosed locations, perhaps on U.S. warships at sea where they would also be
outside the protection of any law. (But if U.S. law doesn't apply to these prisoners, under what authority are they being held?)
Critics of the military tribunals are concerned that, even though the executive order exempts U.S. citizens (Section 2, a) once it
becomes established that foreign "terrorists" can be tried in these star chamber courts (or imprisoned indefinitely with no trial at all),
soon it will be possible to treat U.S. citizens in the same way. And in fact this has already begun, in the cases of Yasser Hamdi and
Jose Padilla. This is extremely important, but there is a larger question: what gives the U.S. government the right to "arrest" foreign
nationals on foreign territory, bring them forcibly on to U.S.-controlled territory, and place them on trial in U.S. military courts? It is
clear that the U.S. is now claiming this right. In his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, President Bush said that while
some governments will cooperate in the War against Terrorism, "some governments will be timid in the face of terror. And make no
mistake about it: If they do not act, America will." In short, if a government does not arrest and turn over the people within its
territory that the U.S. has labeled terrorist, the U.S. will send in the military and/or CIA and make the arrests itself. This is no wild
speculation, it is precisely what the U.S. did in Afghanistan. No other government has the power to arrest foreign nationals in foreign
countries. The U.N. does not have that power. The International Criminal Court does not have that power. The power to arrest is an
aspect of the power to govern. In assuming that power, the U.S. government is taking upon itself, not as a figure of speech or
hyperbolic accusation but in a real and concrete sense, the beginnings of the power of world governance. But since this power was not
granted to the U.S. by any treaty, convention, or international organization but was unilaterally assumed, the accurate term is not
"world government", but "empire".

- 24 -
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney
Impact – Imperialism
Identifying the “terrorist” other utilizes imperialism to promote the “non-terrorists” and subordinate and
exterminate all non-Western culture.
Makau Mutua, prof of Law and director of the Human Rights Center State University of New York @ Buffalo
School of Law, 2002, Buffalo Human Rights Law Review, “Terrorism and Human Rights: Power, Culture, and
Subordination” l/n
In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the United States has led the Western and European worlds towards a stronger consensus
that re-emphasizes the centrality of American -- and Western -- predestination in geopolitics. The September 11 attacks on the United
States have become the pretext for the renewal of a world order centered on Eurocentric norms and processes of global governance
and domination. Nothing more poignantly captures this reality than the repeated warning by senior American officials: "you are either
with us, or you are against us." The "us-and-them" dichotomy has a familiar ring and logic in the history of the West and of
international law. That refrain has remained virtually unbroken in the history of the discipline and its practice. In fact, one cannot
understand the history of international law without locating it in the colonial project, which gave birth to it. n1 That period, which I
call the Age of Europe, denotes a historical and philosophical paradigm; that of European hegemony imposed over the globe,
particularly the South, over the last five centuries, culminating in the domination of the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific.
International law is the legal fiction that was deployed to create and justify the Age of Europe.
The September 11 attacks -- and the subsequent declaration of the so-called global war on terrorism -- provide the fuel for the further
consolidation of globalization. States and other international law-making fora, such as the United Nations, have come under intense
pressure from the United States and its European allies to subordinate all other interests and questions, no matter how important and
urgent, to a new international security-driven order geared toward the elimination of "global terrorism." Since the September 11
attacks have been presented as an assault on Western civilization, it is important to unpack the meaning of the term. Broken [*2] down
to its bare bones, Western civilization denotes a complex of political, cultural, and economic arrangements which are rooted in liberal
theory and philosophy. The current manifestation of that civilization seems to require some form of political democracy and a free-
market system at home. The Judeo-Christian cultural and moral values of the West form the core social bases of Western civilization.
It is out of these traditions that the current post-1945 universal human rights corpus was constructed.
This paper argues that the reassertion of American and European domination of the globe -- under the pretext of the global war on
terrorism -- will have profound and long-lasting implications on human rights. It crushes dissent and virtually eliminates any
opportunities for a robust dialogue on the scope of human rights, their cultural relevance, and the strategies for their enforcement.
Secondly, and more importantly, the war on terrorism gives the United States the ability to define its preferred human rights, and to
exclude and narrow the scope of others. Third, it allows the United States to define the opponents of its version of human rights as
enemies or supporters and sympathizers of global terrorism. In this "us-and-them" dialectic, the project for the reconstruction and
multi-culturalization of human rights will become increasingly difficult -- if not impossible -- as human rights are more openly defined
and identified with the vision of the Bush administration. But there is hope beneath this mountain of despair. The unabashed and
unbridled exercise of American power over the globe should remove the last pretenses of any consensual processes for constructing
the universality of rights and the neutrality of the institutions of global governance. Advocates for a truly universal human rights
doctrine should seize the moment to underscore these deep and abiding imbalances in power. And there could be a bonus. Although it
is highly unlikely, the official guardians of human rights may develop some sympathy for the position of those of who have critiqued
the human rights corpus for its cultural and political biases.
But this paper also contends that the global war on terrorism targets non-Western peoples, cultures, and causes, particularly where they
diverge from -- or resist subordination to -- certain Western interests. The war on terrorism is mainly focused on certain Islamic
traditions and political projects. This is particularly the case where some Arab and Muslim political actors and movements deem
American policies in the Middle East and the Muslim world detrimental. Whether one likes it or not, the war on terrorism has exposed
a deep cultural divide between the West and many in the Islamic and Arab World. In this contest, the West has not been shy to put
forward its script of human history. It is a text that emphatically warns that the summit of human civilization can only exist within the
perimeters of liberal theory and philosophy. It seems a foregone conclusion: Muslim [*3] societies, like all other non-Western
societies, must modernize, democratize, liberalize, and adopt open, free market systems. The message is loud and clear. Islamic
societies must Westernize or perish.

- 25 -
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney

AT: Alt Doesn’t Solve

Rejecting the rhetoric of the war on terrorism that the affirmative embraces is the only means to escape to
construct of the “terrorist” other and prevent extermination.
Makau Mutua, prof of Law and director of the Human Rights Center State University of New York @ Buffalo
School of Law, 2002, Buffalo Human Rights Law Review, “Terrorism and Human Rights: Power, Culture, and
Subordination” l/n
Nothing in the recent past has posed a greater challenge to human rights than the war on terrorism. Traditional human rights advocates
within the United Nations and human rights organizations, even in the West, are now faced with new limitations on the scope of their
advocacy. Governments of all political stripes are now freer to pursue more muscular policies towards their dissenters. Non-Western
human rights thinkers -- especially those who critique the corpus as Eurocentric and challenge its universality -- have been put on the
defensive because of suggestions that their views may further polarize cultural and political divides and harm the march toward
universality. They have also been accused of stoking and fueling anti-Western feelings, ideologies, and causes. In this climate, it will
be difficult to pursue honest and robust conversations about the cultural inclusiveness -- and exclusiveness -- of human rights. In a
word, the project of the genuine universalization or multi-culturalization of human rights has become [*12] even more of an uphill
task than before. But we should not lose sight of what has to be done to construct a culturally-plural human rights corpus.
Before the September 11 attacks, the promise of human rights to the Third World was that problems of cruel conditions of life, state
instability, and other social crises could be contained, if not substantially eliminated, through the rule of law, grants of individual
rights, and a state based on constitutionalism. Through human rights, the Third World was asked to follow a particular script of
history. That script places hope for the future of the international community in liberal nationalism and democratic internal self-
determination. The impression given is that a unitary international community is possible within this template if only the Third World
followed suit by climbing up the civilizational ladder. But this historical model, as now diffused through human rights, cannot respond
to the needs of the Third World absent some radical rethinking and restructuring of the international order. The war on terror does not
change that fact.
The human rights movement must abandon the savage-savior-victim metaphor if there is going to be real hope in a genuine
international discourse on rights. The relentless efforts to universalize an essentially European corpus of human rights through Western
crusades cannot succeed. Nor will demonizing those who resist it. The critiques of the corpus from Africans, Asians, Muslims, Hindus,
and a host of critical thinkers from around the world are the one avenue through which human rights can be redeemed and truly
universalized. This multi-culturalization of the corpus could be attempted in a number of areas: balancing between individual and
group rights, giving more substance to social and economic rights, relating rights to duties, and addressing the relationship between
the corpus and economic systems. These substantive critiques must be carried out with urgency, otherwise the war on terror will
destroy whatever consensus has developed to date.

- 26 -
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney

AT: Alt Doesn’t Solve

The alternatives rhetorical analysis allows true insights into violence
Robert L Ivie, Indiana University Communications Professor and Department Chair, 2003, “Evil Enemy
Versus Agonistic Other: Rhetorical Constructions of Terrorism”, Ebsco
Achieving a democratic perspective by addressing the Other agonistically, hence as a consubstantial rival, requires rhetorical
flexibility unlike the rigid rhetoric of pre-empting evil. The comic corrective of the democratic idiom is enacted by seeing things for
what they are not, both by pointing out similarities where others see only difference and by underscoring differences when others treat
similarities as identities, that is, as identical and essentially the same. This is a rhetoric of metaphor and irony which keeps boundaries
appropriately fuzzy within a prevailing framework of interpretation and political motivation. Fuzzy boundaries are conducive to
locating points of identification between adversaries who position themselves on either side of a dividing line. They make it possible
for rivals to become concurrently adverse and consubstantial, which is to say suitably conflicted and democratically inflected.

We must expose the symbols and representations inherent in the word “terrorism.” Only then can we
prevent dominant discourse from taking over our collective conscience.
Robert L Ivie, Indiana University Communications Professor and Department Chair, 3/25/02 “Profiling
Terrorism” http://www.indiana.edu/~ivieweb/profiling.htm
We are language-using and language-misusing beings destined to interpret and reinterpret our world through the fog of symbols and
with an eye toward adapting in the best way possible to ever-changing circumstances. To persevere, we must remain to some degree
in a state of rhetorical becoming, forever skeptical of representations of evil, so that we might act with maximum consciousness and
with the least possible harm to ourselves and others. As Nietzsche noted, language is inherently rhetorical in its articulation of
perspective and motive.[8] All we can hope to do is to hold our limited perspectives accountable to one another, to retain an agonistic
edge, especially where the presence of one relatively narrow point of view or profile threatens to overtake our collective conscience
and dominate our political consciousness. Thus, we should stand ever-ready to critique the language that constitutes extreme attitudes
of Othering, and, in the immediate case, to profile the prevailing profile of terrorism.

The word “terrorism” is inherently subjective. It invokes fear and support for the status quo policy of
viewing terrorism through the prism of war. We must move away from the object of the criticism to solve.
Robert L Ivie, Indiana University Communications Professor and Department Chair, 3/25/02 “Profiling
Terrorism” http://www.indiana.edu/~ivieweb/profiling.htm
Declaring a war on international terrorism and totalizing the divide between good and evil may well be the worst attitude for meeting
the present challenge. Yet, that is exactly the posture President George W. Bush has taken with the overwhelming support, so far, of
the American public, perhaps because our options seem so limited. The president’s profile of terrorism, it goes almost without saying,
is the single most influential interpretation of the danger at hand. It is his role and the responsibility of his office to shape public
opinion, to put events in perspective, and to set the nation on a sensible course of action. “Terrorism is a complex and frightening
experience for the general public,” Simon notes, “and it becomes natural to look toward Washington for guidance and reassurance.”
The president’s words are magnified by the exigency of the moment and the prominence of his position of leadership. He can either
fuel the crisis in “a highly charged emotional and political atmosphere” or help defuse it in order to avoid falling prey to the terrorist
trap. He can raise unrealistic expectations, which is the easiest course to follow in the short run, or he can undertake the more difficult
task of guiding the nation steadily in the service of long-term interests. The latter approach requires a balanced and more complex
perspective on terrorism; the easier and more dangerous course is to declare a war that promises to defeat international terrorism even
though realistically “terrorism is an endless conflict.”[11] Unfortunately, the president has chosen to view terrorism through the prism
of war. He has remained consistent since September 11 in his condemnation of terrorists as agents of evil and foes of freedom and
has stayed on message to the point of sheer redundancy bolstered by celebrity spectacles, solemn memorials, and patriotic witnessing
at major sporting events and other public occasions. The primary burden of citizenship in this war against terrorism is to wave the flag
and exercise the courage to consume.

- 27 -
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney

Aff
Labeling terror crime causes more terrorism
Alan Dershowitz, Professor of Law @ Harvard, 1/16/06,
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/01/16/terrorism_confusing_cause_
effect/
In the final scene of the movie, Avner asks his Mossad handler why Israel killed the Black September terrorists instead of arresting
them. The answer, never given in the film, is that the arrest method had failed. Arrested terrorists were never tried and imprisoned for
long. Between 1968 and 1975, 204 terrorists were arrested outside of the Middle East. By the close of 1975, only three were still in
prison. George Habash, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (a Marxist terrorist group responsible for some of
the Palestinians' most brutal mass killing), noted that Europe's refusal to imprison terrorists meant that, when it came to plotting
hijackings and bombing, ''success [was] 100 percent assured." Take the example of PFLP hijacker Leila Khaled. In 1969, Khaled
hijacked a TWA plane. She was arrested but soon released. Only a year later, in September 1970, she led another hijacking operation,
this time on an El Al flight to New York. Khaled was held in a British prison where, by her own account, she was treated ''as if I were
an official state guest." The British released her -- after her second hijacking! -- before she had spent even one month in jail. Both
Israel and America pressured the British to extradite Khaled to Israel to stand trial. England refused, aligning itself with every other
European country that had refused to extradite terrorists for trial in Israel. And it is not only Israel whose extradition requests have
been utterly frustrated. In 1985, for example, Italy allowed Achille Lauro mastermind hijacker Abu Abbas to flee safely to Tunisia,
rather than sending him to the United States to face charges of killing American tourist Leon Klinghoffer. The best evidence of why
the arrest method advocated by ''Munich" would not work was provided by Black September's own demands in Munich -- that Israel
free more than 200 imprisoned terrorists. Israel understood that releasing terrorists would encourage future terrorism. Without
European cooperation, Israel stood little chance of curbing international terrorism. Sure enough, Germany released the surviving
Black September terrorists less than two months after Munich, when Palestinian terrorists ''hijacked" a Lufthansa plane. (According to
the senior aide to Germany's interior minister, it is ''probably true" that the ''hijacking" was orchestrated as part of a German-
Palestinian scheme to free the terrorists.) It was the German decision to free these killers to kill again that strengthened Golda Meir's
resolve to take the steps necessary to protect her citizens, but you wouldn't know that from watching ''Munich."

They have no offense-their rhetoric makes every kind of violence inevitable and literally precludes peace.
Robert L Ivie, Indiana University Communications Professor and Department Chair, 2003, “Evil Enemy
Versus Agonistic Other: Rhetorical Constructions of Terrorism”, Ebsco
The audacity of such power to coerce and distract in the name of eradicating evil is such that it brands anybody that might demur as an
irrelevant debating society in the case of the United Nations, as suffering a crisis of credibility in the case of
dissent within the NATO alliance, as passé in the case of “old Europe,” as shrinking in the heat of crisis or lacking
the courage of leadership, and so on. The divide between right and wrong is absolute with no shades of gray or any room for
disagreement. Minimal evidence is required to confirm the existence of hidden diabolical weapons, a satanic dictator’s
conspiracy with terrorist organizations, and the futility of arms inspections relentlessly foiled by deceit and
deception. How does one contain a diabolical dictator when evil knows no bounds? How can one expect to
do the right thing on the cheap or without incurring a regrettable loss of life abroad and perhaps even at
home? And how can anyone rightfully accuse America of imperialism when its humble mission is to bring
the gift of democracy and the promise of prosperity to troubled lands? When evil stalks the civilized world, the pre-
emption of tyrants and terrorists is a defense of freedom, not a distraction or a war of aggression. Trump, trump, and trump. Any
argument one might advance on behalf of peace is tricked in the game of fighting evil, a game that makes the United States complicit
in the spiraling cycle of terror by legitimizing the preemptive killing of Iraqi civilians as the chosen means to political ends.

- 28 -
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney

Aff
Their “critique” is hip posturing that implicitly promotes colonial ideals and victimization. Only the aff has
real solutions
Victor Davis Hanson, Professor of Classical Studies at CSU Fresno, City Journal, Spring 2004,
http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_2_the_fruits.html
Rather than springing from realpolitik, sloth, or fear of oil cutoffs, much of our appeasement of Middle Eastern terrorists derived from a new sort of 
anti­Americanism that thrived in the growing therapeutic society of the 1980s and 1990s. Though the abrupt collapse of communism was a dilemma for 
the Left, it opened as many doors as it shut. To be sure, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, few Marxists could argue for a state­controlled economy 
or mouth the old romance about a workers’ paradise—not with scenes of East German families crammed into smoking clunkers lumbering over potholed roads, like 
American pioneers of old on their way west. But if the creed of the socialist republics was impossible to take seriously in either economic or political terms, such a 
collapse of doctrinaire statism did not discredit the gospel of forced egalitarianism and resentment against prosperous capitalists. Far from it. If Marx receded from 
economics departments, his spirit reemerged among our intelligentsia in the novel guises of post­structuralism, new historicism, multiculturalism, 
and all the other dogmas whose fundamental tenet was that white male capitalists had systematically oppressed women, minorities, 
and Third World people in countless insidious ways. The font of that collective oppression, both at home and abroad, was the rich, corporate, Republican, and white 
United States. The fall of the Soviet Union enhanced these newer post­colonial and liberation fields of study by immunizing their promulgators from charges of fellow­
traveling or being dupes of Russian expansionism. Communism’s demise likewise freed these trendy ideologies from having to offer some wooden, 
unworkable Marxist alternative to the West; thus they could happily remain entirely critical, sarcastic, and cynical without any obligation to suggest something better, as 
witness the nihilist signs at recent protest marches proclaiming: “I Love Iraq, Bomb Texas.” From writers like Arundhati Roy and Michel Foucault (who anointed 
Khomeini “a kind of mystic saint” who would usher in a new “political spirituality” that would “transfigure” the world) and from old standbys like Frantz Fanon and 
Jean­Paul Sartre (“to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time”), there filtered 
down a vague notion that the United States and the West in general were responsible for Third World misery in ways that transcended 
the dull old class struggle. Endemic racism and the legacy of colonialism, the oppressive multinational corporation and the humiliation and erosion of 
indigenous culture brought on by globalization and a smug, self­important cultural condescension—all this and more explained poverty and despair, whether in 
Damascus, Teheran, or Beirut. There was victim status for everybody, from gender, race, and class at home to colonialism, imperialism, and hegemony abroad. 
Anyone could play in these “area studies” that cobbled together the barrio, the West Bank, and the “freedom fighter” into some sloppy global union of the oppressed—a 
 far hipper enterprise than rehashing  Das   Kapital   or listening to a six­hour harangue from Fidel. Of course, pampered Western intellectuals since 
Diderot have always dreamed up a “noble savage,” who lived in harmony with nature precisely because of his distance from the corruption 
of Western civilization. But now this fuzzy romanticism had an updated, political edge: the bearded killer and wild­eyed savage were not merely 
better than we because they lived apart in a pre­modern landscape. No: they had a right to strike back and kill modernizing Westerners who had intruded 
into and disrupted their better world—whether Jews on Temple Mount, women in Westernized dress in Teheran, Christian missionaries in Kabul, capitalist profiteers in 
Islamabad, whiskey­drinking oilmen in Riyadh, or miniskirted tourists in Cairo.  An Ayatollah Khomeini who turned back the clock on female 
emancipation in Iran, who murdered non­Muslims, and who refashioned Iranian state policy to hunt down, torture, and kill liberals 
nevertheless seemed to liberal Western eyes as preferable to the Shah—a Western­supported anti­communist, after all, who was engaged in the 
messy, often corrupt task of bringing Iran from the tenth to the twentieth century, down the arduous, dangerous path that, as in Taiwan or South Korea, 
might eventually lead to a consensual, capitalist society like our own.  

- 29 -
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney

Aff
The neg’s nonjudgementalism justifies atrocities and promotes inaction
Victor Davis Hanson, Professor of Classical Studies at CSU Fresno, City Journal, Spring 2004,
http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_2_the_fruits.html
This nonjudgmentalism—essentially a form of nihilism—deemed everything from Sudanese female circumcision to honor killings on the West 
Bank merely “different” rather than odious. Anyone who has taught freshmen at a state university can sense the fuzzy thinking of our undergraduates: most come to 
us prepped in high schools not to make “value judgments” about “other” peoples who are often “victims” of American “oppression.” Thus, before female­hating 
psychopath Mohamed Atta piloted a jet into the World Trade Center, neither Western intellectuals nor their students would have taken 
him to task for what he said or condemned him as hypocritical for his parasitical existence on Western society. Instead, without logic but with plenty of 
romance, they would more likely have excused him as a victim of globalization or of the biases of American foreign policy. They would have 
deconstructed Atta’s promotion of anti­Semitic, misogynist, Western­hating thought, as well as his conspiracies with Third World criminals, 
as anything but a danger and a pathology to be remedied by deportation or incarceration

Hardline policies are the only way to preserve lasting peace. We outweigh their impacts, and turn the
terminal genocide claim.
Victor Davis Hanson, Professor of Classical Studies at CSU Fresno, City Journal, Spring 2004,
http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_2_the_fruits.html
The twentieth century should have taught the citizens of  liberal democracies the  catastrophic consequences of placating tyrants
   . British 
and French restraint over the occupation of the Rhineland, the Anschluss, the absorption of the Czech Sudetenland, and the incorporation of 
Bohemia and Moravia did not win gratitude but rather Hitler’s contempt for their weakness. Fifty million dead, the Holocaust, and 
the near destruction of European civilization were the wages of “appeasement”—a term that early­1930s liberals proudly embraced as far more 
enlightened than the old idea of “deterrence” and “military readiness.”

American self-flagellation makes the terrorists hate us even more.

Victor Davis Hanson, Professor of Classical Studies at CSU Fresno, City Journal, Spring 2004,
http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_2_the_fruits.html
Our enemies and Middle Eastern “friends” alike sneered at our self­flagellation. In 1991, at great risk, the United States freed Kuwait from Iraq 
and ended its status as the 19th satrapy of Saddam Hussein—only to watch the restored kingdom ethnically cleanse over a third of a million 
Palestinians. But after the murder of 3,000 Americans in 2001, Kuwaitis, in a February 2002 Gallup poll (and while they lobbied OPEC to reduce output and 
jack up prices), revealed an overwhelming distaste for Americans—indeed the highest levels of anti­Americanism in the Arab world. And 
these ethnic cleansers of Palestinians cited America’s purportedly unfair treatment of the Palestinians (recipients of accumulated billions in American aid) as a prime 
cause of their dislike of us.

Retaliation is the only way to prevent endless cycles of violence

Victor Davis Hanson, Professor of Classical Studies at CSU Fresno, City Journal, Spring 2004,
http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_2_the_fruits.html
What went wrong with the West—and with the United States in particular—when not just the classical but especially the recent antecedents to September 11, 
from the Iranian hostage­taking to the attack on the USS Cole, were so clear? Though Americans in an election year, legitimately concerned about our war dead, may 
now be divided over the Iraqi occupation, polls nevertheless show a surprising consensus that the many precursors to the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings 
were acts of war, not police matters. Roll the tape backward from the USS Cole in 2000, through the bombing of the Khobar Towers and the U.S. embassies in East 
Africa in 1998, the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the destruction of the American embassy and annex in Beirut in 1983, the mass murder of 241 U.S. 
Marine peacekeepers asleep in their Lebanese barracks that same year, and assorted kidnappings and gruesome murders of American citizens and diplomats (including 
TWA Flight 800, Pan Am 103, William R. Higgins, Leon Klinghoffer, Robert Dean Stethem, and CIA operative William Francis Buckley), until we arrive at the 
Iranian hostage­taking of November 1979: that debacle is where we first saw the strange brew of Islamic fascism, autocracy, and Middle East 
state terrorism—and failed to grasp its menace, condemn it, and go to war against it. That lapse, worth meditating upon in this 25th anniversary year 
- 30 -
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney
of Khomeinism, then set the precedent that such aggression against the United States was better adjudicated as a matter of law than settled by 
war. Criminals were to be understood, not punished; and we, not our enemies, were at fault for our past behavior. Whether Carter’s impotence sprang 
from his deep­seated moral distrust of using American power unilaterally or from real remorse over past American actions in the cold war or even from his innate 
pessimism about the military capability of the United States mattered little to the hostage takers in Teheran, who for some 444 days humiliated the United States through 
a variety of public demands for changes in U.S. foreign policy, the return of the exiled Shah, and reparations. But  if we know  how
    we failed to respond in the
    
 last three decades, do we yet grasp  why     we were so afraid to act decisively at these earlier junctures, which might have stopped the
    
chain of events that would lead to the al­Qaida terrorist acts of September 11? Our failure was never due to a lack of the necessary wealth or military 
resources, but rather to  a deeply ingrained assumption that we  should   not  retaliate—a hesitancy al­Qaida perceives and plays upon
   . 

Aff
Criminal justice is insufficient to stop terrorism and amounts to appeasement
Victor Davis Hanson, Professor of Classical Studies at CSU Fresno, City Journal, Spring 2004,
http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_2_the_fruits.html
Even when Middle Easterners regularly blew us up, the Clinton administration, unwilling to challenge the new myth of Muslim victimhood, 
transformed Middle Eastern terrorists bent on destroying America into wayward individual criminals who did not spring from a 
pathological culture. Thus, Clinton treated the first World Trade Center bombing as only a criminal justice matter—which of course allowed 
the United States to avoid confronting the issue and taking on the messy and increasingly unpopular business the Bush administration 
has been engaged in since September 11. Clinton dispatched FBI agents, not soldiers, to Yemen and Saudi Arabia after the attacks on the USS Cole and the 
Khobar Towers. Yasser Arafat, responsible in the 1970s for the murder of a U.S. diplomat in the Sudan, turned out to be the most frequent foreign visitor to the Clinton 
Oval Office. If the Clintonian brand of appeasement reflected both a deep­seated tolerance for Middle Eastern extremism and a reluctance to 
wake comfortable Americans up to the danger of a looming war, he was not the only one naive about the threat of Islamic fascism. Especially culpable was the 
Democratic Party at large, whose post­Vietnam foreign policy could not sanction the use of American armed force to protect national interests but only to accomplish 
purely humanitarian ends as in the interventions in Haiti, Somalia, and Bosnia. Indeed, the recent Democratic primaries reveal just how far this disturbing trend has 
evolved: the foreign­policy positions of John Kerry and Howard Dean on Iraq and the Middle East were far closer to those of extremists like Al Sharpton and Dennis 
Kucinich than to current American policy under George W. Bush. Indeed, buffoons or conspiracy theorists like Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, and Al Franken often 
turned up on the same stage as would­be presidents. When Moore, while endorsing Wesley Clark, called an American president at a time of war a “deserter,” when the 
mendacious Sharpton lectured his smiling fellow candidates on the Bush administration’s “lies” about Iraq, and when Al Gore labeled the president’s action in Iraq a 
“betrayal” of America, the surrender of the mainstream Democrats to the sirens of extremism was complete. Again, past decorum and moderation go out the 
window when the pretext is saving indigenous peoples from American oppression. The consensus for appeasement that led to 
September 11, albeit suppressed for nearly two years by outrage over the murder of 3,000, has reemerged in criticism over the ongoing reconstruction 
 of Iraq and George Bush’s prosecution of the War on Terror.   

- 31 -
Terror Talk
William Huang
DDI ‘08
Kernoff/Olney

AT: Terror Impacts

http://polisci.osu.edu/faculty/jmueller/APSACHGO.PDF

- 32 -