1NC

Off Case

Off
The 1acs invocation of nuclear catastrophe is nothing but the petrification of the
social through the simulacrum of deterrence atomic destruction will not take
place, but it is not weapons that are to blame instead, war and political
antagonism have disappeared, replaced with more insidious forms of implosive
violence life is reduced to mere survival in the bunker and Damocles nuclear
sword suspends itself over all value, all meaning, all events the balance of
terror is the terror of balance
Baudrillard 81 (Jean Baudrillard, deader than most dead Frenchies, 1981, Simulacra and Simulation,
pp 32-5, translated by Sheila Faria Glaser, footnote 9 included in curly braces, modified) gz
The apotheosis of simulation : the nuclear . However, the balance of terror is never anything but the
spectacular slope of a system of deterrence that has insinuated itself from the inside into all the
cracks of daily life . Nuclear suspension only serves to seal the trivialized system of deterrence that
is at the heart of the media, of the violence without consequences that reigns throughout the world, of
the aleatory apparatus of all the choices that are made for us . The most insignificant of our behaviors is
regulated by neutralized , indifferent , equivalent signs , by zero-sum signs like those that
regulate the " strategy of games " (but the true equation is elsewhere, and the unknown is precisely that variable
of simulation which makes of the atomic arsenal itself a hyperreal form , a simulacrum that
dominates everything and reduces all "ground-level" events to being nothing but ephemeral
scenarios , transforming the life left us into survival , into a stake without stakes
insurance policy: into

- not even into a life

a policy that already has no value ).

It is not the direct threat of atomic destruction that paralyzes [petrifies] our lives, it is deterrence that
gives them leukemia . And this deterrence comes from that fact that even the real atomic clash is
precluded - precluded like the eventuality of the real in a system of signs . The whole world pretends to
believe in the reality of this threat (this is understandable on the part of the military, the gravity of their exercise and the
discourse of their "strategy" are at stake), but

it is precisely at this level that there are no strategic stakes . The

whole originality of the situation lies in the improbability of destruction .

Deterrence precludes war - the archaic violence of expanding systems. Deterrence itself is the
neutral, implosive violence of metastable systems or systems in involution . There is no longer a
subject of deterrence , nor an adversary nor a strategy - it is a planetary structure of the
annihilation of stakes . Atomic war, like the Trojan War, will not take place . The risk of nuclear annihilation
only serves as a pretext , through the sophistication of weapons (a sophistication that surpasses any
possible objective to such an extent that it is itself a symptom of nullity ), for installing a universal
security system , a universal lockup and control system whose deterrent effect is not at all aimed
at an atomic clash (which was never in question , except without a doubt in the very initial stages of the cold war,
when one still confused the nuclear apparatus with conventional war) but,

rather, at the much greater probability of any

real event , of anything that would be an event in the general system and upset its balance . The
balance of terror is the terror of balance .
Deterrence is not a strategy , it circulates and is exchanged between nuclear protagonists exactly
as is international capital in the orbital zone of monetary speculation whose fluctuations suffice to
control all global exchanges . Thus the money of destruction ( without any reference to real

destruction , any more than floating capital has a real referent of production) that circulates in nuclear
orbit suffices to control all the violence and potential conflicts around the world.
What is hatched in the shadow of this mechanism with the pretext of a maximal, "objective," threat, and
thanks to Damocles' nuclear sword , is the perfection of the best system of control that has ever
existed . And the progressive satellization of the whole planet through this hypermodel of security .
The same goes for peaceful nuclear power stations. Pacification

does not distinguish between the civil and the

military : everywhere where irreversible apparatuses of control are elaborated, everywhere where the
notion of security becomes omnipotent , everywhere where the norm replaces the old arsenal of
laws and violence (including war) , it is the system of deterrence that grows , and around it grows
the historical, social, and political desert . A gigantic involution that makes every conflict , every
finality , every confrontation contract in proportion to this blackmail that interrupts ,
neutralizes , freezes them all. No longer can any revolt, any story be deployed according to its own
logic because it risks annihilation . No strategy is possible any longer, and escalation is only a puerile
game given over to the military. The political stake is dead , only simulacra of conflicts and carefully
circumscribed stakes remain.
The "space race" played exactly the same role as nuclear escalation. This is why the space program was so easily able to replace it
in the 1960s (Kennedy/Khrushchev), or to develop concurrently as a form of "peaceful coexistence." Because what, ultimately, is the
function of the space program, of the conquest of the moon, of the launching of satellites if not the institution of a model of universal
gravitation, of satellization of which the lunar module is the perfect embryo?

Programmed microcosm , where

nothing can be left to chance . Trajectory , energy , calculation , physiology , psychology ,

environment - nothing can be left to contingencies , this is the total universe of the norm - the
Law no longer exists , it is the operational immanence of every detail that is law. A universe purged
of all threat of meaning , in a state of asepsis and weightlessness - it is this very perfection that is
fascinating. The exaltation of the crowds was not a response to the event of Rinding on the moon or of sending a man into space
(this would be, rather, the fulfillment of an earlier dream), rather, we are dumbfounded [flabbergasted] by the
perfection of the programming and the technical manipulation , by the immanent wonder of the
programmed unfolding of events. Fascination with the maximal norm and the mastery of probability .
Vertigo of the model, which unites with the model of death, but without fear or drive. Because if the law,
with its aura of transgression, if order, with its aura of violence, still taps a perverse imaginary, the norm
fixes , fascinates , stupefies , and makes every imaginary involute . One no longer fantasizes about
the minutiae of a program. Just watching it produces vertigo. The vertigo of a world without flaws .
Now, it

is the same model of programmatic infallibility , of maximum security and deterrence that

today controls the spread of the social . There lies the true nuclear fallout : the meticulous operation
of technology serves as a model for the meticulous operation of the social . Here as well, nothing will
be left to chance , moreover this is the essence of socialization, which began centuries ago, but which has now
entered its accelerated phase , toward a limit that one believed would be explosive (revolution), but
which for the moment is translated by an inverse, implosive , irreversible process: the generalized
deterrence of chance, of accident, of transversality, of finality, of contradiction, rupture, or complexity in
a sociality illuminated by the norm, doomed to the descriptive transparency of mechanisms of
information. In fact, the spatial and nuclear models do not have their own ends : neither the discovery of the
moon, nor military and strategic superiority. Their truth is to be the models of simulation, the model vectors
of a system of planetary control (where even the superpowers of this scenario are not free - the

whole world is satellized ).*9 {9. Paradox: all bombs are clean : their only pollution is the system of
security and of control they radiate as long as they don't explode .}
Resist the evidence: in satellization, he who is satellized is not who one might think. Through the orbital inscription of a
spatial object, it is the planet earth that becomes a satellite , it is the terrestrial principle of reality
that becomes eccentric , hyperreal , and insignificant . Through the orbital instantiation of a system of
control like peaceful coexistence , all the terrestrial microsystems are satellized and lose their
autonomy . All energy , all events are absorbed by this eccentric gravitation , everything
condenses and implodes toward the only micromodel of control (the orbital satellite), as conversely,
in the other, biological, dimension, everything converges and implodes on the molecular micromodel of
the genetic code. Between the two, in this forking of the nuclear and the genetic , in the simultaneous
assumption of the two fundamental codes of deterrence, every principle of meaning is absorbed ,
every deployment of the real is impossible .

The 1AC is complicit in the cruel system of contemporary violence war,

understood in terms of adversity or reality, has disappeared withdrawal thus
collapses into a violent system of political alternation wherein war and peace not
only become blurred but reversible, both directed at the liquidation of the carriers
of unpredictability those who retain modes of symbolic organization are marked
for extermination while the moralists of war continue marching on DC
Baudrillard 81 (Jean Baudrillard, deader than most dead Frenchies, 1981, Simulacra and Simulation,
pp 35-9, translated by Sheila Faria Glaser) gz
Yet, despite this deterrence by the orbital power - the nuclear or molecular code - events continue at ground
level , misfortunes are even more numerous , given the global process of the contiguity and
simultaneity of data . But, subtly, they no longer have any meaning , they are no longer anything but
the duplex effect of simulation at the summit. The best example can only be that of the war in Vietnam, because it
took place at the intersection of a maximum historical and "revolutionary" stake, and of the installation of
this deterrent authority . What meaning did this war have, and wasn't its unfolding a means of sealing
the end of history in the decisive and culminating historic event of our era?
Why did this war, so hard, so long, so ferocious, vanish from one day to the next as if by magic?
Why did this American defeat (the largest reversal in the history of the USA) have no internal repercussions in
America? If it had really signified the failure of the planetary strategy of the United States, it would
necessarily have completely disrupted its internal balance and the American political system . Nothing of
the sort occurred .
Something else, then, took place. This

war, at bottom, was nothing but a crucial episode of peaceful

coexistence . It marked the arrival of China to peaceful coexistence . The nonintervention of China obtained
and secured after many years,

Chinas apprenticeship to a global modus vivendi , the shift from a global

strategy of revolution to one of shared forces and empires , the transition from a radical alternative to
political alternation in a system now essentially regulated (the normalization of Peking Washington relations ): this was what was at stake in the war in Vietnam, and in this sense, the USA
pulled out of Vietnam but won the war .
And the

war ended "spontaneously" when this objective was achieved . That is why it was

deescalated , demobilized so easily.

This same reduction of forces can be seen on the field. The war lasted as long as elements irreducible
to a healthy politics and discipline of power , even a Communist one, remained unliquidated . When at
last the war had passed into the hands of regular troops in the North and escaped that of the resistance,
the war could stop : it had attained its objective . The stake is thus that of a political relay . As soon
as the Vietnamese had proved that they were no longer the carriers of an unpredictable subversion ,
one could let them take over. That theirs is a Communist order is not serious in the end: it had proved
itself , it could be trusted . It is even more effective than capitalism in the liquidation of "savage"
and archaic precapitalist structures .
Same scenario in the Algerian war.
The other aspect of this war and of all wars today: behind the armed violence, the murderous antagonism
of the adversaries - which seems a matter of life and death, which is played out as such (or else one could never send people
to get themselves killed in this kind of thing), behind this simulacrum of fighting to the death and of ruthless
global stakes , the two adversaries are fundamentally in solidarity against something else ,
unnamed, never spoken, but whose objective outcome in war, with the equal complicity of the two
adversaries, is total liquidation . Tribal , communitarian , precapitalist structures , every form of
exchange , of language , of symbolic organization , that is what must be abolished , that is the
object of murder in war - and war itself, in its immense, spectacular death apparatus, is nothing but
the medium of this process of the terrorist rationalization of the social - the murder on which
sociality will be founded, whatever its allegiance , Communist or capitalist. Total complicity , or
division of labor between two adversaries (who may even consent to enormous sacrifices for it) for the very end of
reshaping and domesticating social relations .
"The North Vietnamese were advised to countenance a scenario for liquidating the American presence in the course of which, of
course, one must save face."
This scenario: the extremely harsh bombardments of Hanoi. Their untenable character must not conceal the fact that
they were

nothing but a simulacrum to enable the Vietnamese to seem to countenance a compromise

and for Nixon to make the Americans swallow the withdrawal of their troops . The game was already
won , nothing was objectively at stake but the verisimilitude of the final montage .
The moralists of war , the holders of high wartime values should not be too discouraged: the war is no
less atrocious for being only a simulacrum - the flesh suffers just the same , and the dead and
former combatants are worth the same as in other wars . This objective is always fulfilled , just like that
of the charting of territories and of disciplinary sociality . What no longer exists is the adversity
of the adversaries , the reality of antagonistic causes , the ideological seriousness of war. And
also the reality of victory or defeat , war being a process that triumphs well beyond these
appearances .
In any case, the

pacification (or the deterrence ) that dominates us today is beyond war and peace , it

is that at every moment war and peace are equivalent . " War is peace ," said Orwell. There also, the two
differential poles implode into each other , or recycle one another - a simultaneity of contradictions
that is at once the parody and the end of every dialectic . Thus one can completely miss the truth of a
war: namely, that it was finished well before it started , that there was an end to war at the heart of
the war itself , and that perhaps it never started . Many other events (the oil crisis, etc.) never started,
never existed , except as artificial occurrences

abstract , ersatz , and as artifacts of history,

catastrophes and crises destined to maintain a historical investment under hypnosis . The media and
the official news service are only there to maintain the illusion of an actuality , of the reality of the

stakes , of the objectivity of facts . All the events are to be read backward, or one becomes aware (as with the
Communists "in power" in Italy the retro, posthumous rediscovery of the gulags and Soviet dissidents like the almost contemporary
discovery, by a moribund ethnology, of the lost "difference" of Savages) that all these things arrived too late, with a history
of delay, a spiral of delay, that they long ago exhausted their meaning and only live from an artificial
effervescence of signs , that all these events succeed each other without logic, in the most
contradictory, complete equivalence , in a profound indifference to their consequences (but this is
because there are none : they exhaust themselves in their spectacular promotion) - all "newsreel"
footage thus gives the sinister impression of kitsch , of retro and porno at the same time
everyone knows this, and no one really accepts it.

The reality of simulation is unbearable

- doubtless

crueler than

Artaud's Theater of Cruelty , which was still an attempt to create a dramaturgy of life, the last gasp of
an ideality of the body, of blood, of violence in a system that was already taking it away, toward a
reabsorption of all the stakes without a trace of blood . For us the trick has been played. All
dramaturgy, and even all real writing of cruelty has disappeared . Simulation is the master , and we
only have a right to the retro , to the phantom , parodic rehabilitation of all lost referentials .
Everything still unfolds around us, in the cold light of deterrence

(including Artaud, who has the right like

everything else to his revival, to a second existence as the referential of cruelty).

There exists two fundamental communities: the living and the dead/dying the
attempt to secure a community from the excess of death is part and parcel with
the sustainment of life as natural, biological existence and death as the ultimate
end. This initial split formed the basis for all exclusion, making war, genocide,
and discrimination inevitable
Robinson 12
Andrew, Political Theorist, Activist Based in the UK and research fellow affiliated to the Centre for the Study of Social and Global
Justice (CSSGJ), University of Nottingham, Jean Baudrillard: The Rise of Capitalism & the Exclusion of Death, March 30,
http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-2/

Symbolic exchange or rather, its suppression plays a central role in the emergence of capitalism .
Baudrillard sees a change happening over time. Regimes based on symbolic exchange (differences are exchangeable
and related) are replaced by regimes based on equivalence (everything is, or means, the same). Ceremony
gives way to spectacle, immanence to transcendence. Baudrillards view of capitalism is derived from Marxs analysis of
value. Baudrillard accepts Marxs view that capitalism is based on a general equivalent. Money is the general equivalent because it
can be exchanged for any commodity. In turn, it expresses the value of abstract labour-time. Abstract labour-time is itself an effect of
the regimenting of processes of life, so that different kinds of labour can be compared. Capitalism is derived from the

autonomisation or separation of economics from the rest of life. It turns economics into the realityprinciple. It is a kind of sorcery , connected in some way to the disavowed symbolic level. It subtly shifts
the social world from an exchange of death with the Other to an eternal return of the Same .
Capitalism functions by reducing everything to a regime based on value and the production of value. To
be accepted by capital, something must contribute value. This creates an immense regime of social exchange.
However, this social exchange has little in common with symbolic exchange. It ultimately depends on the mark of value itself being
unexchangeable. Capital must be endlessly accumulated. States must not collapse. Capitalism thus introduces the irreversible into
social life, by means of accumulation. According to Baudrillard,

capitalism rests on an obsession with the abolition

of death . Capitalism tries to abolish death through accumulation . It tries to ward off ambivalence (associated with
death) through value (associated with life). But

this is bound to fail. General equivalence the basis of

capitalism is itself the ever-presence of death. The more the system runs from death , the more it
places everyone in solitude, facing their own death . Life itself is fundamentally ambivalent. The
attempt to abolish death through fixed value is itself deathly . Accumulation also spreads to other fields. The idea of
progress, and linear time, comes from the accumulation of time, and of stockpiles of the past. The idea of truth comes from the
accumulation of scientific knowledge.

Biology rests on the separation of living and non-living . According to

Baudrillard, such accumulations are now in crisis. For instance, the accumulation of the past is undermined, because historical
objects now have to be concealed to be preserved otherwise they will be destroyed by excessive consumption. Value is produced
from the residue or remainder of an incomplete symbolic exchange. The repressed, market value, and sign-value all come from this
remainder. To destroy the remainder would be to destroy value. Capitalist exchange is always based on negotiation, even when it is
violent. The symbolic order does not know this kind of equivalential exchange or calculation. And capitalist extraction is

always one-way. It amounts to a non-reversible aggression in which one act (of dominating or killing)
cannot be returned by the other. It is also this regime which produces scarcity

Baudrillard here endorses

Sahlins argument. Capitalism produces the Freudian death drive, which is actually an effect of the capitalist culture of death. For
Baudrillard, the limit to both Marx and Freud is that they fail to theorise the separation of the domains they study the economy and
the unconscious. It is the separation which grounds their functioning, which therefore only occurs under the regime of the code.
Baudrillard also criticises theories of desire, including those of Deleuze, Foucault, Freud and Lacan. He believes desire comes
into existence based on repression. It is an effect of the denial of the symbolic. Liberated energies always leave
a new remainder; they do not escape the basis of the unconscious in the remainder. Baudrillard argues that indigenous groups do
not claim to live naturally or by their desires they simply claim to live in societies. This social life is an effect of the symbolic.
Baudrillard therefore criticises the view that human liberation can come about through the liberation of desire. He thinks that such a
liberation will keep certain elements of the repression of desire active. Baudrillard argues that the processes which operate
collectively in indigenous groups are repressed into the unconscious in metropolitan societies. This leads to the autonomy of the
psyche as a separate sphere. It is only after this repression has occurred that a politics of desire becomes conceivable. He
professes broad agreement with the Deleuzian project of unbinding energies from fixed categories and encouraging flows and
intensities. However, he is concerned that capitalism can recuperate such releases of energy, disconnecting them so they can
eventually reconnect to it. Unbinding and drifting are not fatal to capitalism, because capitalism itself unbinds things, and re-binds
things which are unbound. What

is fatal to it is, rather, reversibility. Capitalism continues to be haunted by the

forces it has repressed . Separation does not destroy the remainder. Quite the opposite. The remainder continues to
exist, and gains power from its repression . This turns the double or shadow into something unquiet,
vampiric, and threatening. It becomes an image of the forgotten dead. Anything which reminds us of the
repressed aspects excluded from the subject is experienced as uncanny and threatening . It becomes
the obscene , which is present in excess over the scene of what is imagined.

This is different from theories of lack, such as

the Lacanian Real. Baudrillards remainder is an excess rather than a lack. It is the carrier of the force of symbolic exchange.
Modern culture dreams of radical difference. The reason for this is that it exterminated radical difference by simulating it. The energy
of production, the unconscious, and signification all in fact come from the repressed remainder.

Our culture is dead from

having broken the pact with monstrosity, with radical difference. The West continues to perpetrate
genocide on indigenous groups . But for Baudrillard, it did the same thing to itself first destroying its
own indigenous logics of symbolic exchange. Indigenous groups have also increasingly lost the symbolic dimension, as
modern forms of life have been imported or imposed. This according to Baudrillard produces chronic confusion and instability. Giftexchange is radically subversive of the system. This is not because it is rebellious. Baudrillard thinks the system
can survive defections or exodus. It is because

it counterposes a different principle of sociality to that of

the dominant system . According to Baudrillard, the mediations of capitalism exist so that nobody has the
opportunity to offer a symbolic challenge or an irreversible gift. They exist to keep the symbolic at bay.
The affective charge of death remains present among the oppressed , but not with the properly symbolic rhythm of
immediate retaliation. The Church and State also exist based on the elimination of symbolic exchange. Baudrillard is highly critical
of Christianity for what he takes to be a cult of suffering, solitude and death. He sees the Church as central to the destruction of
earlier forms of community based on symbolic exchange. Baudrillard seems to think that earlier forms of the state and capitalism
retained some degree of symbolic exchange, but in an alienated, partially repressed form. For instance, the imaginary of the social
contract was based on the idea of a sacrifice this time of liberty for the common good. In psychoanalysis, symbolic exchange is
displaced onto the relationship to the master-signifier. I havent seen Baudrillard say it directly, but the impression he gives is that
this is a distorted, authoritarian imitation of the original symbolic exchange. Nonetheless, it retains some of its intensity and energy.
Art, theatre and language have worked to maintain a minimum of ceremonial power. It is the reason older orders did not suffer the
particular malaise of the present. It is easy to read certain passages in Baudrillard as if he is bemoaning the loss of these kinds of
strong significations. This is initially how I read Baudrillards work. But on closer inspection, this seems to be a misreading.
Baudrillard is nostalgic for repression only to the extent that the repressed continued to carry symbolic force as a referential. He is
nostalgic for the return of symbolic exchange, as an aspect of diffuse, autonomous, dis-alienated social groups. Death Death
plays a central role in Baudrillards theory, and is closely related to symbolic exchange. According to Baudrillard, what we

have lost above all in the transition to alienated society is the ability to engage in exchanges with
death . Death should not be seen here in purely literal terms . Baudrillard specifies early on that he does not
mean an event affecting a body,

but rather, a form which destroys the determinacy of the subject and of

value which returns things to a state of indeterminacy. Baudrillard certainly discusses actual deaths, risk-taking,
suicide and so on. But he also sees death figuratively, in relation to the decomposition of existing relations, the death of the selfimage or ego, the interchangeability of processes of life across different categories. For instance, eroticism or sexuality is related to
death, because it leads to fusion and communication between bodies. Sexual reproduction carries shades of death because one
generation replaces another. Baudrillards concept of death is thus quite similar to Bakhtins concept of the grotesque. Death
refers to metamorphosis, reversibility , unexpected mutations, social change, subjective
transformation, as well as physical death.

According to Baudrillard, indigenous

groups see death as social,

not natural or biological . They see it as an effect of an adversarial will, which they must absorb . And
they mark it with feasting and rituals. This is a way of preventing death from becoming an event which
does not signify. Such a non-signifying event is absolute disorder from the standpoint of symbolic exchange. For Baudrillard,
the wests idea of a biological, material death is actually an idealist illusion , ignoring the sociality of
death. Poststructuralists generally maintain that the problems of the present are rooted in the splitting of life
into binary oppositions . For Baudrillard, the division between life and death is the original, founding
opposition on which the others are founded. After this first split, a whole series of others have been
created, confining particular groups the mad, prisoners, children, the old, sexual minorities,
women and so on to particular segregated situations. The definition of the normal human has been narrowed over
time. Today, nearly everyone belongs to one or another marked or deviant category.

The original exclusion was of the

dead it is defined as abnormal to be dead. You livies hate us deadies . This first split and
exclusion forms the basis , or archetype, for all the other splits and exclusions along lines of
gender, disability, species, class, and so on. This discrimination against the dead brings into being
the modern experience of death.

Baudrillard suggests that

death as we know it does not exist outside

of this separation between living and dead . The modern view of death is constructed on the model of
the machine and the function. A machine either functions or it does not. The human body is treated as a
machine which similarly, either functions or does not. For Baudrillard, this misunderstands the nature of life and death. The
modern view of death is also necessitated by the rise of subjectivity . The subject needs a beginning and an end, so
as to be reducible to the story it tells. This requires an idea of death as an end . It is counterposed to the
immortality of social institutions. In relation to individuals, ideas of religious immortality is simply an ideological cover for the
real exclusion of the dead. But institutions try to remain truly immortal. Modern systems, especially bureaucracies, no
longer know how to die or how to do anything but keep reproducing themselves. The internalisation
of the idea of the subject or the soul alienates us from our bodies, voices and so on. It creates a split, as Stirner
would say, between the category of man and the un-man, the real self irreducible to such categories. It
also individualises people, by destroying their actual connections to others . The symbolic haunts the code
as the threat of its own death. The society of the code works constantly to ward off the danger of irruptions of the symbolic. The
mortal body is actually an effect of the split introduced by the foreclosure of death. The split never
actually stops exchanges across the categories. In the case of death, we still exchange with the dead
through our own deaths and our anxiety about death. We no longer have living, mortal relationships with
objects either. They are reduced to the instrumental . It is as if we have a transparent veil between us .
Symbolic exchange is based on a game , with game-like rules. When this disappears, laws and the
state are invented to take their place. It is the process of excluding, marking, or barring which allows
concentrated or transcendental power to come into existenc e. Through splits, people turn the other into
their imaginary. For instance, westerners invest the Third World with racist fantasies and
revolutionary aspirations; the Third World invests the west with aspirational fantasies of development .
In separation, the other exists only as an imaginary object. Yet the resultant purity is illusory. For Baudrillard, any such marking
or barring of the other brings the other to the core of society. We all become dead , or mad, or
prisoners, and so on, through their exclusion. The goal of survival is fundamental to the birth of

power. Social control emerges when the union of the living and the dead is shattered, and the
dead become prohibited . The social repression of death grounds the repressive socialisation of life.
People are compelled to survive so as to become useful . For Baudrillard, capitalisms original
relationship to death has historically been concealed by the system of production , and its ends. It only becomes
fully visible now this system is collapsing, and production is reduced to operation. In modern societies, death is made
invisible, denied, and placed outside society . For example, elderly people are excluded from society. People no
longer expect their own death . As a result, it becomes unintelligible . It keeps returning as nature which will
not abide by objective laws. It can no longer be absorbed through ritual. Western society is arranged so death is never
done by someone else, but always attributable to nature. This creates a bureaucratic, judicial regime
of death , of which the concentration camp is the ultimate symbol . The system now commands
that we must not die at least not in any old way. We may only die if law and medicine allow it .
violence are legalised,
regressive redistribution of
death. It is wrested from the circuit of social exchanges and vested in centralised agencies . For Baudrillard,
there is not a social improvement here. People are effectively being killed, or left to die, by a
Hence for instance the spread of health and safety regulations. On the other hand, murder and
provided they can be re-converted into economic value. Baudrillard sees this as a

process which never treats them as having value. On the other hand, even when capitalism becomes
permissive, inclusive and tolerant, it still creates an underlying anxiety about being reduced to the status
of an object or a marionette. This appears as a constant fear of being manipulated. The slave remains within the
masters dialectic for as long as his life or death serves the reproduction of domination.

Vote negative to reject the 1AC. The aff accedes its reading to the reality of
modern war. Against this, we scramble the operational codes of processing that
they remained invested in. The alternative is a semiotic insurrection into the
implosive violence of disappearance produced by militarism
Strehle 14. Samuel Strehle, fellow in the DFG research training group The Real and Modern Culture
at the University of Konstanz, Germany, MAs in sociology and philosophy from Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat
Freiburg, Germany, researcher in the department of anthropology at the University of Trier, Germany,
currently pursuing a PhD in sociology at the University of Basel, Switzerland, A Poetic Anthropology of
War: Jean Baudrillard and the 1991 Gulf War, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 11,
Number 2 (May, 2014)
The production of war signs is linked to the issue of war not only in matters of content, but also in
matters of form . Content-wise, war is just one of many fields in which reality signs are produced;
regarding its form, however, it is the pure logic of war itself that works in this industry . The
production of reality

for Baudrillard

is a kind of warfare itself : Not only is it a monologue of power, a

speech without response, as he states in Requiem for the Media (1971: 172); even more, the terrorism of the
code

(ibid.: 179)

is a war-like attack on our senses . We, the viewers, are targets of a

bombardment of signs and images . Semiocracy, Baudrillard (1976: 78) calls this terror in his writing on
the New York Graffiti scene: we live under a dictatorship of signs (against which the Graffiti raise
their anti-semiotic counterforce ). The war sign industry is just one of many subdivisions of a societywide reality sign industry that floods our lives with all kinds of spectacular products and
information . We are all hostages of media intoxication, induced to believe in the war just as we
were once led to believe in the revolution in Romania, and confined to the simulacrum of war as
though confined to quarters . We are already all strategic hostages in situ; our site is the screen on

which we are virtually bombarded day by day (Baudrillard 1991b: 25). Finally now, this is where Baudrillards
genuine theoretical intervention takes place. Like the Graffiti writers, Baudrillard attempts to fight
back against the terrorism of the code and its work of purificationsomehow continuing Graffiti
writing by other means . Baudrillard is leading his own war, his own counter-guerilla warfare against
the reality principle . What are his spray cans? Which are the walls on which he puts his mark on society? It is the holy
walls of theoretical discourse that Baudrillard defaces with a low tech weapon called theoretical
terrorism , as he called it once (Baudrillard 1983a: 91, my translation) a thinking made to oppose, to
challenge the hegemony of reality . The idea of theoretical terrorism is strongly linked to his concept of
reversibility13 a key term in Baudrillards thinking. The term may be characterized by two main aspects: At
first, it refers to the reciprocity of gift exchange in which there is no closure of exchange but an endless
changing and challenging of sides. In this regard, it is a name for the symbolic fluidity of power .14 At
second, it refers to a principle of changing a situation by radically reversing its viewing angle poetic
transference of the situation , as Baudrillard calls it in Impossible Exchange (1999: 85). Being a rather phantastic
the concept of reversibility is linked with the most powerful and yet
most clandestine subtext in Baudrillards oeuvre: Pataphysics . The idea behind this absurd science of
principle (Zapf 2010: 145, my translation),

imaginary solutions is as simple as it is mysterious: It is an attempt to create a different reality

through imagination .15 Pataphysicians fight reality through the use of imaginary forces, through
creating illusion and deceit . It is easily overlooked how central this pataphysical approach has been for Baudrillard; even
his most serious book, Symbolic Exchange and Death, is surprisingly full of pataphysical statements, especially in the dense,
programmatic introductory pages: The

only strategy against the hyperrealist system is some form of

pataphysics , a science of imaginary solutions ; that is, a science-fiction of the systems

reversal against itself at the extreme limit of simulation , a reversible simulation in a hyperlogic
of death and destruction (Baudrillard 1976: 4 f.). How can science-fiction shatter the system of reality? Baudrillard
explains his strategy later in The Perfect Crime (1995), especially in the section on Radical Thought, and in Impossible Exchange
(1999).

Ideas , he claims, can create their own reality, since thinking is a performative act that builds

its own parallel world : Thought [] does not seek to penetrate some mystery of the world , nor
to discover its hidden aspect it is that hidden aspect . It does not discover that the world has a
double life it is that double life , that parallel life (Baudrillard 1999: 149). In the performative act of
thinking (ibid.: 115), reality is not so much depicted but challenged . The purpose of theory for
Baudrillard is the exact opposite of what we normally would expect: It should not recognize and
analyze reality , instead it must deny and contradict its hegemony . It has to create illusion and
establish a power of seduction that makes one lose the path of reality . The value of thought, claims
Baudrillard (1995: 94), lies

not so much in its inevitable convergences with truth as in the immeasurable

divergences which separate it from truth . Only in awareness of those abstract Pataphysics can we distill any sense
out of some of the oddest remarks in Baudrillards oeuvre, for example his delirious self-criticism from Cool Memories where he
accuses himself of having surreptitiously mixed my phantasies in with reality and of having systematically opposed the most
obvious and well-founded notions (Baudrillard 1987: 38). He even complains about readers taking his theories for actual facts and
reading them in a realist version: Simulacra are today accepted everywhere in their realist version: simulacra exist, simulation
exists. It is the intellectual and fashionable version of this vulgarization which is the worst: all is sign, signs have abolished reality,
etc. (Ibid.: 227). Instead of this realist version, Baudrillard suggests that even his most prominent terms can be
regarded as pataphysical attempts to seduce his readers through fictitious ideas , for example when he
admits to having put forward the idea of simulacrum, without really believing in it, even hoping that the
real will refute it (Baudrillard 1995: 101). Apparently he understands his thinking to be something like a playful
simulacrum itself , for also theory can precede and thereby seduce reality : The theoretical
ideal would be to set in place propositions in such a way that they could be disconfirmed by reality , in

such a way that reality could only oppose them violently , and thereby unmask itself . For reality is
an illusion, and all thought must seek first of all to unmask it . To do that, it must itself advance
behind a mask and constitute itself as a decoy , without regard for its own truth. [...] Reality must
be caught in the trap , we must move quicker than reality (ibid.: 99). In this sense, Baudrillards writing
is theory-fiction (Baudrillard 1991c: 202) rather than theory, as he borrows a term from Jean-Franois Lyotard (1979:
92 f., cp. Blask, 2002: 133). Like all Pataphysics, this notion of theory-fiction may be traced back to the
surrealists and their poetic anthropology , as Dietmar Kamper (1981, my translation) has called it. Such an
anthropology is poetic because it refers to the art of writing , but also because it touches the
original notion of poiesis , meaning to create something . Poetic anthropology does not seek
to describe a reality that lies out there, instead it aims to autopoietically produce the subject it
writes about through its own act of description . Theory for Baudrillard is a paradoxical political
intervention

(Zapf 2010: 241, my translation). Thinking

singularity

(Baudrillard 1995: 96) and

event

itself has to become the ambiguous kind of

(ibid.: 104) that

is eliminated from almost any other

sphere of the system : Cipher, do not decipher . Work over the illusion. Create illusion to create
an event . Make enigmatic what is clear , render unintelligible what is only too intelligible, make
the event itself unreadable . Accentuate the false transparency of the world to spread a
terroristic confusion about it , or the germs or viruses of a radical illusion in other words, a
radical disillusioning of the real.
altogether. He is

(Ibid.: 104). Maybe this is the most unique aspect of

Baudrillards thinking

a thinker who tries to think the world different from what it actually is . He sees himself

as something like a smuggler or drug dealer , pushing forbidden items on a black market in
thought

(Baudrillard 1999: 104), promoting

a clandestine trade in ideas , of all inadmissible ideas , of

unassailable ideas , as the liquor trade had to be promoted in the 1930s (Baudrillard 1995: 104 f.). If
Baudrillard is the drug dealer of sociology , what does this imply for his analysis of war and his
reference to the principles of symbolic exchange and the duel form? If we want to believe Baudrillard that he is
not interested in rehabilitating older wars , we should read his reference systematically rather than
historically 16there might have never been any historical war as glamorous and honorable as
portrayed by Clausewitz anyway. Hence, the introduction of symbolic exchange and the duel principle into
the analysis of war might be more like a strategy to introduce a different view of things into the
common perception of war . It delivers the necessary contrast against which the aestheticized ,
whitewashed reality of the war can be scrutinized and deconstructed as not the only possible
reality of war . Only in the light of its radical other can the reality of war be denaturalized and
revealed as a self-display of power and hegemony . In this regard, Baudrillard has always remained a
critical thinker who seeks to intervene into reality instead of just observing it . To the same degree he is
neither a cynic nor a fatalist, that isa resigned thinker. On the contrary, in an interview on the 9/11 attacks on the
World Trade Center he even aligns himself with the ideas of the Enlightenment: Fatalism offers an unpalatable
interpretation of the world, for it leads to resignation. I dont resign myself, I want clarity, a lucid
consciousness. When we know the rules of the game, then we can change them . In this respect, I am a
man of the Enlightenment (Baudrillard 2002b). There is one major difference, though, between Baudrillard and the
wishes for clarity and lucidity, he wants to know the rules of the game, but he
does not seek the truth ; he wants to change the rules of the game by diverting the game from

classical Enlightenment: He

its truth. It does not seem to matter so much to Baudrillard if his instance of contrastsymbolic exchange and
the duel principleis more fictitious or real, illusionary or true; most possibly it has something of both

sides , being undecidable like a simulacrum in the strongest sense. When Baudrillard writes about
the Gulf War , he creates an odd mixture of lucid observations on the one hand and theoretical
seductions on the other. If there could ever be something like war studies in the spirit of Baudrillard,
they would have to dare not to eliminate this undecidability , otherwise they would lose the spirit .
What matters the most for Baudrillard is the effort to break open the uniform process of reality
production and shatter its seeming self-evidence into pieces . Theory

according to Baudrillard is

an

attempt to reverse our view of the world shifting our perspective by introducing something
new and unsettling into the order of things . What seemed natural before , now starts to look
artificial ; what presented itself as a glorious triumph suddenly appears stale ; what was evident
becomes shady . Baudrillards theories are like evil ghosts: They haunt reality by staging its
excluded otherno matter if this other really exists or if it has to be feigned.

Advantage 1

Images of War
Politics is snuff porn: extermination by and for representation the 1ACs images
of war produces moments of excitation through sexual investment into the feelgood affect of anti-war activism this sanitizes the global war against that which
falls outside the Western frame of representation. Images of military violence
transform our hormonal energies into passivity, creating complicity with a system
geared toward the destruction of all life. We, instead, use our bodies, our
speeches, our debates as laboratories of experimental subjectivities that can
foment the critical resistance to normalization needed to produce political
transformation. If you intend to be a doctor of militarism, you must first become a
laboratory animal.
Preciado 13
Beatriz Preciado, The Micropolitics of Gender in the Pharmacopornographic Era, Testo Junkie, 2013, p. 346-353, KB
Snuff Politics

were being fucked right off the bat: becoming a punk civilization. The sudden
emergence of the punk movement in 1977 was not a simple microphenomenon, but the last lucid explosion of what
seems today to be the only ideal shared by the members of what has been called the human species: the
The fact is that

pleasure instinct as a death instinct. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, no cultural production
has entailed such a punk dimension as much as snuff has the filming of death (or its
representation ) as it happens. In popular culture, snuff refers to those films that show the murder of a
person or animal with the unique objective of making that death visible , transforming it into public ,
marketable representation.
Everything, in fact, begins as something sham. In 1971, Z-series directors Michael and Roberta Findlay made
The Slaughter, a small-budget film production that combined erotic scenes with horror scenes. That same
year, Ed Sanders interviewed Charles Manson. Manson claimed to have recorded some of the celebrity
murders perpetrated by his followers under his authority. No trace of such films were found, but the myth of snuff
was born. In 1972, the distributor Alan Shackleton got ahold of The Slaughter, added a last scene in which one
of the actresses is disemboweled (fictionally) in front of the camera, and rereleased this new edit under the
title Snuff. The premiere of the film took place in 1976 and provoked an unprecedented debate over the verity of the actresss
death. Antiporn groups, pro-censorship feminists, and the media took part in this debate. The film, which had no other
cinematographic or narrative interest outside the evisceration scene, would garner unexpected profits.
As a questioning of representational limits, snuff has served as a pornographic paradigm for both pro-censorship
feminists and antiporn Christians, and also as a formal model of realism to which the dramatization of sex
in pornography must tend: a film is that much more pornographic if the sexual scene that is filmed is real,
in the same way that a representation is snuff when the crime has actually taken place. Radically postmodern,
the notion of snuff is opposed to the dramatic or simulated and mimetic quality of all representation. On the
contrary, it affirms the performative power of representation to modify reality, or a desire for the real to exist
in and by representation. This brings us to the theatrical relationship between pornography, snuff, and politics. Today, some
snuff film catalogs offer images filmed by Allied or Nazi soldiers in concentration camps , Zapruders film of
the John F. Kennedy assassination, the film of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, videos of the
executions of prisoners of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, videos showing the American army destroying Iraqi
villages, images of the destruction of New Yorks Twin Towers and of the execution of Saddam Hussein .
Politics has become snuff: extermination by and for representation.
The mushroom cloud left in the sky by the atomic bomb, the photograph of the completely naked little girl
running away from the Vietnam village Trang Bang in flames after a napalm attack , the sperm-filled lips of
Linda Lovelace, piles of mutilated limbs in Rwanda, double penetration, the terrifying feats performed in
Big Brother and the surgical scenes in Nip/Tuck, the liters of fat suctioned from the buttocks of American
housewives for the cameras of Extreme Makeover, murders at the maximum-security San Quentin State

Prison filmed by security camerasall of them say more about the current state of our species than any
philosophy book of the twentieth century, from Husserl to Sartre. The distinctive feature of the techno-pornopunk moment is snuff politics: rip away everything from life to the point of death and film the process ,
record it in writing and image , distribute it live over the Internet, make it permanently accessible
in a virtual archive, an advertising medium on the global scale. By the beginning of the twenty-first
century, our species had literally stuck good philosophical intentions up our ass , filming the thing
before marketing the images from it. The philosophy of the pharmacopornographic regime has been
reduced to an enormous, dripping butt-plug camera. In such circumstances, the philosophy of such highpunk modernity can only be autotheory, autoexperimentation, auto-techno-penetration, pornology.
When surmising about the future of the planet, Donna J. Haraway encourages us to avoid two kinds of narrative
traps of the metaphysical and semiotico-fascist kind. First, there is the messianic temptation : someone will come to
save ussome unique religious or technical force, an allpowerful understanding that possesses all the answers
needed to transform the human condition. Second, there is the apocalyptic temptation : nothing can be
done, and the disappearance of the species is imminent. Haraway tells us, We might profitably learn to doubt
our fears and certainties of disasters as much as our dreams of progress. We might learn to live without
the bracing discourses of salvation history.11 The problem resides precisely in the fact that no one will come to save us
and that we are still some distance from our inevitable disappearance. It will thus be necessary to think about doing
something while we are on the way out, undergoing mutation or changing planets, even if this something
consists in intentionally accelerating our own disappearance , mutation , or cosmic displacement.
Let us be worthy of our own fall and imagine for the time left the components of a new pornopunk
philosophy.
The Principle of the AutoGuinea Pig
The first principle of a trans-feminism movement capable of facing porno-punk modernity: the fact that

your body, the body of

the multitude and the pharmacopornographic networks that constitute them are political laboratories ,
both effects of the process of subjection and control and potential spaces for political agency and
critical resistance to normalization. I am pleading here for an array of politics of physical
experimentation

and

semiotechnology that (in the face of the principle of political representation, which dominates

our social life and is at the core of political mass movements, which can be as totalitarian as they are democratic) will be
regulated by the principle thatin accordance with Peter Sloterdijks intuitionsI will call the principle of the auto-guinea
pig.12
In China, in 213 BC, all books were burned by order of the emperor. In the fifth century, after a series of wars had ransacked and
decimated the library at Alexandria, it was accused of harboring pagan teachings contrary to the Christian faith and was destroyed
by the decree of Emperor Theodosius. The greatest center of research, translation, and reading disappeared. Between 1330 and
1730, thousands of human bodies were burned during the Inquisition, thousands of books were destroyed, and hundreds of works
related to the expertise and production of subjectivity were relegated to oblivion or to the underground. In 1813, American soldiers
took York (now Toronto) and burned the parliament and legislative library. A year later, the Library of Congress was razed. In 1933,
one of the first actions of the Nazi government was the destruction of the Institut fr Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual
Research) in Berlin. Created in 1919 by Magnus Hirschfeld, this center had for years played a role in the research and
dissemination of progressive ideas and practices concerning sex and sexuality. Twenty thousand books from the Hirschfeld Institute
were burned on May 10, 1933, on Opernplatz on a gigantic pyre whose flashing flames were imprinted on the camera film of Hitlers
reporters. On the night of March 9, 1943, an air raid on a library in Aachen destroyed five hundred thousand books. In 1993,
Croatian militia destroyed dozens of libraries (among them, those in Stolac). In 2003, American bombs and Saddam loyalists sacked
and destroyed the National Library of Baghdad13 . . .
The theorico-political innovations produced during the past forty years by feminism, the black liberation movement, and queer and
transgender theory do seem to be lasting acquisitions. However, in the context of global war, this collection of scholarship could be
destroyed also, as fast as a microchip melting under intense heat. Before all the existing fragile archives about feminism and black,
queer, and trans culture have been reduced to a state of radioactive shades, it is indispensible to transform such minority knowledge
into collective experimentation, into physical practice, into ways of life and forms of cohabitation. We are no longer pleading, like our
predecessors in the 1970s and 1980s, for an understanding of life and history as effects of different discursive regimes. We are

pleading to use discursive productions as stakeholders in a wider process of the technical

materialization of life that is occurring on the planet. A materialization that each day resembles more
and more a total technical destruction of all animal, vegetable, and cultural forms of life and that will

end, undoubtedly, in the annihilation of the planet and the self-extinction of most of its species . Alas, it
will become a matter of finding ways to record a planetary suicide.
Until the end of the eighteenth century, self-experimentation was still a part of the research protocols of pharmacology. Animal
experimentation was not yet called into question, but an ethical precept dictated that the researcher take on the risk of unknown
effects on his or her own body before enacting any test on the body of another human. Relying on the rhetoric of objectivity, the
subject of scientific learning would progressively attempt to generate knowledge outside him- or herself, to exempt his or her body
from the agonies of self-experimentation. In 1790, the physician Samuel Hahnemann self-administered strong daily doses of quinine
in order to observe its effects in fighting malaria. His body reacted by developing symptoms that resembled the remittent fever
characteristic of malaria. The experiment would serve as the basis for the invention of the homeopathic movement, which, based on
the law of similars, maintains that it is possible to treat illness using minute doses of a substance that, in much larger amounts,
would provoke the same symptoms of that illness in a healthy body, in the manner of a therapeutic mirror. Peter Sloterdijk, inspired
by Hahnemann, will call the process of controlled and intentional poisoning voluntary auto-intoxication and will sum it up as follows:

If you intend to be a doctor, you must try to become a laboratory animal. 14

In order to transform conventional frameworks of the cultural intelligibility 15 of human bodies, it is
necessary to evolve toward practices of voluntary autointoxication. From Novalis to Ritter, the romanticism
from which Sloterdijk draws his inspiration for a counterproject to modernity will make autoexperimentation the central technique of
the self in a dystopian society. Nevertheless, romantic autoexperimentation carries the risk of individualism and depolitization. On
the other hand, two of the discourses around which the critique of modern European subjectivity will developthose of Sigmund
Freud and Walter Benjaminwill begin under the form of the invention of new techniques of the self and repertories of practices of
voluntary intoxication. But the dominant discourse of disciplinary modernity will brush them aside; the process of institutionalization
that both psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School will experience will go hand in hand with the pathologizing of intoxication and the
clinical industrialization of experimentation.
It would be a good thing if a doctor were able to test many more drugs on himself, declared the young doctor
Mikhail Bulgakov in 1914, in Morphine, a text in which the protagonist describes the effects of morphine on his own body.16
Likewise, it seems urgent today, from the perspective of a trans-feminist project, to use our living bodies as

biopolitical platforms to test the pharmacopornopolitical effects of synthetic sex hormones in order to
create and demarcate new frameworks of cultural intelligibility for gender and sexual subjects. In an
era in which pharmaceutical laboratories and corporations and state medico-legal institutions are
controlling and regulating the use of gender and sex biocodes (the active molecules of progesterone, estrogen, and
testosterone) as well as chemical prostheses, it seems anachronistic to speak of practices of political
representation without going through performative and biotechnological experiments on sexual
subjectivity and gender. We must reclaim the right to participate in the construction of biopolitical
fictions. We have the right to demand collective and common ownership of the biocodes of gender, sex,
and race. We must wrest them from private hands , from technocrats and from the pharmacoporn
complex . Such a process of resistance and redistribution could be called technosomatic
communism.

As a mode of the production of common knowledge and political transformation, the autoguinea pig
principle would be critical in the construction of the practices and discourses of trans-feminism and the
coming liberation movements of gender, sexual, racial, and somatic-political minorities. To echo Donna J.
Haraways expression, it will consist of a positioned, responsible corporal political practice, so that anyone
wishing to be a political subject will begin by being the lab rat in her or his own laboratory.

1NC Alt Causes

The plan will not alter Chinas calculus too many alternative causes
-US ICBMs can first strike all of Chinas ICBMS
-US GMD 44 interceptors, almost as many as China ICBMs
-ASB conventional first strike take out Chinese command and control
Darling 15 [Lt. Col. Paul Darling, member of the Alaska National Guard where he commands the
207th Training Regiment. He holds a B.S. from the U.S. Military Academy and an M.S. from the University
of Missouri, Rolla., April 7, 2015, Reading Chinese Nuclear Deterrence, Cicero Magazine,
http://ciceromagazine.com/features/china-america-and-modern-nuclear-deterrence-strategy/]
Today, both the Russian and American nuclear inventories are greatly reduced. On the U.S. side, the first strike ICBM force has
been slashed to only 450 warheads. While incapable of severely reducing the Soviet land based retaliatory capabilities, it
provides an intimidating threat against the most likely Chinese capability. Several U.S. warheads could be
targeted against each Chinese ICBM. The Chinese are developing mobile ICBMs utilizing a tunnel
system to mitigate this threat, but the Chinese can never be sure how well U.S. intelligence has
penetrated the secrets of Sino nuclear deterrence.
The improving GMD (Ground-based Mid-Course Defense) system is unquestionably a cause for concern for China.
John Holum, former U.S. State Department chief of arms control, stated, The Chinese see missile defense as part of a grand design aimed at China.

the Obama administration, far from a hawk

has promised to increase the current inventory to 44, nearly matching Chinas entire ICBM

Only a decade ago, the five interceptors were a minimal threat to Chinas deterrence. But now
on missile defense,

fleet.

That is an order of magnitude larger inventory in only ten years. Publicly, the U.S. says the deterrence is designed against emerging threats
such as North Korea and Iran. But publicly the U.S. also said Sentinel was directed against China. Has the public deception now flipped? It is hard to
justify 44 interceptors to counter the current or even future estimated North Korean nuclear capabilities. Both their warheads and their missiles are of

The single warhead

capability which China supposedly possesses is more easily countered by GMD than Multiple, IndependentlyTargeted Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs) previously used by the United States and currently used by Russia. The West Coast based
questionable quantity and quality. The current GMD system is designed to counter warheads specifically, not missiles.

system in California and Alaska is well-situated to provide defenses against a North Korean launch. But the geographical proximity of China to North

China cannot ignore the simple fact

that, accidentally or otherwise, GMD poses a direct threat to their second strike deterrence.
Korea cannot be ignored by either party. We can deny GMD is focused on China in all honesty. But

The terrorist attacks of the post-Cold War era have given impetus to the development of greatly improved domestic response capabilities. Their title is
no longer civil defense, which described their purpose, but rather now describes the threats they defend against: Chemical, Biological, Radiological,
Nuclear and Explosive (CBRNE). Since 1996, the United States has invested heavily in the US military and civilian first responder CBRNE defensive
capability. Every major citys fire department is trained in radiological response. The US DoD has likewise invested greatly in National Guard CBRNE
capabilities. Each state and territory has at least one full time response team and each of the ten Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
regions have a robust National Guard unit dedicated to search and rescue, medical support and radiological decontamination. While no one can say
these teams were designed as part of a Herman Kahn-ian first strike plan, the fact is these teams do support that 50 year old concept. As pure
coincidence, FEMA was created by combining the various civil defense organizations created in response to Kahns ideas.

You cannot talk about American strategy against China without talking about Air Sea Battle (ASB), the
conventional operational concept developed partially, if not mostly, to counter Chinese expansionism. The details of ASB
change as required, but the original, and most bellicose, description came from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis (CSBA) which

utilizing advanced conventional strike capabilities to target not only Chinas conventional military,
but also its command and control. The new TRIAD may now be applied to target the heart of all nuclear deterrence; its trigger. So while
describes

ASB may specifically decline a nuclear integration, if successful in its implied operational objective of isolating the political control of its enemies

China sees conventional high tech

warfare as a part of modern nuclear combat.
Here we have four separate elements of the U.S. defense establishment seemingly developed independently
combining to counter Chinas current estimated nuclear deterrence. If the heart of stability is found in the sanctity of both
military, it would effectively and surgically neuter its nuclear deterrence as well. Remember, too,

parties second strike force, then we are rapidly approaching an increasingly unstable future vis a vis China. From this assumption, predictive analysis
is possible.
How Will China Respond?
The sine quo non of super power sovereignty is effective nuclear deterrence. China must respond in the face of openly stated American capabilities
and operational concepts.

The U.S. 44-GMD-interceptor capability can expect to be countered through

an increased

warhead count, either through more ICBMs or the development of a MIRV capability. While a Chinese nuclear submarine force is
being developed, U.S. Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) has an 80 year history of success. It would be questionable for China to invest its deterrence
capability in submarines so early in its own history of submarine warfare. To increase survivability, China is already investing in endo-atmospheric
hypersonic capabilities for its warheads. This could conceivably nullify GMDs abilities, though its technological viability is still questionable.
China may continue to openly state a no first use policy, but expect Chinese opaqueness to render the truth of these statements questionable.
American policymakers must be sure to be as inclusive as possible in determining exactly what no first use means with every conceivable nuance
taken into account. Finally, China may utilize the brute force mechanism of simply building an unassailably large arsenal of missiles. A new arms race
may be the only technologically viable mechanism available for China to maintain a reliable second strike. And as long as ASB maintains its insistence
upon striking the Chinese mainland, a more decentralized nuclear command and control mechanism is a logical counter. The combination of larger
nuclear forces and an increasingly decentralized command structure might be the price China must pay.

Two of these elements (ASB and the 44 interceptor fleet) remain years away from operational status. China currently has a window where their current
nuclear deterrence remains relatively strong. China may take this near-term opportunity and accelerate its forceful advancement of territorial claims in
the Asia-Pacific region. Rather than improve its nuclear deterrence, China may simply move quickly to establish a new status quo in a conventional
manner before the US has its more robust first strike capability established. Chinas recent actions in the Spratleys and Senkaku islands could reflect
this strategy. American current and planned actions should elicit a Chinese response. Whether this will be near term conventional aggressiveness or a
long term buildup of their nuclear forces (or both) is unknown.
What Can America Do?

Should the United States adjust its policies to assuage Chinese concerns? One has to ask which parts of
this four-headed hydra (civil defense, ASB, missile defense and ICBMs ) the United States would be
willing to abandon. Our civil defense capabilities are clearly required in the wake of successful and attempted terrorist attacks both in the
United States and abroad. Its linkage to our nuclear posture is a vestige of a generation past. It is by far the weakest aspect of any first strike
capability and one that most likely enjoys the highest level of public support. Our ICBM force is an established part of Americas TRIAD of nuclear
deterrence. Anything short of complete removal of this leg will do little to change the balance of deterrence and is a political decision that appears
unreasonable in the near future. And it doesnt eliminate the use of submarine launched missiles in a first strike role.
GMD is likewise a political winner with admittedly vocal detractors. The bedrock of all deterrence is rationality amongst all players. To eliminate GMD
would require an assumption of rationality from all current and would be nuclear powers. Iran and North Korea may behave rationally, but are their
underlying grand strategies equally rational? Henry Kissinger identified that communicating suicidal tendencies has a rational role for weaker powers.
U.S. policymakers would be betting the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans on the rationality of the current and any future North Korean
dictator. The number of interceptors, rather than the program itself, is the most likely mechanism to adjust Chinas possibly negative perspective. A
shift of funds from operational interceptors to more robust testing could be reassuring for both the United States and China.
Finally, ASB must be reappraised from a nuclear deterrence perspective. A fair assumption on the part of China is that, should the U.S. utilize the
thousands of strike fighters and bombers being justified, in part, to support the ASB concept, their command and control elements will be targeted to
isolate them from their deployed forces or destroyed completely. That these C2 elements might also control Chinas nuclear deterrence cannot be
ignored. Even if the United States adopts a clearly limited strategy, this does not mean that the Chinese fear of India or Russia taking advantage of
their weakness is removed. We must see the targeting of high level C2 elements in China as a nuclear level provocation and treat it as such.
Thus far, China has eschewed meaningful participation in strategic arms limitation talks. Two of its three largest threats, Russia and the United States,
are providing a free ride for China as current strategic arms treaties demand openness and verification of nuclear capabilities. China knows what each
has with nothing given up on their part.

Should the U.S. wish to entice the Chinese to a more open

nuclear posture, all aspects of our nuclear deterrence, even those which we do not consider a nuclear threat to China, must
be part of the discussion. Whether we say it or believe it, GMD and ASB, as well as civil defense and, of course, our
nuclear TRIAD, all pose legitimate threats to Chinese nuclear deterrence. As Sun Tzu reminds us, If you besiege an
In the face of a growing American capability, this will not change.

army, you must leave an outlet. We must likewise be aware of the pressure we exert on Chinas nuclear deterrence and leave an outlet if we wish to
duplicate the successful deterrence we enjoyed in the Cold War in a 21st century multi-polar nuclear environment.

1NC China War

US-China war wont escalate
Allison & Blackwill 3/5 -- *director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and
Douglas Dillon Professor at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government AND **Henry A. Kissinger
Senior Fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations (Graham and Robert D., 2013,
"Interview: Lee Kuan Yew on the Future of U.S.- China Relations,"
http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/03/interview-lee-kuan-yew-on-the-future-of-us-chinarelations/273657/)
Interview with Lee Kuan Yew, the founding prime minister of Singapore, one of Asia's most prominent
public intellectuals, a member of the Fondation Chirac's honour committee
Competition between the United States and China is inevitable, but conflict is not . This is not the Cold
War. The Soviet Union was contesting with the United States for global supremacy. China is acting purely in its own
national interests. It is not interested in changing the world . There will be a struggle for influence. I think it
will be subdued because the Chinese need the United States , need U.S. markets , U.S. technology ,
need to have

students

going to the United States to study the ways and means of doing business so they can improve their lot. It will take them 10, 20, 30
years. If you quarrel with the United States and become bitter enemies, all that information and those technological
capabilities will be cut off. The struggle between the two countries will be maintained at the level that allows them to
still tap

the United States. Unlike U.S.-Soviet relations during the Cold War, there is no irreconcilable

ideological conflict between the United States and a China that has enthusiastically embraced the market .
Sino-American relations are both cooperative and competitive. Competition between them is inevitable, but conflict is not. After the
collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States and China are more likely to view each other as competitors if not adversaries. But
the die has not been cast. The best possible outcome is a new understanding that when they cannot cooperate, they will
coexist and allow all countries in the Pacific to grow and thrive. A stabilizing

factor in their relationship is that each

nation requires cooperation from and healthy competition with the other . The danger of a military
conflict between China and the United States is low . Chinese leaders know that U.S. military superiority is
overwhelming and will remain so for the next few decades. They will modernize their forces not to challenge
America but to be able, if necessary, to pressure Taiwan by a blockade or otherwise to destabilize the economy. China's
military buildup delivers a strong message to the United States that China is serious about Taiwan. However, the Chinese do
not want to clash with anyone -- at least not for the next 15 to 20 years. The Chinese are confident that in 30 years their
military will essentially match in sophistication the U.S. military. In the long term, they do not see themselves as disadvantaged in
this fight.

Mirvs

1NC MIRVs D
No evidence that China has or will MIRV its missiles--- the US only saw footage of
decoys, not multiple warheads, and it takes a long time to ramp-up MIRV
capability
Wright 5/20/15 [David, http://allthingsnuclear.org/china-and-mirved-warheads/, Dr. Wright received his PhD in physics
from Cornell University in 1983, and worked for five years as a research physicist. He was an SSRC-MacArthur
Foundation Fellow in International Peace and Security in the Center for Science and International Affairs in the
Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and a Senior Analyst at the Federation of American Scientists. He is a
Fellow of the American Physics Society (APS) and a recipient of APS Joseph A. Burton Forum Award in 2001. He has
been at UCS since 1992. Areas of expertise: Space weapons and security, ballistic missile proliferation, ballistic
missile defense, U.S. nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons policy; co-Director and Senior Scientist @ Union of
Concerned Scientists, All Things Nuclear, mg]
The recent announcement that China has equipped some of its large DF-5 missiles to carry multiple

warheads does not imply that China will be able to significantly expand the number of warheads it
can deploy on missiles any time soon. However, China might find it useful to add a small maneuvering bus to its
mobile missiles to release decoys and other countermeasures along with the warhead, to defeat missile defenses. In this case the
added mass of lightweight decoys and a small bus could be within the payload capacity of Chinas mobile missiles. If the United

States has observed flight tests of Chinese missiles that release multiple objects, these objects
may be decoys rather than additional warheads.

1NC Asia D
No Asia war
Nick Bisley 14, Professor of IR @ La Trobe University (Australia) and Executive Director of La Trobe
Asia, Its not 1914 all over again: Asia is preparing to avoid war, 3/10, http://theconversation.com/its-not1914-all-over-again-asia-is-preparing-to-avoid-war-22875
Asia is cast as a region as complacent about the risks of war as Europe was in its belle poque. Analogies are an understandable way of trying to make sense of unfamiliar

the historical parallel is deeply misleading.

circumstances. In this case, however,

Asia is experiencing a period of uncertainty and strategic risk
unseen since the US and China reconciled their differences in the mid-1970s. Tensions among key powers are at very high levels: Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe recently
invoked the 1914 analogy. But

there are very good reasons, notwithstanding these issues, why Asia is not about to

tumble into a great power war. China is Americas second most important trading partner. Conversely,
the US is by far the most important country with which China trades. Trade and investments golden
straitjacket is a basic reason to be optimistic. Why should this be seen as being more effective than the high levels of interdependence
between Britain and Germany before World War One? Because Beijing and Washington are not content to rely on markets alone to keep the peace. They are
acutely aware of how much they have at stake . Diplomatic infrastructure for peace The two powers have
established a wide range of institutional links to manage their relations. These are designed to
improve the level and quality of their communication, to lower the risks of misunderstanding spiralling
out of control and to manage the trajectory of their relationship. Every year, around 1000 officials from all ministries led by the top
political figures in each country meet under the auspices of the Strategic and Economic Dialogue. The dialogue has demonstrably improved US-China relations across the policy
spectrum, leading to collaboration in a wide range of areas. These range from disaster relief to humanitarian aid exercises, from joint training of Afghan diplomats to marine

Unlike the near total

absence of diplomatic engagement by Germany and Britain in the lead-up to 1914, todays two would-be
combatants have a deep level of interaction and practical co-operation. Just as the extensive array of common
interests has led Beijing and Washington to do a lot of bilateral work, Asian states have been busy the
past 15 years. These nations have created a broad range of multilateral institutions and mechanisms
conservation efforts, in which Chinese law enforcement officials are hosted on US Coast Guard vessels to enforce maritime legal regimes.

intended to improve trust , generate a sense of common cause and promote regional prosperity. Some organisations, like the AsiaPacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), have a high profile with its annual leaders meeting involving, as it often does, the common embarrassment of heads of government
dressing up in national garb. Others like the ASEAN Regional Forum and the ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting Plus Process are less in the public eye. But

there are

more than 15 separate multilateral bodies that have a focus on regional security concerns. All these organisations
to build what might be described as an infrastructure for peace in the region. While these
mechanisms are not flawless, and many have rightly been criticised for being long on dialogue and short on action, they have been crucial in
managing specific crises and allowing countries to clearly state their commitments and priorities.
are trying

2NC

Disappearance of War

2NC FW
The education they produce is a simulacral project of decision making which
enslaves us to become the research staff for the military industrial complex
Shapiro 14 (Alan, senior lecturer at the Offenbach Art and Design University in Germany, Jean Baudrillard and
Albert Camus on the Simulacrum of Taking a Stance on War, IJBS Volume 11, Number 2 (May 2014), Special Issue:
Baudrillard and War, [SG])
Unlike other thinkers such as Noam Chomsky or Chris Hedges (whose positions are highly valuable in their own right), Jean

Baudrillard is not against war. Baudrillards position is rather that of being neither for nor against
contemporary hyper-real mediatized wars, and seeing the imperative of choosing whether one is for or
against war as being something of a forced and imposed simulacrum. To say that one is against a
specific war, or even all wars, would be to implicitly acknowledge the reality of war(s), which
have , to the contrary, drifted increasingly into the fakeness of virtuality , simulation, and an
indeterminate hyperspace. Baudrillard, in his orientation of being neither for nor against war, finds a strong predecessor in
another great writer and thinker who wrote in French: Albert Camus. In his political theory and activist engagements, Camus was an
independent hybrid anarchist-liberal (the very notion of hybrid, with which one can retrospectively illuminate Camus politics, has
only emerged as a well-known concept in recent times, in the wake of, for example, Donna Haraways cyborg theory). Camus was a
serious thinker who like Plato, Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Philip K. Dick had deep insights into the genealogy of imagemaking simulacra in and of Western culture. As a major figure of twentieth century French intellectual history, Albert Camus appears
now in retrospect to have been way ahead of his time in his positions on ethics, aesthetics, virtuality, and political philosophy. The
intention of this essay is not to claim that Baudrillard and Camus had the same position on war or on simulacra. It is, rather, to
make an initial attempt to outline important affinities between the two thinkers, hinting at a sort of alliance between these two
intellectual figures which has not been previously articulated in the academic literature in Baudrillard or Camus studies. The essay
indicates certain key starting points for substantiating the affinity/alliance, but it should also be read in the spirit of suggesting fruitful
directions for future research. The

stance of opposition to a war undertaken by Americas military-industrial

complex (MIC), as President Dwight D. Eisenhower termed it in his Farewell Address to the nation on
January 17, 1961 after spending 8 years as President, seems to be based on the assumption of the
discursive viability of projecting oneself into the imaginative space of being a sort of shadow

empowered by democracy into the democratic position

of being able to make better decisions for the body politic of democracy than
those who hold institutional power in political economy and
government. Most political discourse in the U.S., including the anti-war stance, seems to take for
granted the idea that we should clarify our politics by imaginatively putting ourselves
in the shoes of national strategists choosing among the policy
options available . Jean Baudrillard expands our sense of what is history because he does not operate with
government of truth-speakers ,

a strict separation between what are the facts and what are the engaging stories that we as a culture
have written and enacted about important historical events . Much of what we know about the Holocaust, the Second
World War, and the Vietnam War comes from Hollywood films about the Holocaust, the Second World War, and the Vietnam War
that we have seen. In his essay on Francis Ford Coppolas 1979 blockbuster Vietnam War movie Apocalypse Now, Baudrillard
writes that Coppolas masterpiece is the continuation of the Vietnam War by other means. Nothing else in the world smells like
that, says Lt. Colonel Bill Kilgore played by Robert Duvall in the 2 hour and 33 minute film. I love the smell of napalm in the
morning It smells like victory. The high-budget extravaganza was produced exactly the same way that America fought in Vietnam,
says Jean Baudrillard of the film made by director Francis Ford Coppola (Baudrillard 1981: 89-91). War becomes film,
Baudrillard writes of Coppolas spectacularly successful cinematic creation. Film becomes war, the two united by their
shared overflowing of technology (Ibid.: 89). There is implosion or mutual contamination between film becoming Virtual
Reality and War. Think also of Steven Spielbergs Saving Private Ryan (1998): total immersion in the Virtual Reality of

combat an aesthetics of VR different from critical distance as a new kind of testimonial position with
respect to war and atrocities. In Vietnam-slash-Apocalypse Now, War is a Drug Trip and a God Trip, a
psychedelic and pornographic carnival (Baudrillard 2010), a savage cannibalism practiced by the Christians, a film before
the shooting and a shoot before the filming, a vast machine of excessive special effects, a show of power, a territorial lab for testing

new weapons on human guinea pigs, and the sacrificial jouissanceof throwing away billions of dollars all these aspects alluded to
or mentioned by Baudrillard. Coppolas film, according to Baudrillard, is the carrying on of an undeclared, unfinished and unending
War. An interminable Heart of Darkness. Jean Baudrillard is not against war, not even against specific wars like
the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He says this explicitly in Le masque de la guerre, published in the Parisian daily
newspaper Libration, just prior to President George W. Bushs invasion of Iraq in 2003. Ni pour ni contre. Neither for nor against.
This war is a non-event, writes Baudrillard, and it is absurd to take a stance on a non-event (Baudrillard 2003).

The non-events of the Iraq War and the War on Terror opposed themselves to the event of September
11th, 2001. Baudrillards two most explicit texts about war are The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991), written just before,
during, and just after the Persian Gulf War of 1991 that was initiated by President George H.W. Bush, and The Spirit of Terrorism
(2002), written just after 9/11. At the very beginning of the essay The Gulf War Will Not Take Place, the first of the three essays that
comprise The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Baudrillard explains that non-war which is what the military-industrial

complex or the (non-)war machine has become very adept at carrying out in the age of virtuality is
characterised by that degenerate form of war which includes hostage manipulation and negotiation
(Baudrillard 1995: 24). The Eisenhower-coined term of the military-industrial complex is used by Baudrillard in his essay "No
Reprieve For Sarajevo," published in Libration, January 8, 1994. He sees

the MIC as still operative yet in need of

conceptual upgrading. Hostages and blackmail, Baudrillard continues in The Gulf War Will Not Take Place, are
the purest products of deterrence. The hostage has taken the place of the warrior . He has become the
principal actor, the simulacral protagonist, or rather, in his pure inaction, the protagoniser (le protagonisant) of
non-war (Baurillard 1995: 24). And we, the television viewers of the non-war, are all in the situation of hostages, all
of us as information hostages on the world media stage (Ibid.). Hostages of the screen, of the intoxication
of the media, dragged and drugged into a logic of deterrence, "we are no longer in a logic of the passage
from virtual to actual but in a hyperrealist logic of the deterrence of the real by the virtual (Ibid.: 27). The
post-structure [the successor to a sociological structure with less stability and with less of a center] of the (non-)war
machine in the age of media virtuality has properties of binary/digital, simulation/modeling, viral
metastasis, and complex intricate paradoxical topology. Let us consider all four of these properties as aspects of a
Baudrillardian theory of war (or a theory of war in honour of Jean Baudrillard). First of all, the post-structure of the (non-)war
machine in the age of media virtuality has the property of binary/digital. It presents itself to us through
the dualistic structure of a forced binary choice, where the system obliges each of us to take a
position for or against war , or for or against particular wars, as waged, for example, by the
Pentagon, the EU humanitarian forces, or the surveillance states War on Terror. It is this very binary
logic of yes or no that is the news media discourse, the rhetoric of politicians , and the hybrid
virtual-and-real-killing of the screen and the bomb. Today, of course, the Internet has superceded television as the
prevailing universal media (although there is much convergence and combination of the two). And the Internet is much more
interactive and participatory. There is much more response. There is much less of a spectacle than there was when Guy Debord
and the Situationists conceptualized their media theory in the 1960s. Yet everywhere that the news media and the (non)-war

machine still prevail, everywhere that they are still massively influential, everywhere that they still exercise
their power, we are not quite liberated from the speech without response described by the early Baudrillard.
When Muammar Gaddafi, the former dictator of Libya, was brutally killed by rebel forces on October 20, 2011, during the Libyan
Civil War, the event, having been filmed by a cell phone, was presented to worldwide viewers by almost all of the news media as
some kind of triumph for justice, even though it was clearly a loss for democratic principles and the possible coming to light of
priceless information about the decades of atrocities committed by Gaddafis regime during a public trial which would never take
place.

2NC Nukes
The industrial logic of deterrence freezes the movement of life and locks the
world into a glass sarcophagus this is an endemic process of extermination
which makes genocidal violence inevitable against this blackmail of survival,
we affirm the silent indifference of the masses to nuclear pathos only this
strategy of resignation replaces homeopathic survivalism with an open ethos of
life its better to die in the open air than cower in a bunker
Baudrillard 86 (Jean Baudrillard, deader than most dead Frenchies, 1986, America, pp 42-4,
translated by Chris Turner) gz
Everywhere survival has become a burning issue, perhaps by some obscure weariness of life or a
collective desire for catastrophe (though we should not take all this too seriously: it is also a playing at catastrophe).
Certainly, this whole panoply of survival issues - dieting, ecology, saving the sequoias, seals or the human race - tends to prove that
we are very much alive (just as all imaginary fairy-tales tend to prove that the real world is very real). But this is not so certain, for
not only is the fact of living not really well-attested, but the paradox of this society is that you cannot
even die in it any more since you are already dead . . . This is real suspense. And it is not simply an effect
of living in the nuclear age, but derives from the ease with which we now live, which makes survivors of
us all. If the bomb drops, we shall neither have the time to die nor any awareness of dying . But
already in

our hyper-protected society we no longer have any awareness of death , since we have subtly
passed over into a state where life is excessively easy.
The holocaust created an anticipatory form of such a condition. What the inmates of the
concentration camps were deprived of was the very possibility of having control of their own
deaths , of playing , even gambling with their own deaths, making their deaths a sacrifice : they
were robbed of power over their own deaths . And this is what is happening to all of us , in slow,
homeopathic doses , by virtue of the very development of our systems. The explosions and the
extermination (Auschwitz and Hiroshima) still go on , though they have simply taken on a purulent,
endemic form . The chain reaction continues nonetheless, the contagion , the unfolding of the viral
and bacteriological process. The end of history was precisely the inauguration of this chain
reaction .
The obsessive desire for survival ( and not for life ) is a symptom of this state of affairs and doubtless
also the most worrying sign of the degradation of the species . If you think about the forms that desire
currently takes - antinuclear shelters , cryogenization , high-pressure therapy - you see that they
are exactly the forms of extermination . To avoid dying, one chooses to withdraw into some
protective bubble or other. In this light, we should take it as a reassuring sign that people lost
interest in antinuclear protection so quickly (the shelter market has become a mere prestige market ,
like the market for artworks or luxury yachts ). It seems that people have become tired of nuclear
blackmail and decided not to give in to it , leaving the threat of destruction hanging in mid-air over
them , perhaps with an obscure sense of how unreal it is . A fine example of a vital reaction disguised
as resignation . If we have to die, better to die in the open air than in an underground
sarcophagus . At a stroke an end is put to survival blackmail and life can go on .
Everyone is weary of these apocalyptic visions - the great scenario of the nuclear threat, the theatrical
negotiations, Star Wars. In the end, they defend themselves with a lack of imagination . Even attempts to
stimulate that imagination in films like The Last Day have not worked. Nothing has ever been able to make this

nuclear scene - or obscenity - credible. With delicate matters like this (as with cancer), imagining death has
the effect of bringing the fatal event closer . The masses silent indifference to nuclear pathos
(whether it comes from the nuclear powers or from antinuclear campaigners)

political fact of the utmost importance .

is therefore a great sign of hope and a

2NC China
The affirmatives shift from containment to cooperation with China can only
produce insidious forms of domination under the guise of harmonious collectivity
Nordin 14 (Astrid, Lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy, and Religion at Lancaster University,
Radical Exoticism: Baudrillard and Others Wars, IJBS Volume 11, Number 2 (May 2014) Special Issue: Baudrillard
and War, [SG])

with regards to Asia, and more specifically Japan, he argues for

increased exoticisation (Baudrillard 2003a). For Baudrillard, it is the modern Wests refusal of alterity that spawns
nostalgia for the Other, who is now always already domesticated (Baudrillard 1990 [1987]:145, 165). Despite this nostalgia, we must
not try to foster difference. It is counterproductive to call for respecting the difference of marginalized groups, as
this relies on a presumption that they need to have an Identity and makes the marginal valued as such,
thus leaving the marginal where they are, in place. Difference must therefore be rejected in favour of greater otherness or alterity: otherness
[laltrit] is not the same thing as difference. One might even say that difference is what destroys otherness (Baudrillard 1993 [1990]: 127, 131). Thus
Baudrillard has a limited amount to say about this outside, but

the other must stay Other, separate, perhaps difficult to understand, uncontrollable (Hegarty 2004: 118). In this way, Baudrillard advocates more exoticism, an interest in the
other as Other. The Other can only remain Other insofar as we resist the urge to assimilate. What, then, is the consequence of this for scholars who are interested in

Should we simply stop

speaking of Asia in order to try to give it some sort of status as an unknown unknown? Surely this would
be intolerably patronising, building precisely the ethos of derivative difference-promotion that destroys
Otherness. Or should we sidestep the issue by simply assuming that everything is now part of the global
cleptocracy of Western-style capitalism, without an outside? This would surely be an equally intolerable
and patronising approach to the issue of otherness. I shall return to these questions towards the end of this article. First, however, I shall brave
configurations beyond the purported Western system or consumer society that Baudrillard clearly thinks he can speak about?

an attempt to speak of Others wars, namely imaginations of war emerging from contemporary China. Before I venture into some discussion of contemporary Chinese modes of

There is a large and varied

literature engaging the varied traditions of Chinese strategic culture, the numerous cultural expressions
that deal with the theme of war, not to mention the Chinese military in foreign policy . In what follows I outline three
war, I shall state the obvious: what I discuss here is merely a small selection of what one could write of as Chinese wars.

dimensions of contemporary Chinese war in order to bring out a number of contrast and themes that have some bearing on Baudrillards discussion of war. I turn, first, to the
Peoples Republic of Chinas participation in the war on terror. I thereafter contrast this allegedly modern and Western-led war with contemporary rhetoric in Chinese academic
and policy discourse, which draws on Ancient Chinese philosophy.

This discourse has focused on the pre-emption of war in

conjunction with the language of harmony , innate peacefulness and soft power, portraying such
attitudes in opposition to the West. Having outlined a number of areas where I think Baudrillards discussions of war can shed
some light on this allegedly Chinese ontology of war , I thereafter turn to Chinese actors or discourses that act out war in other modes,
including in popular culture and propaganda. How should we understand these simultaneous approaches to war, in relation
to the disappearance of war that Baudrillard and others have described in modern Western practices? As
described above, there are aspects of Baudrillards writing where all alternatives to American achieved utopia appear to be erased for Baudrillard (Beck 2009: 110). In the final
parts of America, for example, simulation is portrayed as a means of sustaining and extending American
dominance at home and abroad, which is now uncontested and uncontestable, a universal model
even reaching as far as China (Baudrillard 1989 [1986]: 116). And indeed, this universal model has literally reached the
very territorial border of China in the form of the war on terror that was rolled out all the way to the SinoAfghan border and beyond. In Baudrillards view, the 9/11 attacks represented the clash of triumphant
globalization at war with itself and unfolded a fourth world war: The first put an end to European
supremacy and to the era of colonialism; the second put an end to Nazism; and the third to Communism.
Each one brought us progressively closer to the single world order of today , which is now nearing its end,
everywhere opposed, everywhere grappling with hostile forces (Baudrillard, 2003b). In this new fractal state of war and hostility,

the Chinese state has joined forces with the American leadership to
reinstate the hegemony of the global (of which they have surely dreamt, just like the rest of us). To the
American unilateral war on terror in Afghanistan and George W. Bushs call you are either with us or
against us, the Chinese government responded with a (perhaps reluctant) we are with you! This wish to
be part of the global American self has not meant, however, the full contribution to the war effort that
some American representatives may have hoped. China has , since around the time of 9/11 shifted from being
extremely reluctant to condone or participate in any form of peacekeeping missions , including under United Nations
(UN) flag, to being the UN Security Council member that contributes most to UN peacekeeping missions. Much of
this participation has taken the form of non-combatant personal. Nonetheless, China has been an actively involved party in Operation Enduring Freedom. It has provided police

training for Afghanistans security forces, as well as mine-clearance. Though it was opposed to the US invasion of Iraq without UN mandate, China has emerged as one of the
biggest beneficiaries of the occupation, as it is one of the biggest winners of oil contracts in Iraq. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, China has been accused of free-riding on

The Chinese state has benefited

from participation in the war on terror in more ways than one. The war has increased Chinese influence in
Central Asia. It has legitimized Chinas harsh clamp-downs in Xinjiang, where the state claims its violence is justified by the presence of separatist terrorists in the
Muslim Uyghur community. Not least, Chinas participation in the war on terror has been used to demonstrate to
American efforts, but China has nonetheless been clearly positioned as part of the participating and benefiting we.

the world that China is now a responsible great power, as measured by the standard of
international society

(see Yeophantong 2013 for a discussion of this responsibility rhetoric).

Again, this rhetoric of

responsibility has been deployed by both American and Chinese leaders to tie China more tightly
to the purported American-led we . More recently, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has stressed the importance of continued Sino-US
co-operation over Afghanistan post-2014 troop withdrawal . Wang has publicly stressed the common goals of China and the US
with regards to Afghanistan: We both hope Afghanistan will continue to maintain stability We both hope to see the reconstruction of Afghanistan and we both dont want to

China and the USA have jointly engaged in what is termed advisory
and capacity-building for Afghans, for example in training Afghan diplomats, and their co-operation
continues around shared goals in the region. Much could be said here about Chinas participation in the
American-led globalization project and war on terror . My point here is simply to note that whatever we read America as doing through its war
on terror, China is a supporting and benefiting actor in this process. It is clearly positioned as part of this global idea of self. At the
see the resurgence of terrorism (cited in Chen Weihua, 2013).

same time , however, China is also portrayed , from within and without, as a challenger , an
alternative, or an other to that global, American or Western order . We therefore turn next to the Chinese scholarly and
governmental rhetoric that claims to offer such an alternative or challenge to the Western way of war that Baudrillard criticized and that we can see China joining in the war on
terror. (ii). Contemporary PRC rhetoric on pre-modern Chinese thought on war In contemporary China, the official rhetoric on war focuses on pre-emption and the claim that
China will never be a hegemonic or warmongering power unlike the US. In this rhetoric, the Chinese war is by nature a non-war. Official documents emerging in the last
decade repeatedly stress that China is by nature peaceful, which is why nobody needs to worry about its rise. In the 2005 government whitepaper Chinas Peaceful
Development Road, for example, we are told that: [i]t is an inevitable choice based on Chinas historical and cultural tradition that China persists unswervingly in taking the road
of peaceful development. The Chinese nation has always been a peace-loving one. Chinese culture is a pacific culture. The spirit of the Chinese people has always featured
their longing for peace and pursuit of harmony (State Council of the PRC 2005b). The whitepaper (and numerous other official and unofficial publications) posit an essentialised
Chinese culture of peacefulness as prior to any Chinese relations with the world. This rhetoric of an inherently non-bellicose Chinese way has also echoed in Chinese academic
debates, where Chinese pre-modern philosophy has come back in fashion as a (selectively sampled) source of inspiration. The claims and logics that have come out of these
debates are varied. One significant grouping of Chinese academics directly follow the government line and claim that choosing peaceful rise is on the one hand Chinas
voluntary action, on the other hand it is an inevitable choice (Liu Jianfei 2006: 38). That peacefulness and harmony is something that Chinese people have always valued is an
implication, and often explicitly stated fact in these literatures. Zhan Yunling, for example, claims that from ancient times until today, China has possessed traditional thought
and a culture of seeking harmony (Zhang Yunling 2008: 4). This claim to natural harmony is mutually supportive of the claim that the Chinese nation has always been a

A related set of commentators further stress the

significance of militarily non-violent means to China getting its (naturally peaceful) way in international
relations. For example, Ding Sheng draws on the Sunzi quote mentioned above: to subjugate the enemys army without doing battle is the highest of excellence (Ding
Sheng 2008: 197). This line of argument typically sees what some would call soft power tools as a way of getting
others to become more like yourself without any need for outright war or other forms of physical violence .
peaceful nation, to authors such as Liu Jianfei (2006), or Yu Xiaofeng and Wang Jiangli (2006).

In a discussion of the official government rhetoric of harmonious world under former president Hu Jintao, Shi Zhongwen accordingly stresses that the doctrine opposes going to
extremes, and therefore contradicts what Shi calls the philosophy of struggle (Shi Zhongwen 2008: 40, where struggle implies Marxist ideology). Qin Zhiyong similarly argues
that China needs to steer away from collisions and embrace the aim of merging different cultures (Qin Zhiyong 2008: 73). At the same time, few Chinese academics question
the direction of the merging of cultures discussed above clearly it is other cultures that should merge into Chinas peaceful one. In a common line of thought that draws on the
historical concept of Tianxia, or All-under-heaven, it is argued that the Chinese leadership can thus bring about a harmonious world through voluntary submission [by others]
rather than force simply through its superior morality and exemplary behaviour (Yan Xuetong 2008: 159). On this logic, the leadership will never need to use violence, because
everybody will see its magnanimity and will want to emulate its behaviour (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 34. See Callahan 2008: 755 for a discussion). Much of these debates have
come to pivot around this concept of Tianxia, an imaginary of the world that builds on a holistic notion of space, without radical self-other distinction or bordered difference. To
some thinkers, this imagination is based on a notion of globalisation (for example Yu Xiaofeng and Wang Jiangli 2006: 59) or networked space (Ni Shixiong and Qian Xuming
2008: 124) where everything is always already connected to everything else in a borderless world. In these accounts, Tianxia thinking is completely different from Western
civilisation, since Chinese civilisation insists on its own subjectivity, and possesses inclusivity (Zhou Jianming and Jiao Shixin 2008: 28). Despite this apparent binary, it is
claimed that Tianxiaism involves an identification with all of humankind, where there is no differentiation or distinction between people (Li Baojun and Li Zhiyong 2008: 82). A
thinker whose deployment of the Tianxia concept has been particularly influential is Zhao Tingyang, who proposes the concept as a Chinese and better way of imagining world
order (Zhao Tingyang 2005; 2006), where better means better than the Western inter-state system to which Tianxia is portrayed as the good opposite. In opposition to this
Western system, he argues that Tianxia can offer a view from nowhere or a view from the world, where [w]orld-ness cannot be reduced to internationality, for it is of the
wholeness or totality rather than the between-ness (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 39). However, as a consequence of a prioritisation of order over the preservation of alterity, any
inconsistency or contradiction in the system will be a disaster (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 33). As a corollary of this prioritisation, Zhao comes to insist on the homogeneity of his allinclusive space, which aims at the uniformity of society (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 33, emphasis in original) where all political levels should be essentially homogenous or
homological so as to create a harmonious system (2006: 33). The aim of the Tianxia system is thus to achieve one single homogeneous and uniform space. Clearly, for such
homogeneity to be born from a heterogeneous world, someone must change. Zhao argues that: one of the principles of Chinese political philosophy is said to turn the enemy
into a friend, and it would lose its meaning if it were not to remove conflicts and pacify social problems in a word, to transform () the bad into the good (Zhao Tingyang

this conversion to a single good homogeneity should happen

through volontariness rather than through expansive colonialism:

2006: 34). Moreover,

an

empire of All-under-Heaven could only be an exemplar passively in situ, rather than positively become
missionary (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 36, emphasis in original). However, when we are given clues as to how this idea of the good to
which everyone should conform would be determined , Zhaos idea of self-other relations seems to rely on the
possibility of some Archimedean point from which to judge this good, and/or the complete eradication of
any otherness, so that the one space that exists is completely the space of self (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 33). Thus, Zhao

[t]he unspoken theory is that most people do not really know what is best for them, but that the
elite do, so the elite ought genuinely to decide for the people (2006: 32). As explained by William A. Callahan: By thinking through the
confesses that

world with a view from everywhere, Zhao argues that we can have a complete and perfect understanding of problems and solutions that is all-inclusive. With this all-inclusive
notion of Tianxia, there is literally no outside. Since all places and all problems are domestic, Zhao says that this model guarantees the a prioricompleteness of the world

This complete and perfect understanding is hence attainable only to an elite, who will
achieve homogeneity (convert others into self) through example. Eventually, then, there will be no other,
the many will have been transformed into the one (Zhao Tingyang 2005: 13, see also 2006). It is through this
(Callahan 2007: 7).

transformation and submission to the ruling elite that the prevention of war is imagined .

Chinese redeployments of pre-modern thought on war (which, to my knowledge, he

have recognised many of the themes that interested him in Western approaches to the first Gulf war.
Most strikingly, this is a way of talking about war that writes out war from its story. Like deterrence, it is an imagination of war that
approaches it via prevention and pre-emption. What is more, we recognise an obsession with the selfimage of the self to itself in this case, a Chinese, undemocratic self rather than a Western, democratic
one. In this Chinese war, like in the Persian Gulf of which Baudrillard wrote, there is no space for an Other that is
Other. In the Tianxia imaginary, Others can only be imagined as something that will eventually assimilate into The System and become part of the Self, as the Self strives for
all-inclusive perfection. There is no meeting with an Other in any form. Encounter only happens once the Other becomes like the Self,
is assimilated into the One, and hence there is no encounter at all (for an analysis that reads Baudrillard and Tianxia to this effect in
a Chinese non-war context, see Nordin 2012). As was the case with the first Gulf War, the war that we are waiting for here in
the Chinese case is thus a non-war. If by war we mean some form of (symbolic) exchange or some clash
of forms, agons, or forces (as we tend to do even in the current cutting edge research in critical war studies, see Nordin and berg 2013) we cannot
expect it to take place. In China, we see not only a participation in the Western system of (non)war
If Baudrillard had engaged with these contemporary
never did), I think he would

through the war on terror, but also another system that precisely denies space for imagining an
other as Other, which in turn makes the idea of exchange impossible . In this sense, the Ancient Chinese approach to war
through the Tianxia concept at least as it is reflected by current Chinese thinkers like Zhao Tingyang and Yan Xuetong is not a Clausewitzean war
continuing politics by other means, but precisely a continuation of the absence of politics by other
means . It arguably shares this aspect with both the first and the second Gulf Wars.

This, however, is certainly not to

say that there are not those who fear a Chinese war or that we have no reason to fear it. In various guises, the war that is imagined through a Clausewitzean ontology of
agonistic and reciprocal exchange returns and is reified also in China. It is not uncommon for authors discussing the Chinese traditions of thinking war that I describe above to
begin their discussion by explicitly drawing on Clausewitz and take his war as their point of departure (for example Liu Tiewa 2014). For several Chinese writers, it is clear that
this building of a harmonious world is directed against others whose influence should be smashed (Fang Xiaojiao 2008: 68). From this line of thinkers, the call to build a
harmonious world has also been used to argue for increased Chinese military capacity, including its naval power (Deng Li 2009). Although Chinese policy documents stress that
violence or threat of violence should be avoided, they similarly appear to leave room for means that would traditionally be understood as both hard and soft in Joseph Nyes
dichotomisation (See for example State Council of the PRC 2005a). Indeed, many of Chinas neighbours have voiced concern with growing Chinese military capacity over the
last few years, and

a Chinese non-war is no less frightening to its neighbours than a war be it labelled

just or unjust, real or virtual . This Chinese war past, present and future is acted out in various
different modes. Violent war is reified through the spectacle of computer games, art, online memes,
cartoons and not least dramas on film and television (Diamant 2011, 433). The Chinese state claims success in all
of its wars, and simultaneously claims that it has never behaved aggressively beyond its borders (which is also,
of course, a convenient way of glossing over all the violence perpetrated by the Chinese state within
those borders, the violence with which they are upheld and with which they were established in the
first place, and the clear contradiction between the states fixation on territorial integrity and its
borderless and holisticTianxia rhetoric ). Popular cultural renditions of war paint a more varied picture, but all
contribute to a reification of war.

1NR

Disappearance of War

A2: Recuber
The 1ACs creation of empathetic connections creates a demand for more
suffering turns the whole aff
Baudrillard 94 (Jean, ex-Prof of Sociology at Paris X, The Illusion of the End p. 66-70)
We
must today denounce the moral and sentimental exploitation of that poverty - charity cannibalism
being worse than oppressive violence. The extraction and humanitarian reprocessing of a destitution
which has become the equivalent of oil deposits and gold mines. The extortion of the spectacle of poverty
and, at the same time, of our charitable condescension : a worldwide appreciated surplus of fine
sentiments and bad conscience. We should, in fact, see this not as the extraction of raw materials, but as a wasteWe have long denounced the capitalistic, economic exploitation of the poverty of the 'other half of the world' ['autre monde].

reprocessing enterprise. Their destitution and our bad conscience are, in effect, all part of the waste-products of history- the main
thing is to recycle them to produce a new energy source. We have here an escalation in the psychological balance of terror. World
capitalist oppression is now merely the vehicle and alibi for this other, much more ferocious, form of moral predation. One might
almost say, contrary to the Marxist analysis, that material exploitation is only there to extract that spiritual raw
material that is the misery of peoples, which serves as psychological nourishment for the rich
countries and media nourishment for our daily lives. The 'Fourth World' (we are no longer dealing with a 'developing' Third
World) is once again beleaguered, this time as a catastrophe-bearing stratum. The West is whitewashed in the

reprocessing of the rest of the world as waste and residue. And the white world repents and seeks
absolution - it, too, the waste-product of its own history. The South is a natural producer of raw materials,
the latest of which is catastrophe. The North, for its part, specializes in the reprocessing of raw materials
and hence also in the reprocessing of catastrophe . Bloodsucking protection, humanitarian interference, Medecins sans
frontieres, international solidarity, etc. The last phase of colonialism: the New Sentimental Order is merely the latest form of the New
World Order. Other people's destitution becomes our adventure playground. Thus, the humanitarian offensive
aimed at the Kurds - a show of repentance on the part of the Western powers after allowing Saddam Hussein to crush them - is in
reality merely the second phase of the war, a phase in which charitable intervention finishes off the work of extermination. We are
the consumers of the ever delightful spectacle of poverty and catastrophe, and of the moving spectacle of our own efforts to

alleviate it (which, in fact, merely function to secure the conditions of reproduction of the
catastrophe market); there, at least, in the order of moral profits, the Marxist analysis is wholly
applicable: we see to it that extreme poverty is reproduced as a symbolic deposit, as a fuel essential to
the moral and sentimental equilibrium of the West. In our defence, it might be said that this extreme poverty was
largely of our own making and it is therefore normal that we should profit by it. There can be no finer proof that the distress of the
rest of the world is at the root of Western power and that the spectacle of that distress is its crowning glory than the inauguration, on
the roof of the Arche de la Defense, with a sumptuous buffet laid on by the Fondation des Droits de l'homme, of an exhibition of the
finest photos of world poverty. Should we be surprised that spaces are set aside in the Arche d' Alliance. for universal suffering
hallowed by caviar and champagne? Just as the economic crisis of the West will not be complete so long as it

can still exploit the resources of the rest of the world, so the symbolic crisis will be complete only when it
is no longer able to feed on the other half's human and natural catastrophes (Eastern Europe, the Gulf,
the Kurds, Bangladesh, etc.). We need this drug, which serves us as an aphrodisiac and hallucinogen.
And the poor countries are the best suppliers - as, indeed, they are of other drugs. We provide them,
through our media, with the means to exploit this paradoxical resource, just as we give them the means to
exhaust their natural resources with our technologies. Our whole culture lives off this catastrophic
cannibalism, relayed in cynical mode by the news media, and carried forward in moral mode by our
humanitarian aid, which is a way of encouraging it and ensuring its continuity, just as economic aid is a
strategy for perpetuating under-development. Up to now, the financial sacrifice has been compensated a
hundredfold by the moral gain. But when the catastrophe market itself reaches crisis point, in
accordance with the implacable logic of the market, when distress becomes scarce or the marginal returns on it fall from
overexploitation, when we run out of disasters from elsewhere or when they can no longer be traded like coffee or
other commodities, the West will be forced to produce its own catastrophe for itself, in order to meet its
need for spectacle and that voracious appetite for symbols which characterizes it even more than its
voracious appetite for food. It will reach the point where it devours itself. When we have finished sucking out the destiny of others,
we shall have to invent one for ourselves. The Great Crash, the symbolic crash, will come in the end from us Westerners, but only
when we are no longer able to feed on the hallucinogenic misery which comes to us from the other half of the world. Yet they do not
seem keen to give up their monopoly. The Middle East, Bangladesh, black Africa and Latin America are really going flat out

in the distress and catastrophe stakes, and thus in providing symbolic nourishment for the rich world.
They might be said to be overdoing it: heaping earthquakes, floods, famines and ecological disasters one

upon another, and finding the means to massacre each other most of the time. The 'disaster show' goes
on without any let-up and our sacrificial debt to them far exceeds their economic debt. The misery with which they
generously overwhelm us is something we shall never be able to repay. The sacrifices we offer in return are laughable (a tornado or
two, a few tiny holocausts on the roads, the odd financial sacrifice) and, moreover, by some infernal logic, these work out as much
greater gains for us, whereas our kindnesses have merely added to the natural catastrophes another one immeasurably worse: the
demographic catastrophe, a veritable epidemic which we deplore each day in pictures. In short, there is such distortion between
North and South, to the symbolic advantage of the South (a hundred thousand Iraqi dead against casualties numbered in tens on
our side: in every case we are the losers), that one day everything will break down. One day, the West will break down if we are not
soon washed clean of this shame, if an international congress of the poor countries does not very quickly decide to share out this
symbolic privilege of misery and catastrophe. It is of course normal, since we refuse to allow the spread of nuclear weapons, that
they should refuse to allow the spread of the catastrophe weapon. But it is not right that they should exert that monopoly indefinitely.
In any case, the under-developed are only so by comparison with the Western system and its presumed

success. In the light of its assumed failure, they are not under-developed at all. They are only so in terms
of a dominant evolutionism which has always been the worst of colonial ideologies. The argument here is that
there is a line of objective progress and everyone is supposed to pass through its various stages (we find the same eyewash with
regard to the evolution of species and in that evolutionism which unilaterally sanctions the superiority of the human race). In the light
of current upheavals, which put an end to any idea of history as a linear process, there are no longer either developed or underdeveloped peoples. Thus, to encourage hope of evolution - albeit by revolution - among the poor and to doom
them, in keeping with the objective illusion of progress, to technological salvation is a criminal absurdity. In
actual fact, it is their good fortune to be able to escape from evolution just at the point when we no longer know where it is leading.
In any case, a majority of these peoples, including those of Eastern Europe, do not seem keen to enter this evolutionist modernity,
and their weight in the balance is certainly no small factor in the West's repudiation of its own history, of its own utopias and its own
modernity. It might be said that the routes of violence, historical or otherwise, are being turned around and that the viruses now pass
from South to North, there being every chance that, five hundred years after America was conquered, 1992 and the end of the
century will mark the comeback of the defeated and the sudden reversal of that modernity. The sense of pride is no longer on the
side of wealth but of poverty, of those who - fortunately for them - have nothing to repent, and may indeed glory in being privileged in
terms of catastrophes. Admittedly, this is a privilege they could hardly renounce, even if they wished to, but natural disasters merely
reinforce the sense of guilt felt towards them by the wealthy by those whom God visibly scorns since he no longer even strikes
them down. One day it will be the Whites themselves who will give up their whiteness. It is a good bet that repentance will reach its
highest pitch with the five-hundredth anniversary of the conquest of the Americas. We are going to have to lift the curse of the
defeated - but symbolically victorious - peoples, which is insinuating itself five hundred years later, by way of repentance, into the
heart of the white race.

Their reproductive project makes macro-level violence inevitable

baedan 12 (baedan is a journal composed by a collective of anonymous queer negativists, Summer 2012, Baedan 1: Journal of Queer
Nihilism, pp 17-9) gz

the cathexis which captures all political ambition

is a drive toward the future. The social order must concern itself with the future so as to create the
forward-moving infrastructure and discourse to proliferate itself . Edelmans name for this insistence on the Child as the future is
reproductive futurism. Reproductive futurism is the ideology which demands that all social relationships and
communal life be structured in order to allow for the possibility of the future through the reproduction of
the Child, and thus the reproduction of society. The ideology of reproductive futurism ensures the sacrifice of all
vital energy for the pure abstraction of the idealized continuation of society. Edelman argues that futurity amounts to a
It should be obvious through Edelmans treatment of the relationship of politics to the Child that

struggle for Life at the expense of life; for the Children at the expense of the lived experiences of actual children.

If queerness is a refusal of the symbolic value of the Child as the horizon of the future, queerness must
figure as being against the future itself. To be specific, our queer project must also pose itself as the denial of the
future of civilization.
Edelman argues that the queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to
the social, to every social structure or form. He locates this queer anti-futurity as being the primary fantastic justification for anti-queer violence: If
there is no baby and, in consequence, no future, then the blame must fall on the fatal lure of sterile,
narcissistic enjoyments understood as inherently destructive of meaning and therefore as responsible for
the undoing of social organization, collective reality, and, inevitably, life itself . He invokes the anti-queer interpretations of the
Biblical destruction of Sodom to describe the ways in which the collective imaginary is still haunted by the notion that a proliferation of queerness can only
result in a persistent threat of societal apocalypse. Thus in the name of the Child and the future it
represents, any repression, sexual or otherwise, can be justified.
The Child, immured in an innocence seen as continuously under siege, condenses a fantasy of vulnerability to the queerness of queer sexualities
precisely insofar as that Child enshrines, in its form as sublimation, the very value for which queerness regularly find itself condemned: an insistence
on sameness that intends to restore an Imaginary past. The Child, that is, marks the fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity: an erotically charged
investment in the rigid sameness of identity that is central to the compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism. And so, as the radical right maintains,

the battle against queers is a life-and-death struggle for the future of a Child whose ruin is pursued by
queers. Indeed, as the Army of God made clear in the bomb-making guide it produces for the assistance of its militantly pro-life members, its
purpose was wholly congruent with the logic of reproductive futurism: to disrupt and ultimately destroy Satans power to kill our children, Gods
children.

futurism is intrinsic to white supremacist ideology and white nationalism;

bound as the Child is to notions of race and nation :
Edelman goes on to cite the ways in which reproductive

Let me end with a reference to the fourteen words, attributed to David Lane, by which members of various white separatist organizations throughout the United States affirm

we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white
children. So long as white is the only word that makes this credo appalling, so long as the figural children continue to secure our existence through the fantasy that we
their collective commitment to the cause of racial hatred:

survive in them, so long as the queer refutes that fantasy, effecting its derealization as surely an encounter with the Real, for just so long must [queerness] have a future after all.

fantasy of the
future was intrinsic to the spread of fascism in Europe . Edelman, via Benjamin, describes the fascism of the babys face, a phrase meant to
illustrate the absolute power afforded to the ideology of reproductive futurism. This fascism of the babys face serves to reify difference and
thus to secure the reproduction of the existent social order in the form of the future. No atrocity is out of
the question if it is for the Child; no horrible project of industry should precluded if it will serve to hasten
the future of industrial civilization. Armies of men, imperial and revolutionary alike, have always lined up to
the slaughter in the name of the Child.
To bolster his argument about the repressive nature of reproductive futurism, Edelman cites Walter Benjamin in describing the way in which the

But we neednt look any further than todays headlines to see the symbolic power the Childs face deploys in the service of the social order. This year, the nation has been
captivated by two horrific examples of the death-regime of white supremacy in the United States. Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida and Bo Morrison in Slinger, Wisconsin: two
black youth murdered at the hands of racist vigilantes.
While the systematic murder and imprisonment of black people is so commonplace that it cannot make headlines, these stories have swept the nation particularly because of
the way they intersect with the narratives of innocence and childhood. Specifically in the case of Trayvon Martin, whose future was taken from him at the age of seventeen, a
debate is raging centered around his character and his innocence with regard to his symbolic place as the Child.
One side of this debate circulates a angelic picture of his face to assure society of his child-like nature. The other side circulates a doctored picture of him wearing a grill as a
kind of racialized testament to his adultness. Each side feverishly examines the evidence to argue whether or not he had attacked his murderer before he died. Whats at stake
in this debate is Trayvons symbolic position as the Child: if he represents the Child, his murder is the atrocious destruction of his future (and by extensions everyones). If he is
not the Child, then his killer acted out of the need to protect the future of his own community (and the children within it) from a perceived (even if falsely) threat. While politicians
as high-ranking as the President invest Trayvon with the burden of carrying the futurity of their own children, others continue to assert their second amendment right to own
weapons so they may protect theirs.
Bo Morrison was also murdered by a racist homeowner, and his killer continues on with impunity because he can claim that he needed to eliminate any threat to his children.

Young black men who figured, like the queer, as threats to the family were destroyed in the Childs name.
In each instance, the entire discourse is centered on the Child while entirely obscuring the reality of the actual young individuals executed in the Childs name.
Pundits articulate the measures that could be taken by parents and the state to restore the promise of the future: a ban on guns, more responsible gun ownership, the removal

These horrific killings demonstrate that there truly is no

future. It is this truth which young people everywhere are awakening to. They are swarming the streets en masse, hoods up, to outrun the police and snare the flows of the
of hoodies from childrens wardrobes, neighborhood watch, more policing, justice.

cities. They are walking out of school that banal prison of futurity in order to loot stores and be with their friends. They are preparing and coordinating, so that the next time
one of them is burned at the stake for the sake of the Future, theyll make the city burn in kind. The fires of Greece, London and Bahrain hint toward the consequences of such
an awakening.