8/12/2019 123 Laugh at Me

1/17

Contention 1 is Red (White and Blue) Spread

The status quo is defined by an exponentially increasing use of drone warfare as part

of an ever-expanding war on alteritypresent in every conflict, UAVs have become

the keystone of borderless warfare that has defined the present conflictGaist 7/23 (Thomas, reporter for GlobalResearch, the center for globalization studies based in Montreal, US Expands Global DroneWarfare http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-expands-global-drone-warfare/5343612, retrieved 9/26/13, RC THIS CARD IS GENDER MODIFIED)

In what the Washington Postdescribes as the next phase of drone warfare,the Obama administration is set to extendthe Pentagons robust surveillance networks far beyond traditional, declared combat zones. According tothe Post, Washington is set to deploy the drone fleet to new areas across the globe, where it will be used to monitor drug runners, pirates and

other targets that worry US officials. A Defense Department spokeswoman said the military is committed to increasingdrone activitiesthroughout Asia and the Pacific. The Postalso cites Colombia as a war theater that will likely see increased use ofAmerican drones, although US drones have already been engaged in operations against narco-terrorists in collaboration with the Colombian

military. Surveillance drones could really help us out and really take the heat and wear and tear off of some of our manned [personed] aviation

assets, Marine Gen. John F. Kelly, head of the US Southern Co mmand, said in March.While Obama has claimed that the tide

of war is receding, actually the US government is intensifying military operations worldwide. Duringthe past decade, the Pentagon has assembled a fleet of hundreds of high-altitude, unmanned

[personed] aerial vehicles (UAVs), which now carry out missions on a daily basis in service of the

strategic aims of US imperialism. The Predator drone series alone has carried out at least 80,000

sortiesin conflict areas including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bosnia, Serbia, Iraq, Yemen, Libya and Somalia. In their 2013 article, How ManyWars Is the US Fighting Today? Linda Bilmes of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and Michael Intriligator of the Univ ersity of

California, Los Angeles argue thatthe US is engaged in at least five unannounced and undeclared wars fought

to a large extent with robotic weapons systems. As the paper points out, these conflicts are part of a long tradition of

many previous covert US military incursions, including those in Chile, Cuba, Nicaragua and many other countries. Advanced militarytechnologies have facilitated a massive extension of such covert military incursions, the authors

argue, writing that the emergence of robotic warfare is enabling the US to become involved in more

conflicts worldwide. The paper states: Today US military operations are involved in scores of countries across all the five continents.The US military is the worlds largest landlord, with significant military facilities in nations around the world, and with a significant presence in

Bahrain, Djibouti, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Kyrgyzstan, in addition to long -established bases in

Germany, Japan, South Korea, Italy, and the UK. Additionally, the US has some kind of military presencein Colombia, Egypt, Iran, Jordan,

Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Oman, Pakistan, the Philippines, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, UAE and Yemen. Bilmes and Intriligator assert that the

invention of precise, remotely controlled robotic aircraft has enabled the US to expand dramatically

the number of covert, unofficial attacks it carries out without providing information to the public

about where it operates, how it selects targets, or how many people it has killed, including innocent

civilian bystanders. Statistics from the New America Foundation show that drone strikes have

escalated at an exponential rate. Pakistan was hit by only nine drone strikes from 2004 to 2007, increasing to 118 by 2010. Manysmaller US military operations in Africa and the Middle East are increasingly utilizing drones. Former US Africa Command (AFRICOM)

commander General Carter Ham stated in February that his forces required a 15-fold increase in surveillance and reconnaissance capacities for

the continent. US Air Force drones have already been flying sorties across North Africa, and the US already operates drone bases in Djibouti,

Ethiopia and the Seychelles.As part of Operation Nomad Shadow, a secret US military surveillance program,the US military is currently launching drones from the Incirlik air base in Turkey to provide surveillance

for the Turkish military in its campaign against the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party(PKK). The drones flyinto northern Iraq to gather data, which is then transmitted to a fusion cell in Ankara for analysis. The drone operations are arousing popular

hostility in Turkey. Protests erupted in 2012 in response to an airstrike by Turkish pilots, directed by a US

drone, which killed 34 civilians. The US drone incorrectly identified the convoying civilians as PKK

guerrillas. A study released on Thursday by the Pew Research Center found that 82 percent of Turks oppose the Obamas administrationsglobal drone war. Simultaneous with its operations abroad, the Obama administration is ramping up drone flights in the US. The Office of

National Marine Sanctuaries (ONMS), for instance, has purchased Puma drones used by the Navy, which are slated for deployment off the coast

of Los Angeles. ONMS is currently preparing to expand drone flights in other states, including Hawaii, Florida, and Washington. A new $100

8/12/2019 123 Laugh at Me

2/17

million drone hangar is currently planned for Fort Riley, Kansas, along with a new hangar and airfield at Fort Hood, Texas. The drone war is

taking a heavy toll of civilian lives. Last year,the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) published informationabout deliberate targeting of rescuers, mourners, funeral processions, and those who return to the

scene of drone strikes after the initial explosions, a tactic known as the double tap. So-called

signature drone strikes are frequently launched based on analysis of patterns of behavior, with

individuals engaging in supposedly suspicious gatherings and movements selected for targeting.

According to the BIJ, US drone strikes have been responsible for at least 3,500 deaths, includingAmerican citizens, who have been personally selected for assassination by President Obama . The BIJmaintains that at least 555 of the dead are confirmed civilians, in opposition to Senator Dianne Feinsteins claim that civil ian casualties have

been in the single digits. Pakistani government estimates featured in a recently leaked internal document, Details of Atta cks by NATO

Forces/Predators in FATA, show thatat least 147 of 746 people killed by US drones between 2006 and 2009were civilians, and 94 of them children. A report issued by Stanford and NYU law schools last year

found that 50 civilians are killed for every confirmed insurgent who is eliminated by the strikes. The

Obama administration, as the Post observed, has imposed a broad cone of silence on its drone

programs worldwide, operating on the basis of secrecy and issuing secret laws and fiats to

institutionalize worldwide targeted assassination.In May, Obama gave a speech in staunch defense of his use of dronestrikes, and announced the codification of his administrations drone policies in a new Presidential Policy Guidance documen t. Obama said,

For the same human progress that gives us the technology to strike half a world away also demands the discipline to constrain that poweror

risk abusing it. Thats why, over the last four years, my administration has worked vigorously to establish a framework that governs our use of

force against terroristsinsisting upon clear guidelines, oversight and accountability that is now codified in Presidential Policy Guidance that I

signed yesterday.The Presidential Policy Guidance (PPG) document is one of more than 20 secretPresidential Policy Directives (PPD) promulgated by the Obama administration and withheld from

public view. According towww.allgov.com, a PPD is a statement by the President directed to the Executive Branch which becomes part

of the particular legal framework that grows up around any statute or program.The PPG institutionalizes and provides afalse veneer of legality to the worldwide campaign of targeted killings. What Obama presents as a

constraint on power is, in reality, a measure that strips every person on the planet of their right not to

be killed arbitrarily on the say-so of US state officials. The global drone war is a primary instrument of

US foreign policy. It is waged, under the fraudulent mantle of the Global War on Terrorism, notto

defend the US against terrorists, but as part of an expansive militarist agenda aimed at shoring up

American imperialismseroding position of strategic dominance.

This has led to a re-hashing of imperialism oriented around virtual, casualty free

battlesthis militarism ensures military conflict ad infinitum

Buchanan 06 (Ian, professor of critical and cultural theory at Cardiff University Treatise on Militarism retrieved 10/8/13 R.C.)

The Vietnam Syndrome isan optical illusion, a wish-fulfillmenton the part of those who would like

to see an end to U.S. imperialism.7In philosophical terms, the Vietnam Syndrome was the negativeneeded by

militarism to resurrect itself. What the military realized in Vietnam is that the U.S. public will not

tolerate a high casualty rateamongst its own troops unless there is a pressing need . While savingfreedom might be construed as a pressing need, stopping communismin a country most people hadnt heard of before the war started didnt

cut it. Lacking ideological support, the U.S. military publicly adopted azero-casualty approach to itselective wars (to continue with thesurgical trope) and banked on technology to achieve it. Theanti-warsentiment ignited by the Vietnam conflict played a large part in securing public acceptancefor this strategy in spite of the escalatingcosts it entailed. The U.S. showed it was anti-war only to

the extent thatwar put its people in harms way, but had nostrong opinion on thematter when itwas merely a question of unloading deadly ordinancefrom a high altitude on faceless peoples far

from the homeland.Whatever the eventual cost, and the figures for military expenditure arealways

astronomical(consider the 2004 budget of $400 billion a year towage war in Iraq), technology was to become the

http://www.allgov.com/http://www.allgov.com/http://www.allgov.com/

8/12/2019 123 Laugh at Me

3/17

solution to what is essentially an ideological problem, the U.S. population isnt willing tocommit itsbody to the U.S.s military causes.8After Vietnam, no administration of the future could afford to be softon military spending (if

they lost spending $30 billion a year, theycould hardly afford to spend less in the future is the presiding logic)(Kolko 356). The spin-

doctoring that has gone into talking up thecapabilities of the new class of so-called smart weaponsis worthy ofMadison Avenue.9 Its effect has been to persuade the American peoplethat technology

has made them invulnerable. Thus, war has enteredthe age of intelligent machines and unintelligentgovernment.10 In any case, the present conflict proves beyond any shadow of adoubt that the U.S.will not hesitate to embroil itself in a potentiallyVietnam-like conflict if the conditions are ripe. I haveread reports thatU.S. soldiers based in Iraq are writing Is this Vietnamyet? on theirhelmets; sadly theyre not asking the right question.

Given theadmission that the insurgency problem may never be resolved, itplainly is anotherVietnam. If this isnt the view of the Hawks inWashington who orchestrated the war, and I dontbelieve for a secondthat it is, then it begs the question: what makes the present conflict not

another Vietnam in the eyes of its architects? What are the conditions under which the U.S. will

engage in a potentially protracted foreign war and not consider that a strategic error?

And this new militarism has led to war existing in a state of simulationwinning is no

longer the objective, but rather the act of war itself. The end result is an endless spiraldownward until the war machine subsumes the State culminating in total endless war

and infinite threat annihilation

Buchanan 06 (Ian, professor of critical and cultural theory at Cardiff University Treatise on Militarism retrieved 10/8/13 R.C.THISEVIDENCE IS GENDER MODIFIED)

Why did this American defeat(the largest reversal in thehistory of the USA) have no internal repercussions in

America?If it had really signified the failure of the planetary strategy ofthe United States, it wouldnecessarily have completelydisrupted its internal balance and the American politicalsystem.Nothing of the sort occurred.Something else, then, took place. (Baudrillard 1994, 36)Baudrillards answer to this question is that

war ceased to be real; itceased to be determined in terms of winning and losing and becameinstead

simulation, a pure spectacleno less terrifying or deadly for itslack of reality. The consequences ofthis metaphysical adjustment areshocking and go a long way towards explaining the strategy of so-calledterrorists.As Andrew Bacevich writes, it is not only the superpowers like the U.S. that haverelinquished the concept of victory. It is asthough war itself has jettisoned it as so much extra baggage.The typical armedconflict today no longer pits like againstlikefield army v. field army or battle fleet v. battle fleetandthere usually is no longer even the

theoretical prospect of adecisive outcome. In asymmetric conflicts, combatants employviolence indirectly. The

aim is not to defeat but to intimidateand terrorize, with women a favored target and sexual assaultoften the weapon ofchoice. (26)TheB-52 pilot unloading bombs on an unseen enemy below knows just as well as the suicide

bomber in Iraq that his [their] actions will not lead directly to a decisive change, that in a sense the

gesture is futile; but, healso knows, as does the suicide bomber, that his [their] actions will help

createan atmosphere of fearthat, it is hoped, will one day lead to change.Deprived of teleology, war thrives in

an eternal present.If Vietnamchanged so little, then what can we expect in the way of meaningfulpolitical change when the present

war ends?Terror is not merely the weapon of the weak; it is the new conditionof war, and no powercan claim exception. For Clausewitz and hisspiritual tutor Machiavelli, the only rational reason to wage war is towin where winningmeans achieving a predetermined and clearly prescribed goal. Britains colonial wars are an obvious case in point.The self-serving claim that

Britain acquired its empire in a fit of absenceowes its sense to the fact that it never set out to gain its eventually quiteconsiderable empire

(it was at least geographically true, albeit nothistorically true, that the sun never set on the British Empire,encompassing as it did territories

in virtually every region of the world)all at once as Hitler and Hirohito were later to do, but built it oneterritory at a time over a two century-

long period. Through a sequenceof limited wars, it was able to deploy its limited means to obtain colossalriches. The First World War

essentially started out in the same way.Germanys goal was to secure a European empire before it was too late, but the machinegun put paid

to that ambition, and instead of a quickwar returning a specific prize, there irrupted a g lobal conflagration thatwas to consume the wealth

and youth of Europe. As Wallersteinargues, the true victor of the First World War wasnt Britain or France,but American industry, and by

8/12/2019 123 Laugh at Me

4/17

extension, the true loser wasntGermany and its allies, but Europe itself (14). Eric Hobsbawm hasdefined the twentieth century as the age

when wars of limited meansand limited aims gave way to wars of limited means and unlimited aims(29-30). The twenty-first

century appears to be the age of wars ofunlimited means and no precise aim.When the aim of warhas been completely deterritorialized in thisway, Deleuze and Guattari argue that Clausewitzs

formula iseffectively reversed (421). When total wari.e., war which not onlyplaces the

annihilation of the enemys army at its center but its entirepopulation and economy toobecomes

the object of the Stateappropriatedwar machine, then at this level in the set of all possibleconditions, the object and the aim enter into new relations that can reachthe point of contradiction

(421). In the first instance, the war machineunleashed by the State in pursuit of its object, total war,remainssubordinate to the State and merely realizes the maximal conditions ofits aims (421).Paradoxically, though, the more successful it is inrealizing the States aims, the less controllable bythe State it becomes.As the States aims growon the back of the success of its war machine,so therestrictions on the war machines object shrink untilscorpionlikeit effectively subsumes the

State, making it just one of its manymoving parts. In Vietnam, the State was blamed for the failure of thewar machineprecisely because it attempted to set limits on its object. Itsinability to adequately impose these limits not only cost it the war, butin effect

its sovereignty too. Since then the State has been a puppet of awar machine global in scope and ambition.

This is the status ofmilitarism today, and no one has described its characteristics morechillingly

than Deleuze and Guattari: This worldwide war machine, which in a way reissues from

the States,displays two successive figures: first, that of fascism,which makes war an unlimited movement with

no other aimthan itself; but fascism is only a rough sketch, and the second,postfascist, figure is thatof a war machine that takes peace asits object directly, as the peace of Terror or Survival. The warmachine reforms a smooth space that now claims to control, to surround the entire earth. Total war

is surpassed, toward aform of peace more terrifying still.(1987, 421)

8/12/2019 123 Laugh at Me

5/17

Contention 2 is Collateral Damage

The militarism invoked by the politics of War for Peace spills across borders, spinning

a web that ensnares every culturally productive institutionthe status quo is defined

by a culture of war that increasingly radicalizes and militarizes every day spaces. Thissystematized violence becomes pleasure to a militarized population, with the media

constantly offering new forms of spectacularized violence to fuel the fetishes of the

populous. War and Death are trivialized and turned to sport in order to encourage

passivity with regards to the permanent state of war. The only hope we have left is to

re-open the pedagogical spaces that have been sealed off, and develop the vocabulary

key to define the way that violence now structures life.

Giroux 12(Henry, holds the Global Television and Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, and prominentsocial critic Violence, USA: The Warfare State and the Hardening of Everyday Life http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa

retrieved 10/15/13 R.C.)

Since 9/11, the war on terror and the campaign for homeland security have increasingly mimicked the

tactics of the enemies they sought to crush. Violence and punishment as both a media spectacle and a

bone-crushing reality have become prominent and influential forces shaping U.S. society. As the

boundaries between the realms of war and civil life have collapsed, social relations and the public

services needed to make them viable have been increasingly privatized and militarized.1The logic of

profitability works its magic in channeling the public funding of warfare and organized violence into

universities, market-based service providers, Hollywoodcinema, cable television, and deregulated contractors. The

metaphysics of war and associated forms of violence now creep into every aspect of U.S. society .As the

preferred instrument of statecraft, war and its intensifying production of violence crosses borders, time, space,

and places.2 The result is that the United States has become a culture of warengulfed in fear and

violence[and trapped by a military metaphysics in which] homeland security matters far more than social security.3Seemingly

without any measure of self-restraint, state-sponsored violence now flows and regroups effortlessly,contaminating both foreign and domestic policies. The criticism of the military-industrial complex, along with its lobbyists

and merchants of death, that was raised by President Eisenhower seems to have been relegated to the trash can of history. Instead of

being disparaged as a death machine engaged in the organized production of violence, the military-

industrial complex is defended as a valuable jobs program and a measure of national pride and

provides a powerful fulcrum for the permanent warfare state.It gets worse. One consequence of the permanent

warfare state is evident in the recent public revelations concerning war crimes committed by U.S. government forces. These include the

indiscriminate killings of Afghan civilians by U.S. drone aircraft; the barbaric murder of Afghan children and peasantfarmers by U.S. infantrymen infamously labeled as the Kill Team;4disclosures concerning four U.S. marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters;

and the uncovering of photographs showing more than a dozen soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Divisions Fourth Brigade Combat T eam, along

with some Afghan security forces, posing with the severed hands and legs of Taliban attackers in Zabul Province in 2010.5And, shocking even

for those acquainted with standard military combat, there is the case of Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, who walked off a small combat

outpost in Kandahar province and slaughtered 17 villagers, most of them women and children, and later walked back to his base and turned

himself in.6Mind-numbing violence, war crimes, and indiscriminate military attacks on civilians on the part of the U.S. government are farfrom new and date back to infamous acts such as the air attacks on civilians in Dresden along with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki during the Second World War.7Military spokespersons are typically quick to remind the U.S. public that

such practices are part of the price one pays for combat and are endemic to war itself. State violence

wages its ghastly influence through a concept of permanent war, targeted assassinations, an assault

on civil liberties, and the use of drone technologies that justifies the killing of innocent civilians as

collateral damage. Collateral damage has also come home with a vengeance as soldiers returning

from combat are killing themselves at record rates and committing mayhemparticularly sexual

http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa%20retrieved%2010/15/13http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa%20retrieved%2010/15/13http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa%20retrieved%2010/15/13http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en1http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en1http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en1http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en2http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en3http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en3http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en3http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en4http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en4http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en4http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en5http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en5http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en5http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en6http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en6http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en6http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en7http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en7http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en7http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en7http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en6http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en5http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en4http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en3http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en2http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en1http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa%20retrieved%2010/15/13http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa%20retrieved%2010/15/13

8/12/2019 123 Laugh at Me

6/17

violence and spousal and child abuse.8After more than a decade at war, soldiers in the U.S. military are also returning home andjoining the police, thus contributing to the blurring of the line between the military and law enforcement.The history of atrocities committed

by the United States in the name of war need not be repeated here, but some of these incidents have doubled in on themselves and fueled

public outrage against the violence of war.9One of the most famous events was the My Lai massacre, which played a crucial role in mobilizing

protests against the Vietnam War.10Even dubious appeals to national defense and honor can provide no excuse for mass killings of civilians,

rapes, and other acts of destruction that completely lack any justifiable military objective. Not only does the alleged normative violence of war

disguise the moral cowardice of the warmongers, it also demonizes the enemy and dehumanizes soldiers. It is this brutalizing

psychology of desensitization, emotional hardness, and the freezing of moral responsibility that isparticularly crucial to understand, because it grows out of a formative culture in which war, violence,

and the dehumanization of others becomes routine, commonplace, and removed from any sense of

ethical accountability.It is necessary to recognize that acts of extreme violence and cruelty do notrepresent merely an odd or marginal and private retreat into barbarism. On the contrary, warlike

values and the social mindset they legitimate have become the primary currency of a market-driven

culture that takes as its model a Darwinian shark tank in which only the strongest survive. In a

neoliberal order in which vengeance and revenge seem to be the most cherished values in a social

order organized around the brute necessity of survival, violence becomesboth a legitimate

mediating force and one of the few remaining sources of pleasure.11At work in the new hyper-social Darwinism is a

view of the Other as the enemy, an all-too-quick willingness in the name of war to embrace the

dehumanization of the Other, and an all-too-easy acceptance of violence, however extreme, asroutine and normalized.As many theorists have observed, the production of extreme violence in its various incarnations is now asource of profit for Hollywood moguls, mainstream news, popular culture, the corporate-controlled entertainment industry, and a major

market for the defense industries.12This pedagogy of brutalizing hardness and dehumanization is also

produced and circulated in schools, boot camps, prisons, and a host of other sites that now trade in

violence and punishment for commercial purposes, or for the purpose of containing populations that are viewed assynonymous with public disorder. The mall, juvenile detention facilities, many public housing projects, privately owned apartment buildings,

and gated communities all embody a model of a dysfunctional sociality and have come to resemble proto-military spaces in which the culture

of violence and punishment becomes the primary order of politics, fodder for entertainment, and an organizing principle for society. All of

these spaces and institutions, from malls to housing projects to schools, are beginning to resemble war zones that

impose needless frameworks of punishment. This is evident not only in New York Citys infamous stop -and-frisk policy, butalso in shopping malls that now impose weekend teen curfews, hire more security guards, employ high-tech surveillance tools, and closely

police the behavior of young people. Similarly, housing projects have become militarized security zones meting out harsh punishments for drug

offenders and serve as battlegrounds for the police and young people.Even public-school reform is now justified in the dehumanizinglanguage of national security, which increasingly legitimates the transformation of schools into adjuncts of the surveillance and police state.13

The privatization and militarization of schools mutually inform each other as students are increasingly

subjected to disciplinary apparatuses that limit their capacity for critical thinking while molding them

into consumers, testing them into submission, stripping them of any sense of social responsibility, and

convincing large numbers of poor minority students that they are better off under the jurisdiction of

the criminal justice system instead of being treated as valued members of the publicschools. Schools areincreasingly absorbing the culture of prisons and are aggressively being transformed into an extension of the criminal justice system.Many

public schools are being militarized to resemble prisons instead of being safe places that would enable students to learn how to be critical and

engaged citizens. Rather than being treated with dignity and respect, students are increasingly treated as if they were criminals, given that they

are repeatedly photographed, fingerprinted, scanned, x-rayed, sniffed and snooped on.14The space of the school resembles a high-security

prison with its metal detectors at the school entrances, drug-sniffing dogs in school corridors, and surveillance cameras in the hallways and

classrooms. Student behaviors that were once considered child play are now elevated to the status of a crime. Young people who violate dress

codes, engage in food fights, hug each other, doodle, and shoot spit wads are no longer reprimanded by the classroom teacher or principal;

instead their behavior is criminalized. Consequently, the police are called in to remove them from the classroom, handcuff them, and put themin the back of a police car to be carted off to a police station where they languish in a holding cell. There is a kind of doubling that takes place

here between the culture of punishment, on the one hand, and the feeding of profits for the security-surveillance industries, on the other.

What has emerged in the United States is a civil and political order structured around the problem of

violent crime. This governing-through-crime model produces a highly authoritarian and mechanistic

approach to addressing social problems that often focuses on low-income and poor minorities,

promotes highly repressive policies, and places undue emphasis on personal security rather than

considering the larger complex of social and structural forces that fuels violence in the first place. Far

from promoting democratic values, a respect for others, and social responsibility, a governing-

http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en8http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en8http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en8http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en9http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en9http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en9http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en10http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en10http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en10http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en11http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en11http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en11http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en12http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en12http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en12http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en13http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en13http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en13http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en14http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en14http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en14http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en14http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en13http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en12http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en11http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en10http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en9http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en8

8/12/2019 123 Laugh at Me

7/17

through-crime approach criminalizes a wide range of behaviors and in doing so often functions largely

to humiliate, punish, and demonize.The abuse and damage that is being imposed on young people as a result of the ongoingmilitarization and criminalization of public schools defy the imagination. And the trivial nature of the behaviors that produce such egregious

practices is hard to believe. A few examples will suffice:In November 2011, a 14-year-old student in Brevard County, Florida, was suspended

for hugging a female friend, an act which even the principal acknowledged as innocent. A 9-year-old in Charlotte, North Carolina, was

suspended for sexual harassment after a substitute teacher overheard the child tell another student that the teacher was cute. A 6-year-old

in Georgia was arrested, handcuffed and suspended for the remainder of the school year after throwing a temper tantrum in class. A 6-year-old

boy in San Francisco was accused of sexual assault following a game of tag on the playground. A 6-year-old in Indiana was arrested, handcuffedand charged with battery after kicking a school principal. Twelve-year-old Alexa Gonzalez was arrested and handcuffed for doodling on a desk.

Another student was expelled for speaking on a cell phone with his mother, to whom he hadnt spoken in a month because she wa s in Iraq on a

military deployment. Four high school students in Detroit were arrested and handcuffed for participating in a food fight and charged with a

misdemeanor with the potential for a 90-day jail sentence and a $500 fine. A high school student in Indiana was expelled after sending a

profanity-laced tweet through his Twitter account after school hours. The school had been conducting their own surveillance by tracking the

tweeting habits of all students. These are not isolated incidents. In 2010, some 300,000 Texas schoolchildren received misdemeanor tickets

from police officials. One 12-year-old Texas girl had the police called on her after she sprayed perfume on herself during class.15Public

spaces that should promote dialogue, thoughtfulness, and critical exchange are ruled by fear and

become the ideological corollary of a state that aligns its priorities to war and munitions sales while

declaring a state of emergency (under the aegis of a permanent war) as a major reference for shaping

domestic policy. In addition, the media and other cultural apparatuses now produce, circulate, and

validate forms of symbolic and real violence that dissolve the democratic bonds of social reciprocity.

This dystopian use of violence as entertainment and spectacle is reinforced through the mediasincessant appeal to the market-driven egocentric interests of the autonomous individual, a fear of the

Other, and a stripped-down version of security that narrowly focuses on personal safety rather than

collective security nets and social welfare. One consequence is that those who are viewed as

disposable and reduced to zones of abandonment are forced to address the reality of extreme

violencein the very heart of their everyday life.16 Violence in everyday life is matched by a surge of

violence in popular culture.Violence now runs through media and popular culture like an electric current. As the New York Timesreported recently, The top-rated show on cable TV is rife with shootings, stabbings, machete attacks and more shootings. The top drama at the

box office fills theaters with the noise of automatic weapons fire. The top-selling video game in the country gives players the choice to kill or

merely wound their quarry.17Under such a warlike regime of privatization, militarism, and punishing violence, it is not surprising that the

Hollywood film The Hunger Games has become a mega-box-office hit. The film and its success are symptomatic of a society in which violence

has become the new lingua franca. It portrays a society in which the privileged classes alleviate their boredom through satiating their lust for

violent entertainment, and in this case a brutalizing violence waged against children. Although a generous reading might portray the film as a

critique of class-based consumption and violence, given its portrayal of a dystopian future society so willing to sacrifice its children, in the endthe film should more accurately be read as depicting the terminal point of what I have called elsewhere the suicidal society (a suicide pact

literally ends the narrative).18Given Hollywoods rush for ratings, the film gratuitously feeds enthralled audiences with voyeuristic images of

children being killed for sport. In a very disturbing opening scene, the audience observes children killing one another within a visual framing

that is as gratuitous as it is alarming. That such a film can be made for the purpose of attaining high ratings and big profits, while becoming

overwhelmingly popular among young people and adults alike, says something profoundly disturbing about the cultural force of violence and

the moral emptiness at work in U.S. society. This is not the type of violence that is instructive about how damaging

the spectacle of violence can be. On the contrary, such representations of violence are largely

gratuitous, and they create the conditions for a disturbing voyeurism while both mitigating the effects

of violence and normalizing it.Of course, the meaning and relevance of The Hunger Games rest not simply with its production ofviolent imagery against children, but with the ways these images and the historical and contemporary meanings they carry are aligned and

realigned with broader discourses, values, and social relations. Within this network of alignments, risk and danger combine with myth and

fantasy to stoke the seductions of sadomasochistic violence, echoing the fundamental values of the fascist state in which aesthetics dissolves

into pathology and a carnival of cruelty. How else to explain the emergence of superhero films that increasingly contain deep authoritarian

strains, films that appear to have a deep hold on their dutifully submissive audiences. The film critic A. O. Scott has argued that films such asSpider-Man, Dark Knight, and The Avengers are marked by a hectic emptiness, bloated cynicism, and function primarily as dutiful

corporate citizensserving private interests.19But most important, they reinforce the increasingly popular notion that the price of

entertainment is obedience.20There is more at work here than what Scott calls imaginative decadence.21 There is also the seductive lure

and appeal of the authoritarian personality, which runs deep in U.S. culture and finds its emergence in the longing for hyper-masculine

superheroes who merge vigilante justice with anti-democratic values.22Equally disturbing is the alignment of such films with a corporate-

controlled cultural apparatus that legitimates and celebrates a passive embrace of authoritarian values, power, and mythic authoritarian

figures.Within the contemporary neoliberal theater of cruelty, war has expanded its poisonous reach

and moves effortlessly within and across U.S. national boundaries. As Chris Hedges has pointed out

brilliantly and passionately, war allows us to make sense of mayhem and death as something not to

http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en15http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en15http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en15http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en16http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en16http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en17http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en17http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en17http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en18http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en18http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en18http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en19http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en19http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en19http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en20http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en20http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en20http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en21http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en21http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en21http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en22http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en22http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en22http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en22http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en21http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en20http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en19http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en18http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en17http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en16http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en15

8/12/2019 123 Laugh at Me

8/17

be condemned, but to be celebrated as a matter of national honor, virtue, and heroism.23One particularlyegregious example of this took place in the summer of 2012 when NBC decided to air Stars Earn Stripes, a reality TV show in which celebrities

are matched with U.S. military personnel, including former Green Berets and Navy Seals, in carrying out simulated military training, including

helicopter drops in water and long-range weapons fire, all under the direction of retired General Wesley Clark.24The various contestants

compete against each other to win prizes that are given to various armed forces, charities, and some veterans groups. NBC celebrates the show

as a fast-paced competition and defends it as a glorification of service rather than a glorification of war. 25War in this rendering becomes

a form of sport, amusement, and entertainment. The violence of war and the human suffering and death it produces

is both sanitized and trivializedin this show. Amy Fairweather, a member of the veterans organization Swords to Ploughshares,rightly criticized the program: The show trivialized war, whose real consequences were not that you were knocked out of the competition

next week, the consequences are you dont get to go on with your life. 26Nine Nobel Prize winners, including Desmond Tutu, echoed this view

in a letter to NBC. They wrote:It is our belief that this program pays homage to no one anywhere and continues and expands on an inglorious

tradition of glorifying war and armed violence.Real war is down-in-the-dirt deadly. Peoplemilitary and

civiliansdie in ways that are anything but entertaining. Communities and societies are ripped apart

in armed conflict and the aftermath can be as deadly as the war itself as simmering animosities are

unleashed in horrific spirals of violence. War, whether relatively short-lived or going on for decades as

in too many parts of the world, leaves deep scars that can take generations to overcomeif ever.

Trying to somehow sanitize war by likening it to an athletic competition further calls into question the

morality and ethics of linking the military anywhere with the entertainment industry in barely veiled

efforts to make war and its multitudinous costs more palatable to the public.27Celebrating war,

spectacularized violence, and hyper-masculinity reveals more than an ethical descent into barbarism.It also makes visible a market-driven social and economic order that is driven by a financial elite who

subordinate all ethical, political, and material considerations to the altar of profit-making and capital

accumulation.28War takes as its aim the killing of others and legitimates violence through a morally bankrupt mindset in which just andunjust notions of violence collapse into each other, increasingly in the name of profit and the glorification of celebrity culture. Consequently, it

has become increasingly difficult to determine justifiable violence and humanitarian intervention from unjustifiable violence involving torture,

massacres, and atrocities, which now operate in the liminal space and moral vacuum of legal illegalities. Even when such acts are recognized as

war crimes, they are often dismissed as simply an inevitable consequence of war itself. This view was recently echoed by Leon Panetta, who,

responding to the killing of civilians by U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, observed: War is hell. These kinds of events and incidents are

going to take place, theyve taken place in any war, theyre terrible events, and this is not the first of those events, and probably will not be the

last.29He then made clear the central contradiction that haunts the use of machineries of war by stating: But we cannot allow theseevents

to undermine our strategy.30Panettas qualification is a testament to barbarism because it means being committed to a war machine that

trades in indiscriminate violence, death, and torture while ignoring the pull of conscience or ethical considerations. Hedges is right when he

argues that defending such violence in the name of war is a rationale for usually nothing more than gross human cruelty, brutality a nd

stupidity.31War and the organized production of violence have also become forms of governance,increasingly visible in the ongoing militarization of police departments throughout the United States. According to the Homeland Security

Research Corporation, The homeland security market for state and local agencies is projected to reach $19.2 billion by 2014, up from $15.8

billion in fiscal 2009.32The structure of violence is also evident in the rise of the punishing and surveillance state,33with its legions of

electronic spies and ballooning prison populationnow more than 2.3 million. Evidence of state-sponsored warring violence

can also be found in the domestic war against terrorists (code for young protesters), which provides

new opportunities for major defense contractors and corporations to become more a part of our

domestic lives.34 Young people, particularly poor minorities of color, have already become the

targets of what David Theo Goldberg calls extraordinary power in the name of securitization[They

are viewed as] unruly populations[who] are to be subjected to necropolitical discipline through the

threat of imprisonment or death, physical or social.35The rhetoric of war is now used by politicians not only to appeal toa solitary warrior mentality in which responsibility is individualized, but also to attack womens reproductive rights, limit the voting rights of

minorities, and justify the most ruthless cutting of social protections and benefits for public servants and the poor, unemployed, and sick. There

is also the day-to-day effects of a hyped-up and militarized police force that in light of the subordination of individual rights to matters ofindividual security rarely questions the limits of their own authority. One example of the emerging police state can be found in roadside police

stops in which any regard for privacy, individual rights, and human dignity appears to have been abandoned. John W. Whitehead, the director

of the Rutherford Institute, provides one disturbing but not untypical example of the police state in action. He writes:Consider, for example,

what happened to 38-year-old Angel Dobbs and her 24-year-old niece, Ashley, who were pulled over by a Texas state trooper on July 13, 2012,

allegedly for flicking cigarette butts out of the car window. First, the trooper berated the women for littering on the highway. Then, insisting

that he smelled marijuana, he proceeded to interrogate them and search the car. Despite the fact that both women denied smoking or

possessing any marijuana, the police officer then called in a female trooper, who carried out a roadside cavity search, sticking her fingers into

the older womans anus and vagina, then performing the same procedure on the younger woman, wearing the same pair of gloves. No

marijuana was found. [And in a hard to believe second example,] Leila Tarantino was allegedly subjected to two roadside strip searches in plain

view of passing traffic during a routine traffic stop, while her two childrenages 1 and 4waited inside her car. During the second strip search,

http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en23http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en23http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en23http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en24http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en24http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en24http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en25http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en25http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en25http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en26http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en26http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en27http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en27http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en28http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en28http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en28http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en29http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en29http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en29http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en30http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en30http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en30http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en31http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en31http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en31http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en32http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en32http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en32http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en33http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en33http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en33http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en34http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en34http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en35http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en35http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en35http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en35http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en34http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en33http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en32http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en31http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en30http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en29http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en28http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en27http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en26http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en25http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en24http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en23

8/12/2019 123 Laugh at Me

9/17

presumably in an effort to ferret out drugs, a female officer forcibly removed a tampon from Tarantinos body. No contraban d or anything

illegal was found.36The politics and pedagogy of death begins in the celebration of war and ends in the

unleashing of violence on all those considered disposable on the domestic front. A survival-of-the-

fittest ethic and the utter annihilation of the Other have now become normalized, saturating

everything from state policy to institutional practices to the mainstream media. How else to explain

the growing taste for violencein, for example, the world of professional sports, extending from professional hockey to extreme

martial arts events? The debased nature of violence and punishment seeping into the U.S. cultural landscape becomes clear in the recentrevelation that the New Orleans Saints professional football team was running a bounty program which rewarded players for inflicting

injuries on opposing players.37In what amounts to a regime of terror pandering to the thrill of the crowd and a take-no-prisoners approach to

winning, a coach offered players a cash bonus for laying hits that resulted in other athletes being carted off the field or landing on the injured

player list.38The bodies of those considered competitors, let alone enemies, are now targeted as the war-as-politics paradigm turns the

United States into a warfare state. And even as violence flows out beyond the boundaries of state-sponsored militarism and the containment of

the sporting arena, citizens are increasingly enlisted to maximize their own participation and pleasure in violent acts as part of their everyday

existenceeven when fellow citizens become the casualties. Maximizing the pleasure of violence with its echo of

fascist ideology far exceeds the boundaries of state-sponsored militarism and violence. Violence can

no longer be defined as an exclusively state function, since the market in its various economic and

cultural manifestations now enacts its own violence on numerous populations no longer considered of

value. Perhaps nothing signals the growing market-based savagery of the contemporary moment more than the privatized and corporate-fueled gun culture of the United States.Gun culture now rules U.S. values and has a powerful influence in shaping domestic policies. The

National Rifle Association is the emerging symbol of what the United States has come to represent, perfectly captured in T-shirts worn by its

followers that brazenly display the messages I hate welfare and the biblical-sounding message If any would not work neither should he

eat.39The celebration of guns and v iolence merges in this case with a culture of cruelty, hatred, and exclusion. The National Rifle Association

begins to resemble a regime of terror as politics and violence become an inseparable part of its message and the most important mediating

force in shaping its identity. The relationship Americans have to guns may be complicated, but the social costs are less nuanced and certainly

more deadly. In a country with 90 guns for every 100 people, it comes as no surprise, as Gary Younge points out, that more than 85 people a

day are killed with guns and more than twice that number are injured with them. 40The merchants of death trade in a formative and material

culture of violence that causes massive suffering and despair while detaching themselves from any sense of moral responsibility. Social costs

are rarely considered, in spite of the endless trail of murders committed by the use of such weapons and largely inflicted on poor minorities and

young people.With respect to young people, Each year, more than 20,000 children and youth under age 20 are killed or injured by firearms in

the United States. The lethality of guns, as well as their easy accessibility to young people, are key reasons why firearms are the second leading

cause of death among young people ages 10 to 19. Only motor vehicle accidents claim more young lives. 41Violence has become not

only more deadly but flexible, seeping into a range of institutions, cannibalizing democratic values,

and merging crime and terror. As Jean and John Comaroff point out, under such circumstances a social

order emerges that appearsever more impossible to apprehend, violence appears ever more

endemic, excessive, and transgressive, and police come, in the public imagination, to embody a

nervous state under pressure.42The lethality of gun culture and the spectacle of violence are reinforced in U.S. life as public

disorder becomes both a performance and an obsession. The obsession with violence is clearly reflected inadvertising and other everyday venuesadvertising can even transform nightmare into

desire.[Yet] violence is never just a matter of the circulation of images. Its exercise, legitimate or

otherwise, tends to have decidedly tangible objectives. And effects.43An undeniable effect of thewarmongering state is the drain on public coffers. The United States has the largest military budget in the world and in20102011 accounted for 40% of national [federal government] spending.44The Eisenhower Study Group at Brown Universitys Watson

Institute for International Studies estimates that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost the U.S. taxpayers between $3.7 and $4.4 trillion.

What is more, funding such wars comes with an incalculable price in human lives and suffering. For example, the Eisenhower Study Group

estimated that in these two wars there have been over 224,475 lives lost, 363,383 people wounded, and 7 million refugees and internally

displaced people.45But war has another purpose, especially for neoconservatives who want to destroy the social state. By siphoning funds and

public support away from much needed social programs, war, to use David Rothkopfs phrase, diminishes government so that it becomes too

small to succeed.46The warfare state hastens the dismantling of the social state and its limited safety net, creating the conditions for theultra-rich, mega-corporations, and finance capital to appropriate massive amounts of wealth, income, and power. This has resulted between

2010 and 2012 in the largest-ever increase in inequality of income and wealth in the United States.47One acute register of the growing

inequality in wealth and income is provided by Michael D. Yates:In the United States in 2007, it is estimated that the five best-paid hedge-fund

managers earned more than all of the CEOs of the Fortune 500 corporations combined. The income of just the top three hedge -fund

managers (James Simon, John Paulson, and George Soros) taken together was $9 billion dollars in 2007.Pittsburgh hedge-fund manager David

Tepper made four billion dollars.If we were to suppose that Mr. Tepper worked 2,000 hours in 2009 (fifty weeks at forty hours per week), he

took in $2,000,000 per hour and $30,000 a minute.Others are not so fortunate. In 2010, more than 7 million people had incomes less than 50

percent of the official poverty level of income, an amount equal to $11,245, which in hourly terms (2,000 hours of work per year) is $5.62. At

this rate, it would take someone nearly three years to earn what Tepper got each minute. About one-quarter of all jobs in the United States pay

http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en36http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en36http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en36http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en37http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en37http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en37http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en38http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en38http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en38http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en39http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en39http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en39http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en40http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en40http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en40http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en41http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en41http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en41http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en42http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en42http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en42http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en43http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en43http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en43http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en44http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en44http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en44http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en45http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en45http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en45http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en46http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en46http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en46http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en47http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en47http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en47http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en47http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en46http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en45http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en44http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en43http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en42http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en41http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en40http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en39http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en38http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en37http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en36

8/12/2019 123 Laugh at Me

10/17

an hourly wage rate that would not support a family of four at the official poverty level of income.48Structural inequalities do

more than distribute wealth and power upward to the privileged few and impose massive hardships

on the poorest members of society. They also generate forms of collective violence accentuated by

high levels of uncertainty and anxiety, all of which, as Michelle Brown points out, makes recourse to

punishment and exclusion highly seductive possibilities.49The merging of the punishing and financial state is partlylegitimated through the normalization of risk, insecurity, and fear in which individuals not only have no way of knowing their fate, but also have

to bear the consequences of being left adrift by neoliberal capitalism.Increasingly, institutions such as schools, prisons, detention centers, andour major economic institutions are being organized for the production of violence. Rather than promote democratic values and a respect for

others or embrace civic values, they often function largely to humiliate, punish, and demonize any vestige of social responsibility. Our political

system is now run by a financial oligarchy that is comparable to what Alain Badiou calls a regime of gangsters.50And as he rightly argues, the

message we get from the apostles of casino capitalism carries with it another form of social violence:Privatize everything. Abolish help for the

weak, the solitary, the sick and the unemployed. Abolish all aid for everyone except the banks. Dont look after the poor; let the elderly die.

Reduce the wages of the poor, but reduce the taxes on the rich. Make everyone work until they are ninety. Only teach mathematics to traders,

reading to big property-owners and history to on-duty ideologues. And the execution of these commands will in fact ruin the lives of millions of

people.51It is precisely this culture of cruelty that has spread throughout the United States that makes

the larger public not merely susceptible to violence but induces it to luxuriate in its alleged pleasures.

In U.S. society, the seductive power of the spectacle of violence is fed through a framework of fear,

blame, and humiliation that circulates widely in popular culture. The consequence is a culture marked

by increasing levels of inequality, suffering, and disposability. There is not only a surplus of rage, but

also a collapse of civility in which untold forms of violence, humiliation, and degradation proliferate.Hyper-masculinity and the spectacle of a militarized culture now dominate U.S. societyone in which

civility collapses into rudeness, shouting, and unchecked anger.What is unique at this historical conjuncture in theUnited States is that such public expression of hatred, violence, and rage no longer requires concealment but is comfortable in its

forthrightness.52How else to explain the support by the majority of Americans for state-sanctioned torture, the public indifference to the

mass incarceration of poor people of color, the silence on the part of many Americans in the face of the increasing use of police and state-

sanctioned violence against peaceful Occupy Wall Street protesters, or the public silence in the face of police violence in public schools against

children, even those in elementary schools? As war becomes the organizing principle of society, the ensuing effects

of an intensifying culture of violence on a democratic civic culture are often deadly and invite anti-

democratic tendencies that pave the way for authoritarianism.In addition, as the state is hijacked by the financial-military-industrial complex, the most crucial decisions regarding national policy are not made by representatives, but by the financi al and

military elites.53Such massive inequality and the suffering and political corruption it produces point to

the need for critical analysis in which the separation of power and politics can be understood. This

means developing terms that clarify how power becomes global even as politics continues to functionlargely at the national level, with the effect of reducing the state primarily to custodial, policing, and

punishing functionsat least for those populations considered disposable.The state exercises its slavish role inthe form of lowering taxes for the rich, deregulating corporations, funding wars for the benefit of the defense industries, and devising other

welfare services for the ultra-rich. There is no escaping the global politics of finance capital and the global

network of violence it has produced. Resistance must be mobilized globally and politics restored to a

level where it can make a difference in fulfilling the promises of a global democracy. But such a

challenge can only take place if the political is made more pedagogical and matters of education take

center stage in the struggle for desires, subjectivities, and social relations that refuse the normalizing

of violence as a source of gratification, entertainment, identity, and honor.War in its expandedincarnation works in tandem with a state organized around the production of widespread violence.

Such a state is necessarily divorced from public values and the formative cultures that make a

democracy possible. The result is a weakened civic culture that allows violence and punishment to

circulate as part of a culture of commodification, entertainment, distraction, and exclusion. In opposingthe emergence of the United States as both a warfare and a punishing state, I am not appealing to a form of left moralism meant simply to

mobilize outrage and condemnation. These are not unimportant registers, but they do not constitute an adequate form of resistance.What is

needed are modes of analysis that do the hard work of uncovering the effects of the merging of institutions of capital, wealth, and power, and

how this merger has extended the reach of a military-industrial-carceral and academic complex, especially since the 1980s. This complex of

ideological and institutional elements designed for the production of violence must be addressed by making visible its vast national and global

interests and militarized networks, as indicated by the fact that the United States has over 1,000 military bases abroad.54Equally important is

the need to highlight how this military-industrial-carceral and academic complex uses punishment as a structuring force to shape national

policy and everyday life.Challenging the warfare state also has an important educational component. C.

http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en48http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en48http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en48http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en49http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en49http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en49http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en50http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en50http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en50http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en51http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en51http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en51http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en52http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en52http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en52http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en53http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en53http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en53http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en54http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en54http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en54http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en54http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en53http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en52http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en51http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en50http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en49http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en48

8/12/2019 123 Laugh at Me

11/17

Wright Mills was right in arguing that it is impossible to separate the violence of an authoritarian

social order from the cultural apparatuses that nourish it. As Mills put it, the major cultural

apparatuses not only guide experience, they also expropriate the very chance to have an experience

rightly called our own.55This narrowing of experience shorn of public values locks people intoprivate interests and the hyper-individualized orbits in which they live.Experience itself is now privatized,instrumentalized, commodified, and increasingly militarized. Social responsibility gives way to organized infantilization and a flight from

responsibility.Crucial here is the need to develop new cultural and political vocabularies that can fosteran engaged mode of citizenship capable of naming the corporate and academic interests that support

the warfare state and its apparatuses of violence, while simultaneously mobilizing social movements

to challenge and dismantle its vast networks of power. One central pedagogical and political task in

dismantling the warfare state is, therefore, the challenge of creating the cultural conditions and public

spheres that would enable the U.S. public to move from being spectators of war and everyday

violence to being informed and engaged citizens. Unfortunately, major cultural apparatuses like

public and higher education, which have been historically responsible for educating the public, are

becoming little more than market-driven and militarized knowledge factories. In this particularly

insidious role, educational institutions deprive students of the capacities that would enable them not

only to assume public responsibilities, but also to actively participate in the process of governing.

Without the public spheres for creating a formative culture equipped to challenge the educational,military, market, and religious fundamentalisms that dominate U.S. society, it will be virtually

impossible to resist the normalization of war as a matter of domestic and foreign policy.Any viable

notion of resistance to the current authoritarian order must also address the issue of what it means

pedagogically to imagine a more democratically oriented notion of knowledge, subjectivity, and

agency and what it might mean to bring such notions into the public sphere. This is more than what

Bernard Harcourt calls a new grammar of political disobedience.56It is a reconfiguring of the natureand substance of the political so that matters of pedagogy become central to the very definition of

what constitutes the political and the practices that make it meaningful. Critical understanding

motivates transformative action, and the affective investments it demands can only be brought about

by breaking into the hardwired forms of common sense that give war and state-supported violence

their legitimacy. War does not have to be a permanent social relation, nor the primary organizing

principle of everyday life, society, and foreign policy.The war of all-against-all and the socialDarwinian imperative to respond positively only to ones own self-interest represent the death of

politics, civic responsibility, and ethics, and set the stage for a dysfunctional democracy, if not an

emergent authoritarianism.The existing neoliberal social order produces individuals who have no commitment, except to profit,disdain social responsibility, and loosen all ties to any viable notion of the public good. This regime of punishment and privatization is organized

around the structuring forces of v iolence and militarization, which produce a surplus of fear, insecurity, and a weakened culture of civic

engagementone in which there is little room for reasoned debate, critical dialogue, and informed intellectual exchange. Patricia Clough and

Craig Willse are right in arguing that we live in a society in which the production and circulation of death functions as political and economic

recovery.57The United States understood as a warfare state prompts a new urgency for a collective politics and a social movement capable

of negating the current regimes of political and economic power, while imagining a different and more democratic social order. Until the

ideological and structural foundations of violence that are pushing U.S. society over the abyss are

addressed, the current warfare state will be transformed into a full-blown authoritarian state that will

shut down any vestige of democratic values, social relations, and public spheres. At the very least, theU.S. public owes it to its children and future generations, if not the future of democracy itself, to make

visible and dismantle this machinery of violence while also reclaiming the spirit of a future that works

for life rather than deaththe future of the current authoritarianism, however dressed up they appear in thespectacles of consumerism and celebrity culture. It is time for educators, unions, young people, liberals, religious organizations, and other

groups to connect the dots, educate themselves, and develop powerful social movements that can restructure the fundamental values and

social relations of democracy while establishing the institutions and formative cultures that make it possible. Stanley Aronowitz is right in

arguing that:the system survives on the eclipse of the radical imagination, the absence of a viable

political opposition with roots in the general population, and the conformity of its intellectuals who, to a

http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en55http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en55http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en55http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en56http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en56http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en56http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en57http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en57http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en57http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en57http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en56http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en55

8/12/2019 123 Laugh at Me

12/17

large extent, are subjugated by their secure berths in the academy [and though] we can take some solace in 2011, the year of the protesterit

would be premature to predict that decades of retreat, defeat and silence can be reversed overnight without a commitment to what may be

termed a long march through the institutions, the workplaces and the streets of the capitalist metropoles.58The current protests among

young people, workers, the unemployed, students, and others are making clear that this is notindeed, cannot beonly a short-term project

for reform, but must constitute a political and social movement of sustained growth, accompanied by the reclaiming of public spaces, the

progressive use of digital technologies, the development of democratic public spheres, new modes of education,

and the safeguarding of places where democratic expression, new identities, and collective hope can

be nurtured and mobilized. Without broad political and social movements standing behind anduniting the call on the part of young people for democratic transformations, any attempt at radical

change will more than likely be cosmetic.Any viable challenge to the new authoritarianism and itstheater of cruelty and violence must include developing a variety of cultural discourses and sites

where new modes of agency can be imagined and enacted, particularly as they work to reconfigure a

new collective subject, modes of sociality, and alternative conceptualizations of the self and its

relationship to others.59Clearly, if the United States is to make a claim to democracy, it must develop

a politics that views violence as a moral monstrosity and war as virulent pathology. How such a claim

to politics unfolds remains to be seen.In the meantime, resistance proceeds, especially among the young people who now carrythe banner of struggle against an encroaching authoritarianism that is working hard to snuff out all vestiges of democratic life.

http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en58http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en58http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en58http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en59http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en59http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en59http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en59http://monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa#en58

8/12/2019 123 Laugh at Me

13/17

Thus the Plan: The United States Federal Government should

implement a ban on targeted killing through drone strikes.

8/12/2019 123 Laugh at Me

14/17

Solvency

And armed drones are the lynchpin of this new form of imperialismthey are THE

critical component in the evolution of a deterritorialized, borderless everywhere

warShaw 13 (Ian, Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Glasgow, Predator Empire: The Geopolitics of U.S. Drone Warfarehttp://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241 retrieved 10/21/13 R.C.)

According to research by Nick Turse, the US military operates 1,100 bases across the planet.98Many of these sites exist inshadow because they are used for paramilitary operations by Special Forces and the CIA. These bases range in size and location, but a recent

and favoured strategy of the US military has been to construct skeletal lily pads that are scattered in remote outposts across the globe.

Chalmers Johnson, author of the book Blowback, wrote back in 2004 that this vast network of American bases on every

continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empirean empire of bases with its

own geography not likely to be taught in any high school geography class.99

While this new form of

empire has been growing for decades, the proliferation of remotely piloted aircraft certainly marks a

new phase in its evolutionthe Predator Empire. Everywhere and nowhere, drones have becomesovereign tools of life and death; where the lives and deaths of subjects become rights only as a

result of the will of the sovereign.100The Predator Empire is underpinned by an expanding

geography of drone bases in and around the areas of concern mentioned in the NSS and NSC. There are now

at least sixty bases used for US military and CIA dronesfrom medium-sized Predators and Reapers to

experimental systems such as the Sentinelthat was captured by Iran. As part of their surveillance of Iraq, Afghanistan,Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, and Mali, US drones have flown out of Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Djibouti, the Seychelles, Niger, and many more.101

These geographic locations are intended to develop overlapping circles of surveillance. The jewel in

the crown in this new form of empire is Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, which is sandwiched between

Somalia and Yemen. This secretive 500-acre base is the first ever camp dedicated solelyto tracking

and eliminating al-Qa'ida and its affiliates.102Around sixteen drones either take off or land every

day at the base,which has its origins as an outpost in the French Foreign Legion. Activities at Camp Lemonnier increased in 2010 after

eight Predators were delivered, turning the camp into a fully fledged drone base. The CIA first shipped its Predators to the camp in 2002,103

andit now acts in collaboration with the secretive Joint Special Operations Command. A total of 3,200 US troops, civilians, and contractors are

assigned to the camp where they train foreign militaries, gather intelligence and dole out humanitarian aid across East Afric a as part of a

campaign to prevent extremists from taking root.104

In short, Camp Lemonnier is the concrete symbol of a Predator

Empire no longer bound to Pakistan or Afghanistan, and expanding across Africa. But despite this

concrete presence, the CIA's fleet of secret drones has little interest in securing territory in the

traditional sense, seeking instead to secure and eliminate patterns of life that threaten. In Security,Territory, Population

105Foucault details how biopower is not exercised across territory per se,

106but through spaces of circulation or a milieu

of human and nonhuman multiplicities that constitute life-in-the-making. Similarly he wrote that the last domain of biopolitics is control over

relations between the human race, or human beings insofar as they are a species, insofar as they are living beings, and their environment, the

milieu in which they live.107

Here, Foucault refers to both natural and manmade environments, where mastery of the environment is

translated into mastery of the population. Sloterdijk goes so far as to state that the 20th

century will be remembered as the period whose

decisive idea consisted in targeting not the body of the enemy, but his environment.108

Indeed, securing the atmosphere has continually

transformed understandings of space, power, and sovereignty.109

The question is therefore howis the environment a biopolitical target for the

Predator Empire? How is the environment understood and controlled? Unlike forms of environmental intervention thatleave a gigantic footprint in the soil of the earth, such as the counterinsurgency pursued in Iraq, the

Predator Empire pursues a different kind of spatial biopolitics; a virtual intervention where what is

captured is not hearts and minds but endless streams of information that are broadcast back to the

Homeland.This suggests that the direction of power is not just an outwardprojectionas with the geographic expansionism that

traditionally defines American power projection across the globe. Rather, it also suggests an inward power collection:

defined here as the power to incorporate, to bring closer. The drone continues to transform US

biopower by bringing distant areasof concern such as the tribal areas of Pakistan into the gaze of

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241%20retrieved%2010/21/13http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0098http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0098http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0098http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0098http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0099http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0099http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0099http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0100http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0100http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0100http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0100http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0101http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0101http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0101http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0102http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0102http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0102http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0102http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0103http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0103http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0103http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0104http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0104http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0104http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0104http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0104http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0105http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0105http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0105http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0106http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0106http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0106http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0107http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0107http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0107http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0107http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0108http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0108http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0108http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0108http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0109http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0109http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0109http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0109http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0108http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0107http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0106http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0105http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0104http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN0103http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#EN010