Heg Good K

Hegemony Good Kritik Little Rock Central 2010-111/33 Ian Wren

IndexSTRATEGY.............................................................................................................................................................................2

***Shells .................................................................................................................................................................................. 2 1NC Shell.................................................................................................................................................................................3

***Top SHELF ....................................................................................................................................................................... 7 2NC O/V..................................................................................................................................................................................8Intellectual Indict.....................................................................................................................................................................9War Good...............................................................................................................................................................................10

***LINKS ............................................................................................................................................................................. 10 Link—Criticism/Multiculturalism.........................................................................................................................................11Link—Rejection of Western Power.......................................................................................................................................12Link—Collateral Damage......................................................................................................................................................13IL/National Pride K2 Solve War............................................................................................................................................14IL/A2: Global Movements Solve...........................................................................................................................................15

***Imperialism GOOD ........................................................................................................................................................ 15 Imperialism Good—Generic..................................................................................................................................................16Imperialism Good—Separatism.............................................................................................................................................18Imperialism Good—Terrorism..............................................................................................................................................20Imperialism Good—Space.....................................................................................................................................................21

***Threats DEBATE ........................................................................................................................................................... 21 2NC Threats Real...................................................................................................................................................................222NC Threats Offense.............................................................................................................................................................24

***A2’S ................................................................................................................................................................................. 24 A2: Ks of Heg........................................................................................................................................................................25A2: “derp that’s the link”.......................................................................................................................................................26A2: Link Turn “We solve violence”......................................................................................................................................27A2: Social Construction.........................................................................................................................................................29A2: Realism Bad....................................................................................................................................................................30A2: We’re Patriotic................................................................................................................................................................31Iraq = Not that bad.................................................................................................................................................................32

Freedom fries//never forget


STRATEGY

This argument basically states that whining about America collapses our willingness to preserve hegemony and address existential threats. And that aligning ourselves with heg and being proud Americans solves. I’d suggest that you read the 1NC/2NC Blocks to get a better grasp.

Almost everything you need to win in order to win this argument boils down to this:

A world without hegemony would be net worse than the squo.

You really need to stress this argument. K affs are generally going to be harms-centric, meaning they like to talk a lot about the dangers of the status quo but don’t really articulate well what the plan mechanism does/what the world looks like post-plan. You need to play off of this vagueness, seeing as they probably won’t be prepared to do impact calc this abstract. You need to be winning that threats are real in order to do this calculus, obviously. Given that this entire file is cut from guys who piss and bleed military history, it shouldn’t be hard to find some empirical examples of threats.

And remember, these are pre-fiat impacts.

If they’re defending the instrumental adoption of a plan, you need to faceroll them on this point. Don’t grant them any sort of weight to Ks of heg if they don’t have some sort of pre-fiat mechanism to solve those Ks.

If they aren’t defending instrumental adoption, you just need to prove that extinction outweighs.

Also, this file is not meant to be any sort of comprehensive answer to K shenanigans or a heg backfile. You should have your respective evidence on those questions ready to be pulled from elsewhere.

HEG IS GOOD. MAKE US PROUD, GENTLEMEN.



1NC Shell

The Affirmative’s criticism of American policy is dangerous – it contributes to isolationism and the eventual collapse of U.S. primacy

Robert Kagan, Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and PhD in American History from American University, “The Benevolent

Empire,” Foreign Policy. Summer, 1998. http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=275, Accessed Online: 09/11/2008. //wku-tjs

Those contributing to the growing chorus of antihegemony and multipolarity may know they are playing a dangerous game, one that needs to be conducted with the utmost care, as French leaders did during the Cold War, lest the entire international system come crashing down around them. What they may not have adequately calculated, however, is the possibility

that Americans will not respond as wisely as they generally did during the Cold War.Americans and their leaders should not take all this sophisticated whining about U.S. hegemony too seriously. They certainly should not take it more seriously than the whiners themselves do. But, of course, Americans are taking it seriously. In the United States these days, the lugubrious guilt trip of post-Vietnam liberalism is echoed even by conservatives, with William Buckley, Samuel Huntington, and James Schlesinger all decrying American "hubris," "arrogance," and "imperialism." Clinton administration officials, in between speeches exalting America as the "indispensable" nation, increasingly behave as if what is

truly indispensable is the prior approval of China, France, and Russia for every military action. Moreover, at another level, there is a stirring of neo-isolationism in America today, a mood that nicely complements the view among many Europeans that America is meddling too much in everyone else's business and taking too little time to mind its own. The existence of the Soviet Union disciplined Americans and made them see that

their enlightened self-interest lay in a relatively generous foreign policy. Today, that discipline is no longer present.In other words, foreign grumbling about American hegemony would be merely amusing, were it not for the very real possibility that too many Americans will forget —- even if most of the rest of the world does not —- just how important continued American dominance is to the preservation of a reasonable level of international security and prosperity . World leaders may want to keep this in mind when they pop the champagne corks in celebration of the next American humbling.

This intellectual arrogance will get us killed – the debating and whining needs to end so we can face realistic threats

Victor Davis Hanson, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Professor Emeritus at California University, Fresno, Ph.D. from Stanford, “We Could Still Lose.”

National Review Online. August 11, 2003. http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3050721.html, Accessed Online: 09/11/2008. //wku-tjs

If one were to collate the news reports about the Mosul shootout, the lessons would be as follows: read two mass killers their Miranda rights; dodge their bullets when they shoot first; capture them alive; let Europeans cross-examine them in the Hague; lose no friendlies in the operation; do not disturb the residents next door; protect the Husseins’ victims from such oppressors (but without cracking their plaster); and in general remember that the entire scene will be filmed and then broadcast as Cops rather than as Hell Is for Heroes. I am not suggesting that we ignore the real dangers involved in ethnic profiling or discount the moral issues that arise from killing our enemy leaders and disseminating gross pictures of their corpses. And, of course, we

should seek to distinguish Baathist culprits from ordinary Iraqis. My point is rather that, because we are products of an affluent and leisured West, we have a special burden to remember how tenuous and fragile civilization remains outside our suburbs. Most of us don’t fear much from the fatwa of a murderous mullah, and few have had our sisters shredded before our eyes in one of

Uday’s brush chippers—much less ever seen chemical warfare trucks hosing down our block, in the same way that crop dusters fogged our backyards. Instead, we have the leisure to engage in utopian musing, assured that our economy, our unseen soldiers, or our system working on autopilot will always ensure us such prerogatives. And in the la-la land of Washington and New York, it is especially easy to forget that we are not even like our own soldiers in Iraq, now sleeping outside without toilets and air conditioners, eating dehydrated food, and trying to distinguish killers from innocents. What does all this mean? Western societies from ancient Athens to imperial Rome to the French republic rarely collapsed because of a shortage of resources or because foreign enemies proved too numerous or formidable in arms—even when those

enemies were grim Macedonians or Germans. Rather, in times of peace and prosperity there arose an unreal view of the world beyond their borders, one that was the product of insularity brought about by success, and an intellectual arrogance that for some can be the unfortunate by-product of an enlightened society. I think we are indulging in this unreal hypercriticism—even apart from the election season antics of our politicians—because we are not being gassed or shot or even left hot or hungry. September 11 no longer evokes an image of incinerated firefighters, innocents leaping out of skyscrapers, or the stench of flesh and melted plastic but rather squabbles over architectural designs, lawsuits, snarling over John Ashcroft’s new statutes, or concerns about being too rude to the Arab street. Such smug dispensation—as profoundly amoral as it is—provides us, on the cheap and at a safe distance, with a sense of moral worth. Or perhaps censuring from the bleachers enables us to feel superior to those less fortunate who are still captive to their primordial appetites. We prefer to cringe at the thought that others like to see proof of their killers’ deaths, prefer to shoot rather than die capturing a mass murderer, and welcome a generic profile of those who wish to kill them

en masse. We should take stock of this dangerous and growing mind-set—and remember that wealthy, sophisticated societies

Freedom fries//never forget***Shells


like our own are rarely overrun. They simply implode—whining and debating to the end, even as they pass away.



Ceding to the affirmative’s antics is suicide – the only risk of international violence is a world in which the U.S. succumbs to internal criticism

Thomas Sowell, Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, November 16, 2006. “Where is the West?” http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell110906.php3, Accessed Online: 09/11/2008. //wku-tjs

European nations protesting Saddam Hussein's death sentence, as they protested against forcing secrets out of captured terrorists, should tell us all we need to know about the internal degeneration of western society, where so many confuse squeamishness with morality. Two generations of being insulated from the reality of the international jungle, of not having to defend their own survival because they have been living under the protection of the American nuclear umbrella, have allowed too many Europeans to grow soft and indulge themselves in illusions about brutal realities and dangers. The very means of their salvation have been demonized for decades in anti-nuclear movements and protesters calling themselves "anti-war." But there is a huge difference between being anti-war in words and being anti-war in deeds. How many times, in its thousands of years of history, has Europe gone 60 years without a major war, as it has since World War II? That peace has been due to American nuclear weapons, which was all that could deter the Soviet Union's armies from marching right across Europe to the Atlantic Ocean. Having overwhelming military force on your side, and letting your enemies know that you have the guts to use it, is being genuinely anti-war. Chamberlain's appeasement brought on World War II and Reagan's military buildup ended the Cold War. The famous Roman peace of ancient times did not come from negotiations, cease-fires, or pretty talk. It came from the Roman Empire's crushing defeat and annihilation of Carthage, which served as a warning to anyone else who might have had any bright ideas about messing with Rome. Only after the Roman Empire began to lose its own internal cohesion, patriotism and fighting spirit over the centuries did it begin to succumb to its external enemies and finally collapse. That seems to be where western civilization is heading today. Internal cohesion? Not only does much of today's generation in western societies have a "do your own thing" attitude, defying rules and flouting authority are glorified and Balkanization through "multiculturalism" has become dogma. Patriotism? Not only is patriotism disdained, the very basis for pride in one's country and culture is systematically undermined in our educational institutions at all levels. The achievements of western civilization are buried in histories that portray every human sin found here as if they were peculiarities of the west. The classic example is slavery, which existed all over the world for thousands of years and yet is incessantly depicted as if it was a peculiarity of Europeans enslaving Africans. Barbary pirates alone brought twice as many enslaved Europeans to North Africa as there were Africans brought in bondage to the United States and the American colonies from which it was formed. How many schools and colleges are going to teach that, going against political correctness and undermining white guilt? How many people have any inkling that it was precisely western civilization which eventually turned against slavery and began stamping it out when non-western societies still saw nothing wrong with it? How can a generation be expected to fight for the survival of a culture or a civilization that has been trashed in its own institutions, taught to tolerate even the intolerance of other cultures brought into its own midst, and conditioned to regard any instinct to fight for its own survival as being a "cowboy"? Western nations that show any signs of standing up for self-preservation are rare exceptions. The United States and Israel are the only western nations which have no choice but to rely on self-defense — and both are demonized, not only by our enemies but also by many in other western nations. Australia recently told its Muslim population that, if they want to live under Islamic law, then they should leave Australia. That makes three western nations that have not yet completely succumbed to the corrosive and suicidal trends of our times. If and when we all succumb, will the epitaph of western civilization say that we had the power to annihilate our enemies but were so paralyzed by confusion that we ended up being annihilated ourselves?

The failure to embrace violent solutions guarantees foreign aggression from Iran and other violent regimes – their criticism is an open invitation to a new generation of Hitlers

Thomas Sowell, Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, July 24, 2007. “Morally Paralyzed,” http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell072407.php3, Accessed Online: 09/11/2008. //wku-tjs

"Moral paralysis" is a term that has been used to describe the inaction of France, England and other European democracies in the 1930s, as they watched Hitler build up the military forces that he later used to attack them. It is a term that may be painfully relevant to our own times. Back in the 1930s, the governments of the democratic countries knew what Hitler was doing —



and they knew that they had enough military superiority at that point to stop his military buildup in its tracks. But they did nothing to stop him. Instead, they turned to what is still the magic mantra today — "negotiations." No leader of a democratic nation was ever more popular than British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain — wildly cheered in the House of Commons by opposition parties as well as his own — when he returned from negotiations in Munich in 1938, waving an agreement and declaring that it meant "peace in our time." We know now how short that time was. Less than a year later, World War II began in Europe and spread across the planet, killing tens of millions of people and reducing many cities to rubble in Europe and Asia. Looking back after that war, Winston Churchill said, "There was never a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action." The earlier it was done, the less it would have cost. At one point, Hitler could have been stopped in his tracks "without the firing of a single shot," Churchill said. That point came in 1936 — three years before World War II began — when Hitler sent troops into the Rhineland, in violation of two international treaties. At that point, France alone was so much more powerful than Germany that the German generals had secret orders to retreat immediately at the first sign of French intervention. As Hitler himself confided, the Germans would have had to retreat "with our tail between our legs," because they did not yet have enough military force to put up even a token resistance. Why did the French not act and spare themselves and the world the years of horror that Hitler's aggressions would bring? The French had the means but not the will. "Moral paralysis" came from many things. The death of a million French soldiers in the First World War and disillusionment with the peace that followed cast a pall over a whole generation. Pacifism became vogue among the intelligentsia and spread into educational institutions. As early as 1932, Winston Churchill said: "France, though armed to the teeth, is pacifist to the core." It was morally paralyzed. History may be interesting but it is the present and the future that pose the crucial question: Is America today the France

of yesterday? We know that Iran is moving swiftly toward nuclear weapons while the United Nations is moving slowly — or not

at all — toward doing anything to stop them. It is a sign of our irresponsible Utopianism that anyone would even expect the UN to do anything that would make any real difference. Not only the history of the UN, but the history of the League of Nations before it, demonstrates again and again that going to such places is a way for weak-kneed leaders of democracies to look like they are doing something when in fact they are doing

nothing. The Iranian leaders are not going to stop unless they get stopped. And, like Hitler, they don't think we have the guts to stop them. Incidentally, Hitler made some of the best anti-war statements of the 1930s. He knew that this was what the Western democracies wanted to hear — and that it would keep them morally paralyzed while he continued building up his military machine to attack them. Iranian leaders today make only the most token and transparent claims that they are building "peaceful" nuclear facilities — in one of the biggest oil-producing countries in the world, which has no need for

nuclear power to generate electricity. Nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran and its international terrorist allies will be a worst threat than Hitler ever was. But, before that happens, the big question is: Are we France? Are we morally paralyzed, perhaps fatally?

The result is wars around globe

Stephen Peter Rosen, Kaneb Professor of National Security and Military Affairs at Harvard University and director of its Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, The

National Interest. “An Empire, if You Can Keep It.” March 22, 2003. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2751/ is_2003_Spring/ai_99377575 Accessed Online: 09/11/2008. //wku-tjs

As for imperial rule over other peoples, the United States has always preferred indirect rule: the installation of local governments compatible with American policies. Direct rule will be seen as a temporary measure to prepare conditions for a transfer of power to local inhabitants. But effective transfer could be a long time coming in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, or in other places where the United States establishes military garrisons

intended to be temporary. The United States is fully capable of enlarging its army to maintain such garrisons over long

periods of time; in living memory, after all, the peacetime U.S. military has had over three million men and women. The real constraint will be political: Will the elites and general population of the United States regard it as just to rule other peoples , some

of whom hate Americans enough to engage in suicidal attacks, and many of whom may exploit American power for their own malign purposes ? Rather than wrestle with such difficult and unpleasant problems, the United States could give up the imperial mission, or pretensions to it, now. This would essentially mean the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from the Middle East, Europe and mainland Asia. It may be that all other peoples, without significant exception, will then turn to their own affairs and leave the United States alone. But those who are hostile to us might remain hostile, and be much less afraid of the United States after such a withdrawal. Current friends would feel less secure and, in the most probable post-imperial world, would revert to the logic of self-help in which all states do what they must to protect themselves. This would imply the relatively rapid acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Iran, Iraq and perhaps Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Indonesia and others. Constraints on the acquisition of biological weapons would be even weaker than they are today. Major regional arms races would also b e very likely throughout Asia and the Middle East. This would not be a pleasant world for Americans, or anyone else. It is difficult to guess what the costs of such a world would be to the United States. They would probably not put the end of the United States in prospect, but they would not be small. If the logic of American empire is unappealing, it is not at all clear that the alternatives are that much more attractive.



The alternative is to vote negative to align yourself with American hegemony.The only tangible threat to US primacy is isolationism – rhetoric of support is critical to preserving international stability

William Kristol, Visiting Professor in Government at Harvard University, and Robert Kagan, Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International

Peace and PhD in American History, “Toward a Neo-Reganite Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs. July/August 1996. http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=276, Accessed Online: 09/11/2008. //wku-tjs

BENEVOLENT HEGEMONYTWENTY YEARS later, it is time once again to challenge an indifferent America and a confused American conservatism. Today's lukewarm consensus about America's reduced role in a post-Cold War world is wrong. Conservatives should not accede to it; it is bad for the country and, incidentally, bad for conservatism. Conservatives will not be able to govern America over the long term if they fail to offer a more elevated vision of America's international role. What should that role be? Benevolent global hegemony. Having defeated the "evil empire," the United States enjoys strategic and ideological predominance. The first objective of U.S. foreign policy should be to preserve and enhance that predominance by strengthening America's security, supporting its friends, advancing its interests, and standing up for its principles around the world. The aspiration to benevolent hegemony might strike some as either hubristic or morally suspect. But a hegemon is nothing more or less than a leader with preponderant influence and authority over all others in its domain. That is America's position in the world toda y . The leaders of Russia and China understand this. At their April summit meeting, Boris Yeltsin and Jiang Zemin joined in denouncing "hegemonism" in the post-Cold War world. They meant this as a complaint about the United States. It should be taken as a compliment and a guide to action. Consider the events of just the past six months, a period that few observers would consider remarkable for its drama on the world stage. In East Asia, the carrier task forces of the U.S. Seventh Fleet helped deter Chinese aggression against democratic Taiwan, and the 35,000 American troops stationed in South Korea helped deter a possible invasion by the rulers in Pyongyang. In Europe, the United States sent 20,000 ground troops to implement a peace agreement in the former Yugoslavia, maintained 100,000 in Western Europe as a symbolic commitment to European stability and security, and intervened diplomatically to prevent the escalation of a conflict between Greece and Turkey. In the Middle East, the United States maintained the deployment of thousands of soldiers and a strong naval presence in the Persian Gulf region to deter possible aggression by Saddam Hussein's Iraq or the Islamic fundamentalist regime in Iran, and it mediated in the conflict between Israel and Syria in Lebanon. In the Western Hemisphere, the United States completed the withdrawal of 15,000 soldiers after restoring a semblance of democratic government in Haiti and, almost without public notice, prevented a military coup in Paraguay. In Africa, a U.S. expeditionary force rescued Americans and others trapped in the Liberian civil conflict. These were just the most visible American actions of the past six months, and just those of a military or diplomatic nature. During the same period, the United States made a thousand decisions in international economic forums, both as a government and as an amalgam of large corporations and individual entrepreneurs, that shaped the lives and fortunes of billions around the globe. America influenced both the external and internal behavior of other countries through the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Through the United Nations, it maintained sanctions on rogue states such as Libya, Iran, and Iraq. Through aid programs, the United States tried to shore up friendly democratic regimes in developing nations. The enormous web of the global economic system, with the United States at the center, combined with the pervasive influence of American ideas and culture, allowed Americans to wield influence in many other ways of which they were entirely unconscious. The simple truth of this era was stated last year by a Serb leader trying to explain Slobodan Milosevic's decision to finally seek rapprochement with Washington. "As a pragmatist," the Serbian politician said, "Milosevic knows that all satellites of the United States are in a better position than those that are not satellites." And America's allies are in a better position than those who are not its allies. Most of the world's major powers welcome U.S. global involvement and prefer America's benevolent hegemony to the alternatives. Instead of having to compete for dominant global influence with many other powers, therefore, the United States finds both the Europeans and the Japanese -- after the United States, the two most powerful forces in the world -- supportive of its world leadership role. Those who anticipated the dissolution of these alliances once the common threat of the Soviet Union disappeared have been proved wrong. The principal concern of America's allies these days is not that it will be too dominant but that it will withdraw. Somehow most Americans have failed to notice that they have never had it so good. They have never lived in a world more conducive to their fundamental interests in a liberal international order, the spread of freedom and democratic governance, an international economic system of free-market capitalism and free trade, and the security of Americans not only to live within their own borders but to travel and do business safely and without encumbrance almost anywhere in the world. Americans have taken these remarkable benefits of the post-Cold War era for granted, partly because it has all seemed so easy. Despite misguided warnings of imperial overstretch, the United States has so far exercised its hegemony without any noticeable strain, and it has done so despite the fact that Americans appear to be in a more insular mood than at any time since before the Second World War. The events of the last six months have excited no particular interest among Americans and, indeed, seem to have been regarded with the same routine indifference as breathing and eating. And that is the problem. The most difficult thing to preserve is that which does not appear to need preserving. The dominant strategic and ideological position the United States now enjoys is the product of foreign policies and defense strategies that are no longer being pursued. Americans have come to take the fruits of their hegemonic power for granted. During the Cold War, the strategies of deterrence and containment worked so well in checking the ambitions of America's adversaries that many American liberals denied that our adversaries had ambitions or even, for that matter, that America had adversaries. Today the lack of a visible threat to U.S. vital interests or to world peace has tempted Americans to absentmindedly dismantle the material and spiritual foundations on which their national well-being has been based. They do not notice that potential



challengers are deterred before even contemplating confrontation by their overwhelming power and influence. The ubiquitous post-Cold War question -- where is the threat? -- is thus misconceived. In a world in which peace and American security depend on American power and the will to use it, the main threat the United States faces now and in the future is its own weakness. American hegemony is the only reliable defense against a breakdown of peace and international order. The appropriate goal of American foreign policy, therefore, is to preserve that hegemony as far into the future as possible. To achieve this goal, the United States needs a neo-Reaganite foreign policy of military supremacy and moral confidence.



2NC O/V

The Affirmatives criticism of the resolution strays away from addressing realistic threats because it prevents the debaters from coming to a resolve that’s our Hanson evidence. We isolate three impacts that outweigh and turn the case:

1. Holocaust—the affirmative ignorance of action is exactly what the U.S. did during the holocaust when we ignored the mass murder of 6 million Jews—that’s the Sowell evidence.

2. Hegemony—the rhetoric in the 1ac is used to criticize US primacy and destroys our international credibility the impact is nuclear war—that’s Rosen 3’

3. And, U.S. leadership precludes international hostility and violence, it’s the solution to all modern forms of instability

Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations,1995. "Losing the Moment? The United States and the World After the Cold War" The Washington Quarterly, RETHINKING GRAND STRATEGY; Vol. 18, No. 2; Pg. 84. //wku-tjs

Under the third option, the United States would seek to retain global leadership and to preclude the rise of a global rival or a return to multipolarity for the indefinite future. On balance, this is the best long-term guiding principle and vision. Such a vision is desirable not as an end in itself, but because a world in which the United States exercises leadership would have tremendous advantages. First, the global environment would be more open and more receptive to American values -- democracy, free markets, and the rule of law. Second, such a world would have a better chance of dealing cooperatively with the world's major problems, such as nuclear proliferation, threats of regional hegemony by renegade states, and low-level conflicts. Finally, U.S. leadership would help preclude the rise of another hostile global rival, enabling the United States and the world to avoid another global cold or

hot war and all the attendant dangers, including a global nuclear exchange . U.S. leadership would therefore be more conducive to global stability than a bipolar or a multipolar balance of power system.

And, we’re not defending that heg is good in every instance, just that it’s comparably better than a world without. Any indicts of hegemony will only be magnified in a world without American primacy—there’s no logical reason to assume foreign actors would be comparably more peaceful.

The alternative would solve—our Kristol and Kagan evidence indicate that allying ourselves with American hegemony is the only way to ensure its survival in the face of an indifferent public.

Freedom fries//never forget***Top SHELF


Intellectual Indict Be skeptical of their authors—they have a vested interest in downplaying the need for military force.

Sowell 10 (Thomas, Ph.D., Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, graduated from Harvard and received doctorate at UChicago in economics, pretty much a total badass, “Intellectuals and Society”, loc 5443-58, kindle, IWren)

Intellectuals have every incentive to believe in the effectiveness of their own specialty—articulated ideas —and to correspondingly undervalue competing factors, such as the experience of the masses and especially the use of force by the police or the military. The unarticulated cultural distillations of mass experience over the generations are often summarily dismissed as mere prejudices. Force or the threat of force is likewise deemed far inferior to articulated reason , whether in dealing with criminals, children or hostile nations. “Military service is the remedy of despair—despair of the power of intelligence,”10 as John Dewey put it. Reason tends to be considered preferable categorically, with little consideration of differing circumstances in which one of these approaches—that is, reason or force—may be incrementally better than the other in some cases but not in other cases. The intelligentsia seem especially to reject the idea of private individuals using force in defense of themselves and

their property or to have guns with which to do so. In international issues of war and peace, the intelligentsia often say that war should be “a last resort.” But much depends crucially on the context and the specific meaning of that phrase. War should of course be “a last resort”—but last in terms of preference, rather than last in the sense of hoping against hope while dangers and provocations accumulate unanswered, while wishful thinking or illusory agreements substitute for serious military preparedness —or, if necessary, military action. As Franklin D. Roosevelt said in 1941, “if you hold your fire until you see the whites of his eyes, you will never know what hit you.”11 The repeated irresolution of France during the 1930s, and on into the period of the “phony war” that ended in its sudden collapse in 1940, gave the world a painful example of how caution can be carried to the point where it becomes dangerous.



War Good

Warfighting is a necessary tool in defending our lives and their value—just because some wars are stupid doesn’t mean all wars are unnecessary.


During the Cold War, and especially after the escalating involvement of the United States in the Vietnam war, many among the intelligentsia began repeating the old notion that war “solves nothing,” an echo from the 1930s, where the futility of war was proclaimed, among many others, by Neville Chamberlain, who said that war “wins nothing, cures nothing, ends nothing”48—and who was in turn echoing what many among the intelligentsia were saying in his

day. But, like so much that has been said by the intelligentsia on so many subjects, the notion that “war solves nothing” had less to do with any empirical evidence than with its consonance with the vision of the anointed, which in turn has had much to do

with the exaltation of the anointed. Had the battle of Lepanto in 1571 or the battle of Waterloo in 1815 gone the other way, this could be a very different world today. Had the desperate fighting at Stalingrad and on the beaches at Normandy gone the other way during the Second World War, life might not be worth living for millions of human beings today . There have of

course been futile wars in which all the nations on both sides ended up far worse off than before—the First World War being a classic example. But no one would make the blanket statement that medical science “solves nothing” because many people die despite treatment and some die because of wrong treatment or even from the remote risks of vaccinations. In short, mundane specifics are more salient in evaluating any particular war than are the sweeping , abstract and dramatic pronouncements so often indulged in by the intelligentsia.

Abandonment of the military is genocidal—the refusal to use force devalues life and ensures conflict

Violet B. Ketels, Associate Professor of English at Temple University, “‘’Havel to the Castle!’ The Power of the Word,” 548 Annals 45, November 1996. JSTOR http://www.jstor.org/stable/1048542 Accessed: 04/14/2008. //wku-tjs

Havel stresses the potential of truth and humane values to transform human consciousness incrementally over time. We must constantly work for every

good thing and struggle against violence. But Havel is tough-minded, his vision comprehensive and realistic. Violence may be unavoidable in the face of totalitarian savagery. Still, it must remain a means of last resort. Repeatedly, he warns that violence breeds violence. Havel is not, however, a pacifist, as that term applies to Quakers or others who organize peace movements.40 Although the regime Havel and his fellow dissidents resisted for more than thirty years accused them of terrorist tactics and plots, they conscientiously sought legal justification for their resistance, using the letter even of unjust laws to manifest support for the principle of legality. Their attitude was "fundamentally hostile to the notion of violent change-simply because it places its faith in violence," Havel writes in one place. He immediately restates the point, however, in a powerfully

significant parenthesis: "the 'dissident' attitude can only accept violence as a necessary evil in extreme situations, when direct violence can only be met by violence and where remaining passive would in effect mean supporting violence."41 He recalls us to the tragic blindness of European pacifism that helped to prepare the ground for World War II. He points to the fact that the Czechs sent troops to the Persian Gulf and stood willing to contribute to a U.N. force in the former Yugoslavia. But he is at pains to condemn violence used as a quick fix to change political systems-the sacrifice of human beings here and now for "abstract political visions of the future." The problems in human society "lie far too deep to be settled through mere systemic changes, either governmental or technological."42 Havel writes and thinks out of a unique humanist tradition that has been continuous in Czech history. He has specifically identified with the humanism of the founder of the Czech state, Tomas Masaryk, who regarded "ethical, aesthetic and scientific categories" as "no less real than bread and butter." Masaryk felt the need for a social revolution "more moral and less materialistic than that envisaged by the Marxists." Like Havel, he hoped to avoid violence, but he does not rule it out altogether. His language is as circumspect as Havel's: We must consistently reject every act of violence; otherwise we shall never be able to disentangle ourselves from violence. We may, should, must protect, defend ourselves. In extreme cases with the sword. But even in self-defense we must restrain ourselves from new, active acts of violence.43 In an address prepared for delivery at a 1985 peace conference, Havel explains the reticence of Europeans to join Western peace movements as rooted in the skepticism of those who have already been burned by succumbing to other forms of utopianism, specifically the Stalin-Leninist variety, which grotesquely deformed its utopian principles as soon as it got power. The very word "peace" has been drained of all content by

the European experience of "peace in our time."44 The Western version of peace sounds far too much like appeasement. Havel speculates whether World War II, with its millions of corpses, could have been avoided if the Western democracies had stood up to Hitler forcefully and in time. He ascribes to the Czech people as a whole the firmly rooted idea that the inability to risk, in extremis, even life itself to save what gives it meaning and a human dimension leads not only to the loss

of meaning but finally and inevitably to the loss of life as well-and not one life only but thousands and millions of lives . 45



Link—Criticism/Multiculturalism

Liberal criticism of Western society creates reluctance to address existential threats—world war 2 proves.


The moral dimensions of the invidious seem also to have a widespread attraction among the intelligentsia. Opportunities to be morally one-up on others—sometimes including their whole society—have been eagerly seized, whether in opposing stern punishment of criminals, denouncing the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or

insisting on applying the Geneva Convention to captured terrorists who neither subscribe to the Geneva Convention nor are covered by it. Moral double standards— denouncing the U nited S tates for actions that are passed over with little or no comment when other nations do the same things or worse—are defended on grounds that we should have higher moral standards . Thus an incidental comment that can be construed as “racist” can provoke more outrage in the America n media than the beheading of innocent people by terrorists and the dissemination of the videotapes of these beheadings to eager audiences in the Middle East. Seldom is there much concern expressed by the intelligentsia about the cumulative effect of such biased filtering of information and comments on the public at large or on students who receive a steady diet of such filtered information from the elementary schools to the universities.

What is called “ multiculturalism” is seldom a warts-and-all picture of societies around the world. Far more common is an emphasis on warts when it comes to discussing the history and current condition of the United States or of Western civilization, and a downplaying or ignoring of warts when discussing India or other non-Western societies . Since every society is challenged from within and without, distortions that denigrate a society have consequences, including a reluctance to defend one’s own society against even unreasonable demands or deadly threats . As will become clear in Chapter 7,

this can include a reluctance to respond even to military dangers , sometimes giving potential enemies such as Hitler every benefit of the doubt until it is too late.

Freedom fries//never forget***LINKS


Link—Rejection of Western Power

Rejecting western conceptions of power guarantees American self-sacrifice destroying hegemony

John Dawson, Writer for the Ayn Rand; February 14, 2003, “Baby Kim’s Secret Weapon,” http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&Article&id=7455&news_iv_ctrl=1076, Accessed Online: 02/17/2008. //wku-tjs

Today’s moralists adamantly insist that there is no objective standard of morality. Every culture is sacrosanct and immune from judgment. This moral relativism implies that a brutal communist dictatorship such as North Korea is morally equal to the United States . Unwilling to challenge this sacred cow, Bush is disarmed. He lacks the confidence and certainty that would allow him to take action, so he is reduced to issuing empty threats followed by more empty threats. But despite their hard-line relativism, Western moralists do offer one moral precept that they consider unquestionable: altruism, the ethics of self-sacrifice . According to this doctrine, those with wealth are guilty by the mere fact of their success and are duty-bound to sacrifice their wealth to those who have less. Thus, rich and powerful America is morally responsible for the impoverished North Koreans, which is why Bush hurriedly offers “food and fuel” and other unnamed aid to Kim. According to this view, America must not only respect the sovereignty of North Korea, regardless of how Baby Kim enslaves and impoverishes his people, but it must also feed and empower that impoverished population. If North Koreans die as human shields or when the collective crops fail or when the food aid stops, Kim knows that it won’t be he who will be denounced as morally culpable. It will be Bush because he didn’t bail Kim out of the problems caused by Kim’s unproductive, repressive economic system. So as long as Kim is ruthless enough to sacrifice his people, while Bush accepts that their misery is America’s responsibility, Kim can use them as a weapon. Their lives are in his hands, but he knows that American will be held responsible for their fate. While heholds his own people in hostage, Kim can threaten any atrocity and demand any tribute, knowing that Bush will appease him rather than face the denunciation of critics wielding a morality he dare not reject. The fear and indecision engendered by moral relativism, and the sacrifice of America engendered by altruism must stop. America must do no more penance for its achievements. It must stop appeasing every petty tyrant with pay-offs. America must recognize that its wealth and power are earned: It must be proud not humble. It must protect and defend the rights of its citizens. If American does not throw off the moral chains imposed by so many Western intellectuals, it will continue to be victimized by the Baby Kims, Saddams and Bin Ladens of the world. Just as an individual should act to preserve and sustain his life, so should America. The alternative—for individuals and nations—is suicide.



Link—Collateral Damage

Critiques of collateral damage stem from the liberal media complex—fail to account for limiting factors in combat operations and overlook military victories—Vietnam proves.


The Vietnam war also saw the revival in America of a pattern seen in France between the two World Wars—the downgrading of soldiers in battle from the role of patriotic heroes, no matter what acts of bravery and self-sacrifice they engaged in . During the Vietnam

war, this tendency was carried even further. Collateral damage to Vietnamese civilians during American military operations, or even allegations of individual misconduct by American troops, led to sweeping moral condemnations of the U.S. military as a whole, often without any examination of the question whether such collateral damage was unusual in warfare or unusually extensive , or whether atrocities were authorized or condoned by authorities .30 The most widely publicized atrocity against civilians—the “My Lai massacre” by an American military unit against a South Vietnamese village that was suspected of harboring Communist guerrillas—was stopped by other American troops when they arrived on the scene, and the officer in charge was court-martialed for things that the Communist guerrillas did routinely

and on a vastly larger scale.31 The image , filtered through the media, of those who served in the military during the Vietnam war , like the image of French soldiers who had served in the First World War, often became that of victims. “‘Hero stories’ were off the menu” in Vietnam, as the head of the Washington Post’s bureau in Vietnam later recalled the coverage of the war in the American media.32 A common image of Vietnam veterans was that they were disproportionately the poor, the uneducated, the minorities—and that the trauma of combat drove them to widespread drug usage in Vietnam and to acts of violence upon returning home with “post-traumatic stress syndrome.” Widely hailed motion pictures depicting that era dramatized such images.33 Hard statistical data, however, contradicted such depictions34 and some of the Vietnam “combat veterans” featured on television

specials by Dan Rather and others later turned out to have never been in combat or never to have been in Vietnam.35 But what they said fit the vision and that was often enough to get them on television and cited in newspapers and books. Some among the American media and intelligentsia outdid the interwar French by depicting American combat veterans as villains. The only Pulitzer Prize awarded for coverage of the Tet offensive went to a reporter who wrote about the My Lai massacre without ever setting foot in Vietnam . 36 This tangential tragedy thus overshadowed innumerable battles across South Vietnam in which American troops won overwhelming victories. That much of this fighting against urban guerrillas in civilian clothes took place in residential neighborhoods made the task more difficult for American troops but presented the media with numerous opportunities to criticize those troops:



IL/National Pride K2 Solve War

National honor should be viewed through consequences—it’s historically more important than military strength in preventing hostile aggression and securing allies.


As with many other things , how consequential they are can be discovered by what happens in their absence. When Hitler launched an invasion of France in 1940, against the advice of his top generals, it was because he was convinced that contemporary France was lacking in these supposedly irrelevant qualities 143—and the sudden collapse of the French, despite their military advantages, suggests that these qualities are indeed consequential . What is called “national honor” is a long-run perspective on national decisions and their consequences, the opposite of the one-day -at-a-time rationalism by which France had declined to fight over the militarization of the Rhineland in 1936, or to live up to the French mutual defense treaty with Czechoslovakia in 1938, or to seriously engage the Germans militarily during the long months of the “phony war” following the formal

declaration of war in 1939, despite France’s large military superiority on the western front while Hitler’s troops were concentrated in the east, conquering Poland. A willingness to fight can be a deterrence to attack and , conversely, an unwillingness to meet a challenge or provocation can make a nation a target for an all-out assault . “National honor” is simply an idiomatic expression for this long-run perspective on national interest , as distinguished from a one-day-at-a-time perspective , which may serve the short-

run interests of politicians, by sparing them from making the hard decisions which distinguish a politician from a statesman. But many intellectuals have tried to reduce a sense of national honor , like patriotism, to a psychological quirk and certainly “a very insufficient reason for hostilities,” in Godwin’s words.144 However , even British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain , the man most indelibly identified with

the policy of appeasement of Hitler, belatedly seemed to acknowledge that national honor was consequential, just months before the Second World War began: I had the opportunity yesterday of exchanging a few words with M. Blum, the French Socialist leader and former Prime Minister, and he said to me that in his view, and in the view of all the Socialist friends with whom he had talked, there was only one danger of war in Europe, and that was a very real one: it was that the impression should get about that Great Britain and France were not in earnest and that they could not be relied upon to carry out their promises. If that were so, no greater, no more deadly mistake could be made—and it would be a frightful thing if Europe were to be plunged into war on account of a

misunderstanding. 145 In short, Europe and the world were on the brink of a catastrophic war because neither friend nor foe believed that Britain and France had national honor. That is, there was no sense of a firm resolve by the British or the French, on which friendly nations could stake their own survival by relying on allying themselves with Britain or France, at the cost of incurring

the wrath of Nazi Germany.v Likewise, there was no sense among belligerent nations that they need fear anything more serious than temporizing words from Britain and France. What was lacking in Chamberlain’s statement, on the eve of war, was any acknowledgment that it was his own policies, and similar policies in France, substituting talk for action, which had created this deadly misconception that all they would ever do was talk. Hitler was in fact quite surprised when his invasion of Poland led to declarations of war by Britain and France.146



IL/A2: Global Movements Solve

National pride is recognition that well-being is contingent on your government, not global obligation—failure to embrace this collapses civilization itself.


Despite a tendency in some intellectual circles to see the nation as just a subordinate part of the world at large—some acting, or

even describing themselves, as citizens of the world—patriotism is, in one sense, little more than a recognition of the basic fact that one’s own material well-being, personal freedom, and sheer physical survival depend on the particular institutions , traditions and policies of the particular nation in which one lives . There is no comparable world government and, without the concrete institutions of government, there is nothing to be a citizen of or to have enforceable rights , however lofty or poetic it may sound to be a citizen of the world. When one’s fate is clearly recognized as dependent on the surrounding national framework—the institutions, traditions and norms of one’s country—then the preservation of that framework cannot be a matter of indifference while each individual pursues purely

individual interests. Patriotism is a recognition of a shared fate and the shared responsibilities that come with it . National honor is a recognition that one-day-at-a-time rationalism is a delusion that enables politicians to escape the responsibilities of statesmanship. Conditions may become so repugnant

in one country that it makes sense to move to another country. But there is no such thing as moving to “the world .” One may of course live in a country parasitically , accepting all the benefits for which others have sacrificed—both in the past and in the present—while rejecting any notion of being obliged to do the same. But once that attitude becomes general, the country becomes defenseless against forces of either internal disintegration or external aggression. In short, patriotism and national honor cannot be reduced to simply psychological quirks , to which intellectuals can consider themselves superior, without risking dire consequences, of which France in 1940 was a classic example. It was considered chic in some circles in France of the 1930s to say, “Rather Hitler than

Blum.”152 But that was before they experienced living under Hitler or dying after dehumanization in Hitler’s concentration camps. Disdain for patriotism and national honor was just one of the attitudes among the intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s to reappear with renewed force in Western democracies in the 1960s and afterwards. How far history will repeat itself , on this and other issues, is a question for the future to answer. Indeed, it is the question for the future of the Western world.



Imperialism Good—Generic

Cultural Imperialism is a Process of Preserving World Peace and Guaranteeing Survival

Robert Tracisnsky, Writer for the Ayn Rand Institute, October 8, 2001, “An Empire of Ideals,” http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page-NewsArticle&id=7392&news_iv_ctrl=1076, //wku-tjs[**THIS CARD IS NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART!]

Everyone has finally awakened to the deadly threat posed by terrorism, and some are even willing to admit that the source of this

threat is Islamic fundamentalism. But almost no one is prepared to name the long-term answer to that threat. The long-term answer—the only means by which we can eventually secure world peace—is cultural imperialism. “Cultural imperialism ” is not exactly the right term. That is a smear-tag created by the academic left, which hates everything good about Western culture and tries to dismiss that culture’s worldwide popularity by blaming it on some kind of coercive conspiracy. The same purpose is served by another leftist smear-tag, “cultural genocide,” which sounds like mass-murder abut actually refers to people in the Third World choosing to adopt Western manners and attitudes, the poor things. The investors of these smears are the same people who clamor for a “multicultural” society, ostensibly a society that tolerates many different cultural influences—except, of course, any influence coming

from the West. The real phenomenon that the phrase “ cultural imperialism” refers to is the voluntary adoption of ideas , art and entertainment produced in civilized countries. It refers to the most benevolent kind of “empire” that could be imagined: an empire of common ideals and attitudes ; an empire spread purely by voluntary persuasion; an empire

whose “conquest” consists of bringing the benefits of civilization to backward regions. Western “cultural imperialism” is the march of progress across the globe. But woe unto he who suggests that Western culture might be worth spreading. Italisn Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi learned this when he states that: “We must be aware of the superiority of our civilization, a system that has guaranteed well-being, respect for human rights and—in contrast with Islamic countries—respect for religious and political rights.” The reaction was immediate and fierce. The Belgian prime minister scolded that Berlusconi’s remarks could have “dangerous consequences.” Gosh, they might cause us to overthrow Middle Eastern dictatorships! The head of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, immediately denounced Berlusconi’s statements as “racist”—an accusation which itself equates race with culture, as if Arabs are biologically determined to embrace theocracy. Ironically, Moussa got his idea from the West—that is, form our own hordes of anti-Western intellectuals. One such intellectual expressed the prevailing dogma perfectly: “one cannot speak of the superirority of on culture of another.” What no one challenged, however, was Berlusconi’s factual description of the values held by the West versus those held by the Islamic world. Nearly every country in the Middle East is a dictatorship. These countries are wrached with chronic povery bred by dicatatorship—with the exception of the rulers, who pocket money from oil reserves discovered, drilled and made valuable by Western technology. All of these countries are overrun—or are on the verge of being overrun—by religious fanatics who ruthlessly suppress any manifestation of the pursuit of happiness in this world, from baring one’s ankles to watching television. We broadcast to these oppressed people the Western message of liberty, prosperity and happiness—in forms as low-brow as Baywatch or as sophisticated as the Declaration of Independence. This is the “imperialism” that terrifies Islamic fundamentalists. They should be terrified—because they know that in a fair competition, their values cannot win. On the one side, there are Western values of intellectual freedom, science, prosperity, individual rights and the pursuit of happiness . On the other side, there are the centuries-old scourages of theocracy, superstition, poverty , dictatorship and mass-murder. Is one of these alternatives superior to the other? You bet your life it is. We must begin a campaign of education designed to export Western values to the barbarous East—and that campaign must be led by our intellectuals, not denounced by them. This war must be fought with televisions, radios, books and movies—and by the intransigently pro-Western statements of our political and intellectual

leaders. This is a battle between opposite and irreconcilable cultures, and if we want to survive, we must begin with the conviction that our culture deserves to win. A physical war against terrorist states—a war fought with bombs, rockets and guns against the governments that support terrorism—has now become a necessity. But that battle is only a first step. In the long run, we can only stop the re-emergence of new Islamic fanatics by disinfecting the cultural miasma in which they breed. And light, the light of benevolent Western ideals, is the best disinfectant.

Multiculturalism triggers ethnic violence that results in extinction.

Glenn Woiceshyn , Freelance Writer, residing in Calgary, and studied philosophy and writing, full time, at the Objectivist Graduate Center of the Ayn Rand

Institute as an auditing student, “Multiculturalism Breeds Terrorism,” Capitalism Magazine, June 24, 200 6 , http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4714, Accessed Online: //wku-tjs

Defenders of multiculturalism argue that deeming one culture superior to another leads to racism, which they allege to be trying to prevent. But racism involves judging a person’s character according to race, not chosen ideas and values. Racism is essentially different from the evaluation of a cultural practice according to the objective standard of survival and the enjoyment of life. In fact, as will soon become clear, multiculturalism is a racist doctrine. The next step in constructing multiculturalism involved shrinking the concept of culture from chosen, conceptual, significant values, such as wisdom, individual liberty, prosperity, romantic art, etc., to non-chosen or insignificant characteristics, such as skin color, gender, ethnic/religious/linguistic heritage, birth defect, etc. This served to promote a tribal mentality whereby individuals are encouraged to

Freedom fries//never forget***Imperialism GOOD


think of themselves as inescapable members of a tribe (or sub-tribe) defined by unchosen, perceptual-level characteristics—not chosen, conceptual

values. The next step consisted of promoting “diversity” as a value, which involves diluting rational, practical values with irrational, destructive ones , such as forcing companies to hire people on the basis of race—not ability, which is racism . Another example is the dilution of school curricula with useless cultural trivia, such as hair styles of different cultures, or with ridiculous courses such as “black science” and “feminist algebra.” Andrew Coyne tried to redefine “diversity” to mean the different ideas that flow from free and thinking individuals, but then “diversity” is not the defining characteristic. There is no value for such individuals to diversify rational ideas with Nazism or Wahhabism. The final step in constructing multiculturalism involved blending cultural relativism with “egalitarianism ,” which holds that no one (or no tribe) should benefit from a value, such as wealth,

success, pride, etc., unless all do equally. Hence, if one culture appears to be ahead in terms of wealth creation, technology and the enjoyment of life, then this would imply “oppression” because all cultures have equal value and thus deserve equal results. This helps explain why militant Muslims in the East are murdering innocent people while claiming to

be victims of Western oppression. The logical result of multiculturalism is to create a world of primitive, tribalistic mentalities that form countless sub-tribes based on unchosen identities and battle each other for power and unearned wealth until all values (and lives) are destroyed —which is the ultimate goal of nihilism . Ayn Rand, in her seminal essay entitled “Global Balkanization,” wrote, “There is no surer way to infect mankind with hatred—brute, blind, virulent hatred—than by splitting it into ethnic groups or tribes. If a man believes that his own character in some unknown, ineffable way, and that the characters of all strangers are determined in the same way—then no communication, no understanding, no persuasion is possible among them, only mutual fear, suspicion, and hatred.” [3]



Imperialism Good—Separatism

Turn: Secession: Failure to close cultural value gaps ensure separatist conflict

David Rothkopf, Professor of International Affairs at Columbia University, IN PRAISE OF CULTURAL IMPERIALISM, 1997, http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/protected/rothkopf.html, Accessed Online: 03/28/2008. //wku-tjs

Repression is not defensible whether the tradition from which it springs is Confucian, Judeo-Christian, or Zoroastrian. The repressed individual still suffers, as does society, and there are consequences for the global community. Real costs accrue in terms of constrained human creativity, delayed market development, the diversion of assets to enforce repression, the failure of repressive societies to adapt well to the rapidly changing global environment, and the dislocations, struggles, and instability that result from these and other factors. Americans should promote their vision for the world, because failing to do so or taking a "live and let live" stance is ceding the process to the not-always-beneficial actions of others . Using the tools of the Information Age to do so is perhaps the most peaceful and powerful means of advancing American interests. If Americans now live in a world in which ideas can be effectively exported and media delivery systems are powerful, they must recognize that the nature of those ideas and the control of those systems are matters with which they should be deeply concerned. Is it a threat to U.S. interests, to regional peace, to American markets, and to the United States'

ability to lead if foreign leaders adopt models that promote separatism and the cultural fault lines that threaten stability?. It certainly is. Relativism is a veil behind which those who shun scrutiny can hide. Whether Americans accept all the arguments of Huntington or not,

they must recognize that the greater the cultural value gaps in the world, the more likely it is that conflict will ensue. The critical prerequisite for gaining the optimum benefits of global integration is to understand which cultural attributes can and should be tolerated--and, indeed, promoted--and which are the fissures that will become fault lines.



And, the impact is enormous—it undermines global institutions and risks terrorism, environmental destruction, and WMD prolif, and, of course, nuclear war

Gideon Gottlieb, Council on Foreign Relations, NATION AGAINST STATE, 1993, p. 26. //wku-tjs

Self-determination unleashed and unchecked by balancing principles constitutes a menace to the society of states. There is simply no way in which all the hundreds of peoples who aspire to sovereign independence can be granted a state of their own without loosening fearful anarchy and disorder on a planetary scale. The proliferation of territorial entities poses exponentially greater problems for the control of w eapons of m ass d estruction and multiplies situations in which external intervention could threaten the peace. It increases problems for the management of all global issues, including terrorism, AIDS, the environment, and population growth . It creates conditions in which domestic strife in remote territories can drag powerful neighbors into local hostilities, creating ever widening circles of conflict. Events in the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union drove this point home. Like Russian dolls, ever smaller ethnic groups dwelling in larger units emerged to secede and to demand independence. Georgia, for example, has to contend with the claims of South Ossetians and Abkhazlans for independence, just as the Russian Federation is confronted with the separatism of Tartaristan. An international system made up of several hundred independent territorial states cannot be the basis for global security and prosperity.



Imperialism Good—Terrorism

Turn: Terrorism, The fight against terrorism is an ideological battle wedded in conflicting values

Gerhard Hoffstaeder, PhD Anthropologist, “The ‘West’ – conceptualization of an idea”, January 20, 2003. http://stirling.ukc.ac.uk:16080/Anthropologists/gmh1/docs/West.pdf, Accessed Online: 03/21/2008. //wku-tjs

From Spengler’s pessimistic view on the decline of the West, Fukuyama offers a radical break and offers a different ending, one in where the West triumphs. The ideological battle won, he dispenses history and makes the West an immortal and absolute, whilst leaving the rest of the world behind in Hegel’s sequences of history. His right wing stance went down well with those governments, namely the USA, which needed a new legitimacy for a new kind of war, in which a new kind of enemy is fought. The ‘war on terror’ , conducted against the ‘axis of evil’ implies, that Bush’s side, the West, is the ‘force of good’, the righteous and benevolent. For if the Western model of democracy and Western mode of life has prevailed over all others, those last enclaves of deviance must be brought in line with the West.

And, Terrorism promises the end of civilization

ALEXANDER (Dir. Inter-University Center for Terrorism) 2000 [Yonah, “Terrorism in the 21st Century”, Depaul Business Law Journal, p. LN. //wku-tjs]

More specifically, present -day terrorists have introduced into contemporary life a new scale of terror violence in terms of both threats and responses that has made clear that we have entered into an Age of Terrorism with all of its serious implications to national, regional, and global security concerns. n25 Perhaps the most significant dangers that evolve from modern day terrorism are those relating to the safety, welfare, and rights of ordinary people; the stability of the state

system; the health of economic [*67] development; the expansion of democracy; and possibly the survival of civilization itself .



Imperialism Good—Space

Turn: Space, Spread of American values is key to get off the rock and avoid inevitable extinction

Kort Patterson, President of Overall Technology Inc., “The 4th of July”, 1994. http://130.94.161.3/KortExplores/articles/files/4july1.php, Accessed Online: 03/21/2008. //wku-tjs

It seems obvious to me that the overall solution to the bulk of mankind's problems is finding more "somewhere else" - opening a new frontier to absorb the excess humanity and attract society's malcontents away from the center. Opening the space frontier represents the single most monumental undertaking of [humankind]’s entire history. A successful effort will tax the abilities

and creativity of the human race to the limits as no other before. We must do it or die. In the long term there isn't any other choice. Further complicating the equation, we're using up the earth's natural resources at an ever accelerating rate. Recycling and high efficiency lighting make Yuppies feel good, but they're like trying to bail out the Titanic with a teacup compared to the global effects of overpopulation. Some estimates indicate we have less than 30 years to make the giant step into space before the converging resource consumption and population curves cross.

After that, population pressures and the resulting resource scarcities will guarantee that we are never again be able to concentrate sufficient resources in one place to make the great leap into space. Perhaps we'll have another shot if any of us are still around after the population is massively reduced by the next great die off.... So the stage is set for humanity's greatest adventure or

tragedy. Even in its current sorry state, America is the only nation in the world today that even comes close to the vitality and self confident bravado necessary to overcome the tremendous obstacles standing in the way of our becoming the first space faring species ever to step out of the Earth's nursery and challenge the universe. If America falters and collapses into decadence and corruption, the hopes of all humanity die with it. The brilliance and foresight of the founding Fathers of America embodied in the Federalist papers, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, is nothing short of

breathtaking even today. This country was gifted at its birth with an extraordinary legacy - a detailed set of rules and processes that defined a system of government that would work . Industry has only recently started to understand that the purpose of management is to facilitate the production of labor not to rule as dictator over an oppressed peasantry. It is critically necessary to all of mankind that we apply this same reasoning to government. Government must return to the role of facilitator and coordinator of the public's will and efforts - not the omnipotent autocrat dictating to cowed and subservient citizens it currently seeks to become.

And, We must go to space now to avoid an otherwise inevitable extinction

Ad Astra ’95 [July/August, p. 43]

Beyond the planetary shore lies the even greater ocean of space itself. Here, of course, reside the ultimate hopes for all mankind. Earth is a closed ecosystem , and as such it presents limits to our possibilities. Space is limitless in every sense. If we are to survive and progress as a species then we must eventually break through the limits of our home planet and people the reaches of space. This is crucial to the survival of not only humanity, but life itsef. The very existence of life as a phenomenon in the universe may depend on our making the transition from planetary to space-based civilization . Eventually , barring all other potential catastrophes, the Earth, like Jupiter, will be struck by a large comet. The agent of our destruciton may already be on its way. The solar system is surrounded by a cloud of comets. As the Sun spirals its way around the galactic plane, it dances with other stars. When one passes too close it dislodges a hail of comets form the cloud. It takes thousands of years for comets to fall into the inner solar system from the Oort cloud, but a close encounter may have occurred thousands of years ago, and a sleet of comets may already be hurtling toward us. To avoid extinction we must eventually colonize space. Given the consequences of failure and the unknown and unknowable nature of the threats facing us , the sooner the better .



2NC Threats Real

At the top—it’s illogical and dangerous to assume that threats aren’t out there. Any reason the aff can access their impacts is a reason to assume that there are real dangers to our survival—other leaders of other nations are going to be just as combative, if not more so.

Empirics go our way—historically psychological bias runs towards threat deflation—we are the opposite of paranoid

Schweller 4 [Randall L. Schweller, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at The Ohio State University, “Unanswered Threats A Neoclassical RealistTheory of Underbalancing,” International Security 29.2 (2004) 159-201, Muse]

Despite the historical frequency of underbalancing, little has been written on the subject. Indeed, Geoffrey Blainey's memorable observation that for "every thousand pages published on the causes of wars there is less than one page directly on the causes of peace" could have been made with equal

veracity about overreactions to threats as opposed to underreactions to them.92 Library shelves are filled with books on the causes and dangers of exaggerating threats, ranging from studies of domestic politics to bureaucratic politics, to political psychology, to organization theory. By comparison, there have been few studies at any level of analysis or from any theoretical perspective that directly explain why states have with some, if not equal, regularity underestimated dangers to their survival . There may be some cognitive or normative bias at work here. Consider, for instance, that there is a commonly used word, paranoia, for the unwarranted fear that people are , in some way,

" out to get you " or are planning to do oneharm. I suspect that just as many people are afflicted with the opposite psychosis : the delusion that everyone loves you when, in fact, they do not even like you. Yet, we do not have a familiar word for this phenomenon. Indeed, I am unaware of any word that describes this pathology (hubris and overconfidence come close, but they plainly define something other than what I have described). That

noted, international relations theory does have a frequently used phrase for the pathology of states' underestimation of threats to their survival, the so-called Munich analogy. The term is used, however, in a disparaging way by theorists to ridicule those who employ it. The central claim is that the naïveté associated with Munich and the outbreak of World War II has become an overused and inappropriate analogy because few leaders are as evil and unappeasable as Adolf Hitler. Thus, the analogy either mistakenly causes leaders [End Page 198] to adopt hawkish and overly competitive policies or is deliberately

used by leaders to justify such policies and mislead the public. A more compelling explanation for the paucity of studies on underreactions to threats, however, is the tendency of theories to reflect contemporary issues as well as the desire of theorists and journals to provide society with policy- relevant theories that may help resolve or manage urgent security problems. Thus, born in the

atomic age with its new balance of terror and an ongoing Cold War, the field of security studies has naturally produced theories of and prescriptions for national security that have had little to say about—and are, in fact, heavily biased against warnings of—the dangers of underreacting to or underestimating threats. After all, the nuclear revolution was not about overkill but, as Thomas Schelling pointed out,

speed of kill and mutual kill.93 Given the apocalyptic consequences of miscalculation , accidents, or inadvertent nuclear war, small wonder that theorists were more concerned about overreacting to threats than underresponding to them. At a time when all of humankind could be wiped out in less than twenty-five minutes, theorists may be excused for stressing the benefits of caution under conditions of uncertainty and erring on the side of inferring from ambiguous actions overly benign assessments of the opponent's intentions. The overwhelming fear was that a crisis "might unleash forces of an essentially military nature that overwhelm the political process and bring on a war thatnobody wants. Many important conclusions about the risk of nuclear war, and thus about the political meaning of nuclear forces, rest on this fundamental idea."94 Now that the Cold War is over, we can begin to redress these biases in the literature. In that spirit, I have offered a domestic politics model to explain why threatened states often fail to adjust in a prudent and coherent way to dangerous changes in their strategic environment. The model fits nicely with recent realist studies on imperial under- and overstretch. Specifically, it is consistent with Fareed Zakaria's analysis of U.S. foreign policy from 1865 to 1889, when, he claims, the United States had the national power and opportunity to expand but failed to do so because it lacked sufficient state power (i.e., the state was weak relative to society).95 Zakaria claims that the United States did [End Page 199] not take advantage of opportunities in its environment to expand because it lacked the institutional state strength to harness resources from society that were needed to do so. I am making a similar argument with respect to balancing rather than expansion: incoherent, fragmented states are unwilling and unable to balance against potentially dangerous threats because elites view the domestic risks as too high, and they are unable to mobilize the required resources from a divided society. The arguments presented here

also suggest that elite fragmentation and disagreement within a competitive political process , which Jack Snyder cites as an explanation for

overexpansionist policies, are more likely to produce underbalancing than overbalancing behavior among threatened incoherent states.96 This is

because a balancing strategy carries certain political costs and risks with few, if any, compensating short-term political gains, and because the strategic environment is always somewhat uncertain. Consequently, logrolling among fragmented elites within threatened states is more likely to generate overly cautious responses to threats than overreactions to them. This dynamic captures the underreaction of democratic states to the rise of Nazi Germany during the interwar period.97 In addition to elite fragmentation, I have suggested some basic domestic-level variables that regularly intervene to thwart balance of power predictions.

Predator states will inevitability arise, proliferating the securitization of threats

Freedom fries//never forget***Threats DEBATE


Alexander Wendt, “Anarchy is what states make of it,” (1992). International Organization, Vol. 46, No. 2, Spring, p. MIT Press Journals. 391-425. JSTOR. //wku-tjs

Predator states and anarchy as permissive cause The mirror theory of identity-formation is a crude account of how the process of creating identities and interests might work, but it does not tell us why a system of states—such as, arguably, our own—would have ended up with self-regarding and not collective identities. In this section, I examine an efficient cause, predation, which, in conjunction with anarchy as a permissive cause, may generate a self-help system. In so doing, however, I show the key role that the structure of identities and interests plays in mediating anarchy’s explanatory role.

The predator argument is straightforward and compelling. For whatever reasons—biology, domestic politics, or systemic victimization—some states may become predisposed toward aggression. The aggressive behavior of these predators of “bad apples” forces other states to engage in competitive power politics, to meet fire with fire, since failure to do so may degrade or destroy them. One predator will best a hundred pacifists because anarchy provides no guarantees. This argument is powerful in part because it is so weak: rather than making the strong assumption that all states are inherently power-seeking (a purely reductionist

theory of power politics), it assumes that just one is power-seeking and that the others have to follow suit because anarchy permits the one to exploit them.



2NC Threats Offense

Turn – your impacts are magnified in a world of your advocacy – adopting a culture of political pacifism causes a fillin from a much more dangerous and authoritarian superpower

Michael Lind, Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, (1999). “Vietnam: The Necessary War.” P. 281-2 //wku-tjs

Pacifists to the contrary, it is honorable and moral to fight on behalf of one’s nation in a just cause—and that cause may take the form of a necessary war on behalf of the hegemonic credibility or alliance worthiness of one’s country. A consensus to the opposite effect in the United States will only prove tha the accused Basnian war criminal Ratko Mladic was right when he sneered, “The Western countries have learned that they cannot recruit their own children to realize goals outside their homelands.” The leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic, admitted that “if the West put in 10,000 men to cut off our supply corridors, we Serbs would be finished.” But another accused Serb war criminal, Vojislav Seslj, remarked: “The Americans would have to send tens of thousands of body bags. It would be a new

Vietnam” If American radical leftists, pacifists , and libertarian isolationists prevail in promoting a pacifist political culture in the U nited S tates, then it is only a matter of time before the world is dominated by a military superpower whose leaders have an ethos like that of today’s Serb leaders.

Turn: Threats are inescapable and must be confronted—refusal to engage emboldens aggression, resulting in conflict

Bradley A. Thayer, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, 2006. “In Defense of Primacy”, The National Interest, November-December, p. 32-37. LN //wku-tjs

In contrast, a strategy based on retrenchment will not be able to achieve these fundamental objectives of the United States. Indeed, retrenchment will

make the United States less secure than the present grand strategy of primacy. This is because threats will exist no matter what role America chooses to play in international politics. Washington cannot call a "time out", and it cannot hide from threats. Whether they are terrorists, rogue states or rising powers, history shows that threats must be confronted. Simply by declaring that the U nited States is "going home", thus abandoning its commitments or making

unconvincing half-pledges to defend its interests and allies, does not mean that others will respect American wishes to retreat. To make such a declaration implies weakness and emboldens aggression. In the anarchic world of the animal kingdom, predators prefer to eat

the weak rather than confront the strong. The same is true of the anarchic world of international politics. If there is no diplomatic solution to the threats that confront the United States, then the conventional and strategic military power of the United States is what protects the country from such threats.



A2: Ks of Heg

They’re missing the boat here—hegemony is just a tool we have available to address problems. Just because some people do bad things with that tool doesn’t mean it always have to be that way. Even toothbrushes can be evil when you use them to shank fellow prisonmates, but that’s not a reason we should abandon dental hygiene.

Alt solves—Kristol and Kagan indicate that hegemony in a world post-alt would be conducive to freedom and democracy—their indicts only assume the heg of the status quo.

Freedom fries//never forget***A2’S


A2: “derp that’s the link”

No, that’s the impact turn—if we win our impact claims then links to their criticism are irrelevant—we prove that net worse violence happens in the world of the aff.

And no, it’s not a link. We’re just providing analysis of danger in the international sphere and comparing ways to solve it—we’re not engaging in any sort of explicitly normative or prejudiced practices.



A2: Link Turn “We solve violence”

THEY SAY THAT THEY SOLVE VIOLENCE, GROUP IT:

1. The links are individual reasons you can’t solve—we’re the only ones accessing a realistic global mechanism for sustainable solutions—and even if the alt can’t solve links are independent alt causes

2. Epistemological flaws ensure the affirmative’s advocacy of peace ignores the countless number of times the peace movement has failed and actually caused war—prefer empirics

Thomas Sowell, Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, July 21, 2006. “Pacifists versus peace.” http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell072106.asp, Accessed Online: 09/11/2008. //wku-tjs

One of the many failings of our educational system is that it sends out into the world people who cannot tell rhetoric from reality. They have learned no systematic way to analyze ideas, derive their implications and test those implications against hard facts. "Peace" movements are among those who take advantage of this widespread inability to see beyond rhetoric to realities. Few people even seem interested in the actual track record of so- called "peace" movements — that is, whether such movements actually produce peace or war . Take the Middle East.

People are calling for a cease-fire in the interests of peace. But there have been more cease-fires in the Middle East than anywhere else. If cease-fires actually promoted peace, the Middle East would be the most peaceful region on the face of the earth instead of the most violent. Was World War II ended by cease-fires or by annihilating much of Germany and Japan? Make no mistake about it, innocent civilians died in

the process. Indeed, American prisoners of war died when we bombed Germany. There is a reason why General Sherman said "war is hell" more than a century ago. But he helped end the Civil War with his devastating march through Georgia — not by cease fires or bowing to "world opinion" and there were no corrupt busybodies like the United Nations to demand replacing military force with diplomacy. There was a time when it would have been suicidal to threaten, much less attack, a nation with much stronger military power because one of the dangers to the attacker would be the prospect of being annihilated. "World opinion," the U.N. and "peace movements" have eliminated that deterrent. An aggressor today knows that if his aggression fails, he will still be protected from the full retaliatory power and fury of those he attacked because there will be hand-wringers demanding a cease fire, negotiations and concessions. That has been a formula for never-ending attacks on Israel in the Middle East. The disastrous track record of that approach extends to other times and places — but who looks at track records? Remember the Falkland Islands war, when Argentina sent troops into the Falklands to capture this little British colony in the South Atlantic? Argentina had been claiming to be the rightful owner of those islands for more than a century. Why didn't it attack these little islands before? At no time did the British have enough troops there to defend them. Before there were "peace" movements and the U.N., sending troops into those islands could easily have meant finding British troops or bombs in Buenos Aires. Now "world opinion" condemned the British just for sending armed forces into the South Atlantic to take back their islands. Shamefully, our own government was one of those that opposed the British use of force. But

fortunately British prime minister Margaret Thatcher ignored "world opinion" and took back the Falklands. The most catastrophic result of "peace" movements was World War II. While Hitler was arming Germany to the teeth, "peace" movements in Britain were advocating that their own country disarm "as an example to others." British Labor Party Members of Parliament

voted consistently against military spending and British college students publicly pledged never to fight for their country. If "peace" movements brought peace, there would never have been World War II. Not only did that war lead to tens of millions of deaths, it came dangerously close to a crushing victory for the Nazis in Europe and the Japanese empire in Asia. And we now know that the United

States was on Hitler's timetable after that. For the first two years of that war, the Western democracies lost virtually every battle, all over the world, because pre-war "peace" movements had left them with inadequate military equipment and much of it obsolete . The Nazis and the Japanese knew that. That is why they launched the war. "Peace" movements don't bring peace but war .

Even if they win that the plan solves, it doesn’t happen overnight. The transition away from hegemony will be violent and invite foreign aggression—that’s 1NC Sowell and Rosen. We’ll win an extinction disad to the plan in the short term.

And, To make matters worse, the affirmative is utterly incapable of describing or even comprehending the horrors of a world without active American engagement. War has proven to be an effective vehicle for liberating millions and stopping Hitler and it is the only thing standing between us and greater evil—our evidence is contextual

Ralph Peters, Retired U.S. Army intelligence officer, September 27, 2005. "Protest Therapy." The New York Post. http://terpsboy.com/Articles/protest-therapy.html, Accessed Online: 09/11/2008. //wku-tjs



The reason no protester has described what would follow a withdrawal of our troops is that no one on the left can face the answers. Who needs responsibility, anyway? The protesters are cocooned in a society that minimizes consequences . If anything goes wrong, it isn't their fault. The answer is never personal responsibility, but joining a support group. The protesters get their wish, our troops leave and a bloodbath erupts, drawing in Turkey, Syria and Iran? Just reach for a glass of sauvignon blanc and speed-dial a like-minded pal for reassurance. Genocide isn't your fault, girlfriend. You did what you felt was right, don't be so hard on yourself. No consequences. At least not for us.If the demonstrators believe so firmly that our government and military are wrong, shouldn't they follow the example of the earlier leftists who formed the Lincoln Brigade and fought against fascism? Couldn't they at least muster a Jane Fonda Battalion of artists, actors and professors to deploy to Iraq and bore our troops into surrendering?The truth about those who would abandon the people of Iraq and Afghanistan to terrorists and thugs is that their spiritual ancestors aren't the men of the Lincoln Brigade, but the thousands of Americans who joined the German-American Bund in the 1930s , arguing that American interests lay in peace with Reichskanzler Hitler, one swell guy.A popular theme last weekend was, "War, what is it good for?" Well, the answer is that war's good for plenty of things. It freed and forged our nation. War liberated millions of black Americans from bondage. War stopped Hitler , if too late for many millions of his victims (peace at any price tends to have a very high price, indeed). And our troops liberated 50 million human beings in Afghanistan and Iraq — who are far more grateful than the protesters or our media will accept. In this infernally troubled world, war is sometimes the only effective response to greater evils. And there is evil on this earth. It would also be easier to sympathize with the anti-war protesters if they occasionally criticized the terrorists who bomb the innocent. But the protesters don't really care about Iraqi suffering, or terror, or the Taliban's legacy. They're a forlorn mix of Bush-haters who reject election results that they don't like and drifting souls yearning for a cause to lend their failed lives meaning.



A2: Social Construction

Claims of “social construction” ignore the specific validation processes that tie theories to objective reality—the only alternative is unverifiable and equally constructed.


The seeming sophistication of the notion that all reality is “socially constructed ” has a superficial plausibility but it ignores the various validation processes which test those constructions. Much of what is said to be socially “constructed” has been in fact socially evolved over the generations and socially validated by experience . Much of what many among the intelligentsia propose to replace it with is in fact constructed—that is, created deliberately at a given time and place—and with no validation beyond the consensus of like-minded peers. If facts, logic , and scientific procedures are all just arbitrary “socially constructed” notions, then all that is left is consensus—more specifically peer consensus, the kind of consensus that matters to adolescents or to many among the intelligentsia. In a very limited sense, reality is indeed constructed by human beings. Even the world that we see around us is ultimately constructed inside our brains from two very small patches of light falling on our retinas. Like images seen in the back of a view camera, the image of the world in the back of our eyes is upside down. Our brain turns it right side up and reconciles the differences between the image in one eye with the image in the other eye by perceiving the world as three-dimensional. Bats do not perceive the world in the same way humans do because they rely on signals sent out like sonar and bounced

back. Some creatures in the sea perceive through electrical fields that their bodies generate and receive. While the worlds perceived by different creatures through different mechanisms obviously differ from one another, these perceptions are not just free-floating notions , but are subjected to validation processes on which matters as serious as life and death depend . The specific image of a lion that you see in a cage may be a construct inside your brain, but entering that cage will quickly and catastrophically demonstrate that there is a reality beyond the control of your brain . Bats do not fly into brick walls during their nocturnal flights because the very different reality constructed within their brains is likewise subject to validation by experience in a world that exists outside their brains. Indeed, bats do not fly into plate glass windows, as birds sometimes do when relying on sight—indicating both differences in perception systems and the

existence of a reality independent of those perception systems. Even the more abstract visions of the world can often be subject to empirical validation . Einstein’s vision of physics , which was quite different from that of his predecessors, was shown at Hiroshima to be not just

Einstein’s vision of physics—not just his truth versus somebody else’s truth, but an inescapable reality for everyone present at that tragic place at that catastrophic time. Validation processes are the crucial ignored factor which allows many intellectuals to regard all sorts of phenomena—whether social, economic or scientific— as mere subjective notions, implicitly allowing them to substitute their own preferred subjective notions as to what is, as well as what ought to be.



A2: Realism Bad

We’re not a defense of realism—don’t let them conflate addressing threats with an entirely separate field of academic inquiry.

[OPTIONAL]And, just because realism is bad doesn’t mean we should reject it—alternative worldviews will be just as violent or worse

O'Callaghan, 02 (Terry , lecturer in the school of International Relations at the University of South Australia, International Relations and the third debate, ed: Jarvis, 2002, p. 79-80)

In fact, if we explore the depths of George's writings further, we find remarkable brevity in their scope, failing to engage with practical issues beyond platitudes and

homilies. George, for example, is concerned about the violent, dangerous and war-prone character of the present international system. And rightly so. The world is a cruel and unforgiving place, especially for those who suffer the indignity of human suffering beneath tyrannous leaders,

warrior states, and greedy self-serving elites. But surely the problem of violence is not banished from the international arena once the global stranglehold of realist thinking is finally broken ? It is important to try to determine the levels of violence that might be

expected in a nonrealist world. How will internecine conflict be managed? How do postmodernists like George go about managing conflict between marginalized groups whose "voices" collide? It is one thing to talk about the failure of current realist thinking, but there is absolutely nothing in George's statements to suggest that he has discovered solutions to handle events in Bosnia, the Middle East, or East Timor. Postmodern approaches look as impoverished in this regard as do realist perspectives. Indeed, it is interesting to note that George gives conditional support for the actions of the United States in Haiti and Somalia "because on balance they gave people some hope where there was none" (George, 1994:231). Brute force, power politics, and interventionism do apparently have a place in George's postmodem world. But even so, the Haitian and Somalian cases are hardly in the same intransigent category as those of Bosnia or the Middle East. Indeed, the Americans pulled out of Somalia as soon as events took a

turn for the worse and, in the process, received a great deal of criticism from the international community. Would George have done the same thing? Would he

have left the Taliban to their devices in light of their complicity in the events of September 11? Would he have left the Somalians to wallow in poverty and misery? Would he have been willing to sacrifice the lives of a number of young men and women (American, Australian, French, or whatever) to subdue Aidid and his minions in order to restore social and political stability to Somalia? To be blunt, I wonder how much better off the international community would be if Jim George were put in charge of foreign affairs. This is not a fatuous point. After all, George wants to suggest that students of international politics are implicated

in the trials and tribulations of international politics. All of us should be willing, therefore, to accept such a role, even hypothetically. I suspect, however, that were George actually to confront some of the dilemmas that policymakers do on a daily basis, he would find that teaching the Bosnian Serbs about the dangers of modernism , universalism and positivism, and asking them to be more tolerant and sensitive would not meet with much success . True, it may not be a whole lot worse than current realist approaches, but the point is that George has not demonstrated how his views might make a meaningful difference. Saying that they will is not enough, especially given that the outcomes of such strategies might cost people their lives. Nor, indeed, am I asking George to develop a "research project"

along positivist lines. On the contrary, I am merely asking him to show how his position can make a difference to the "hard cases" in international politics. My point is thus a simple one. Despite George's pronouncements, there is little in his work to show that he has much appreciation for the kind of moral dilemmas that Augustine wrestled with in his early writings and that confront human beings every day. Were this the case, George would not have painted such a black-and- white picture of the study of international politics.



A2: We’re Patriotic

Nobody cares if you’re patriotic—good intentions can have terrible consequences for a country’s defense, the only valuable metric is consequentialism.


No matter how much journalists, politicians or others undermine a war effort, anyone calling such actions unpatriotic is automatically met with the indignant response, “How dare you question my patriotism?” Just why patriotism is something that it is unreasonable or unworthy to question is something for which no argument is advanced, unless endless repetition is considered to be an argument. This is not to say that anyone with whom one disagrees about a war or any other issue can be automatically called “unpatriotic.” That is not a charge to

be either automatically accepted or automatically rejected. Even actions detrimental to a country’s self-defense are not automatically unpatriotic in intention . It is not necessary to assume that the intelligentsia of the 1930s, for example, deliberately set out to do such things as making their own countries vulnerable to military attack . As noted in Chapter 7, Georges Lapierre—the leader of the French teachers’ union’s campaigns to promote pacifism in France’s textbooks during the 1920s and 1930s, downplaying national pride and national defense—nevertheless, after the fall of France in 1940, joined the French underground resistance movement against the Nazi conquerors, and as a result ended up being captured and sent to his death in Dachau.137 He was clearly not an unpatriotic man. But, whatever his intentions during the interwar years, the more important question is the ultimate effect of his efforts on a whole generation. Many other prewar pacifist teachers also ended up fighting in the French resistance movement after the vision they

had promoted for so long led to opposite results from what they were seeking. They had, in Burke’s words from an earlier time, helped bring about the worst results “without being the worst of men.”138 In their own minds, the teachers “wove together patriotism and pacifism,” according to an account

of that era139 but, regardless of what went on inside those educators’ minds, the net result out in the real world was the same as if they had deliberately undermined the patriotism of a whole generation of their students, for whom they made internationalism as well as pacifism prime virtues, despite whatever passing mention there might be of love of country as a subordinate aspect of a love of humanity in general.



Iraq = Not that bad

The situation in Iraq isn’t that bad—reports focus excessively on casualties but it’s a comparatively less bloody conflict than even a single day in previous wars.


The American military’s positive achievements in general, whether in battle or in restoring civil order or carrying out humanitarian activities, received little attention in the media . While the Iraq war began to disappear from the front pages of the New York Times

as terrorist attacks declined in the wake of the surge , and coverage shrank similarly in other media, American casualties continued to be highlighted , even when those casualties were in single digits, and the cumulative casualties were constantly featured, even though these casualties were by no means high compared to other wars. In fact, all the Americans killed in the two Iraq wars put together were fewer than those killed taking the one island of Iwo Jima during the Second World War or one day of

fighting at Antietam during the Civil War.129 Unless one believes that wars can be fought with no casualties , there was nothing unusual about the casualty rate in the first or second Iraq war, except for its being lower than in most wars. But casualties fit the constant theme of soldiers as victims, and verbal virtuosity has enabled this victimization message to be characterized as “supporting the troops” or even “honoring the troops.” After the New York Times published photographs of dying and dead American soldiers in Iraq, its executive editor replied to criticisms by declaring that “death and carnage are part of the story, and to launder them out of our account of the war

would be a disservice.”130 Such verbal virtuosity creates a straw man of “laundering out” the fact of deaths in war —which no one has ever doubted—and equates publishing photos of individual soldiers in the throes of death with just telling the story, while burying stories of soldiers’ heroism deep inside the paper.


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