Gonzaga Debate Institute 2010 Scholars Nuclear K’s

Impacts – Racism – Genocide

>CONTINUED<

I think that, broadly speaking, racism justifies the death-function in the economy of biopower by appealing to the principle that the death of others makes one biologically stronger insofar as one is a member of a race or a population, insofar as one is an element in a unitary living plurality. You can see that, here, we are far removed from the ordinary racism that takes the traditional form of mutual contempt or hatred between races. We are also far removed from the racism that can be seen as a sort of ideoloical operation that allows States, or a class, to displace the hostility that is directed toward [them], or which is tormenting the social body, onto a mythical adversary. I think that this is something much deeper than an old tradition, much deeper than a new ideology, that it is something else. The specificity of modern racism, or what gives it its specificity, is not bound up with mentalities, ideologies, or the lies of power. It is bound up with the technique of power, with the technology of power. It is bound up with this, and that takes us as far away as possible from the race war and the intelligibility of history. We are dealing with a mechanism that allows biopower to work. So racism is bound up with the workings of a State that is obliged to use race, the elimination of races and the purification of the race, to exercise its sovereign power. The juxtaposition of-or the way biopower functions through-the old sovereign power of life and death implies the workings, the introduction and activation, of racism. And it is, I think here that we find the actual roots of racism.

Impact Calc – Genocide

Moral obligation to prevent genocide

Rummel 6 (Rudolph, Prof. Pol. Science at u of Hawaii, http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.CHA, 7/2/10) jl

Genocide is horrible, an abomination of our species, totally unacceptable. It is an obscenity, the evil of our time that all good people must work to eradicate. And at the core there is no doubt as to what this evil is—all recognize that the Nazi program to kill all Jews was genocide. Nor is there any doubt that the current Bosnian Serb massacre of Bosnian Moslems is genocide. But was genocide also the massacre of helpless villagers in the Sudan by government forces fighting a rebellion, the Indonesian army purge of communists, the assassination of political opponents by the Nationalist government on Formosa, the "land-refom" executions of landlords in the Soviet Union, or the rapid death of inmates in Vietnamese reeducation camps? What about non-killing which has been called genocide, such as the absorption of one culture by another, the disease spread to natives by contact with colonists, the forced deportation of a people, or African slavery?
Genocide must be prevented at all costs, its corporate nature makes it morally worse than extinction

Lang 3 (Berel, Prof Philosophy Wesleyan U, Act and idea in the Nazi genocide, p. 12-13) jl

A number of further questions arise in connection with the act of genocide, in particular with the status of its agents. That genocide entails the intended destruction of a group does not by itself imply that the destruction must itself be the act of a group; but the extent of actions required by any design for genocide is so broad as virtually to ensure that the purpose will involve corporate decisions and effort. Admittedly, the same technological advances (in communications, for example) that make genocide as a collective action increasingly possible also increase the likelihood that an individual acting alone could initiate such actions. (When the push of a single button can produce immeasurable catastrophic effects, we discover the possibility of an order of destruction beyond genocide as well: “omnicide.”) But it is also clear that the opprobrium attending the term “genocide” comes in part from its connotation of a corporate action - as if the same act or set of acts would be a lesser fault, easier to understand or even excuse, if a single person rather than a group were responsible, with the connection of the latter (we suppose)to a public moral code and to decisions that would have had to be made or supported collectively. The fact of corporate responsibility sometimes diminish the enormity of an action, as when the difficulty of assigning specific responsibility gives to the action a vagueness of reference similar to that of a natural or otherwise impersonal force. But the almost necessarily corporate origins of genocide seem rather to accentuate its moral enormity, multiplying the individual acts of consciousness that would have been required to produce the larger corporate act.

No Impact – Epistemology

Their prolif impacts are informed by an epistemology of uncertainty which reifies their ethical imagery – Be skeptical of their ev.
Massumi, 7 (Brian, professor in the Communication Department at the Université de Montréal, “Potential Politics and the Primacy of Preemption”, 10:2, p. Project Muse TBC 6/30/10)

Preemption shares many characteristics with deterrence. Like deterrence, it operates in the present on a future threat. It also does this in such as way as to make that present futurity the motor of its process. The process, however, is qualitatively different. For one thing, the epistemology is unabashedly one of uncertainty, and not due to a simple lack of knowledge. There is uncertainty because the threat has not only not yet fully formed but, according to Bush's opening definition of preemption, it has not yet even emerged. In other words, the threat is still indeterminately in potential. This is an ontological premise: the nature of threat cannot be specified. It might in some circumstances involve weapons of mass destruction, but in others it will not. It might come in the form of strange white power, or then again it might be an improvised explosive device. The enemy is also unspecifiable. It might come from without, or rise up unexpectedly from within. You might expect the enemy to be a member of a certain ethnic or religious group, an Arab or a Moslem, but you can never be sure. It might turn out be a white Briton wearing sneakers, or a Puerto Rican from the heartland of America (to mention just two well-known cases, those of John Reid and Jose Padilla). It might be an anonymous member of a cell, or the supreme leader of a "rogue" state. The lack of knowledge about the nature of the threat can never be overcome. It is part of what defines the objective conditions of the situation: threat has become proteiform and it tends to proliferate unpredictably. The situation is objectively one in which the only certainty is that threat will emerge where it is least expected. This is because what is ever-present is not a particular threat or set of threats, but the potential for still more threats to emerge without warning. The global situation is not so much threatening as threat generating: threat-o-genic. It is the world's capacity to produce new threats at any and every moment that defines this situation. We are in a world that has passed from what "the Architect" called the "known unknown" (uncertainty that can be analyzed and identified) to the "unknown unknown" (objective uncertainty). Objective uncertainty is as directly an ontological category as an epistemological one. The threat is known to have the ontological status of indeterminate potentiality. The unknown unknown is unexpungeable because its potentiality belongs to the objective conditions of life today. Consequently, no amount of effort to understand will ever bring a definitive answer. Thinking about it will only reopen the same uncomprehending question: "why do they hate us so"? This question, asked over and over again by the US media since 9-11, expresses the impossibility of basing a contemporary logic of conflict on a psychological premise. The nature and motives of the adversary strike us as purely incomprehensible. The only hypothesis left is that they are just plain "evil," capable of the worst "crimes against humanity." They are simply "inhuman." The only way to identify the enemy collectively is as an "axis of evil." That characterization does not add new knowledge. It is the moral equivalent of ignorance. Its function is to concentrate "humanity" entirely on one side in order to legitimate acts on "our" side that would be considered crimes against humanity were the enemy given the benefit of being considered human (torture, targeting civilian populations, contraventions of human rights and the laws of war). The ostensibly moral judgment of "evil" functions very pragmatically as a device for giving oneself unlimited tactical options freed from moral constraint. This is the only sense in which something like deterrence continues to function: moral judgment is used in such a way as to deter any properly moral or ethical logic from becoming operative. The operative logic will function on an entirely different plane.