Thomas
4-13-20
, an award-winning writer and editor who has covered foreign affairs and national security issues extensively and reported from more than 50 countries, Senior
Writer at U.S. Institute of Peace, previously a Senior Professional Staff Member at U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs, a Non-resident Senior Fellow at Center for Transatlantic Relations, a Diplomatic
Correspondent/Senior Writer at U.S. News & World Report, and Associate (deputy) Editor; Acting Editor at Foreign Policy Magazine, B.S. in Economics @ University of Minnesota
, “Obama's Slight Easing of Cuba
Restrictions Leaves Embargo Intact,” http://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2009/04/13/obamas-slight-easing-of-cuba-restrictionsleaves-embargo-intact
The moves
, in
part reflecting
Obama's
campaign promises on Cuba policy, leave in place nearly all of the U.S. economic embargo
but do represent the first major moves in a decade or more to alter a policy that is widely criticized as having failed to encourage democracy or human rights in the nearby Communist nation despite nearly half a century of trying. During the campaign,
Obama said he would retain the embargo
for now as leverage to promote democratic progress in
Cuba.
If recent interviews with officials in Havana are a guide, the Cuban government will welcome the removal of restrictions on Cuban-
Americans. However, it may well bristle at the administration's emphasis on "creating space" for Cubans to operate apart from their government. Cuban officials say they will accept no preconditions in terms of political steps there in order to launch and sustain a direct dialogue between Havana and Washington that could lead to a normalization of relations. How they will react to U.S. telecommunications firms possibly becoming active on the island is also unclear. "The president has made clear he's willing to talk with our adversaries," Robert Gibbs, the
White House press secretary, said. But, he added, Washington would "not talk for talk's sake." Gibbs also suggested that the next step "in many ways depends on the actions of the Cuban government." In particular, he called for the Cuban government to reduce the fees it charges Cubans for receiving money from American relatives. The administration's announcement came four days before Obama begins participating in this year's Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago. Latin American leaders there are expected to urge him to remove the economic embargo and end the decades of mutual antipathy between the United States and Cuba. To facilitate the flow of information into Cuba, where media are state-controlled, Obama wants to allow U.S. companies to provide fiber-optic and satellite communication links between the United
States and Cuba, as well as to receive licenses for cellular phone links and satellite TV and radio services into Cuba. Julia Sweig, a Cuba expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that, if successful, the new telecommunications approach "could help bring communication on [Cuba] and between the two countries into the 21st century. This opens the door for real negotiations, and that will require political will in Havana and
Washington." Overall, the administration's steps
may be significant in humanitarian terms but do not fundamentally reshape U.S. policy toward Cuba.
Non-Cuban Americans still will not be able to travel legally to the island, with some exceptions.
The embargo continues .
(Joy, Professor of Philosophy at Fairfield University, published in the Harvard
University Press, “A Peaceful, Silent, Deadly Remedy: The Ethics Of Economic Sanctions,” Ethics and International Affairs, Volume 13, Issue 1, 4-
11-06, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/doi/10.1111/j.1747-7093.1999.tb00330.x/pdf)
In many regards, sanctions are the modern version of siege warfare : each involves the systematic deprivation of a whole city or nation of economic resources.
Although in siege warfare this is accomplished by surrounding the city with an army, the same effect can be achieved by using international institutions and international pressure to prevent the sale or purchase of goods
, as well as to stop migration. It is sometimes argued that an embargoed nation can still engage in marginal trade, despite sanctions; but in a siege as well there may be marginal ways of getting goods

through gaps in the blockade. In both cases, however, the unit under embargo or siege is a mixed population rather than a military installation, or is entirely civilian
. In both cases, the net effect is the same: the disrup- tion or strangulation of the economy as a whole. As Michael Walzer notes, siege is the oldest form of total war; in siege, noncombatants are not only exposed, but in fact are more likely to be killed than combatants, given that the goal of siege “is surrender, not by defeat of the enemy army, but by the fearful spectacle of the civilian dead. ” 3 The principle of discrim- ination in just war doctrine requires the attacker to distinguish between combat- ants and noncombatants; between combatants who are injured and those who are uninjured; between combatants who are armed and those who have surrendered and are defenseless; and so forth.4 There has never been a strict prohibition against killing civilians, or killing injured or unarmed combatants, when it is required by “military necessity” or as an unavoidable consequence of an attack on a legitimate military target.
A common example is that an ammunition facto- ry is a legitimate military target in wartime; if during the bombing of the factory civilians who live nearby are also killed, no war crime has been committed. What is prohibited is to target civilians, or injured or defenseless combatants, directly, or to bomb indiscriminately where the deaths of civilians are foreseeable.
Siege warfare reverses
these priorities: civilian suffering is not “collateral” damage, but rather is the primary objective of the siege strategy, or at least the foreseeable and direct result of siege
.
Siege operates by restricting the economy of the entire community, creating shortages of food, water, and fuel . Those who are least able to survive the ensuing hunger, illness, and cold are the very young, the elderly, and those who are sick or injured . Thus the direct consequence of siege is that harm is done to those who are least able to defend themselves , who present the least military threat, who have the least input into policy or military decisions, and who are the most vulnerable . The harm done by the enemy’s deprivation is exacerbated by domestic policy, which typically shifts whatever resources there are to the military and to the political leadership.
This is sometimes done for security reasons, in the belief that defending against military attack is the highest priority, more immedi- ately urgent than the slower damage of hunger and illness to which the civilian population is subjected. It may also happen because the leadership is corrupt, or because the desperation creates conditions for black marketeering. Both of these consequences — the suffering of the innocent
and helpless
, and the shifting of resources to the military and the privileged
— are as old as siege itself
. Thus, the argument can be made that siege is a form of warfare that itself constitutes a war crime. In just war doctrine we could demand a justification for a military strategy in terms of the obligation to minimize harm to civilians: the ammunition factory was a legitimate target, and there was no way to bomb it without collateral damage to nearby residential areas. But siege is peculiar in that it resists such an analysis: the immediate goal is precisely to cause suffering to civilians. In the case of the ammunitions factory, we can answer the question, how is this act consistent with the moral requirement to discriminate? In the case of siege, we cannot.
Sanctions are subject to
many of the same moral objections as siege. They
intentionally, or at least predictably, harm the most vulnerable and the least political ,
and this is something the party imposing sanctions either knows or should know. To the extent that economic sanctions seek to undermine the economy of a society and thereby prevent the production or importation of necessities, they are functioning as the modern equivalent of siege.
To the extent that sanctions deprive the most vulnerable and least political sectors of society of the food, potable water, medical care, and fuel necessary for survival and basic human needs, sanctions should be subject to the same moral objections as siege warfare.
(Vilma, professor of macroeconomics at the University of Havana, Milagros, Research Fellow at the
University of Havana, working with the Centro de Estudios sobre Estados Unidos (CESEU), “Is the U.S. Economic Embargo on Cuba Morally
Defensible?,” muse.jhu.edu/journals/logos/v003/3.4hidalgo.html, Project Muse)
Assuring Adequate Food Supplies and Good Health ¶ In spite of the severity of the crisis, one of the goals of the economic program begun in
Cuba during the nineties was to preserve social [End Page 106] gains and prevent the costs of this adjustment from impacting spending to benefit the society. Cutbacks required by the inevitable macroeconomic readjustment largely involved administrative costs and subsidies to public enterprise, while the national budgets for health and education remained virtually unchanged. An effort was made to ensure consumption of essential goods by all families through distribution of a quota of these items at subsidized prices. But in spite of good political intentions, the gravity of the monetary pressures that the nation faced led inevitably to lost ground with respect to assuring an adequate diet and maintaining the quality of basic services.
¶
Cuban agriculture was not exempt from the crisis. In the face of shortages of fuel and farming supplies, the level of activity in this sector fell significantly
, heightening the dependence on imported foods acquired at unfavorable market conditions. As a result, in a few years the effects on consumption

by the general population were in evidence: daily caloric consumption, for example, dropped 34 percent, and protein intake plummeted 40 percent between 1989 and the worst year of the crisis,
1993
. Despite a slight recent improvement, there is a long row to hoe before previous levels are reached: in 1989 the availability of food per capita was 3,108 caloric units and 73 grams of protein, while in 1997 these figures were 2,480 and 51.7, respectively. 5
This drastic change in consumption levels affected the health of the population, as both men and women experienced weight loss, epidemics of some diseases previously unknown in the country broke out, and the birth weight of babies declined
. In these difficult times
, every additional dollar paid to import foodstuffs affected
Cuban families, taking its toll in human terms.
¶ When the Torricelli Act took effect, contracts valued at over $100 million with Argentine subsidiaries of Continental Grain, in New York, and Cargill, in Minnesota, for products such as wheat, soy, beans, peas and lentils had to be canceled. The U.S. market is obviously one of the most competitive in terms of production of [End Page 107] various types of foods.
According to several studies, the average cost of importing grains coming from U.S. suppliers, including transportation charges, is $130 (US) per metric ton, substantially cheaper than importing the grain from Europe, which would cost around $270. 6 This means, for example, that in 1997 the added cost for Cuba of importing beans was $24 million (US) dollars, and for importing wheat flour it is $7.8 million each year.
¶ Likewise, restrictions imposed on shipping by sea raised transportation costs of food by 30 percent with respect to international rates and lengthened delivery cycles of goods to the people. Thus, for example, a New Zealand company that manufactures powdered milk declined to supply 1,500 metric tons in the face of refusal on the part of their shipping company to deliver the cargo to Cuban ports. Overall, it is estimated that in 1998, the added cost of importing essential foods, given the lack of access to U.S. markets, reached $30 million, 7 which represented approximately 2 percent of exports that year and substantially reduced the global import budget. This figure is equivalent to 15,000 tons of powdered milk that
Cuban children never received.
¶
The impact on availability of food was not limited exclusively to direct importation of foodstuffs but also exerted considerable effect on the already weakened agro-industrial sector. The productivity of the agricultural and farming sector was severely hampered by the prohibition on selling items such as pesticides, fertilizers, animal feed, and fuel.
¶ Two well-known cases were those of Bayer
AG of Germany and Sanachem of South Africa. Bayer canceled sales of the pesticide Sencor because the company transferred production of the active ingredient to a plant in Kansas City. Bayer requested permission from the United States to continue exporting to Cuba, but permission was denied. In 1997, Dow Chemical bought the shares of the Sentrachem group of South Africa, owner of Sanachem, with which Cuba had enjoyed stable trading relations since 1992. In 1997 a Cuban import [End Page 108] firm had purchased pesticides valued at $82 million from
Sanachem, yet after that acquisition the U.S. Treasury Department put an end to business dealings between the two companies, refusing even to grant a license to cover the shipment of products that were in transit. 8 ¶
The human costs
due to impact on the health sector are even more
obvious and dramatic if we consider that U.S. companies produce more than 50 percent of important new drugs on the international market and that 90 percent of patents on new biotechnology products are granted to U.S. firms. Many of these products are vital to saving human lives and have no equivalents made in Cuba
. After Torricelli, fourteen subsidiaries based in Germany, Sweden, Japan, France,
Argentina, Italy, Australia, the Netherlands, Canada, Belgium and Switzerland that produce medicines and medical equipment stopped selling to
Cuba.
¶
Cuba is forbidden to buy
, from U.S. companies or subsidiaries, products such as third-generation antibiotics, medicines and drugs used
in postoperative pediatric cardiology and to treat infantile leukemia, modern cancer therapies, and medications for the relief of side effects, for the treatment of AIDS
, and others. Cuba is also denied the ability to purchase equipment and replacement parts for donated equipment, as is the case of Kobe dialysis equipment, used with persons requiring transplants.
¶ In addition, the situation was complicated after mergers and acquisitions among American and foreign companies in 1994 and 1995. In 1995, for example, the U.S. company Upjohn merged with the Swedish firm Pharmacia, which since 1970 had been selling medical equipment, reagents, chemotherapy drugs, and other products to a Cuban company. Cuba also lost an important supplier of diagnostic materials when Wisconsin's Sybron International acquired Germany's Nuc. Sales of pacemakers for heart patients were suddenly halted when Siemens of Sweden and Teletronics Pacing System of Australia transferred production and ownership to the United [End Page 109]
States. As a result, the number of surgeries at Havana's Cardiology Center, where more than half of Cuba's pacemakers are implanted, dropped
50 percent between 1990 and 1995. The effect of this decline was considerable, since heart disease is the leading cause of death in Cuba. 9
(Joy, Professor of Philosophy at Fairfield University, published in the Harvard University Press, “A Peaceful, Silent, Deadly
Remedy: The Ethics Of Economic Sanctions,” Ethics and International Affairs, Volume 13, Issue 1, 4-11-06, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/doi/10.1111/j.1747-7093.1999.tb00330.x/pdf)
But deontological arguments
do offer guidance in situations where military aggression is not at issue
, and where the choice therefore is not which innocent population suffers harm, but whether an innocent population may be harmed in the service of the political interests of a foreign state , or for the interest of the international community in enforcing norms. Where sanctions impose suffering on

innocent sectors of the target country population for an objective other than preventing the deaths of other innocent persons, this is clearly incompatible with deontological ethics
, since
in these situations, to use
Kantian language, human beings are reduced to nothing more than a means to an end , where that end is something less than the lives of other human beings.
Jonathan
, 7-29-20
, writer for the Chronicle, B.A. @ Trinity University, 2002
, “U.S. should lift embargo, respect Cuban autonomy,” http://www.dukechronicle.com/articles/2002/07/30/us-should-lift-embargo-respect-cuban-autonomy
Some
recent letters
have appeared in The Chronicle that criticize
the Editorial Board's support for ending the U.S. embargo against Cuba. These letters reflect how many in the U nited
S tates do not understand our own government's policies toward Cuba
, nor do they understand what contemporary life is like on the island. In the June 27 issue, J.
Edgar Williams wrote, "The U.S. embargo... has not affected Cuba's ability to trade with the rest of the world." To the contrary, the "Cuban
Liberty and Solidarity Act," the 1996 legislation that details the specific provisions of the U.S. embargo
, penalizes all nations that trade with Cuba by disallowing ships to port in the U nited
S tates for six months after they have visited any Cuban port.
Additionally, the act allows the U nited
S tates to enact economic sanctions against countries that trade with Cuba.
Both of these policies starve the small island nation of billions
of dollars in potential revenue.
As we speak, President George W. Bush pressures Mexican President Vicente Fox and other Latin American leaders to cut economic ties with Cuba in exchange for closer trade relations with the United States.
I am disturbed by the dichotomist options that the current debate has left us with, forcing us to decide whether the U nited
S tates should
: a) maintain the embargo or
b) lift the embargo and allow Cubans to experience the "wonders" of free market capitalism. Cuba needs neither . Contrary to the dictates of our country's power-brokers, capitalism does not work for everyone. Cubans
in Cuba have chosen a socialist economy, and they should not be punished or patronized for that decision.
Indeed, it is a tough lesson to learn that we in the United States do not know what is right for all the world's inhabitants.
I am not an apologist for the Cuban revolutionary government.
I simply ask that we learn more about how things really work before judging a people and their right to self-determination. We can begin this process by respecting Cuba as an autonomous nation and lifting the unjust embargo.
What do you think?
Paul
9-[2-5]-20
,
Humber College, McMaster University, member of the Eric
Voegelin Institute, a humanities and social sciences research institute devoted to the revitalization of teaching and understanding of the “great books” of Western civilization in comparison with other tradition
, “Totality and Ambivalence: Postmodern Responses to Globalization and the American Empire,” http://www.lsu.edu/artsci/groups/voegelin/society/2004%20Papers/Corey2004.shtml
The third, and final, autoimmune moment is what Derrida calls "The vicious cycle of repression."
Derrida claims that humanity is not defenseless against the threat of this new evil, but
he claims that
"all forms" of the current "war on

terror" will only work to "regenerate, in the short and long term, the causes of the evil they seek to eradicate"
(PT 100). In other words, the victims of Western military action in places such as Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, will respond, either personally or by proxy, with more terrorism. This in turn will inspire more violence from America and its allies, and so on ad infinitum.
Derrida's brief account of this autoimmune moment was formulated a month after 9/11 and long before the Iraq war. From a Derridian perspective, the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq was a suicidal autoimmune response to terror, not just because it was fought under false pretenses (no
WMD's, no working relation between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda), but also because it ironically facilitated and inspired the spread of terror
(in Iraq itself and Spain). The chaos of post-war Iraq created an environment in which Islamic extremism could thrive. Islamist movements that were oppressed by Saddam's tyranny were revitalized. The U.S. invasion also divided the West. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the
Western world was united, and there was little opposition to the war in Afghanistan. Within a year and a half, that unity had disintegrated. The schisms created by the war in Iraq are now everywhere. Consequently, the international response required to contain terrorism has been compromised. Our immune systems are threatened. Baudrillard and the Traditional Moral Order Baudrillard's and Derrida's analyses of globalization and its discontents are similar. But their accounts of how we should respond to this malaise, and what the future may hold, differ radically. Baudrillard writes that "Terrorism is immoral," but that terror "is a response to a globalization which is itself immoral." Then, in a manner that recalls Nietzsche, he writes:
"let us be immoral: and if we want to have some understanding of all this, let us go and take a little look beyond Good and Evil"
(ST 12-13).
Baudrillard
attacks the predominant Western understanding of Good and Evil. He defines the Western
conception of
"Good" as "the unification of things in a totalized world ," whereas Evil is whatever antagonizes or disrupts this unification.
[11] It must be said that all of
Baudrillard's philosophical efforts are directed against such a unification
; thus, in this sense, he is firmly on the side of "Evil." However, we must not think that this leads to a philosophy where "everything is permitted." Baudrillard is "immoral" from the standpoint of a
Western philosophy, which can only conceive of goodness as total unification; however,
Baudrillard wants to get beyond this understanding
, and he directs us to, what he calls, the traditional "moral universe" that existed in premodern societies. Once again, Baudrillard works in the spirit of Nietzsche, who wanted to move beyond Christian and modern conceptions of "good and evil," but not beyond older conceptions of "good and bad." [12]
The expectation, central to both
Judeo-Christian and modern understandings, that Good can be separated from Evil, or that it can eradicate Evil, is a disorienting illusion – an illusion that Baudrillard calls a "terroristic dream."
He writes:
"
We ought not to entertain the illusion that we might separate the two, that we might cultivate good and happiness in a pure state and expel evil and sorrow as wastes.
" [13] But this eschatological illusion, according to
Baudrillard, has been propagated in Western thought, first in "theology," and then in the "whole of modern philosophy." [14] Baudrillard writes: This is precisely where the crucial point lies – in the total misunderstanding on the part of Western philosophy, on the part of the Enlightenment, of the relation between Good and Evil. We believe naively that the progress of Good, its advance in all fields (the sciences, technology, democracy, human rights), corresponds to a defeat of Evil.
No one seems to have understood that Good and Evil advance together, as part of the same movement.
(ST 13) Thus, "it is not by expurgating evil that we liberate good. Worse, by liberating good, we also liberate evil." [15] Globalization unleashed a "total extrapolation of Good" (ST 14), but evil was not diminished; on the contrary, it has increased exponentially, "transpiring though" the hegemony of Globalization (the Good) and manifesting itself in system breakdowns, accidents, catastrophes, new diseases, violence, and terrorism.
Evil, writes Baudrillard, is "everywhere," despite our enlightened efforts to conquer it; it has "metamorphosed into all the viral and terroristic forms that obsess us."
[16] Baudrillard directs us away from the dream that evil can be conquered. He claims we will not achieve
"equilibrium" until we accept what he variously calls the "moral universe
" or "traditional universe" (ST 14). It is a universe that accepts the world as it is without any appeal to an actual or hypothetical triumph of the
Good.
This world, according to Baudrillard, is constituted by an inescapable duality. "Everything," says Baudrillard, "is in the play of duality."
[17] And perhaps the most fundamental duality is that of Good and Evil.
The world as constituted by Good and Evil cannot be exchanged for a world constituted by Good alone.
Thus, the traditional moral universe was an "antagonistic coexistence of two equal and eternal principles, Good and Evil, at once inseparable and irreconcilable." [18]
There was
" a balance between Good and Evil
, in accordance with a dialectical relation which maintained the tension and equilibrium of the moral universe, come what may" (ST 14). This delicate balance was maintained because there was no supremacy of one over the other. However, this balance was upset with the Western hegemony of the Good – the effort to destroy any negative or adverse force, and subsume all "otherness" within a universal order.
The irony, of course, is that Evil developed exponentially; the positive accomplishments of Western economic expansion and technological advancement have been met by equally negative reactions. Thus,
Baudrillard argues against
any type of
Western based "internationalism," whether
this

be the internationalism of economic globalization or universal human rights . The idea that Western values or markets can unify the world
, or mediate the world's differences, must be abandoned, for the intent is naively utopian and the results have been destructive.
Through these efforts, the West has attempted to exterminate all "otherness." It will accept "difference,"
says Baudrillard, but only if the various differences accept the overriding Western value system. We must
, according to Baudrillard, adopt a different strategy.
We must surrender to the fragmentation that is occurring, and embrace the idea of a radically plural world that cannot be mediated or unified by a transcendent system of law, politics, economics or values.
Baudrillard calls for nothing short of abandon ing the Western dream of unification and universality
in all its guises.
Darrell J.
,
Professor of Religious
Studies of the University of South Florida in Tampa, holds a joint appointment in Special Education, has served as Associate Dean for Faculty Development in the College of Arts and Sciences and as Chair of the
Department of Religious Studies
, “The Ethical Challenge of Auschwitz and Hiroshima: Apocalypse or Utopia?” p. 1-7
Now the whole earth had one language and the same words.
And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly." And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." The Lord came down to see the city and the tower which mortals had built. And the Lord said, ''Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another's speech." So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.
Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.
Genesis 11:19 1 The story of Babel is a tale for our times. It is a parable through which we might come to understand our situation.
The citizens of Babel
, it seems, sought to build a perfect city
, a utopia whose technological prowess would make their name known throughout the earth. These citizens, we are told, sought to seize control of transcendence through the ideology of a single language and the common
technological project of building a tower to heaven. God
, however, upset their efforts by confusing their tongues, so that they could not understand each other.
They became strangers to one another
and so could not complete their task. They had to abandon all "final solutions" and settle for an unfinished city. The popular interpretation of this story is that the confusion of tongues was a curse and a punishment for the Page
2 human sin of pride. But I am convinced that this is a serious misunderstanding of its meaning. For this story must be interpreted within the tradition of stories that make up the canon of the Tanakh (Old Testament), where the command to welcome the stranger appears more often than any other commandment. 2 In the light of that emphasis, I would suggest that the point of the story is that human beings misunderstood where transcendence lay
, and
God
simply redirected them to the true experience of transcendence , which can occur only when there are strangers to be welcomed into our lives.
The moral of this story, as I read it, is that utopian transcendence is to be found not in a "finished world" of
technological and ideological conformity but in an "unfinished world" of diversity
, a world that offers us the opportunity to welcome the stranger.
Indeed, our attempts to define a world through
technological prowess and ideological uniformity have led us, more than once, to
the brink of MAD-ness (mutually assured destruction) the brink of an apocalyptic nuclear annihilation.
Our hope lies in seeing
the utopian possibilities of a world of diversity the latent possibilities that can be actualized through an ethic of welcoming the stranger.
This book follows upon and expands the argument of my previous book, Narrative Theology After Auschwitz: From Alienation to Ethics (Fortress,
1992). It is intended to be an experiment in theology of culture as an approach to comparative religious ethics through narrative. In Narrative
Theology After Auschwitz I attempted to restructure the Christian narrative tradition in the light of Auschwitz through a dialogue with that

strand of post- Holocaust Jewish theology and ethics that draws on the Jewish narrative tradition of chutzpah.3 That volume culminated in an ethic of personal and professional responsibility proposed as a strategy for restraining the human capacity for the demonic. This volume, The
Ethical Challenge of Auschwitz and Hiroshima: Apocalypse or Utopia? continues the narrative ethics approach but extends the ethical focus of the discussion to encompass religion, technology, and public policy in a cross-cultural perspective. In this work, I attempt to do what narrative ethicists have said cannot be done; namely, construct a cross-cultural ethic of human dignity, human rights, and human liberation that is rooted in and respects the diversity of narrative traditions. Moreover, I have tried to do this without succumbing to either ethical relativism or ethical absolutism, even as I seek to directly confront the dominant narrative of our technological civilization. That narrative, I am convinced, is the
Janus-faced myth of "Apocalypse or Utopia." This mythic narrative tends to render us
Page 3 ethically impotent, for, mesmerized by the power of technology, we become trapped in the manic-depressive rhythms of a sacral awe; that is, of fascination and dread.
When we are caught up in the utopian euphoria created by the marvelous promises of technology we do not wish to change anything. And when, in our darker moments, we fear that this same technology is out of control and leading us to our own apocalyptic self-destruction, we feel overwhelmed and unable to do anything. The paradox is that the very strength of our literal utopian euphoria sends us careening toward some literal apocalyptic "final solution." In Narrative
Theology After Auschwitz I argued that the demonic narrative theme that dominated Auschwitz was "killing in order to heal."
In this book I argue that this theme became globalized when it was incorporated into the Janus-faced technological mythos that emerged out of Hiroshima. This mythic narrative underlies and structures much of public policy in our nuclear age. In response to this demonic narrative, I propose a cross-cultural coalition for an ethic of human dignity, human rights, and human liberation at the intersection of those holy communities whose narrative traditions emphasize the importance of welcoming the stranger. My goal is to construct a bridge not only over the abyss between religions, East and West, but also between religious and secular ethics. The total project, then, is about religion, ethics, and public policy after Auschwitz and Hiroshima. It is about (a) rethinking the meaning of civilization and public order in an emerging pluralistic world civilization as we approach the end of a millenniumthe year 2000 C.E.; (b) the need for a cross-cultural ethic in a world wracked by ethical relativism and ideological conflict; and (c) sacred and secular public narratives in a technological civilization and the appropriate role for religion in the shaping of public values in a "secular" world. The perspective from which this book is written is that of theology. However, it is not "Christian" theology, although it is most certainly theology written by a Christian. It is not "confessional theology," but theology understood as an academic discipline within the humanities, whose purpose is the illumination of the human experience
(individual and communal) of transcendence as self-transcendence. Needless to say, the same subject matter would be treated differently had this project been written by a Buddhist or some other more "secular" a-theist, 4 or by a Hindu, Jew, or Muslim rather than a Christian. And yet I intend it to be a theology that has something to say not only to Christians but also to Jews, Buddhists, and otherseven to ''secular" humanistic a-theists. What I am engaged in is "theology of culture," a discipline first Page 4 introduced by Paul Tillich in his 1920 essay, "On the Idea of a
Theology of Culture," with which he inaugurated his career. 5 Theology of culture is an appropriate discipline for the "secular" university in an emerging world civilization. For, as Tillich insists, the theologian of culture is no ''confessional theologian" but rather a "free agent" who takes as his or her task the identification and elucidation of the relationship between religion and culture in all its diversity. Theology of culture could equally be called "philosophy of religion," provided that discipline were able to break free of its nearly exclusive bias as a tradition of commentary on the logic of Western theism rather than on religion as a transcultural human phenomenon. Theology of culture, as I understand it, exists at the intersection of philosophy and the history of religions, as a form of comparative religious ethics. It separates itself from some forms of comparative religious ethics in that it goes beyond description to prescription. Its task is nothing less than a total critique of culture.
Doing ethics requires not just philosophical reflection but also historical, sociological, and psychological reflection. Tillich's proposal for a theology of culture draws these diverse elements into a unified whole that replaces traditional ethics with the new and uniquely modern task of the critique of culture. The critique of culture "as a whole" presents a unique problem. For if we live, move, and have our being within culturehow is it possible to transcend it so as to critique it? From what vantage point can we "stand outside it" so to speak? Such a critique presupposes the identification of values that, in some sense, transcend the cultures in which they are embodied. I believe such values can be identified. However, they do not exist in a vacuum. They are embodied in particular types of narrative carried by specific types of communal traditions that, in some sense, stand apart from the cultures in which they find themselves. The ultimate goal of theology of culture is to identify those religious experiences, forms of religious community and narrative traditions that have transcended the historical epoch and cultural milieu of their origin to influence other times and places. For these narrative traditions will have proven themselves culturally transcendent allies and therefore may offer possible norms for the critique of both religions and cultures. Although I attempt to identify the positive and negative value of several types of religious experience in this book, I do not pretend to have written it from some neutral
Archimedean vantage point. As Tillich insisted, no theologian of culture can escape his or her own religious and cultural history. Indeed, every scholar in the social sciences and humanities is a "participant observer" in the human condition Page 5 being studied. There is no neutral vantage point from which to begin. As Alasdair MacIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas have both argued, no scholar lives in a storyless world, not even the Enlightenment rationalist who pretends to. One must acknowledge one's starting position and work outward from there. This is as true for the psychologist or anthropologist as it is for the political scientist, philosopher, and theologian. If we wish to speak of (or to) other storied worlds we must find a way to stretch our own narrative worlds to make a place for their otherness. That is in fact what I shall attempt to do. My own starting point is that of an alienated Christian, alienated from my own narrative traditions by my encounter with the Holocaust and the history of anti-Judaism that paved the way to it and by the processes of secularization in a technical civilization that led not only to
Auschwitz but also Hiroshima. Confessionally, my stand in Christianity, like Tillich's, is that of a Lutheran. But like Tillich, I seek to be an objective scholar, making philosophically fair statements and evaluations about a wide diversity of religious and cultural phenomenon in order to construct a social ethic that can sustain a total critique of modern culture. Nevertheless, I am only too aware how vulnerable are the arguments and methodologies that I use in this book. Many specialists will no doubt have serious questions about my grasp of materials that touch upon their areas. I too have such questions. But I see no point in playing it safe, I mean to provoke discussion, and I hope the dialogue that follows shall enrich and correct my perspective. Moreover, I confess my own perspective and its limitations at the outset because I believe that after
Auschwitz and Hiroshima it is dangerous to write in the third person, as if no one in particular were having these thoughts. In our world we each need to take responsibility for our thoughts and their social consequences. I reflect further on these matters in the Epilogue, and some may find it helpful to read that concluding essay immediately after reading this Prologue to understand more clearly what I am attempting to

do in the body of the text itself. The best way to describe the "style" of the theology of culture proposed in these books is to suggest that it is a
"decentered" or "alienated theology." Alienated theology is the opposite of apologetic theology.
Apologetic theology typically seeks to defend the "truth" and ''superiority" of one's own tradition against the "false," "inferior," and "alien" views of other traditions. Alienated theology
, by contrast, is theology done "as if" one were a stranger to one's own narrative traditions, seeing and critiquing one's own traditions from
Page 6 the vantage point of the other's narrative traditions.
It is my conviction that alienated theology is the appropriate mode for theology in an emerging world
civilizationa civilization tottering in the balance between apocalypse and utopia.
There are two ways to enter world history, according to the contemporary author John Dunne: you can be dragged in by way of world war or you can walk in by way of mutual understanding. By the first path, global civilization emerges as a totalitarian project of dominance that risks escalating into a nuclear apocalypse. By the second path, we prevent the first, creating global civilization through an expansion of our understanding of what it means to be human.
This occurs when we pass over to an other's religion and culture and come back with new insight into our own. Gandhi is an example, passing over to the Sermon on the Mount and coming back to the Hindu Bhagavad
Gita to gain new insight into it as a scripture of nonviolence. Gandhi never seriously considered becoming a Christian but his Hinduism was radically altered by his encounter with Christianity. One could say the same (reversing the directions) for Martin Luther King Jr., who was deeply influenced by Gandhi's understanding of nonviolent resistance in the Gita. When we pass over (whether through travel, friendship, or disciplined study and imagination) we become "strangers in a strange land" as well as strangers to ourselves, seeing ourselves through the eyes of another.
Assuming the perspective of a stranger is an occasion for insight and the sharing of insight.
Such crosscultural interactions build bridges of understanding and action between persons and cultures that make cooperation possible and conquest unnecessary.
"Passing over" short circuits apocalyptic confrontation and inaugurates utopian new beginningsnew beginnings for the "post-modern'' world of the coming third millennium. Gandhi and King are symbols of a possible style for a postmodern alienated theology.
To be an alien is to be a stranger. To be alienated is to be a stranger to oneself.
We live in a world of ideological conflict in which far too many individuals (whether theists or a-theists) practice a
"centered theology" in which they are too sure of who they are and what they must do. Such a world has far too many answers and not nearly enough questions and selfquestioning. A world divided by its answers is headed for an inevitable apocalyptic destiny. However, when we are willing to become strangers to ourselves (or when we unwillingly become so), new possibilities open up where before everything was closed and hopeless. At the heart of my position is the conviction that the kairos of our time calls forth the badly neglected
Page
7 ethic of "welcoming the stranger" that underlies the biblical tradition and
analogously "welcoming the outcast" that underlies the Buddhist tradition. This care for the stranger and the outcast
, I shall argue, provides the critical norm for identifying authentic transcendence as self-transcendence. Centered theologies
, whether sacred or secular, theist or a-theist, are ethnocentric theologies that can tolerate the alien or other, if at all, only as a potential candidate for conversion to sameness. Centered theologies
are exercises in narcissism that inevitably lead down apocalyptic paths like those that led to Auschwitz and Hiroshima.
Why? Because such theologies
, whether sacred or "secular," cannot permit there to be others in the world whose way of being might
, by sheer contrast, cause self-doubt
and self-questioning. When as a student I read Paul Tillich, I found it hard to believe him when he said that the questions were more important than the answers. I was so taken with his answers that I was sure he was just trying to be modest. What really mattered were the answers. Since then, I have come to realize that answers always seem more important and more certain to those who have come by them without wrestling with the questions. I know now that Tillich was quite serious and quite rightthe questions are indeed more important. I have come to find a fullness in the doubts and questions of my life, which I once thought could be found only in the answers. After Auschwitz and Hiroshima, I distrust all final answersall final solutions. Mercifully, doubts and questions have come to be so fulfilling that I find myself suspicious of answers, not because they are necessarily false or irrelevant, but because even when relevant and true they are, and can be, only partial.
It is doubt and questioning that always lures me on to broader horizons and deeper insights through an openness to the infinite that leaves me contentedly discontent. Alienated theology understands doubt and the questions that arise from it as our most fundamental experience of the infinite.
For, our unending questions keep us open to the infinite, continually inviting us to transcend our present horizon of understanding.
In a like manner, the presence of the stranger continuously calls us into question and invites us to transcend the present horizon of the egocentric and ethnocentric answers that structure our personal and cultural identities. An alienated theology understands that only a faith which requires one to welcome the alien or stranger is truly a utopian faith capable of transforming us into "new beings"
who are capable of creating a new world of pluralistic human interdependence.

Richard
, 1-01-20
,
Charles Seelig professor of philosophy at Boston College, author of over 20 books on European philosophy and literature
, “Others and Aliens; Between Good and Evil,” from “Evil After Postmodernism;
Histories, Narratives, and Ethics,” https://www2.bc.edu/~kearneyr/pdf_articles/pl86217.pdf
One of the oldest conundrums of human thought is: unde malum? Where does evil come from? What are the origins of evil — human, natural, super natural? What is the character of evil — sin, suffering, catastrophe, death? Deconstruction cautions against a rush to judgement. While not for a moment denying that evil exists, Derrida and certain other postmodern thinkers counsel vigilance.
The tendency of our media society, so prone to hysteria, is to anathematize anything that is unfamiliar as “evil.” The other thus becomes the alien, the stranger the scapegoat, the dissenter the devil.
And it is this proclivity to demonize alterity as a threat to our collective identity that so easily issues in paranoid fantasies about invading enemies
.
Any threat to “national security” is met with immediate defense-attack mechanisms. One thinks of
McCarthy’s blacklists and Reagan’s Star Wars, the Soviet show trials and gulags, Mao’s cultural revolution and Tiananmen Square, the embargo of Cuba
and the mining of Managua, the bombing of Cambodia and the sinking of the Rainbow
Warrior, Bloody Sunday and the introduction of internment without trial in Ulster, Kristallnachi and Auschwitz, Satilla and Chabrilla, Sarajevo and Kosovo. The list is interminable.
Most nation-states bent on preserving their body politic from alien viruses seek to pathologize and purge their adversaries.
Faced with a threatening outsidei; the best mode of defense becomes attack. Again and again the national we is defined over and against the alien them, That’s one reason borders exist, with nationals “in” and aliens “out,” You can, of course, cross the border with the right passport and become an alien resident (like myself). But to be truly uuionalized. you need more — not always readily available if you happen to be arriving from beneath the Rio Grande or beyond the Gaza strip. National security draws a cordon sanitaire around the nation-state, protecting it from alien trespassers. Like the line drawn in sand at the Alamo. Or the
Mason—Dixon line, Or other lines separating north and south — in Vietnam, in Korea, in Lebanon, in Ireland. It is in the context of such partitioning and polarizing that Derrida has pursued the question of justice and hospitality in recent years. Every nation- state is logocentric to the extent that it excludes those who do not conform (non-a) to its identity logic (a is a). This is necessary up to a point, as even the cosmopolitan Kant recognized when he accepted the need to issue conditions for refugee visitors to a state (e.g., that their sojourn be temporary, law-abiding, and non-divisive).2 The world belongs to everyone. yes, but within the borders of nation-states, it belongs to some morc than others. Granted, some
form of immigration/emigration laws are inevitable
, That’s the law and
Derrida accepts this; but he goes on to argue that there’s something beyond the law: namely, justice. And justice
demands more: unconditional hospitality to the alien. Hospitality is only truly just, thi s argument goes, when it resists the temptation to discriminate between good or evil others
, that is, between the hostile enemy
(host is) and the benign host (hospis). Derrida has much to say about such alienology in his book, De’ 1’hospitalité As we generally understand it, the subject of hospitality is a generous host who decides, as master chez lui, whom to invite into his home. But it is precisely because of such sovereign self-possession that the host comes to fear certain others who threaten to invade his house, transforming him from a host into a hostage.
The laws of hospitality
thus reserve the right of each host to evaluate, select, and choose those he wishes to include or exclude
— that is, to discriminate. Such discrimination, indispensable to the “law of hospitality” (hospitalité en droit), requires that each visitor identify and name him/herself before entering ones home. And this identification process involves
at least some degree of violence.
Derrida comments astutely on this paradox: There can be no sovereignty in the classic sense without the sovereignty of the self in its own home, but since there is no hospitality without finitude, sovereignty can only operate by filtering, choosing and therefore excluding and doing violence. A certain injustice . . . is present from the outset, at the very threshold of the right to hospitality. This collusion between the violence of power or the force of law (Gewali) on the one hand, and hospitality on the other, seems to be radically integral to the very inscription of hospitality as a right.4 Derrida goes on to link this inclusive/exclusive law of hospitality with ethics in the more general sense. The paradox of the stranger (xenos/hostis) as either invader-alien or welcome-other “extends from the circumscribed field of ethos or ethics, of habitation or visitation as ethos, of Sittlichkeit, of objective morality as specifically identified in Hegel’s threefold determination of right and the philosophy of right: fiirni1y society (civil or bourgeois) and state (or nation-state).”5 Derrida sums up the aporia of the alien-other thus: “the outsider (hostis) received as host or as enemy. Hospitality, hostility, hostipitality.” Fully cognizant of the

way this undecidable dialectic con founds our ethical conventions,
Derrida affirms the priority of a hospitality of justice — open to the absolute other as another without name.
Here we supersede the hospitality of law. What distinguishes the absolute other
is that he is without distinction, that is
, without name
or proper name. And the absolute
or unconditional hospitality
that he deserves marks a break with everyday conventions of hospitality governed by rights, contracts, duties, and pacts. Absolute hospitality
, argues Derrida, requires that I open my home and that I give not only to the stranger
(furnished with a family name and the social status of a stranger, etc.) but to the absolute other, unknown and anonymous
; and that 1 give place (donne lieu), Let come, arrive, let him take his place in the place that I offer him, without demanding that he give his name or enter into some reciprocal pact.7 If absolute hospitality requires us to break with the accredited hospitality of right, this doesn’t mean repudiating the latter out of hand; it may even mean, concedes Derrida. preserving it in a state of perpetual progress and mutation. What it does mean, however, is that absolute hospitality is as heterogeneous to conditional hospitality as justice is to the law of right with which it is tied.8 But Derrida adds a telling coda to this dazzling deconstruction of the “right of hospitality.” The other is not just the alien stranger, utterly external to home, family, nation, or state. That would he to relegate the other to absolute exteriority
— barbarous, savage, precultural, and prejuridical. No, in order that hospitality be just, we must allow some way for the absolute other to enter our
home, family, nation, state
, And that is why justice can never dispense with the law of right:
“The relation to the alien/stranger (l’étranger) is regulated by the law of right (le droit), by the becoming-right of justice.”9 The difficulty with this analysis of hospitality is that it seems to preclude our need to differentiate between good and evil aliens, between benign and malign strangers, between saints and psychopaths (though admittedly 99 per cent of us fall somewhere between the two). If hospitality is to remain absolutely just and true, all incoming others must remain unidentifiable and undecidable. Derrida appears to claim as much when he declares that for pure hospitality or pure gift to occur there must be absolute surprise . . . an opening without horizon of expectation
. . . to the newcomer whoever that may be.
The newcomer may be good or evil , but if you exclude the possibility that the newcomer is coining to destroy your house , if you want to control this and exclude this terrible possibility in advance, there is no hospitality
. . . . The other, Like the Messiah, must arrive whenever he or she wants.1° For Derrida, aliens only come in the dark
(like thieves in the night), and we are always in the dark when they come. We are never sure who or what they are; we cannot even be sure if we are hallucinating or not. For the absolute other is without name and without face, an
“impossible, unimaginable, unforseeable, unbelievable, absolute surprise.” The best we can do is
try to read between the lines and make
a leap of faith, an impossible leap of faith
, like Abraham, like Kierkegaard. But why not add — and here’s my difficulty with the undecidable — “like Jim Jones or David Koresh” or other figures of mystical madness who believe they are recipients of messianic messages from sorne Other they caJi God?
Brock
, Spring-xx-20
,
Duquesne University, Philosophy, Graduate Student
, “Derridean Hospitality in an Age of
Political Xenophobia,” http://www.academia.edu/2235169/Derridean_Hospitality_in_an_Age_of_Political_Xenophobia
The Cult(ure)ivation of Fear Consequently, however, we are not a nation of people who know how to practice philoxenia, despite how much we claim to give to non-profit organizations or
to foreign aid.
Instead, we have opted for a culture of xenophobia instead.
Fear drives the installation of security systems, fenced-in homes, and our everincreasingly private lives.
Fear
is what sells our newspapers, drives our political policies
, and often ultimately influences our vote.
Rather than a culture of welcoming the stranger, we have witnessed a cultivation of fear. Insidious
in our thinking is a belief that anything foreign is dangerous and ought to be feared.
As a result, much of the inflammatory rhetoric
in the public square is aimed at spreading distrust and a complete dismissal of the other rather than willingness for open dialogue. Such rhetoric can be clearly seen in
the speech revolving around
terrorism and
American foreign policy
with the Middle East, the issue of immigration and undocumented immigrants in the United States, and most recently in the 2008 presidential campaign.
A common view pervades our culture
, for

instance, that all
Muslims support terrorism, and that the Middle East is in desperate need of American democracy.
Such views have led to the mistreatment of
Muslim and Arab-native people in our country
, and in the blacklisting and deportation of some of them. It can be observed in the way “being Arab” has become a kind of racial slur in our society. And this xenophobia is evidenced in the up-to-date tally of U.S. military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan while there is virtually no report of the possibly 1.3 million Iraqis who have died since the American occupation in 2003 and millions of others who have fled from their homes.9
Xenophobia can be seen in the way many people have responded to the problem of undocumented workers
, particularly in those who are convinced “those Mexicans”— as if every one of them
is from Mexico— are going to steal our jobs and force us to all learn Spanish
, and that the only proper response is to round them up and ship them home. Convinced that to be
“all-American” is to be White and English-speaking, there exists a large portion of our population
who are wary of
the foreign tongues
and faces of immigrants. This white supremacist thinking is exhibited in the comments of Pat Buchanan, for instance, who said that the diverse immigration population that is eradicating a white majority in the U.S. will bring about a “Third World America.”
Such convictions have not only led to the subhuman treatment of undocumented workers but have also made it more difficult for refugees, individuals seeking asylum, and immigrants to obtain U.S. citizenship.
This culture of xenophobia seems no more vivid in our imagination currently than in how it has been portrayed in the finally over 2008 presidential campaign. Numerous Republicans utilized countless fear tactics to try to deter people from voting for our new President,
Barack Obama. They chanted his middle name “Hussein” in order to incite distrust and fear into Americans. They fabricated lies that Obama is a
Muslim— which, again, would having a Muslim as President really be such a bad thing? In fact, Rush Limbaugh went so far as to say that Obama was not American but was an Arab (codeword for “Muslim,” which is then a codeword for “terrorist”) and came from an Arab part of Africa. His comment not only encourages the breeding of a culture of fear, but it is simply not true—Kenya (even though Obama is not “from” Kenya) is in sub-Saharan Africa, where, ironically enough, the national language is English and 90% of its population identify themselves as Christian. Obama has been said to “pal around with terrorists,” has been called a socialist, a Marxist, and a communist—as if all of these terms were synonymous and were somehow evil in themselves. He has been called unpatriotic and un-American (i.e., not White), and even the anti-Christ.
This billowing
racist neo-McCarthyism is expounded with the view
in mind that
Obama, because of his blackness, is somehow not one of us, is mysterious and strange—is the enemy—and we ought to do everything to shore up our defenses against those who may take away what we hold to be “American.”
Indeed, one article which noted the many hate crimes which occurred after Obama won the election—from campaign signs vandalized to schoolchildren chanting “Assassinate
Obama”—cited how there is “a large subset of white people…who feel that they are losing everything they know, that the country their forefathers built has somehow been stolen from them” because of the results of this election. One man went so far as to say, “If you had real change it would involve all the members of (Obama's) church being deported” (Washington).10 The (Im)Possibility of a Politics of Hospitality
What then can be said about the state of our nation and its need for hospitality? Derrida himself made it extremely clear he did not think it possible to legislate unconditional hospitality. Nations, governments, & communities have multiple ethical obligations constantly interfering with and overriding each other. Nations are just as equally obligated to create asylums for the stranger, the orphan, and the widow as they are to protect against the threat of terrorism, for example. In other words, Derrida The American Future: www.American-Future.com writes,
“Hospitality is doomed to be conditional and limited—and therefore violent” (Smith 70). But even if unconditional hospitality cannot be legislated
—which is undesirable in many ways— it
nonetheless is the very thought which allows us to think of the idea of alterity and is, therefore, “the condition of the political”
(Borradori 129). In other words, all of our limited
kinds of hospitality, no matter how fractured
or discriminating they are, can only be conceptualized in light of unconditional hospitality.
As Derrida states, “
If we want to understand what hospitality means, we have to think of unconditional hospitality, that is, openness to whomever, to any newcomer
” (Derrida,
Caputo, & Kearney 304).11 Furthermore, unconditional hospitality is like a specter haunting us from the future, reminding us that we have yet to arrive at “real” democracy, that democracy is always “to come.”
Unconditional hospitality
, then, haunts us as a healthy reminder that
, for Derrida, the “(essential) opposition between the unconditional ideal and the conditions of reality, does not issue in either complacency or despair ; rather, [it] finds in this disparity a call and a challenge : to make laws more hospitable ”
(Smith 70).
It is an ideal that should permeate our
life and political practice in such a way that it breaks forth as justice through the cracks of the law.
What then are some ways in which unconditional hospitality can challenge our laws and stretch our current thresholds of hospitality? A formidable response to the complex matter of the proliferate racism in America would require far more than this paper can offer, but it is safe to say that such acts and attitudes should be roundly condemned. And the notion that there exists an essential, unified “American identity” that ought to be preserved
—whether that consists of being
White, Christian,
English speaking, prowar, or pro-capitalist —ought to be seriously questioned.

Paul
9-[2-5]-20
,
Humber College, McMaster University, member of the Eric
Voegelin Institute, a humanities and social sciences research institute devoted to the revitalization of teaching and understanding of the “great books” of Western civilization in comparison with other tradition
, “Totality and Ambivalence: Postmodern Responses to Globalization and the American Empire,” http://www.lsu.edu/artsci/groups/voegelin/society/2004%20Papers/Corey2004.shtml
To clarify
what he means by absolute hospitality, Derrida distinguishes it from "tolerance." For many
in the
West,
"tolerance" is the ultimate ground of ethics, or the basis of human rights
, but
Derrida argues
that this is not the case.
Tolerance is
the limited
form of hospitality. If we are tolerant, we "accept the foreigner, the other, the foreign body up to a certain point, and so not without restrictions. Tolerance is a conditional
, circumspect, careful hospitality "
(PT 128). Derrida points out that tolerance is always on the side of the strongest.
It is the stronger power that agrees to "tolerate," " put up with ," or "suffer" a weaker power that it thinks is inferior or wrong, and which it could oppress , exclude or destroy .
Instead, the stronger power decides to let a weaker power s live
, and perhaps even thrive, but only under certain conditions
(see PT 127). As such, tolerance
is accompanied by a certain degree of arrogance, which implicitly says: "We are right , you are wrong , we are superior , you are inferior , but you are not insufferable."
There are various connotations to tolerance; religious, ethnic, nationalistic, ideological, racial, and biological. But in every case, the acceptance of the other is limited, regardless of whether we are "suffering" the presence of a different race or a different religion.
Tolerance easily becomes intolerance once the tolerated group is believed to have broken the conditions it was supposed to live under.
For this reason,
"tolerance" cannot be the measure of ethics or human rights. " Unconditional hospitality " is the standard
, so to speak, by which we measure our actions. However, as
Derrida recognizes, "unconditional hospitality is practically impossible to live; one cannot in any case, and by definition, organize it" (PT 129). All political, legal, and religious forms of organization must, by necessity, be inhospitable to some. But, insofar as we are conscious of unconditional hospitality, we are acutely aware of the extent to which these forms are limited and exclusive.
They are, to greater and lesser extents, unjust. Thus, Derrida says we must live in constant tension between the conditional forms of tolerance and practice found in politics, law and religion, and the unconditional imperative of absolute hospitality.
This is Derrida's way of speaking about the metaxy: he encourages us to live in a perpetual state of critical reflection, of continual unease with our worldly systems of politics and law.
The moment that we forget about the transcendent pole in this tension, the moment we try to relieve the tension and abolish the notion of unconditional hospitality, that is the moment when we will become enmeshed in
what Derrida calls "theologico-political" forms; that is, in thoroughly immanent metanarratives that claim to be absolute but are
, in fact, partial, exclusionary
, and imperfectly hospitable. All thought
, all law
, and
all politics are
, for the deconstructionist, never complete; they are always provisional, and always in need of revision.
Derrida speaks of unconditional hospitality as a "messianic promise" – a promise of, what he calls, a "democracy to come" in which absolute hospitality is granted to every "other." However, the "democracy to come" is not an actual event in the future, or, as Derrida puts it, it is not a "future present." [20]
Derrida's "messianic" is structured by the general expectation of a "democracy to come" that is always expected but never arrives.
No messiah, human or divine, will ever bring us "absolute hospitality." Nevertheless, Derrida advises us to adopt
a paradoxical faith – a "quasi-messianism" [21]
– that retains the messianic orientation while remaining acutely aware that the
"democracy to come" will never actually come. This faith encourages "new effective forms of action, practice,

organization, and so forth,"
because it reveals how far the present falls short promised messianic age.
However, it prohibits us from accepting a vehement fundamentalism or a genocidal solution.
[22]
Emmanuel LEVINAS, Face to Face with Levinas, 1986, p. 23-24
The approach to the face is the most basic mode of responsibility. As such, the face of the other is verticality and uprightness; it spells a relation of rectitude. The face is not in front of me (en face de
moi) but above me; it is the other before death, looking through and exposing death. Secondly, the face is the other who asks me not to let him die alone, as if to do so were to become an accomplice in his death. Thus the face says to me: you shall not kill. In the relation to the face I am exposed as a usurper of the place of the other. The celebrated ‘right to existence’ that Spinoza called the conatus
essendi and defined as the basic principle of all intelligibility is challenged by the relation to the face.
Accordingly, my duty to respond to the other suspends my natural right to self-survival, le droit aitale.
My ethical relation of love for the other stems from the fact that the self cannot survive by itself alone, cannot find meaning within its own being-in-the-world, within the ontology of sameness. That is why I prefaced Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence with Pascal's phrase, "'That is my place in the
sun: That is how the usurpation of the whole world began." Pascal makes the same point when he declares that "the self is hateful." Pascal's ethical sentiments here go against the ontological privileging of ‘the right to exist.’ To expose myself to the vulnerability of the face is to put my ontological right to existence into question. In ethics, the other's right to exist has primacy over my own, a primacy epitomized in the ethical edict: you shall not kill, you shall not jeopardize the life of the other. The ethical rapport with the face is asymmetrical in that it subordinates my existence to the other. This principle recurs in Darwinian biology as the "survival of the fittest" and in psychoanalysis as the natural instinct of the ‘id’ for gratification, possession, and power - the libido dominandi

William
, 1-30-20
, research fellow and former curator of the Americas Collection at the Hoover
Institution, research fellow of the Independent Institute, expert on Latin America, China and US policy
,
“Cuba's Tortured Transition,” http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/139281
America’s post-Cold War embargo on Cuba is a clear example of failed international interventionism.
Making sanctions work, Henry Kissinger wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “depends on the ability to define an achievable objective.” Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the U nited
S tates has not had
such an objective in its policy toward Cuba.
Our policy, intended to isolate Cuba, has isolated the United States. This has been most blatantly demonstrated for the past twenty-one years by the United Nations
General Assembly’s annual call to lift the embargo—which Havana
demagogically calls a “ genocidal blockade ”— because it adversely affects Cubans and the freedom of international trade.
(The vote in 2012 to condemn the embargo was 188 to 3.)
Cuba
today does not warrant this extraordinary isolation.
In 2010, former Senator Richard Lugar, then the top-ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, correctly noted: “
We must recognize the ineffectiveness of our current policy
and deal with the Cuban regime in a way that enhances U.S. interests.” the moral case for romneycare 2.0 by scott atlas Fidel Castro in his younger days. Photo credit: Boston Public Library The Original Embargo Re-tooled The
Eisenhower
administration recognized
Fidel
Castro’s government
in early 1959 but soon broke diplomatic relations and imposed an economic embargo
—tightened in 1962 by President John Kennedy— because Cuba nationalized American properties and became an ally of the Soviet Union. The embargo was an integral part of U.S. Cold War strategy against the Soviet bloc and should have been lifted after the bloc collapsed, but wasn’t.
Though some security concerns exist today, including the gathering of Chinese intelligence from the island, and extensive Cuban meddling in Venezuela, these challenges are not lessened by the embargo. Post-Cold War embargo supporters included some in government and think tanks, but most were
Cubans who had fled to Miami after Castro took power. It seemed possible that given Cuba’s economic crisis following the sudden end of massive bloc aid, a little more pressure might bring Fidel down, but that required shifting the embargo’s focus from U.S. national security to nation building in Cuba. The key document was the revealingly titled, Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (Libertad) Act of 1996, which still forms the core of U.S. policy.
The embargo will be lifted only after decisive steps are taken toward democracy, respect for human rights, and a market economy.
The departure of the Castros is also required. Only one of the six stated
“purposes” of the Act referred (unconvincingly) to national security. One of the co-authors, Senator Jesse Helms, said that Fidel was sustained by foreign money and that his “Helms-Burton Act” would “choke off” the “life-support system keeping him in power.” He said that eighteen years ago. President Bill
Clinton signed legislation to tighten the embargo
in 1992 and 1996 and President George W. Bush did so a decade later.
But living conditions for Cubans did not improve.
Instead Fidel used U.S. “proactive” measures to justify the further harassment and imprisonment of dissidents because of alleged traitorous links to Washington. The most dramatic instance was in 2003 when 75 were arrested and given long prison terms.

(Robert W., associate professor of accounting at Fayetteville State University, 13 doctorates ranging from Politics to Economics to Philosophy, “The Ethics of Economic Sanctions,” Economic Affairs, Volume 23, Issue 4, 6-28-08, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0270.2003.00442.x/pdf)
Just about everyone agrees that the sanctions against Cuba have not worked
, if by ‘worked’ one means regime change (Murray, 1993; Prada, 1995).
Castro has
been in power for more than 40 years and has outlasted more than a half a dozen American presidents. The only thing that sanctions have done is consolidate Castro’s power and given him the excuse he needs to blame the blockade for everything that goes wrong in Cuba
.
Luckily, the blockade has not been totally effective. Although US companies cannot do business with Cuba, European companies can. And they do. European firms are building hotels, restaurants and tourist facilities that American businesses could build, if only they were permitted to do so. American businesses are losing millions of dollars in profits because of US government policy, which provides stiff penalties for doing business with Cuba. However, the blockade has caused a great deal of harm. A major study by the American
Association for World Health found that the US embargo dramatically harmed the health and nutrition of a substantial segment of the Cuban population. The study documents a significant rise in suffering and even deaths. Members of the research team visited a paediatric ward that had gone 22 days without metoclopramide, a drug that prevents nausea for patients undergoing paediatric chemotherapy. Because the 35 children in the ward were deprived of the drug, they were each vomiting an average of 28 to 30 times a day.
One wonders how withholding the sale of such drugs is helping to overthrow the
Castro regime.
William
, 1-30-20
, research fellow and former curator of the Americas Collection at the Hoover
Institution, research fellow of the Independent Institute, expert on Latin America, China and US policy
,
“Cuba's Tortured Transition,” http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/139281
America’s post-Cold War embargo on Cuba is a clear example of failed international interventionism.
Making sanctions work, Henry Kissinger wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “depends on the ability to define an achievable objective.” Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the U nited
S tates has not had
such an objective in its policy toward Cuba.
Our policy, intended to isolate Cuba, has isolated the United States. This has been most blatantly demonstrated for the past twenty-one years by the United Nations
General Assembly’s annual call to lift the embargo—which Havana
demagogically calls a “ genocidal blockade ”— because it adversely affects Cubans and the freedom of international trade.
(The vote in 2012 to condemn the embargo was 188 to 3.)
Cuba
today does not warrant this extraordinary isolation.
In 2010, former Senator Richard Lugar, then the top-ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, correctly noted: “
We must recognize the ineffectiveness of our current policy
and deal with the Cuban regime in a way that enhances U.S. interests.” the moral case for romneycare 2.0 by scott atlas Fidel Castro in his younger days. Photo credit: Boston Public Library The Original Embargo Re-tooled The
Eisenhower
administration recognized
Fidel
Castro’s government
in early 1959 but soon broke diplomatic relations and imposed an economic embargo
—tightened in 1962 by President John Kennedy— because Cuba nationalized American properties and became an ally of the Soviet Union. The embargo was an integral part of U.S. Cold War strategy against the Soviet bloc and should have been lifted after the bloc collapsed, but wasn’t.
Though some

security concerns exist today, including the gathering of Chinese intelligence from the island, and extensive Cuban meddling in Venezuela, these challenges are not lessened by the embargo. Post-Cold War embargo supporters included some in government and think tanks, but most were
Cubans who had fled to Miami after Castro took power. It seemed possible that given Cuba’s economic crisis following the sudden end of massive bloc aid, a little more pressure might bring Fidel down, but that required shifting the embargo’s focus from U.S. national security to nation building in Cuba. The key document was the revealingly titled, Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (Libertad) Act of 1996, which still forms the core of U.S. policy.
The embargo will be lifted only after decisive steps are taken toward democracy, respect for human rights, and a market economy.
The departure of the Castros is also required. Only one of the six stated
“purposes” of the Act referred (unconvincingly) to national security. One of the co-authors, Senator Jesse Helms, said that Fidel was sustained by foreign money and that his “Helms-Burton Act” would “choke off” the “life-support system keeping him in power.” He said that eighteen years ago. President Bill
Clinton signed legislation to tighten the embargo
in 1992 and 1996 and President George W. Bush did so a decade later.
But living conditions for Cubans did not improve.
Instead Fidel used U.S. “proactive” measures to justify the further harassment and imprisonment of dissidents because of alleged traitorous links to Washington. The most dramatic instance was in 2003 when 75 were arrested and given long prison terms.

(Joy, Professor of Philosophy at Fairfield University, published in the Harvard University Press, “A
Peaceful, Silent, Deadly Remedy: The Ethics Of Economic Sanctions,” Ethics and International Affairs, Volume 13,
Issue 1, 4-11-06, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/doi/10.1111/j.1747-
7093.1999.tb00330.x/pdf)
In many regards, sanctions are the modern version of siege warfare : each involves the systematic deprivation of a whole city or nation of economic resources.
Although in siege warfare this is accomplished by surrounding the city with an army, the same effect can be achieved by using international institutions and international pressure to prevent the sale or purchase of goods
, as well as to stop migration. It is sometimes argued that an embargoed nation can still engage in marginal trade, despite sanctions; but in a siege as well there may be marginal ways of getting goods through gaps in the blockade. In both cases, however, the unit under embargo or siege is a mixed population rather than a military installation, or is entirely civilian
. In both cases, the net effect is the same: the disrup- tion or strangulation of the economy as a whole. As Michael Walzer notes, siege is the oldest form of total war; in siege, noncombatants are not only exposed, but in fact are more likely to be killed than combatants, given that the goal of siege “is surrender, not by defeat of the enemy army, but by the fearful spectacle of the civilian dead. ” 3 The principle of discrim- ination in just war doctrine requires the attacker to distinguish between combat- ants and noncombatants; between combatants who are injured and those who are uninjured; between combatants who are armed and those who have surrendered and are defenseless; and so forth.4 There has never been a strict prohibition against killing civilians, or killing injured or unarmed combatants, when it is required by “military necessity” or as an unavoidable consequence of an attack on a legitimate military target.
A common example is that an ammunition facto- ry is a legitimate military target in wartime; if during the bombing of the factory civilians who live nearby are also killed, no war crime has been committed. What is prohibited is to target civilians, or injured or defenseless combatants, directly, or to bomb indiscriminately where the deaths of civilians are foreseeable.
Siege warfare reverses
these priorities: civilian suffering is not “collateral” damage, but rather is the primary objective of the siege strategy, or at least the foreseeable and direct result of siege
. Siege operates by restricting the economy of the entire community, creat- ing shortages of food, water, and fuel. Those who are least able to survive the ensuing hunger, illness, and cold are the very young, the elderly, and those who are sick or injured. Thus the direct consequence of siege is that harm is done to those who are least able to defend themselves, who present the least military threat, who have the least input into policy or military decisions, and who are the most vulnerable.
The harm done by the enemy’s deprivation is exacerbated by domestic policy
, which typically shifts whatever resources
there are to the military and
to the political leadership
. This is sometimes done for security reasons, in the belief that defending against military attack is the highest priority, more immedi- ately urgent than the slower damage of hunger and illness to which the civilian population is subjected. It may also happen because the leadership is corrupt, or because the desperation creates conditions for black marketeering. Both of these consequences — the suffering of the innocent
and helpless
, and the shifting of resources to the military and the privileged
— are as old as siege itself
. Thus, the argument can be made that siege is a form of warfare that itself constitutes a war crime. In just war doctrine we could demand a justification for a military strategy in terms of the obligation to minimize harm to civilians: the ammunition factory was a legitimate target, and there was no way to bomb it without collateral damage to nearby residential areas. But siege is peculiar in that it resists such an analysis: the immediate goal is precisely to cause suffering to civilians. In the case of the ammunitions factory, we can answer the question, how is this act consistent with the moral requirement to discriminate? In the case of siege, we cannot.
Sanctions are subject to
many of the same moral objections as siege. They
intentionally, or at least predictably, harm the most vulnerable and the least political,
and this is something the party imposing sanctions either knows or should know. To the extent that economic sanctions seek to undermine the economy of a society and thereby prevent the production or importation of necessities, they are functioning as the modern equivalent of siege. To the extent that sanctions deprive the most vulnerable and least political sectors of society of the food, potable water, medical care, and fuel necessary for survival and basic human needs, sanctions should be subject to the same moral objections as siege warfare.
(Joy, Professor of Philosophy at Fairfield University, published in the Harvard University Press, “A
Peaceful, Silent, Deadly Remedy: The Ethics Of Economic Sanctions,” Ethics and International Affairs, Volume 13,

Issue 1, 4-11-06, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/doi/10.1111/j.1747-
7093.1999.tb00330.x/pdf)
But deontological arguments do offer guidance in situations where military aggression is not at issue, and where the choice therefore is not which innocent population suffers harm, but whether an
innocent population may be harmed in the service of the political interests of a foreign state, or for the interest of the international community in enforcing norms. Where sanctions impose suffering on innocent sectors of the target country population for an objective other than preventing the deaths of
other innocent persons, this is clearly incompatible with deontological ethics, since in these situations, to use Kantian language, human beings are reduced to nothing more than a means to an end , where that end is something less than the lives of other human beings.
(Joy, Professor of Philosophy at Fairfield University, published in the Harvard University Press, “A
Peaceful, Silent, Deadly Remedy: The Ethics Of Economic Sanctions,” Ethics and International Affairs, Volume 13,
Issue 1, 4-11-06, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/doi/10.1111/j.1747-
7093.1999.tb00330.x/pdf)
It is important to distinguish between the imposition of deprivation, and the response to deprivation.
Undermining a country’s economy is still undermining a country’s economy
— it is still the initiating cause
, regardless of how the sanctioned country responds. The moral burden may broaden to include the sanctioned state when it exacerbates the shortages; historically, this is how the sanctioned state generally responds. It is not uncommon to hear the argument that agency rests with the target nation, because of its misconduct “It was Saddam’s choice to invade Kuwait it was Iraq’s fault for refusing to cooperate with UNSCOM.” But the existence of wrongdoing does not
somehow
“make” sanctions come about in a way that vitiates the moral agency of institutions imposing them
.
Nations violate international norms quite often; sometimes the international community
responds to international wrongdoing by military action, diplomatic protest, sanctions, or other measures.
Sometimes it does nothing.
The situation itself does not compel any particular response, Indeed, a superpower can violate international norms with considerable impunity. For this reason, the nation
or institution imposing sanctions is still the nation
or institution that has imposed the deprivation
— with choice, with intent , and in the face of other options
, ranging from protest to inaction to military invasion. Thus, it is problematic to hold that sanctions are defensible on the grounds that most of those subjected to their harm have implicitly consented, or have consented under coercion, or can be deemed to have consented by virtue of the state’s policies
or acts. In these contexts, “ consent” does not have any content that corresponds to our understanding of what consent is and how it works. Instead, it seems to be a term invoked counterfactually, to attribute choice and therefore responsibility to those who made no choice at all
, except perhaps to endure the circumstances in which they found themselves.
(Joy, Professor of Philosophy at Fairfield University, published in the Harvard University Press, “A
Peaceful, Silent, Deadly Remedy: The Ethics Of Economic Sanctions,” Ethics and International Affairs, Volume 13,
Issue 1, 4-11-06, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/doi/10.1111/j.1747-
7093.1999.tb00330.x/pdf)
Losman’s study of long-term boycotts against Israel, Cuba, and Rhodesia notes that even where there was considerable economic damage, the only apparent political effect was increased political integration.27
The common
(though not uni- versal) result is that “the morale-killing effects of economic sanctions often operate in the opposite fashion , stimulating xenophobia and strengthening the determination of the target country to maintain its stance
. “28
The scholarship on sanctions has to a large extent documented this phenomenon
, though it has also described exceptions. In the first large empirical study of the success of sanctions in the twentieth century, published in 1985, Hufbauer, Schott, and
Elliott held that sanctions had in fact been effective in about one-third of the situations in which they were imposed.29 Theirs is one of the most optimistic estimates. Others question whether sanctions have been effective even one-third of the time.JO It is not surprising to see

historians, political scientists, and economists echo ing the observation that target nations can- not generally be expected to change their acts or policies in response to sanctions.
Thus, when we work out the utilitarian calculus of sanctions , we see on one side that there is not a high likelihood that sanctions will succeed in stopping military aggression or human rights violations
. On the other side of the calculus
, we see the high probability, if not inevitability, that sanctions will harm the most vulnerable population.
(Robert W., associate professor of accounting at Fayetteville State University, 13 doctorates ranging from Politics to Economics to Philosophy, “The Ethics of Economic Sanctions,” Economic Affairs, Volume 23, Issue
4, 6-28-08, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/doi/10.1111/j.1468-
0270.2003.00442.x/pdf)
Another major problem with this line of reasoning is that the assumption is that the sanctions are effective. Studies have almost uniformly shown that sanctions are more likely to fail than succeed.
That being the case, it appears even less likely that a sanction intended to prevent or reduce human
rights abuses will result in a positive-sum game. What is a more likely scenario is that the 10 million people in the target country will not experience a lessening in the extent of the human rights abuses perpetrated against them, while the 6 billion other people in the world will have to pay higher prices for oil and oil products. Thus, everyone is a loser. Indeed, the sanctions may result in additional suffering
on the part of the very people the sanctions are intended to help. That is definitely the case with the sanctions against Iraq, as we shall discuss below. Some studies have estimated the cost of various sanctions. A study by the Institute for International Economics estimated that sanctions imposed
against 26 target countries reduced exports by $15 to $19 billion and cost 200,000 to 260,000 jobs
(Hufbauer et al. , 1997). A National Association of Manufacturers study found that sanctions imposed
between 1993 and 1996 cut off export markets worth $790 billion ( NAM, n.d.). 1 This study found that in the four years covered by the study, the USA enacted 61 laws and executive actions authorising unilateral sanctions against 35 countries having a total population of 2.3 billion people. A report by the
Council on Competitiveness (1994) estimated that eight sanctions cost US businesses $6 billion in lost sales and 120,000 jobs.
(United Nations General Assembly Security Council, “SUPPLEMENT TO AN AGENDA FOR PEACE: POSITION
PAPER OF THE SECRETARY-GENERAL ON THE OCCASION OF THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE UNITED NATIONS,”
REPORT OF THE SECRETARY-GENERAL ON THE WORK OF THE ORGANIZATION, 1-25-1995, http://daccess-ddsny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N95/080/95/PDF/N9508095.pdf?OpenElement)
Sanctions, as is generally recognized, are a blunt instrument. They raise the ethical question of whether suffering inflicted on vulnerable groups in the target country is a legitimate means of exerting pressure on political leaders whose behaviour is unlikely to be affected by the plight of their
subjects. Sanctions also always have unintended or unwanted effects. They can complicate the work
of humanitarian agencies by denying them certain categories of supplies and by obliging them to go through arduous procedures to obtain the necessary exemptions. They can conflict with the development objectives of the Organization and do long-term damage to the productive capacity of
the target country. They can have a severe effect on other countries that are neighbours or major economic partners of the target country. They can also defeat their own purpose by provoking a

patriotic response against the international community, symbolized by the United Nations, and by
rallying the population behind the leaders whose behaviour the sanctions are intended to modify.

(Vilma, professor of macroeconomics at the University of Havana, Milagros, Research Fellow at the
University of Havana, working with the Centro de Estudios sobre Estados Unidos (CESEU), “Is the U.S. Economic Embargo on Cuba Morally
Defensible?,” muse.jhu.edu/journals/logos/v003/3.4hidalgo.html, Project Muse)
The prime victim of the economic blockade has unquestionably been the Cuban people. The blockade affects the Cuban population without regard to sex, age, race, religion, political creed, or social position, not only because it attacks basic means of living but also because it undermines the possibility of intellectual development and the spiritual well-being of the Cuban family.
¶ In this essay we shall focus on three important
and sensitive aspects of the
harm caused to
Cuban families by the blockade: the food supply, health, and the negative consequences felt by women in Cuba.
We shall stress the impact that economic sanctions have had in heightening the crisis during the nineties. For the moment we do not delve into other dimensions of the problem, which may be less visible but are no less relevant, such as the effect on education, culture, scientific activity, and quality of life, as well as a more personal impact felt by sectors of the population such as children and the elderly.
¶ In our effort to present an objective analysis we have often relied on quantifying the most tangible effects from an economic perspective
, yet even so
it has not been possible to evoke the full effect of the havoc wrought by each of the factors described in the preceding section as a function of ensuring adequate food supplies and levels of health among the population.
Moreover, the toll in terms of human suffering cannot be quantified
nor estimated, and consequently we shall allow the historic events themselves to bear witness to what has transpired
, running the risk perhaps that the anecdotal nature of the events reported may seem to render our analysis simplistic.
(Vilma, professor of macroeconomics at the University of Havana, Milagros,
Research Fellow at the University of Havana, working with the Centro de Estudios sobre Estados Unidos (CESEU),
“Is the U.S. Economic Embargo on Cuba Morally Defensible?,” muse.jhu.edu/journals/logos/v003/3.4hidalgo.html,
Project Muse)
Assuring Adequate Food Supplies and Good Health ¶ In spite of the severity of the crisis, one of the goals of the economic program begun in
Cuba during the nineties was to preserve social [End Page 106] gains and prevent the costs of this adjustment from impacting spending to benefit the society. Cutbacks required by the inevitable macroeconomic readjustment largely involved administrative costs and subsidies to public enterprise, while the national budgets for health and education remained virtually unchanged. An effort was made to ensure consumption of essential goods by all families through distribution of a quota of these items at subsidized prices. But in spite of good political intentions, the gravity of the monetary pressures that the nation faced led inevitably to lost ground with respect to assuring an adequate diet and maintaining the quality of basic services.
¶
Cuban agriculture was not exempt from the crisis. In the face of shortages of fuel and farming supplies, the level of activity in this sector fell significantly
, heightening the dependence on imported foods acquired at unfavorable market conditions. As a result, in a few years the effects on consumption by the general population were in evidence: daily caloric consumption, for example, dropped 34 percent, and protein intake plummeted 40 percent between 1989 and the worst year of the crisis,
1993
. Despite a slight recent improvement, there is a long row to hoe before previous levels are reached: in 1989 the availability of food per capita was 3,108 caloric units and 73 grams of protein, while in 1997 these figures were 2,480 and 51.7, respectively. 5
This drastic change in consumption levels affected the health of the population, as both men and women experienced weight loss, epidemics of some diseases previously unknown in the country broke out, and the birth weight of babies declined
. In these difficult times
, every additional dollar paid to import foodstuffs affected
Cuban families, taking its toll in human terms.
¶ When the Torricelli Act took effect, contracts valued at over $100 million

with Argentine subsidiaries of Continental Grain, in New York, and Cargill, in Minnesota, for products such as wheat, soy, beans, peas and lentils had to be canceled. The U.S. market is obviously one of the most competitive in terms of production of [End Page 107] various types of foods.
According to several studies, the average cost of importing grains coming from U.S. suppliers, including transportation charges, is $130 (US) per metric ton, substantially cheaper than importing the grain from Europe, which would cost around $270. 6 This means, for example, that in 1997 the added cost for Cuba of importing beans was $24 million (US) dollars, and for importing wheat flour it is $7.8 million each year.
¶ Likewise, restrictions imposed on shipping by sea raised transportation costs of food by 30 percent with respect to international rates and lengthened delivery cycles of goods to the people. Thus, for example, a New Zealand company that manufactures powdered milk declined to supply 1,500 metric tons in the face of refusal on the part of their shipping company to deliver the cargo to Cuban ports. Overall, it is estimated that in 1998, the added cost of importing essential foods, given the lack of access to U.S. markets, reached $30 million, 7 which represented approximately 2 percent of exports that year and substantially reduced the global import budget. This figure is equivalent to 15,000 tons of powdered milk that
Cuban children never received.
¶ The impact on availability of food was not limited exclusively to direct importation of foodstuffs but also exerted considerable effect on the already weakened agro-industrial sector. The productivity of the agricultural and farming sector was severely hampered by the prohibition on selling items such as pesticides, fertilizers, animal feed, and fuel.
¶ Two well-known cases were those of Bayer
AG of Germany and Sanachem of South Africa. Bayer canceled sales of the pesticide Sencor because the company transferred production of the active ingredient to a plant in Kansas City. Bayer requested permission from the United States to continue exporting to Cuba, but permission was denied. In 1997, Dow Chemical bought the shares of the Sentrachem group of South Africa, owner of Sanachem, with which Cuba had enjoyed stable trading relations since 1992. In 1997 a Cuban import [End Page 108] firm had purchased pesticides valued at $82 million from
Sanachem, yet after that acquisition the U.S. Treasury Department put an end to business dealings between the two companies, refusing even to grant a license to cover the shipment of products that were in transit. 8
¶
The human costs
due to impact on the health sector are even more
obvious and dramatic if we consider that U.S. companies produce more than 50 percent of important new drugs on the international market and that 90 percent of patents on new biotechnology products are granted to U.S. firms. Many of these products are vital to saving human lives and have no equivalents made in Cuba
. After Torricelli, fourteen subsidiaries based in Germany, Sweden, Japan, France,
Argentina, Italy, Australia, the Netherlands, Canada, Belgium and Switzerland that produce medicines and medical equipment stopped selling to
Cuba.
¶
Cuba is forbidden to buy
, from U.S. companies or subsidiaries, products such as third-generation antibiotics, medicines and drugs used
in postoperative pediatric cardiology and to treat infantile leukemia, modern cancer therapies, and medications for the relief of side effects, for the treatment of AIDS
, and others. Cuba is also denied the ability to purchase equipment and replacement parts for donated equipment, as is the case of Kobe dialysis equipment, used with persons requiring transplants.
¶ In addition, the situation was complicated after mergers and acquisitions among American and foreign companies in 1994 and 1995. In 1995, for example, the U.S. company Upjohn merged with the Swedish firm Pharmacia, which since 1970 had been selling medical equipment, reagents, chemotherapy drugs, and other products to a Cuban company. Cuba also lost an important supplier of diagnostic materials when Wisconsin's Sybron International acquired Germany's Nuc. Sales of pacemakers for heart patients were suddenly halted when Siemens of Sweden and Teletronics Pacing System of Australia transferred production and ownership to the United [End Page 109]
States. As a result, the number of surgeries at Havana's Cardiology Center, where more than half of Cuba's pacemakers are implanted, dropped
50 percent between 1990 and 1995. The effect of this decline was considerable, since heart disease is the leading cause of death in Cuba. 9
(Vilma, professor of macroeconomics at the University of Havana, Milagros,
Research Fellow at the University of Havana, working with the Centro de Estudios sobre Estados Unidos (CESEU),
“Is the U.S. Economic Embargo on Cuba Morally Defensible?,” muse.jhu.edu/journals/logos/v003/3.4hidalgo.html,
Project Muse)
¶ Impact on Cuban Women ¶ ¶
The
economic blockade
, like almost all events in a country's economy
, is reflected in people's daily lives and especially in the context of family
. Throughout the time of crisis, intensified by the blockade
and coupled with the existence of cultural norms that continue to prevail in Cuba,
Cuban women have been called upon to make a great sacrifice , becoming protagonists and strategists in the drama of family survival.
¶ ¶
The analysis of the impact of the U.S. blockade on the lives of Cuban women
and their family situation has been carefully studied by several of the country's female academics
. 10 Taking these rigorous studies as a point of reference, we shall try to characterize and quantify the most salient effects in the nineties.
¶ ¶ Cuba's social plan called for the full participation of women in all society's tasks, and this ideal has materialized in educational and cultural work carried out during four decades and in the strengthening of an institutional and legal framework that protects full equality of rights between men and women. Yet there
still remain
deeply rooted ideas
, beliefs, and cultural traditions that assign to women
the greater responsibilities associated with raising children, homemaking, domestic chores, and countless tasks to assure the well-being of
[End Page 110] the family group
. This is a characteristic still prevalent in Cuban families, although its manifestations vary in intensity according to age, educational level, social standing, and other factors. In contrast, women have made greater and greater inroads over the course of four decades, gaining

enhanced professional status and successfully occupying positions in social, scientific, academic, technical, and other fields. In this sense,
the economic crisis has brought greater complexity to the entire scenario, creating true conflicts for Cuban women.
¶ ¶ The crisis heightened by the blockade affects Cuban women in various and diverse forms. In the family setting, where meeting basic needs of nutrition, personal and domestic hygiene, and adequate rest are paramount, accomplishing household chores can become a true dilemma for women in dire economic straits.
Thus, Cuban women have experienced for themselves the harsh effects of the blockade on their regular routine, reflected in the daily difficulties created by shortages of food, delays in receiving supplies of essential products, difficulties in obtaining articles for personal and family hygiene, limitations in acquiring clothing and footwear, short supplies of medicines, the absence of transportation, and costs in terms of time, among many others.
The scarcity of fuel during the first years of the crisis directly affected the life of Cuban households
: for example
, the average number of hours without electricity or water supplied to the domestic sector rose considerably
during the period 1990-1995. In addition, the availability of electrical appliances and of replacement parts for existing machines was sharply reduced. 11 ¶ ¶ It is evident that during those years each Cuban woman became a true strategist of family survival, needing to meet not only the most basic needs for her family, but also assuring that each of its members, children and men, might continue to carry out their social roles and activities. Working just to get by, which now occupied most of her energies, also impinged on the satisfaction of her spiritual needs, [End Page 111] such as modest opportunities for enjoying recreation, time with family, and professional growth.
¶ ¶
However, there has not been a return of Cuban women to the home in proportion to the intensity of the crisis, which is explained by a combination of two factors. First, in spite of cultural standards, the integration of women into the workplace is a gender victory that has been incorporated into her identity. For that reason, even in the worst of circumstances a majority of women were not willing to quite their jobs, even though continuing to work involved a great sacrifice of a personal nature. Second, with women's entrance into the job market, many families were now benefited by the earnings brought home by women, income that became more and more essential in the context of crisis. Moreover, the contribution made by women to the family budget in many cases can hardly be overestimated, given their abilities and professional/technical skills.
¶ ¶
Nevertheless, during these years there was a decline of roughly 16 percent in the female labor force, one particular effect of which was a restructuring of employment.
One portion of the female labor force moved to the informal sector or worked in small-scale private businesses such as food preparation, family restaurant services, and providing lodging for tourists in their own homes. Now 27 percent of the labor force in this sector is female. These activities, while improving the living conditions of many families, reflect one of the contradictions imposed by the crisis: the migration of qualified workers. There was also a migration of the female labor force to the emerging formal sector. 12
For example, 42.8 percent of employees in firms and mixed capital concerns are women. 13 ¶ ¶ In summary, even though women remained at the forefront of the labor arena, the search for alternative solutions to the multiple problems of everyday life exacted a heavy social toll.
Additionally, it increased the conflicts between social and family commitments, between meeting family needs and spiritual needs, between individual [End Page 112] professional ambitions and those of the family. Many of these conflicts, which were also characteristic of earlier times, were aggravated and often led to unfortunate consequences for families, with divorce rates reaching unprecedented levels during the nineties.
¶ ¶ Annual increase in number of divorces ¶ YEAR RATE (%) ¶ 1989 3.6
¶ 1990 3.5
¶ 1991 4.1
¶ 1992
5.9
¶ 1993 6.0
¶ 1994 5.2
¶ 1995 3.7
¶ 1996 3.7
¶ 1997 3.7
¶ 1998 3.6
¶ Source: Center for Population and Development Studies, 1999. Cuban
Demographics Yearbook 1998.
¶
National Office of Statistics, Table V.1, p. 139.
¶ ¶
As in the case of all economic turmoil, the Cuban crisis also had a moral dimension
. Obviously, although it is well known that a people's values and economic situation are not always related in direct proportion, economic crises tend to bring on a crisis of values
. 14
The place of women in society was
also affected by the decline in certain values
that had previously been encouraged,
which gave rise to the reemergence of prostitution --a phenomenon that had all but disappeared--and to trampling upon legal and moral standards for personal gain or even simple subsistence, among other negative
social phenomena.
(Robert W., associate professor of accounting at Fayetteville State University, 13 doctorates ranging from Politics to Economics to Philosophy, “The Ethics of Economic Sanctions,” Economic Affairs, Volume 23, Issue
4, 6-28-08, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/doi/10.1111/j.1468-
0270.2003.00442.x/pdf)
Just about everyone agrees that the sanctions against Cuba have not worked
, if by ‘worked’ one means regime change (Murray, 1993; Prada, 1995).
Castro has
been in power for more than 40 years and has outlasted more than a half a dozen American presidents. The only thing that sanctions have done is consolidate Castro’s power and given him the excuse he needs to blame the blockade for everything that goes wrong in Cuba
.
Luckily, the blockade has not been totally effective. Although US companies cannot do business with Cuba, European companies can. And they do. European firms are building hotels, restaurants and tourist facilities that American businesses could build, if only they were permitted to do so. American businesses are losing millions of dollars in profits because of US government policy, which provides stiff penalties for doing

business with Cuba. However, the blockade has caused a great deal of harm. A major study by the American
Association for World Health found that the US embargo dramatically harmed the health and nutrition of a substantial segment of the Cuban population. The study documents a significant rise in suffering and even deaths. Members of the research team visited a paediatric ward that had gone 22 days without metoclopramide, a drug that prevents nausea for patients undergoing paediatric chemotherapy. Because the 35 children in the ward were deprived of the drug, they were each vomiting an average of 28 to 30 times a day.
One wonders how withholding the sale of such drugs is helping to overthrow the
Castro regime.
(Michèle, MD,
, “Effect of the U.S. Embargo and Economic
Decline on Health in Cuba,” Annals of Internal Medicine, Vol. 132, No. 2, From the Yale School Medicine, 1-18-00, http://www.hawaii.edu/hivandaids/Effect_of_the_U.S._Embargo_and_Economic_Decline_on_Health_in_Cuba.pdf
)
As U.S. pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms merged with European companies, Cuban physicians had to cope with a progressive lack of critically needed medicines, diagnostic tools, vaccines, and
medical machinery that had previously been available or affordable (3, 7). Since 1975, approximately
50% of all newly patented drugs distributed worldwide have been produced by U.S. drug companies.
These drugs are unavailable in Cuba unless they are sold by an intermediary, often at prohibitive cost
(7). The 1996 Helms–Burton law further discouraged foreign investors in the health care in- dustry from contemplating even limited trade with Cuba by threatening non-U.S. intermediaries with
lawsuits in U.S. courts (3). During my recent visit, the human consequences of these decisions were all
too evident in Cuban streets and on the wards of Cuban hospitals. Food was obviously scarce in
bodegas , or grocery stores, as was the technologically advanced machinery that the Cubans had been so proud to display 15 years before. The median weight of children and adults has decreased
dramatically because the amount of food supplied at workplaces and schools has been substantially reduced (3). Several public health catastrophes on the island have been directly attributed to the
U.S. embargo (8 –10). In 1992 and 1993, more than 50 000 cases of optic and peripheral neuropathy occurred. This epidemic was attributed to reduced nutrient intake, which was caused by food
shortages, and local to- bacco use, which increased the risk for blindness. Use of costly multivitamin supplements dramatically decreased the incidence of blindness (9, 10). In addition, an epidemic of
esophageal stenosis in toddlers who inadvertently drank liquid lye is believed to be the result of a
soap shortage that caused Cubans to use lye as a substitute (8). A 1994 outbreak of the Guillain–Barre ́
syndrome in Havana was caused by water that had been contaminated with Campy- lobacter species
because chlorination chemicals were not available for purification (8). Serious shortages of insulin, other medications, and vaccines have also taken their toll, especially on the health of children (2, 3).
(Michèle, MD,
, “Effect of the U.S. Embargo and Economic
Decline on Health in Cuba,” Annals of Internal Medicine, Vol. 132, No. 2, From the Yale School Medicine, 1-18-00, http://www.hawaii.edu/hivandaids/Effect_of_the_U.S._Embargo_and_Economic_Decline_on_Health_in_Cuba.pdf
)

The U.S. embargo against Cuba, one of the few that includes both food and medicine, has been
described as a war against public health with high human costs (10). Although the Cuban government’s curtailment of individual liberties and privacy may be seen as an abridgment of personal freedom, we as health care professionals have a moral duty to protest an embargo that engenders human suffering to achieve political objectives. Medicine, food, and water purification materials should be made available or, preferably, should be exempt from sanctions. Official monitoring of the effects of economic sanctions on civilian populations should become a high priority.
(United Nations General Assembly, submitted by Christine Chanet, French diplomat, Member of the French
National Consultative Commission on Human Rights, “SITUATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN CUBA,” Human Rights
Council, 1-26-07, http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G07/105/23/PDF/G0710523.pdf?OpenElement)
7. The restrictions imposed by the embargo
help to deprive Cuba of vital access to medicines
, new scientific and medical technology, food, chemical water treatment and electricity. The disastrous effects of the embargo in terms of the economic, social and cultural rights of the Cuban people have been denounced by the United Nations
Food and Agriculture Organization, the United Nations Children’s Fund, the United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the World Health Organization
(see all the reports issued by these specialized agencies in 2002). 8.
The embargo
, and particularly the Torricelli and Helms-Burton acts, also have serious impacts in terms of the civil and political rights of Cuban citizens, by provoking a reaction on the part of the Cuban authorities, who take the opportunity offered by a foreign State’s interference in Cuban domestic policy to adopt repressive laws , such as
Act No. 88 on “ protection of Cuba’s national and economic in dependence
”. As the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Cuba, Carl-Johan Groth, noted in 1997 in his report to the Commission at its fifty-third session, by means of the above-mentioned laws “ the U nited
S tates of America assumes the right to be the outside party that determines the rules for converting the current totalitarian system into a different, more pluralist one
” (E/CN.4/1997/53, para. 46). 9. As a result, many
Cuban citizens who are regarded by
the Government of
Cuba as being involved in this effort are identified as “mercenaries working for foreign interests” who should be punished under repressive laws
such as Act No. 88. 10. President Carter, when preparing his report of 21 May
2002 following his visit to Cuba, pointed out that the best-known dissidents are unanimous in opposing the strengthening of a very hard United
States line towards Cuba, as well as any funding of their activities - which might substantiate the claim, long upheld by President Castro, that they are “lackeys of Washington”.
(Alberto R., Professor of Law, Director, European and Latin American Legal Studies Program, Director,
International Law LL.M. Program, DePaul University, former chairman of the Strategic Research Department at the
U.S. Naval War College, cum laude @ Princeton, PhD in government and foreign affairs from University of Virginia,
“Harming Human Rights in the Name of Promoting Them: The Case of the Cuban Embargo,” UCLA J International L.
& Foreign Affairs, p. 199, HeinOnline)
Thus, during Cuba’s painful period of economic readjustment from 1989 to 1994, the embargo became
a key contributing factor to what was already an extremely difficult situation. Legally and morally ,
the United States not only had the opportunity but also the obligation to take Cuba’s deteriorating
economic situation into account in the early 1990s as it pondered whether to relax or tighten the embargo. The U.S. government’s actions—to enhance the embargo’s comprehensive and
indiscriminate character—had predictably harmful effects on the human rights of innocent people .

José
, 5-21-20
,
Caribbean Journal, Associate Professor of Law at Florida International
University in Miami, Fla.
, “Op Ed: The Embargo and Cuban Identity,” http://cri.fiu.edu/news/2013/op-ed-the-embargo-and-cubanidentity/
What
"Cuban embargo" brings to mind
is the economic blockade of the U nited
S tates on the island.
It means something else
tooa— an embargo directed at Cuban-Americans raised in diáspora —in this case, an emotional one that can cabin in identity. These psychic constraints stifle contact with the island and, to some extent, pathologize even the notion of engaging with Cuba, other than to disrupt the government.
Admittedly, by making it harder for Americans to know Cuba
first-hand, the U.S. blockade complements the
identity embargo
, but what really fuels the latter is the Cuban-American family. Much ink has been spilled about the economic blockade, so here I focus on the family ban, speaking as someone born in Cuba, raised in the United States, fiercely proud of my own family, and very much identified with the island. It is in the family that an evergreen memorial has been set up to observe and honor the losses—psychic and financial—caused by leaving Cuba
. These losses can fuel a rich oral history about Cuba and the move to the U nited
S tates. Alternately disturbing, incendiary, and funny, these stories grip the listener, especially a child forming his or her image of the world. A poignant manual for Cubans raising children in the United States explains why this oral history matters.
Written by Ruperto Carmenate in 1971,
El problema del niño cubano
(The Problem of the Cuban Child) urges parents to keep alive notions of Cuba by teaching their kids about Cuban history and culture.
That is, in diaspora the family acts as a placeholder for the lost nation by passing on strategic memories, ones that are intended to shape not only the past but also how the future will be imagined. Heartfelt and touching, this is
also a profoundly ideological project, whose consequences reach far beyond the walls of the family.
These family accounts leave one with an unsettling curiosity (it sounds better in Spanish—inquietudes) about what happened and how it affected who one became. One natural response might be to visit
Cuba, so as to know that part of one's origins firsthand. However, filial piety for family losses can mean boycotting the island, even when contact would be permitted by the already draconian formal blockade. So sons and daughters of Cuban refugees may be reluctant to visit Cuba, sometimes because parents have objected but often out of an implicit sense of taboo.
Welcome to the Cuban-American Oedipal conflict. A child often has to negotiate its autonomy from parents, but for a certain generation of diaspora
U.S. foreign policy and Cuban sovereignty become fields for the conflict.
Granted, island
Cubans may have their own Oedipal issues to reckon with in terms of Fidel Castro as the mythic father of statehood, but I speak only about what I know from where I stand. Which is not to trivialize these evergreen losses. Nor is it to suggest that the feelings are not justified. Far from it. For many in diaspora, mourning is all that is left of a homeland and an imagined future. Our families' accounts about Cuba do deserve filial respect, but they need not be swallowed hook, line, and sinker. My trips to Cuba have helped me to understand what happened to my family, what we became, and why the United States might not feel entirely like home. Now is a good time to take up these issues, in part because things in Havana are changing. Also, what once appeared like a monolithic consensus on the question of Cuba (in Miami especially) is dissolving like a sandcastle. Unstoppable demographic shifts are driving both kinds of change. We should ask ourselves—"what might my real stake in
Cuba be now?"
Lifting the U.S. embargo will take
much momentum and coordination. Reconsidering our own views , though, is within our control.

Paul
, 9-[2-5]-20
,
Humber College, McMaster University, member of the Eric Voegelin Institute, a humanities and social sciences research institute devoted to the revitalization of teaching and understanding of the “great books” of Western civilization in comparison with other tradition
, “Totality and
Ambivalence: Postmodern Responses to Globalization and the American Empire,” http://www.lsu.edu/artsci/groups/voegelin/society/2004%20Papers/Corey2004.shtml
The third, and final, autoimmune moment is what Derrida calls "The vicious cycle of repression." Derrida claims that humanity is not defenseless against the threat of this new evil, but
he claims that
"all forms" of the current "war on terror" will only work to "regenerate, in the short and long term, the causes of the evil they seek to eradicate"
(PT 100). In other words, the victims of Western
military action
in places such as Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, will respond
, either personally or by proxy, with more terrorism.
This
in turn will inspire more violence from America and its allies, and so on ad infinitum.
Derrida's brief account of this autoimmune moment was formulated a month after 9/11 and long before the Iraq war. From a Derridian perspective, the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq was a suicidal autoimmune response to terror, not just because it was fought under false pretenses (no WMD's, no working relation between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda), but also because it ironically facilitated and inspired the spread of terror (in Iraq itself and Spain). The chaos of post-war Iraq created an environment in which Islamic extremism could thrive. Islamist movements that were oppressed by Saddam's tyranny were revitalized. The U.S. invasion also divided the West. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the Western world was united, and there was little opposition to the war in Afghanistan.
Within a year and a half, that unity had disintegrated. The schisms created by the war in Iraq are now everywhere. Consequently, the international response required to contain terrorism has been compromised. Our immune systems are threatened. Baudrillard and the
Traditional Moral Order Baudrillard's and Derrida's analyses of globalization and its discontents are similar. But their accounts of how we should respond to this malaise, and what the future may hold, differ radically. Baudrillard writes that "Terrorism is immoral," but that terror "is a response to a globalization which is itself immoral." Then, in a manner that recalls Nietzsche, he writes:
"let us be immoral: and if we want to have some understanding of all this, let us go and take a little look beyond Good and Evil"
(ST 12-13).
Baudrillard
attacks the predominant Western understanding of Good and Evil. He defines the Western
conception of
"Good" as "the unification of things in a totalized world ," whereas Evil is whatever antagonizes or disrupts this unification.
[11] It must be said that all of
Baudrillard's philosophical efforts are directed against such a unification
; thus, in this sense, he is firmly on the side of "Evil." However, we must not think that this leads to a philosophy where
"everything is permitted." Baudrillard is "immoral" from the standpoint of a
Western philosophy
, which can only conceive of goodness as total unification
; however, Baudrillard wants to get beyond this understanding
, and he directs us to, what he calls, the traditional "moral universe" that existed in premodern societies. Once again, Baudrillard works in the spirit of Nietzsche, who wanted to move beyond Christian and modern conceptions of "good and evil," but not beyond older conceptions of "good and bad." [12]
The expectation
, central to both Judeo-Christian and modern understandings, that Good can
be separated from Evil, or that it can eradicate Evil, is a disorienting illusion
– an illusion that Baudrillard calls a "terroristic dream."
He writes: "
We ought not to entertain the illusion that we might separate the two, that we might cultivate good and happiness in a pure state and expel evil and sorrow as wastes.
" [13] But this eschatological illusion, according to
Baudrillard, has been propagated in Western thought, first in "theology," and then in the "whole of modern philosophy." [14] Baudrillard writes: This is precisely where the crucial point lies – in the total misunderstanding on the part of Western philosophy, on the part of the Enlightenment, of the relation between Good and Evil. We believe naively that the progress of Good, its advance in
all fields (the sciences, tech nology, democracy, human rights
), corresponds to a defeat of Evil.
No one seems to have understood that Good and Evil advance together, as part of the same movement.
(ST 13) Thus, "it is not by expurgating evil that we liberate good. Worse, by liberating good, we also liberate

evil." [15] Globalization unleashed a "total extrapolation of Good" (ST 14), but evil was not diminished; on the contrary, it has increased exponentially, "transpiring though" the hegemony of Globalization (the Good) and manifesting itself in system breakdowns, accidents, catastrophes, new diseases, violence, and terrorism.
Evil
, writes Baudrillard, is "everywhere," despite our enlightened efforts to conquer it; it has "metamorphosed into all the viral and terroristic forms that obsess us."
[16]
Baudrillard directs us away from the dream that evil can be conquered. He claims we will not achieve "equilibrium" until we accept
what he variously calls the "moral universe" or "traditional universe" (ST 14). It is a universe that accepts the world as it is without any appeal to an actual or hypothetical triumph of the Good.
This world, according to Baudrillard, is constituted by an inescapable duality. "Everything," says Baudrillard, "is in the play of duality." [17] And perhaps the most fundamental duality is that of Good and Evil.
The world as constituted by Good and Evil cannot be exchanged for a world constituted by Good alone.
Thus, the traditional moral universe was an "antagonistic coexistence of two equal and eternal principles, Good and Evil, at once inseparable and irreconcilable." [18]
There was
" a balance between Good and Evil
, in accordance with a dialectical relation which maintained the tension and equilibrium of the moral universe, come what may" (ST 14). This delicate balance was maintained because there was no supremacy of one over the other. However, this balance was upset with the Western hegemony of the Good – the effort to destroy any negative or adverse force, and subsume all "otherness" within a universal order.
The irony, of course, is that Evil developed exponentially; the positive accomplishments of Western economic expansion and technological advancement have been met by equally negative reactions. Thus,
Baudrillard argues against
any type of
Western based "internationalism," whether
this be the internationalism of economic globalization or universal human rights . The idea that Western values or markets can unify the world
, or mediate the world's differences, must be abandoned, for the intent is naively utopian and the results have been destructive.
Through these efforts, the West has attempted to exterminate all "otherness." It will accept "difference,"
says Baudrillard, but only if the various differences accept the overriding Western value system. We must
, according to Baudrillard, adopt a different strategy.
We must surrender to the fragmentation that is occurring, and embrace the idea of a radically plural world that cannot be mediated or unified by a transcendent system of law, politics, economics or values.
Baudrillard calls for nothing short of abandon ing the Western dream of unification and universality
in all its guises.
Michael
, 6-26-20
, a Washington D.C.-based journalist and foreign policy analyst whose work has appeared in CNN, Examiner.com and the Afghan Online Press, cited as an expert in Reuters and the
Middle East Policy Journal and has made several live appearances on RT News, a strategist for the New
World Strategies Coalition which develops nonmilitary solutions for Afghanistan, graduated from the
University of Notre Dame with a history degree and is currently pursuing a Master's in Global Security
Studies at Johns Hopkins University
, “No One's World: Preparing for the End of Western Supremacy,” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-hughes/no-ones-world-preparing-f_b_1626497.html
Francis
Fukuyama once hypothesized
that the end of the Cold War signaled the end of history, describing the seminal moment as
" the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
" Charles Kupchan flips this theory on its head in his new book, No
One's World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn, by arguing that the only thing coming to an end is post-
Cold War unipolarity .
Kupchan, a former Clinton national security adviser, has written a book quite audacious in scope considering it covers over 500 years of world history and outlines a grand vision for the next century.
The U.S.
, he posits, will be forced to make room on the world stage for a variety of governing models
such as China's state-capitalist autocracy and the Arab

Spring nascent democracies - forms that do not strictly adhere to traditional Western concepts of modernity.
But it is critical to understand the unique circumstances behind the divergent paths taken by the West and "the rest." Kupchan provocatively suggests that the West's rise was a function of time and place, driven more by singular geopolitical conditions and happenstance than intrinsic superiority.
In fact, for centuries the East considered Europe a backwater.
However, between 1500 and 1800 the world's center of gravity moved westward from Asia and the Mediterranean Basin. The weakness of
Western institutions was actually an asset given the diffusion of power led to a fragmented society amidst which the middle class was born and
"horizontal alignments" were sustained, which proved to be an essential precursor of liberal democracy. The West also benefited from the dissipation of central power that accompanied the turbulent struggle between Church and monarch. Ultimately, the Reformation put Europe on the path to religious tolerance and pluralism, as dissent and socioeconomic ferment fostered political liberalization. The Reformation's impact cannot be overstated, as Kupchan writes: ...the Reformation set the stage for the intellectual advances of the Enlightenment by exposing religion, and ultimately politics, to theological, moral and rationalist inquiry. The intellectual ferment that made possible Europe's eclipse of other regions was, at least initially, unleashed by religious dissent. In contrast, Ottoman rulers maintained strong central control and strict "vertical alignments" throughout the empire, "prohibiting the emergence of autonomous sites of wealth and power that were agents of change in Europe." Plus, because the mosque and state were so intertwined there was never an "Islamic reformation." However, fast forward to present day and a
distressing confluence of factors have gradually chipped away at Western dominion.
Economic stagnation, due to military overreach and divisive domestic politics, has propelled the U.S. towards bankruptcy. Meanwhile, globalization has had a counterintuitive impact on the West.
In such a dynamically interconnected environment countries that embrace laissez faire economics seem to suffer from a loss of control while well-run autocracies prosper. The forces unleashed by this phenomenon have been unkind to pluralistic societies which value freedom and personal gain versus those that value solidarity, stability and communal welfare, like China. China has flexed its muscle economically to become the best of the rest and is destined to surpass America.
U.S. financial mismanagement has resulted in $14 trillion of debt - or 90% of GDP - and China owns $1.2 trillion of it. Economic vitality is critical because there seems to be a direct correlation between material primacy and ideological dominance, and despite
America's
preeminent military status, its global influence has waned.
Point being, it would seem
Western liberal democracy isn't necessarily the alpha and omega or the "final form of human government." The rest of the world doesn't seem
as willing to listen to our sermons on ideal governance
, especially when it doesn't fit their specific value systems
and especially when the U.S. doesn't have its own house in order.

Salim
, 12-17-20
,
La Sorbonne University, Paris
, “U.S. Economic sanctions against Cuba: objectives of an imperialist policy,” http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Caribbean/USEconomicSanctions_Cuba.html
The economic sanctions imposed on Cuba by the U nited
S tates are unique in view of their longevity and of their complexity but they are consistent with the real objectives of the first world power
. In order to show this, it is necessary to base this analysis on the following postulate: the blockade is part of a scheme designed not to promote democratic values
, as the administration in Washington would have us believe, but to control the natural resources of
Third World nations through subjugation.
And the history of the United States ­ characterized mainly by violent and bloody conquest of new territories ­ proves this unequivocally.
As far
back as the
middle of the
19th century, U.S. expansionist
William
Gilpin announced: "The destiny of the American people is to subdue the continent." The
primary goal of the U nited
S tates is to make sure
that the resources of
the countries of the South remain at hand of the capital of the masters of the universe.
The case of
Cuba
is exceptional because it is the only country that has dared to refuse to follow the orders set by their northern neighbor, designing its political, economic and social system , at once sovereign and independent
, despite the unilateral constraints imposed by Washington. The enmity Cuba is a victim of reflects a historical continuity whose broad lines must be retraced. And by the way, it would be widely-known if something like a sense of respect for obvious historical truisms existed. This topic would not be controversial if the society we live in was intellectually free.
Cuba is
no doubt the oldest preoccupation of U.S. colonialists.
As far back as October 20, 1805, Thomas
Jefferson evoked the extreme importance of the Caribbean archipelago ­ under Spanish rule at the time ­ stating: "The control which, with
Florida Point, this island would give us over the Gulf of Mexico, and the countries and isthmus bordering on it, as well as all those whose waters flow into it, would fill up the measure of our political well-being." However, Spain could rule the island until "our people is sufficiently advanced to take those territories from the Spanish, bit by bit" . In 1809, in a letter to James Madison, he wrote: "I candidly confess that I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of States." The theory of the "ripe fruit" ­ evoked in
1823 by one of the most clear-sighted and intelligent political visionary of the history of the United States, John Quincy Adams ­ mentioned "an object of transcendent importance to the commercial and political interests of our Union" that was to fall in the hands of the United States at all costs . This object was the Cuban island, which was already the priority of the United States government of the time.
After the collapse of Napoleon
's empire, the Monroe doctrine came into the world. It stipulated that the United
States would on no account accept European interventions in the affairs of the American hemisphere.
It would enable the northern giant to establish its power on the whole continent without hindrance
, since Europe would not interfere. The theory was first motivated by Russian designs on Oregon and by the will to prevent any reconquest of the young Latin American republics by European nations. The Monroe doctrine ­ one of the founding principles of U.S. foreign policy ­ had imperialist and hegemonic aims. With the Roosevelt Corollary, its scope was later extended to encompass a diversity of situations. Economic factors had a primary role in the search for new markets. The birth of an industrial nation and the rapid increase in the production of goods entailed the need to conquer new territories.
Because of its strategic position if the Gulf of Mexico
and despite the failure of the various attempts to buy the island to Spain,
Cuba was in the U.S. line of sight.
In 1890, U.S. investments in Cuba amounted to $50 million and 7% of U.S. foreign trade was with the island. Spain spent $7 million on Cuban imported goods whereas U.S. imports from the archipelago amounted to $61 million.
U.S. economic interests entailed the need for the U.S. to closely control the Cuban market in order to protect U.S. investments. The
main objective of U.S. intervention in the
Cuban war of independence
against Spain in 1898 was to prevent Cuban revolutionaries to gain their sovereignty
. Indeed, in January 1896, the captain-general of the island Martínez Campos, who was in charge of military Spanish operations, resigned, admitting that he was powerless to stop the rebels who had managed to infiltrate into the distant province of Pinar Del Río, at the extreme West of Cuba. In talks with Spain in June 1896, the United States put forward the possibility of granting Cuba home rule status. This idea aimed at ruining the independence movement and infuriated Maceo ­ second-in-command of the Cuban army of independence ­ who flatly turned down the idea . Although the Spanish army outnumbered Cuban freedom fighters and despite its overwhelming material superiority, Cuban rebels were winning one victory after another and their prestige among the Cuban population and the Latin-American public

was growing day by day. The Russian ambassador in La Havana wrote to his counterpart in Spain that "the cause of Spain [was] lost" . In the same way, Colonel Charles E. Akers, the London Times correspondent, wrote: "With an army of 175,000 men, all kinds of equipment in unlimited quantity, a beautiful weather, no or few diseases, with everything working in his favor, General Weyler was unable to defeat the rebels. " Máximo Gómez, commandant of the Cuban revolutionaries, declared on March, 1, 1898: "the enemies are crushed and retreating and when they had the opportunity to do something, they didn't do anything." This was exactly at that time that the United States decided to intervene, when Spain was put to rout.
The U.S. wanted to despoil the Cuban people of
its independence
, an independence that had been conquered with machetes. U.S. Democrat Senator from Virginia John W. Daniel accused the U.S. government of intervening to prevent a Spanish defeat: "When the most favorable time for a revolutionary victory and the most unfavorable time for Spain came the United States Congress is asked to put the U.S. army into the hands of the President to forcibly impose an armistice between the two parties, one of them having already surrendered." The armistice was signed on December, 10, 1898 in Paris, by the United States and Spain.
The Cubans were excluded from the talks. The vile Platt amendment ­ that was later repealed in 1934 after the United States started to rule over the whole political and economic life of Cuba ­ shattered the hopes of Cubans. The United States replaced Spain in the role of the colonizer, a role decadent Spain could not take on anymore. After they had suffered from Spanish colonialism, Cubans were to endure U.S. neocolonialism and their northern neighbor was going to "build an empire at the expense of Spain" . On January, 1st, 1899, after the Spanish troops had left, the Stars and Stripes ­ not the Cuban flag ­ was hoisted in the sky of La Havana. The ripe fruit had at last fallen into the hands of the
United States . After it had taken hold of almost all sectors of the Cuban economy, the United States intervened several times to maintain the status quo, notably in 1912, 1917 and 1933 when protests were repressed in a bloodbath. Before the 1959 revolution, U.S. companies owned
80% of services, mines, ranches and oil refineries, 40% of the sugar industry and 50% of railways . The Batista regime enjoyed Washington benevolence because it wonderfully served U.S. economic interests. Cuba had to wait until 1959 to taste the fruit of independence that had been forbidden to its people for almost half a millennium. But again Cuba would have to pay the highest possible price for this slap in the face of its lifelong neighbor, an affront that would not be forgiven. And what price!
The total blockade of the island
imposed on
February, 7, 1962 violates international conventions and runs counter to the most basic juridical principles.
Its main objective is to re-establish U.S. neo-colonial domination over Cuba, using starvation as a political weapon against the Cuban people.
The arguments justifying this economic state of siege varied according to time.
During the Cold War, the "communist threat" that Cuba represented was the paradigm in use although any serious study would smash this theory to pieces. Indeed, in 1959, there was no Soviet presence in Cuba. But Washington stuck to that interpretation: Cuba represented a threat for U.S. national security and Kennedy urged Mexico to back them up in their policy of hostility towards Cuba. But the answer of a
Mexican diplomat was not long in coming: "If we publicly declare that Cuba is a threat to our security, forty million Mexicans will die laughing" .
The Cold War context
, used
for thirty years as a pretext legitimizing U.S. animosity towards Cuba, was actually a fraud
since there are no facts to support this theory.
If there had been any foundations to this thesis, the
U nited
S tates would have normalized
its relations
with Cuba after
the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Instead
of that,
Washington launched
a new
and more serious
wave of economic sanctions
with the Torricelli Act in 1992 and the
Helms-Burton Act in 1996.
As the ancient paradigm departed this life in 1991, a new one was created.
Now it is no more about containing communism but about "re-establishing democracy" in Cuba, a
"democracy" devoted to the interests of Washington. No matter if it is ruled by
a clone of Gerardo
Machado or
Fulgencio
Batista: what's important is that it should make of its subordination to the U nited
S tates its main virtue.
Noam
, 11-xx-19
, “The United States and the "Challenge of Relativity",” http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199811--.htm
In the case under discussion here, t he "prevailing orthodoxy" is well summarized by the distinguished Oxford-Yale historian Michael Howard: "For 200 years the United States has preserved almost unsullied the original ideals of the Enlightenment..., and, above all, the universality of these values,"
though it "does not enjoy the place in the world that it should have earned through its achievements, its generosity, and its goodwill since World War II."
The record is unsullied by the treatment of "that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty"
(John Quincy Adams) or the fate of the slaves who provided cheap cotton to allow the industrial revolution to take off
-- not exactly through market forces; by the

terrible atrocities the U.S. was once again conducting in its "backyard" as the praises were being delivered
; or by the fate of Filipinos, Haitians, Vietnamese, and a few others who might have somewhat different perceptions. The favored illustration of "generosity and goodwill" is the Marshall Plan. That merits examination, on the "strongest case" principle. The inquiry again quickly yields facts "that `it wouldn't do' to mention." For example, the fact that "as the Marshall Plan went into full gear the amount of
American dollars being pumped into France and the Netherlands was approximately equaled by the funds being siphoned from their treasuries to finance their expeditionary forces in Southeast Asia," to carry out terrible crimes. And that the tied aid provisions help explain why the U.S. share in world trade in grains increased from less than 10% before the war to more than half by 1950, while Argentine exports reduced by twothirds. And that under U.S. influence Europe was reconstructed in a particular mode, not quite that sought by the anti-fascist resistance, though fascist and Nazi collaborators were generally satisfied. And that the generosity was overwhelmingly bestowed by
American taxpayers upon the corporate sector, which was duly appreciative, recognizing years later that the Marshall Plan
" set the stage for large amounts of private U.S. direct investment in Europe
," establishing the basis for the modern Transnational Corporations, which "prospered and expanded on overseas orders,...fueled initially by the dollars of the Marshall Plan" and protected from "negative developments" by "the umbrella of American power."
It is, again, of some interest that thoughts of that nature were "silenced with surprising effectiveness" during the 50th anniversary celebration of this unprecedented act of generosity and goodwill, the strongest case put forth by admirers of the "global meliorism" of the world's most powerful state, hence of direct relevance to the question being addressed here. The "prevailing orthodoxy" has occasionally been submitted to tests beyond the record of history. Lars Schoultz, the leading academic specialist on human rights in Latin America, found that
U.S. aid "has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens,... to the hemisphere's relatively egregious violators of fundamental human rights."
That includes military aid, is independent of need, and runs through the Carter period. More wide-ranging studies by economist Edward Herman found a similar correlation world-wide, also suggesting a plausible reason: aid is correlated with improvement in the investment climate, often achieved by murdering priests and union leaders, massacring peasants trying to organize, blowing up the independent press, and so on. The result is a secondary correlation between aid and egregious violation of human rights.
It is not that U.S. leaders prefer torture; rather, it has little weight in comparison with more important values. These studies precede the Reagan years, when the questions are not worth posing. By "general tacit agreement," such matters too are
"kept dark," with memories purged of "inconvenient facts."
The natural starting point for an inquiry into Washington's defense of "the universality of [Enlightenment] values" is the UD. It is accepted generally as a human rights standard. U.S. courts have, furthermore, based judicial decisions on "customary international law, as evidenced and defined by the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights." The UD became the focus of great attention in June 1993 at the World Conference on Human Rights in
Vienna.
A lead headline in the New York Times read: "At Vienna Talks, U.S. Insists Rights Must be Universal."
Washington warned
"that it would oppose any attempt to use religious and cultural traditions to weaken the concept of universal human rights,"
Elaine Sciolino reported. The U.S. delegation was headed by Secretary of State Warren Christopher, "who promoted human rights as Deputy Secretary of State in the Carter Administration."
A "key purpose"
of his speech, "viewed as the Clinton
Administration's first major policy statement on human rights," was "to defend the universality of human rights," rejecting the claims of those who plead "cultural relativism."
Christopher said that "the worst violators are the world's aggressors and those who encourage the spread of arms," stressing that "the universality of human rights set[s] a single standard of acceptable behavior around the world, a standard Washington would apply to all countries." In his own words, "The U nited
S tates will never join those who would undermine the
Universal Declaration" and will defend its universality against those who hold "that human rights should be interpreted differently in regions with non-Western cultures," notably the "dirty dozen" who reject elements
of the UD that do not suit them. Washington's decisiveness prevailed.
Western countries
"were relieved that their worst fears were not realized -- a retreat from the basic tenets of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights
..."
The "Challenge of Relativity" was beaten back, and the conference declared that "The universal nature of these rights and freedoms is beyond question."
A few questions remained unasked. Thus
, if "the worst violators are the world's aggressors and those who encourage the spread of arms," what are we to conclude about the world's leading arms merchant, then boasting well over half the sales of arms to the third world, mostly to brutal dictatorships, policies accelerated under Christopher's tenure at the
State Department with vigorous efforts to enhance the publicly-subsidized sales, opposed by 96% of the population but strongly supported by high tech industry?
Or its colleagues Britain and France, who had distinguished themselves by supplying Indonesian and Rwandan mass murderers, among others? The subsidies are not only for "merchants of death." Revelling in the new prospects for arms sales with NATO expansion, a spokesman for the Aerospace Industries Association observes that the new markets ($10 billion for fighter jets alone, he estimates) include electronics, communications systems, etc., amounting to "real money" for advanced industry generally. The exports are promoted by the U.S. government with grants, discount loans and other devices to

facilitate the transfer of public funds to private profit in the U.S. while diverting the economies of the "transition economies" of the former
Soviet empire to increased military spending rather than the social spending that is favored by their populations (the U.S. Information Agency reports). The situation is quite the same elsewhere.
And if aggressors are "the worst violators" of human rights, what of the country that stands accused before the International Court of Justice for the "unlawful use of force" in its terrorist war against Nicaragua, contemptuously vetoing a Security Council resolution calling on all states to observe international law and rejecting repeated General Assembly pleas to the same effect?
Do these stern judgments hold of the country that opened the post-Cold War era by invading Panama, where, four years later, the client government's Human Rights Commission declared that the right to self-determination and sovereignty was still being violated by the "state of occupation by a foreign army," condemning its continuing human rights abuses? Further questions are raised by Washington's
(unreported) reservations concerning the Declaration of the Vienna Conference. The U.S. was disturbed that the Declaration "implied that any foreign occupation is a human rights violation." That principle the U.S. rejects, just as, alone with its Israeli client, the U.S. rejects the right of peoples "forcibly deprived of [self-determination, freedom and independence]..., particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes and foreign occupation or other forms of colonial domination,...to struggle to [gain these rights] and to seek and receive support [in accordance with the Charter and other principles of international law]" -- facts that also remain unreported, though they might help clarify the sense in which human rights are advocated. Also unexamined was just how Christopher had "promoted human rights under the Carter Administration."
One case was in 1978, when the spokesman for the "dirty dozen" at Vienna, Indonesia, was running out of arms in its attack against East Timor, then approaching genocidal levels, so that the Carter Administration had to rush even more military supplies to its bloodthirsty friend. Another arose a year later, when the Administration sought desperately to keep Somoza's National Guard in power after it had slaughtered some 40,000 civilians, finally evacuating commanders in planes disguised with Red Cross markings (a war crime), to Honduras, where they were reconstituted as a terrorist force under the direction of Argentine neo-Nazis. Such matters too fall among the facts "that it `wouldn't do' to mention." The high-minded rhetoric at and about the Vienna conference was not besmirched by inquiry into the observance of the UD by its leading defenders. These matters were, however, raised in Vienna in a Public Hearing organized by NGOs in an attempt to break through the wall of silence erected to protect Western power from "inconvenient facts." The contributions by activists, scholars, lawyers, and others from many countries provided a detailed review of "Alarming evidence of massive human rights violations in every part of the world as a result of the policies of the international financial institutions," the "Washington Consensus" among the leaders of the free world.
This "neoliberal" consensus is based on what might be called "really existing free market doctrine": market discipline is of great benefit to the weak and defenseless, though the rich and powerful must shelter under the wings of the nanny state.
They must be allowed to persist in "the sustained assault on [free trade] principle" that is deplored in a scholarly review of the post-1970 period by GATT secretariat economist Patrick Low, who estimates the restrictive effects of Reaganite measures at about three times those of other leading industrial countries, as they "presided over the greatest swing toward protectionism since the 1930s," shifting the U.S. from "being the world's champion of multilateral free trade to one of its leading challengers," the journal of the
Council on Foreign Relations commented in a review of the decade. It should be added that such analyses omit the major forms of market interference for the benefit of the rich: the transfer of public funds to advanced industry that underlies virtually every dynamic sector of the U.S. economy, often under the guise of "defense."
These measures were escalated again by the Reaganites, who were second to none in extolling the glories of the free market -- for the poor at home and abroad. The general practices were pioneered by the British in the 18th century and have been a dominant feature of economic history ever since, and a good part of the reason for the contemporary gap between the first and the third world (growing for the past 30 years along with the growing gap between rich and poor sectors of the population worldwide). The Public Hearing at Vienna received no mention in mainstream U.S. journals, to my knowledge, but citizens of the free world could learn about the human rights concerns of the vast majority of the world's people from its report, published in an edition of 2000 copies in Nepal. The provisions of the UD are not well-known in the United
States, but some are familiar. The most famous is Article 13 (2), which states that "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own." This principle was invoked with much passion every year on Human Rights Day, December 10, with demonstrations and indignant condemnations of the Soviet Union for its refusal to allow Jews to leave. To be exact, the words just quoted were invoked, but not the phrase that follows: "and to return to his country." The significance of the omitted words was spelled out on Dec. 11, 1948, the day after the UD was ratified, when the General Assembly unanimously passed Resolution 194, which affirms the right of Palestinians to return to their homes or receive compensation, if they chose not to return, reaffirmed regularly since. But there was a "general tacit agreement" that it "wouldn't do" to mention the omitted words, let alone the glaringly obvious fact that those exhorting the Soviet tyrants to observe Article 13, to much acclaim, were its most dedicated opponents. It is only fair to add that the cynicism has finally been overcome. At the December 1993 U.N. session, the
Clinton Administration changed U.S. official policy, joining with Israel in opposing U.N. 194, which was reaffirmed by a vote of 127-2. As is the norm, there was no report or comment. But at least the inconsistency is behind us: the first half of Article 13 (2) has lost its relevance, and
Washington now officially rejects its second half. Let us move on to Article 14, which declares that "Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution." Haitians, for example, including the 87 new victims captured by Clinton's blockade and returned to their charnel house, with scant notice, as the Vienna conference opened. The official reason was that they were fleeing poverty, not the rampant terror of the military junta, as they claimed. The basis for this discovery was not explained. In her report on the Vienna conference a few days earlier, Sciolino had noted that "some human rights organizations have sharply criticized the Administration for failing to fulfill Mr.
Clinton's campaign promises on human rights," the "most dramatic case" being "Washington's decision to forcibly return Haitian boat people seeking political asylum." Looking at the matter differently, the events illustrate Washington's commitment to its uplifting rhetoric on "the universality of human rights." The U.S. has upheld Article 14 in this manner since Carter (and Christopher) "promoted human rights" by shipping miserable boat people back to torment under the Duvalier dictatorship, a respected ally helping to convert Haiti to an export platform for U.S. corporations seeking supercheap and brutalized labor -- or to adopt the terms preferred by USAID, to convert Haiti into the "Taiwan of the
Caribbean." The violations of Article 14 were ratified formally in a Reagan-Duvalier agreement. When a military coup overthrew Haiti's first

democratically elected President in September 1991, renewing the terror after a brief lapse, the Bush Administration imposed a blockade to drive back the flood of refugees to the torture chamber where they were to be imprisoned. Bush's "appalling" refugee policy was bitterly condemned by candidate Bill Clinton, whose first act as President was to make the illegal blockade still harsher, along with other measures to sustain the junta, to which we return. Again, fairness requires that we recognize that Washington did briefly depart from its rejection of Article
14 in the case of Haiti. During the few months of democracy (Feb.-Sept. 1991), the Bush Administration gained a sudden and short-lived sensitivity to Article 14 as the flow of refugees declined to a trickle -- in fact, reversed, as Haitians returned to their country in its moment of hope. Of the more than 24,000 Haitians intercepted by U.S. forces from 1981 through 1990, 11 were granted asylum as victims of political persecution (in comparison with 75,000 out of 75,000 Cubans). In these years of terror and repression, Washington allowed 28 asylum claims.
During Aristide's 7-month tenure, with violence and repression radically reduced, 20 were allowed from a refugee pool 1/50th the scale.
Practice returned to normal after the military coup and the renewed terror. Concerned that protests might make it difficult to maintain the blockade, the Clinton Administration pleaded with other countries to relieve the U.S. of the burden of accommodating the refugees. Fear of a refugee flow was the major reason offered as the "national security" interest that might justify military intervention, eliciting much controversy.
The debate overlooked the obvious candidate: Tanzania, which had been able to accommodate hundreds of thousands of Rwandans, and would surely have been able to come to the rescue of the beleaguered United States by accepting a few more Black faces. The contempt for
Article 14 is by no means concealed. A front-page story in the Newspaper of Record on harsh new immigration laws casually records the fact and explains the reasons: Because the United States armed and financed the army whose brutality sent them into exile, few Salvadorans were able to obtain the refugee status granted to Cubans, Vietnamese, Kuwaitis and other nationalities at various times. The new law regards many of them simply as targets for deportation [though they were fleeing] a conflict that lasted from 1979 until 1992, [when] more than 70,000 people were killed in El Salvador, most of them by the American-backed army and the death squads it in turn supported, [forcing] many people here to flee to the United States. The same reasoning extends to those who fled Washington's other terrorist wars in the region. The interpretation of Article 14 is therefore quite principled: "worthy victims" fall under Article 14, "unworthy victims" do not. The categories are determined by the agency of terror and prevailing power interests. But the facts have no bearing on Washington's role as the crusader defending the universality of the UD from the relativist challenge. The case is among the many that illustrate an omission in Orwell's analysis: the easy tolerance of inconsistency, when convenient. Articles 13 and 14 fall under the category of Civil and Political Rights. The UD also recognizes a second category: Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. These are largely dismissed in the West. U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick described these provisions of the UD as "a letter to Santa Claus... Neither nature, experience, nor probability informs these lists of
`entitlements,' which are subject to no constraints except those of the mind and appetite of their authors." They were dismissed in more temperate tones by the U.S. Representative to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, Ambassador Morris Abram, who emphasized in 1990 that Civil and Political Rights must have "priority," contrary to the principle of universality of the UD. Abram elaborated while explaining
Washington's rejection of the Report of the Global Consultations on the Right to Development, defined as "the right of individuals, groups, and peoples to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy continuous economic, social, cultural and political development, in which all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realized." "Development is not a right," Abram informed the Commission. Indeed, the proposals of the
Report yield conclusions that "seem preposterous," for example, that the World Bank might be obliged "to forgive a loan or to give money to build a tunnel, a railroad, or a school." Such ideas are "little more than an empty vessel into which vague hopes and inchoate expectations can be poured," Abram continued, and even a "dangerous incitement." The fundamental error of the alleged "right to development" is that it presupposes that: Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. If there is no right to development, as defined, then this statement too is an "empty vessel" and perhaps even "dangerous incitement." Accordingly this principle too has no status: there are no such rights as those affirmed in Article 25 of the UD, just quoted. The U.S. alone vetoed the Declaration on the Right to Development, thus implicitly vetoing Article 25 of the UD as well. It is unnecessary to dwell on the status of Article 25 in the world's richest country, with a poverty level twice that of any other industrial society, particularly severe among children. Almost one in four children under six fell below the poverty line by 1995, far more than other industrial societies, though Britain is gaining ground, with "One in three British babies born in poverty," the press now reports, as "child poverty has increased as much as three-fold since Margaret Thatcher was elected" and "up to 2 million British children are suffering ill-health and stunted growth because of malnutrition." Thatcherite programs reversed the trend to improved child health and led to an upswing of childhood diseases that had been controlled, while public funds are used for such purposes as illegal projects in Turkey and
Malaysia to foster arms sales by state-subsidized industry. In accord with "really existing free market doctrine," public spending after 17 years of Thatcherite gospel is the same 42 1/4% of GDP that it was when she took over. In the U.S., subjected to similar policies, 30 million people suffered from hunger by 1990, an increase of 50% from 1985, including 12 million children lacking sufficient food to maintain growth and development (before the 1991 recession). 40% of children in the world's richest city fell below the poverty line. In terms of such basic social indicators as child mortality, the U.S. ranks well below any other industrial country, right alongside of
Cuba
, which has less than 5% the GNP per capita of the U nited
S tates and has undergone many years of terrorist attack and increasingly severe economic warfare at the hands of the hemispheric superpower.
Given its extraordinary advantages, the U.S. is in the leading ranks of relativists who reject the universality of the UD by virtue of Article 25 alone. The same values guide the international financial institutions that the U.S. largely controls. The World Bank and the IMF "have been extraordinarily human rights averse," the chairperson of the U.N. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Philip Alston, observed with polite understatement in his submission to the Vienna counter-session. "As we have heard so dramatically at this Public Hearing," Nouri Abdul Razzak of the Afro-Asian
People's Solidarity Organization added, "the policies of the international financial institutions are contributing to the impoverishment of the world's people, the degradation of the global environment, and the violation of the most fundamental human rights," on a mind-numbing scale.
In the face of such direct violations of the principles of the UD, it is perhaps superfluous to mention the refusal to take even small steps towards upholding them. UNICEF estimates that every hour, 1000 children die from easily preventable disease, and almost twice that many women die or suffer serious disability in pregnancy or childbirth for lack of simple remedies and care. To ensure universal access to basic social services,
UNICEF estimates, would require a quarter of the annual military expenditures of the "developing countries," about 10% of U.S. military spending noted, the U.S. actively promotes military expenditures of the "developing countries"; its own remain at Cold War levels, increasing today while social spending is being severely cut. Also sharply declining in the 1990s is U.S. foreign aid, already the most miserly among the

developed countries, and virtually non-existent if we exclude the rich country that is the primary recipient (Washington's Israeli client). In his
"Final Report" to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, Special Rapporteur Leandro Despouy cites the World Health Organization's characterization of "extreme poverty" as "the world's most ruthless killer and the greatest cause of suffering on earth": "No other disaster compared to the devastation of hunger which had caused more deaths in the past two years than were killed in the two World Wars together."
The right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being is affirmed in Article 25 of the UD, he notes, and in the International
Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, "which places emphasis more particularly on `the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger'." But from the highly relativist perspective of the West, these principles of human rights agreements have no status. Article 23 of the UD declares that "Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment," along with "remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection." We need not tarry on the respect for this principle. Furthermore, "Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests." The latter right is technically upheld in the United States, though legal and administrative mechanisms ensure that it is largely observed in the breach. By the time the Reaganites had completed their work, the U.S. was far enough off the spectrum so that the International Labor Organization, which rarely criticizes the powerful, issued a recommendation that the U.S. conform to international standards, in response to an AFL-CIO complaint about strikebreaking by resort to
"permanent replacement workers." Apart from South Africa, no other industrial country tolerated these methods to ensure that Article 23 remains empty words; and with subsequent developments in South Africa, the U.S. may stand in splendid isolation in this particular respect, though it has yet to achieve British standards, such as allowing employers to use selective pay increases to induce workers to reject union and collective bargaining rights. Reviewing some of mechanisms used to render Article 23 inoperative, Business Week reported that from the early
1980s, "U.S. industry has conducted one of the most successful antiunion wars ever, illegally firing thousands of workers for exercising their rights to organize." "Unlawful firings occurred in one-third of all representation elections in the late '80s, vs. 8% in the late '60s." Workers have no recourse, as the Reagan Administration converted the powerful state they nurtured to an expansive welfare state for the rich, defying U.S. law as well as the customary international law enshrined in the UD. Management's basic goal, the journal explains, has been to cancel the rights
"guaranteed by the 1935 Wagner Act," which brought the U.S. into the mainstream of the industrial world. That has been a basic goal since the
New Deal provisions were enacted, and although the project of reversing the victory for democracy and working people was put on hold during the war, it was taken up again when peace arrived, with great vigor and considerable success. One index of the success is provided by the record of ratification of ILO conventions guaranteeing labor rights. The U.S. has by far the worst record in the Western hemisphere and Europe, with the exception of El Salvador and Lithuania. It does not recognize even standard conventions on child labor and the right to organize. "The
United States is in arrears to the ILO in the amount of $92.6 million," the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights notes, part of the huge debt that Washington refuses to pay (in violation of treaty obligations). This withholding of funds "seriously jeopardizes the ILO's operations"; current U.S. plans for larger cuts in ILO funding "would primarily affect the ILO's ability to deliver technical assistance in the field," thus undermining Article 23 still further, worldwide. Contempt for the socioeconomic provisions of the UD is so deeply engrained that no departure from objectivity is sensed when a front-page story lauds Britain's incoming Labor government for shifting the tax burden from "large businesses" to working people and the "middle class," steps that "set Britain further apart from countries like Germany and France that are still struggling with pugnacious unions, restrictive investment climates, and expensive welfare benefits." Industrial "countries" never "struggle with" huge profits, starving children, or rapid increase in CEO pay (under Thatcher, double that of second-place U.S.); a reasonable stand, under the
"general tacit agreement" that the "country" equals "large businesses," along with doctrinal conventions about the health of the economy -- the latter a technical concept, only weakly correlated with the health of the population (economic, social, or even medical). The attack on unions has many effects. The U.S. Labor Department estimates that these violations of Article 23 account for a large part of the stagnation or decline in real wages under the Reaganites, "a welcome development of transcendent importance," as the Wall street Journal described the fall in labor costs from the 1985 high to the lowest in the industrial world (U.K. aside). The violations also contribute to undermining benefits guaranteed by the UD, including health and safety standards in the workplace, which the government chooses not to enforce, leading to a sharp rise in industrial accidents. Elimination of unions also helps to weaken democracy, as ordinary people lose some of the few methods by which they can enter the political arena. And it contributes further to the privatization of aspirations, dissolving the sense of solidarity and sympathy, and other human values that were at the heart of classical liberal thought but are inconsistent with the reigning ideology of privilege and power. The "free trade agreements," as they are common mislabelled (they include significant protectionist features and are "agreements" only if we discount popular opinion), make further contributions to these ends. Testifying before the Senate Banking Committee in February
1997, Federal Reserve Board Chair Alan Greenspan was highly optimistic about "sustainable economic expansion" thanks to "atypical restraint on compensation increases [which] appears to be mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity," plainly a desideratum for a good society and yet another reason for Western relativists to reject Article 25 of the UD, with its "right to security." The February 1997 Economic
Report of the President, taking pride in the Clinton Administration's achievements, refers more obliquely to "changes in labor market institutions and practices" as a factor in the "significant wage restraint" that bolsters the health of the economy. Some of the causes of these benign changes are spelled out in a study commissioned by the Labor Secretariat of the North American Free Agreement "on the effects of the sudden closing of the plant on the principle of freedom of association and the right of workers to organize in the three countries." The study was carried out under NAFTA rules in response to a complaint by telecommunications workers on illegal labor practices by Sprint. The complaint was upheld by the U.S. National Labor Relations Board, which ordered trivial penalties after years of delay, the standard procedure.
The NAFTA study, by Cornell University Labor economist Kate Bronfenbrenner, has been authorized for release by Canada and Mexico, but not by the Clinton Administration. It reveals a significant impact of NAFTA on strike-breaking. About half of union organizing efforts are disrupted by employer threats to transfer production abroad, for example, by placing signs reading "Mexico Transfer Job" in front of a plant where there is an organizing drive. The threats are not idle. When such organizing drives nevertheless succeed, employers close the plant in whole or in part at triple the pre-NAFTA rate (about 15% of the time). Plant-closing threats are almost twice as high in more mobile industries (e.g., manufacturing vs. construction). These and other practices reported in the study are illegal, but that is a technicality, as the Reagan Administration had made clear, outweighed by the contribution to undermining the right to organize that is formally guaranteed by Article 23 -- or in more polite words, bringing about "changes in labor market institutions and practices" that contribute to "significant wage restraint" within an economic model offered with great pride to a backward world. A number of other devices have been employed to nullify the pledge "never [to] join those who would undermine the Universal Declaration" (Christopher) in the case of Article 23. The elimination of the welfare system, which had been sharply reduced from the '70s, drives many poor women to the labor market, where they will work at or below minimum wage and with limited

benefits, and an array of government subsidies. The obvious (hence surely intended) effect is to drive down wages at the lower end, with indirect effects elsewhere. A related device is the increasing use of prison labor in the vastly expanding system of social control. Thus Boeing, which monopolizes U.S. civilian aircraft production (thanks to massive state subsidy for 60 years), not only transfers production facilities to
China, but also to prisons a few miles from its Seattle offices, one of many examples. Prison labor offers many advantages. It is disciplined, publicly subsidized, deprived of benefits, and "flexible" -- available when needed, left to government support when not. Reliance on prison labor also draws from a rich tradition. The rapid industrial development in the southeastern region a century ago was based heavily on convict labor (Black of course), leased to the highest bidder. These measures maintained the basic structure of the plantation system after the abolition of slavery, but now for industrial development. The practices continued until the 1920s, until World War II in Mississippi. Southern industrialists pointed out that convict labor is "more reliable and productive than free labor" and overcomes the problem of labor turnover and instability. It also "remove[s] all danger and cost of strikes," a serious problem at the time, resolved by state violence that virtually destroyed the labor movement. Convict labor also lowers wages for "free labor," much as in the case of "welfare reform." The U.S. Bureau of Labor reported that
"mine owners [in Alabama] say they could not work at a profit without the lowering effect in wages of convict-labor competition." The resurgence of these mechanisms is quite natural as the superfluous population is driven to prisons. The attack on Article 23 is not limited to the
U.S. The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions reports that "unions are being repressed across the world in more countries than ever before," while "Poverty and inequality have increased in the developing countries, which globalisation has drawn into a downward spiral of ever-lower labour standards to attract investment and meet the demands of enterprises seeking a fast profit" as governments "bow to pressure from the financial markets rather than from their own electorates," in accord with the "Washington consensus." These are not the consequences of "economic laws" or what "the free market has decided, in its infinite but mysterious wisdom," as commonly alleged. Rather, they are the results of deliberate policy choices under really existing free market doctrine, undertaken during a period of "capital's clear subjugation of labor," in the words of the business press. The ability to nullify unwanted human rights guaranteed by the UD should be considerably enhanced by the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) that is now being forged by the OECD and the WTO (where it is the
MIA). If the plans outlined in draft texts are implemented, the world should be "locked into" treaty arrangements that provide still more powerful weapons to undermine social programs and to restrict the arena of democratic politics, leaving policy decisions largely in the hands of private tyrannies that have ample means of market interference as well. The efforts may be blocked at the WTO because of protests of
"developing countries" that are not eager to become wholly-owned subsidiaries of great foreign enterprises. But the OECD version may fare better, to be presented to the rest of the world as a fait accompli, with the obvious consequences. All of this proceeds in impressive secrecy, so far.
Washington's rejection of the Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights guaranteed by the UD does receive occasional mention, but the issue is generally ignored in the torrent of self-praise, and if raised, elicits mostly incomprehension.
To take some typical examples, Times correspondent Barbara Crossette reports that
"The world held a human rights conference in Vienna in 1993 and dared to enshrine universal concepts," but progress was blocked by
"panicked nations of the third world." American diplomats are "frustrated at the unwillingness of many countries to take tough public stands on human rights," even though "Diplomats say it is now easier to deal objectively with human rights abusers, case by case," now that the Cold War is over and "developing nations, with support from the Soviet bloc," no longer "routinely pass resolutions condemning the United States, the
West in general or targets like Israel and apartheid South Africa." Nonetheless, progress is difficult, "with a lot of people paying lip service to the whole concept of human rights in the Charter, in the Universal Declaration and all that," but no more, U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright
(now Secretary of State) observed. On Human Rights day, Times editors condemned the Asian countries that reject the UD and call instead for
"addressing the more basic needs for people for food and shelter, medical care and schooling" -- in accord with the UD. The reasoning is straightforward. The U.S. rejects these principles of the UD, so they are inoperative. By calling for such rights the Asian countries are therefore rejecting the UD. Puzzling over the contention that "`human rights' extend to food and shelter," Seth Faison reviews a "perennial sticking point in United States-China diplomacy, highlighting the contrast between the American emphasis on individual freedom and the Chinese insistence that the common good transcends personal rights." China calls for a right to "food, clothing, shelter, education, the right to work, rest, and reasonable payment," and criticizes the U.S. for not upholding these rights -- which are affirmed in the UD, and are not a matter of "the common good" but are "personal rights" that the U.S. rejects. Again, the reasoning is straightforward enough, once the guiding ideas are internalized. As an outgrowth of the popular movements of the 1960s, Congress imposed human rights conditions on military aid and trade privileges, compelling the White House to find various modes of evasion. These became farcical during the Reagan years, with regular solemn pronouncements about the "improvements" in the behavior of client murderers and torturers that elicited much derision from human rights organizations, but no policy change. The most extreme examples, hardly worth discussing, involved U.S. clients in Central America. There are other less egregious cases, beginning with the top recipient of U.S. aid (Israel) and running down the list. Israel's "systematic torture and illtreatment of Palestinians under interrogation" has repeatedly been condemned by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International (along with apparent extrajudicial execution; legalization of torture; imprisonment without charge, for as long as nine years for some of those kidnapped in
Lebanon; and other abuses). U.S. aid to Israel is therefore illegal under U.S. law, HRW and AI have insistently pointed out (as is aid to Egypt,
Turkey, Colombia and other high-ranking recipients). In the most recent of its annual reports on U.S. military aid and human rights, AI observes
-- once again -- that "Throughout the world, on any given day, a man, woman or child is likely to be displaced, tortured, killed or `disappeared,' at the hands of governments or armed political groups. More often than not, the United States shares the blame," a "practice that "makes a mockery of [congressional legislation] linking the granting of US security assistance to a country's human rights record." Such contentions elicit no interest or response in view of the "general tacit agreement" that laws are binding only when power interests so dictate. The strongest popular support for sanctions was with regard to South Africa. After much delay and evasion, sanctions were finally imposed in 1985 and (over
Reagan's veto) in 1986, but the Administration "created glaring loopholes" that permitted U.S. exports to increase by 40% between 1985 and
1988 while U.S. imports increased 14% in 1988 after an initial decline. "The major economic impact was reduced investment capital and fewer foreign firms." The role of sanctions is perhaps most dramatically illustrated in the case of the voice of the "dirty dozen," Indonesia. After the failure of a CIA operation to foment a rebellion in 1958, the U.S. turned to other methods of overthrowing the Sukarno government. Aid was cut off, apart from military aid and training. That is standard operating procedure for instigating a military coup, which took place in 1965, with mounting U.S. assistance as the new Suharto regime slaughtered perhaps 1/2 million or more people in a few months, mostly landless peasants. There was no condemnation on the floor of Congress, and no aid to the victims from any major U.S. relief agency. On the contrary, the slaughter (which the CIA compared to those of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao) aroused undisguised euphoria in a very revealing episode, best

forgotten.The World Bank quickly made Indonesia its third largest borrower. The U.S. and other Western governments and corporations followed along. There was no thought of sanctions as the new government proceeded to compile one of the worst human rights records in the world, or in the course of its near-genocidal aggression in East Timor, which, incidentally, has somehow not entered the growing literature on
"humanitarian intervention" -- rightly, because there is no need for intervention to terminate the decisive diplomatic and military contribution of the U.S. and its allies. Congress did however ban U.S. military training after the Dili massacre in 1991. The aftermath followed the familiar pattern. Delicately selecting the anniversary of the Indonesian invasion, Clinton's State Department announced that "Congress's action did not ban Indonesia's purchase of training with its own funds," so it can proceed despite the ban, with Washington perhaps paying from some other pocket. The announcement received scant notice, though Congress did express its "outrage," reiterating that "it was and is the intent of
Congress to prohibit U.S. military training for Indonesia" (House Appropriations Committee): "we don't want employees of the US Government training Indonesians," a staff member reiterated forcefully, but without effect. Rather than impose sanctions, or even limit military aid, the U.S.,
U.K., and other powers have sought to enrich themselves by participating in Indonesia's crimes. Indonesian terror and aggression continue unhampered, along with harsh repression of labor in a country with wages half those of China. With the support of Senate Democrats, Clinton was able to block labor and other human rights conditions on aid to Indonesia. Announcing the suspension of review of Indonesian labor practices, Trade Representative Mickey Kantor commended Indonesia for "bringing its labor law and practice into closer conformity with international standards," a witticism that is in particularly poor taste. Also revealing is the record of sanctions against Haiti after the military coup of September 1991 that ended the seven-month period of democracy. The U.S. had reacted to Aristide's election with alarm, having confidently expected the election of its own candidate, World Bank official Mark Bazin, who received 14% of the vote. Washington's reaction was to shift aid to anti-Aristide elements, and as noted, to honor asylum claims for the first time, restoring the norm after the military junta let loose a reign of terror, killing thousands. The OAS declared an embargo, which the Bush Administration at once violated by exempting U.S. firms -- "fine tuning" the sanctions, the press explained, in its "latest move" to find "more effective ways to hasten the collapse of what the
Administration calls an illegal Government in Haiti." Trade with Haiti remained high in 1992, increasing by almost half as Clinton extended the violations of the embargo, including purchases by the U.S. government, which maintained close connections with the coup regime; just how close we do not know, since the Clinton Administration refuses to turn over to Haiti 160,000 pages of documents seized by U.S. military forces -
- "to avoid embarrassing revelations" about U.S. government involvement with the terrorist regime, according to Human Rights Watch.
President Aristide was allowed to return after the popular organizations had been subjected to three years of terror and he had pledged to accept the extreme neoliberal program of Washington's defeated candidate. The U.S. Justice Department revealed that the Bush and Clinton
Administrations had rendered the embargo virtually meaningless by authorizing illegal shipments of oil to the military junta and its wealthy supporters, informing Texaco Oil Company that it would not be penalized for violating the Presidential directive of October 1991 banning such shipments. The information, prominently released the day before U.S. troops landed to "restore democracy" in 1994, has yet to reach the general public, and is an unlikely candidate for the historical record. These were among the many devices adopted to ensure that the popular forces that swept President Aristide to power would have no voice in any future "democracy." None of this should surprise people who have failed to immunize themselves from "inconvenient facts." With general agreement, the Clinton Administration advertises this as a grand exercise in "restoring democracy," the prize example of the Clinton Doctrine. The operative significance of sanctions is articulated honestly by the Wall Street Journal , reporting the call for economic sanctions against Nigeria. "Most Agree, Nigeria Sanctions Won't Fly," the headline reads: "Unlike in South Africa, Embargo Could Hurt West." In brief, the commitment to human rights is instrumental.
Where some interest is served, they are important, even grand ideals; otherwise the pragmatic criterion prevails.
That too should come as no surprise. States are not moral agents; people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions. If they do not, the fine words will remain weapons.
Furthermore, lethal weapons.
U.S. economic warfare against Cuba for 35 years is a striking illustration. The unilateral U.S. embargo against Cuba
, the longest in history, is
also unique in barring food and medicine. When the collapse of the USSR removed the traditional security pretext and eliminated aid from the Soviet bloc, the U.S. responded by making the embargo far harsher, under new pretexts that would have made Orwell wince: The 1992 Cuban Democracy Act, initiated by liberal Democrats, and strongly backed by President Clinton at the same time he was undermining the sanctions against the mass murderers in Haiti. A year-long investigation by the American Association of World Health found that this escalation of U.S. economic warfare had taken a "tragic human toll," causing "serious nutritional deficits" and "a devastating outbreak of neuropathy numbering in the tens of thousands." It also brought about a sharp reduction in medicines, medical supplies and medical information, leaving children to suffer "in excruciating pain" because of lack of medicines. The embargo reversed Cuba's progress in bringing water services to the population and undermined its advanced biotechnology industry, among other consequences. These effects became far worse after the imposition of the
Cuban Democracy Act, which cut back licensed sales and donations of food and medical supplies by
90% within a year. A "humanitarian catastrophe has been averted only because the Cuban government has maintained" a health system that "is uniformly considered the preeminent model in the Third World." The embargo has repeatedly been condemned by the United Nations. The Inter-
American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States condemned U.S. restrictions on shipments of food and medicine to Cuba as a violation of international law. Recent

extensions of the embargo
(the Helms-Burton Act) were unanimously condemned by the OAS.
In August 1996, its judicial body ruled unanimously that the Act violated international law.
The Clinton Administration's response is that shipments of medicine are not literally barred, only prevented by conditions so onerous and threatening that even the largest corporations are unwilling to face the prospects
(huge financial penalties and imprisonment for what Washington determines to be violations of "proper distribution," banning of ships and aircraft, mobilization of media campaigns, etc.).
And while food shipments are indeed barred, the Administration argues that there are
"ample suppliers" elsewhere
(at far higher cost), so that the direct violation of international law is not a violation. Supply of medicines to Cuba would be "detrimental to U.S. foreign policy interests," the
Administration declared.
When the European Union complained to the World Trade Organization that the Helms-Burton Act, with its wide-ranging punishment of third parties, violates the WTO agreements, the Clinton Administration rejected WTO jurisdiction, as its predecessors had done when the World Court addressed Nicaragua's complaint about U.S. international terrorism and illegal economic warfare
(upheld by the Court, irrelevantly).
In a reaction that surpasses cynicism, Clinton condemned Cuba for ingratitude "in return for the Cuban Democracy Act," a forthcoming gesture to improve U.S.-Cuba relations.
John
, 12-xx-20
, teaches political theory in the School of Politics and Public Policy, Griffith University,
Australia, heads the Theory and Practice of Democracy research program and has published numerous articles and books
, “American Values OR Human Rights? U.S. Foreign Policy AND the Fractured Myth of Virtuous Power,” http://www.jstor.org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/stable/pdfplus/27552537.pdf?acceptTC=true
American exceptionalism placed American values at the center of foreign policy, fostering belief in
the essential union of American virtue and power.
Developing a theme of Henry Kissinger's, this article argues that in Vietnam this union was severed and undermined: Americas power was defeated and its virtue assailed. Nixon offered only a pretense of reunion.
Carter attempted the real thing by putting universal human rights , not American values, at the heart of foreign policy.
His failure was followed by Reagans denial of sin and reassurance of American values, though the Gulf War of his successor had a deeper impact on the national psyche. Clinton's foreign policy remained subject to the ''Vietnam syndrome" and he, despite rhetorical dazzle, developed no new consensus on the disposition of American power. September 11, however, produced a sense of injured innocence in whose defense American power could again be virtuously deployed. The subsequent patriotic surge encouraged George W. Bush to revive
American values in foreign policy, with potentially dangerous consequences.
May 2002 brought the odd spectacle of ex-
President Jimmy Carter standing shoul der to shoulder in Havana with
one of the U.S. government's oldest enemies, Cuban pres ident Fidel
Castro.
Carter, on a mission to convey
a message of friendship to the Cuban people and to seek
some common ground
between Cuba and the United States, made a point of meeting and encouraging local democratic
, religious, and human rights activists.
In a televised address, he endorsed the rights of dissidents and urged democracy on the island nation
(Sullivan 2002). He also advocated an end to the U.S. embargo on Cuba (a call immediately echoed at home by 20 Democratic and 20 Republican representa tives in Congress). President George W. Bush's administration responded angrily to Carter's latest adventure as international arbiter. A senior state department official tried to sabotage the ex-president's visit with a carefully timed release of a report claiming that Cuba was conducting bio-weapons research and sharing its findings with other
"rogue nations." Bush himself was quick to reaffirm the sanctions on trade and travel, demanding free elections and a liberalization of Cuba's economy as preconditions of U.S. relaxation. Bush was of course concerned with the votes of large numbers of Cuban-Americans in Florida whose Republican sympathies are closely tied to a strong anti-Castro stance. He was also reportedly angry, in a week when he was finalizing an arms reduction deal with the Russians, at being upstaged in the media by the peripatetic elder statesman. Nevertheless, there was a certain irony in his implied charge that Carter, who had once put human rights centrally on the foreign policy agenda of the United States, was giving aid and comfort to a notorious violator.
There was
also an interesting question as to the essential difference
, if any, between
Carter's excursion and Bush's own previous visit
(in February 2002) to China where
, in a similarly televised address, he had issued a democratic challenge
to the Chinese Com munist leadership (Allen and Pan 2002). Bush had not, of course, made continuing U.S. Chinese trade dependent on democratic progress in China, but policy inconsistency is not what concerns me here.

I want rather to draw attention to the differences and similari ties between Bush's and Carter's proselytizing appeals. Carter, on his return to the United States, argued that his own and the administration's aims for Cuba
were identical, and that only their opinions on means and timing were at variance (Carter 2002). I want to argue, however, that there were in contention here two distinct
though connected rhetorical positions whose historical interrelationship it is important to understand. The first rhetoric is that of human rights per se; the second is the rhetoric of specifically American values.
Thus in China,
Bush invited the Chinese in
the course of their historical economic transformation to draw on specifically "
American ideals of liberty, faith and family
" (Allan and Pan 2002; emphasis added). Bush had begun, quite deliberately and defiantly, to speak this language of American values only after the events of September 11. It was a highly significant rhetorical move aimed at reaffirming a national faith which, according to Henry Kissinger (2000; 2001), had been lost decades earlier. Kissinger argued that the tradition known as American exceptionalism, within which American values were historically embedded, was one of the most important casu alties of the Vietnam War. Characterizing Vietnam 25 years after the fall of Saigon as a national "tragedy,"1 he claimed that the war had opened a rift, still unhealed, in American society and destroyed faith in the uniqueness and universal relevance of American values.2
One unfortunate consequence was a continuing failure to develop a new, rational foreign policy consensus (Kissinger 2000). Americans after
Vietnam could no longer confidently assert their own values or feel comfortable about imposing them on others, and were consequently at a loss as to what to do with their own predominant power. Kissinger's contention is an important one for understanding a persistent dilemma of
American foreign policy, including its most recent manifestation under the Bush administration. I will argue, however, that it deserves a more satisfactory exploration than he himself provides in his book, Does America Need a Foreign Policy?, where he con ducts an analysis in terms of opposing historical traditions. The earliest of these was the "Hamiltonian," which rejected moralizing and based U.S. foreign policy on manipulat ing balance of power relations solely for the sake of the national interest?a position that, since Alexander Hamilton's own time, has apparently been represented only by Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Nixon (Kissinger 2001, 240-42, 248). The other two more dominant traditions were founded on alternate answers to the question of how America best fulfills its "historic mission" in international affairs. The
"Jacksonian" is broadly "isolationist" and argues that America, by minding its own business, sets a suf ficient example to the world; the
"Wilsonian" argues
, on the contrary, that America has a crusading duty to use its power to disseminate its values abroad.
While there is no doubt that these traditions form a vital part of the story, Kissinger tends to treat Jacksonians and
Wilsonians as though they were distinct and discernible groups endur ing across time and capable of forming coalitions or falling apart
(Kissinger 2001, 245 49). Because this has hardly been the case since at least World War II, his analysis often confuses more than it enlightens.
He also uses a thin reading of the Balkan crisis to argue that Wilsonianism has finally triumphed over competing traditions (2001, 254-55), but in doing so he conflates trends in U.S. foreign policy with a recent Wilsonian tendency among European countries and the United Nations to pursue interventions on human itarian grounds.3 This radically underestimates the caution and indecision of American policy in the Clinton era that was a continuing consequence of the trauma of Vietnam. Finally,
Kissinger describes the developing tendency of
Congress to impose sanctions on other countries on human rights grounds as typical
(and regrettable)
Wilsonian crusading. This may be true, but it misses the political significance of the appeal to human rights as a direct response to the very crisis of American values he has identified. I believe greater clarity can be brought to the subject by focusing on the myth, central to the exceptionalist tradition, of the essential unity and compatibility of American power and American virtue.
It was this myth that was shattered in Vietnam producing the crisis of faith in American values that Kissinger notes, and also provok ing a turn to human rights rhetoric in foreign policy. The following is a summary of the argument I will make. The myth of virtuous American power fell into crisis in Vietnam when its essen tial terms were undermined and severed one from the other: American power was defeated, delivering a blow to American pride;
American virtue was assailed, causing a loss of faith in American innocence. This forced an agonizing choice (reflected in the bitter division of patriots and peaceniks at home) between preserving pride by prose cuting the war ever more ruthlessly, and restoring virtue by immediate withdrawal at whatever cost to pride. President Nixon offered the pretense of serving both ends by his "Vietnamization" of the war, but the failure of this strategy helped cause his own downfall. Meanwhile, the American values used to justify intervention in Vietnam were being excoriated by disillusioned Americans as the culturally biased instruments of an imperialist power. President
Carter's human rights initiative was a direct response to this crisis of faith in American values. The attraction
of human rights was that they were precisely not American, despite having a great deal of commonality with traditional
American values. With its foreign policy at the service of universal human rights, America could conceivably avoid the charge of cultural imperialism.
Significantly,
Carter did not reject the exceptionalist tradition but intended rather, by this means, to save it.
A human rights policy would ensure consistency and dispel hypocrisy in foreign policy
, thus realizing
at last the unity of American power and virtue.
Carter's strategy proved premature in a still ideologically divided world, and the dilemma of power and values remained painfully unresolved. His honest failure was fol lowed by President Reagan's denial of American sin and bluff reassertion of traditional American values.
Yet it was the prosecution of the Gulf War by his "unvisionary" suc cessor, George H.W. Bush, that had the deeper impact on American feelings about the virtuous disposition of national power (though his new world order failed to material ize). Clinton seemed at first to promise a return

to Carter's human rights doctrine, but his foreign policy remained subject to the "Vietnam syndrome" and provided no particu lar strategic direction for the use of American power. The terrorist attack of September 11, however, turned America unexpectedly into an innocent victim in whose defense American power could be justly and wholeheartedly deployed.
A surge of popular patriotism played to
George W. Bush's benefit and encouraged him to revive American values as a theme in an aggressively unilateralist foreign policy.
The danger this courted, however, was the very same as that which, in Vietnam, had caused the original crisis of American faith. Before pursuing this argument more closely, it will be useful to look at the differ ences and connections between
American values and international human rights. Human Rights and American Values Because the
Western Enlightenment is the historical fons et origo of both human rights and American values, it is not surprising that there is a huge overlap in their sub stantive content.
Both traditions insist on religious, political, and civic rights and free doms, both advocate the rule of law and democracy,4 both lay claim to universality of application. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by all nations at the UN General Assembly in 1948 was, in fact, heavily indebted to the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights as this had been elaborated and developed by the Supreme Court during 150 years of interpretation and application (Henkin 1998, 513-14).5 This extensive common ground should not, however, blind us to the political significance of adopting one rhetoric rather than (or more than) another. The difference is more than one of content or emphasis, though these surely exist. The Universal Declaration, for example, went beyond the U.S. model in asserting sub stantial economic and social welfare rights (Articles 22-26) that seem to place it more toward the political left than some
Americans, particularly Republicans, find comfort able. This raises the possibility that a rhetorical resort to human rights is merely a func tion of the central ideological divide of American politics. Certainly a Democrat like Carter's Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, was happy to include a right to the fulfillment of "vital needs"?food, shelter, health care, and education?among the human rights that were to be the focus of
American foreign policy in 1977 (Vance 1983a, 433). Repub licans, of course, do not generally admit that such needs, though they might be the basis of discretionary legal entitlements, can be asserted as fundamental rights. They tend to emphasize instead the historical American devotion to individual rights to private property, a matter that receives only brief mention in the Declaration (Article 17). Yet, despite certain elective affinities, it is much too simple to associate the rhet oric of human rights with Democrats and the rhetoric of American values with
Repub licans. For one thing, Democrats are as prone as Republicans to appeal to specifically American values.
Carter
, as we shall see, made human rights the keystone of his foreign policy precisely in order to reinstate and restore popular belief in American exceptionalism.
Republicans, on the other hand, have not hesitated to speak the language of human rights when advocating a tough stance against countries such as the former Soviet Union, China, Burma, or Iraq. The reason they have found it useful and convenient to do so has, moreover, an important bearing on the differential political implications of employing one rhetoric over another despite the substantive ground they share.
The exceptionalist tradition asserts the special, perhaps unique, relationship of the U nited
S tates to purportedly universal Enlightenment values.
But to assert these abroad under the banner of "American values" invites the challenge that they are not really uni versal but merely particular and biased standards
that a powerful nation conveniently deploys to justify imposing its will on weaker countries. This is a problem made more acute by certain peculiarities of the American tradition. The ideal of liberty, for example, has been indissolubly linked in America to property and private enterprise since the time of the Jacksonian democracy. But the identification of liberty with free enterprise could and did come into serious contradiction with an American commitment to the right of nations to self-determination, especially when foreign peoples opted for socialistic forms of government (Williams 1978, 13). It appeared that nations were free to choose their own destiny provided they chose according to American values that they did not neces sarily accept. Resorting to a language of human rights that has broad international currency and acceptance was a way of avoiding imperialistic connotations.
Human rights cannot, by definition, be tied to a particular state but are rather "universally legitimate and recog nized claims by every individual upon his or her national society, which that society is duty-bound to recognize and to realize, to respect and to ensure"
(Henkin 1998, 512). It is true, of course, that international human rights principle s have themselves been accused (most notably by certain Asian nations at the 1993 Vienna Conference on Human Rights) of simultaneously further ing and mask ing the particular selfish interests of Western countries.
These claims, however, have made small headway against a powerful international consensus created under United Nations auspices (no nation, for example, has reserved against Articles 55 and 56 of the UN Charter, which mandate cooperation on human rights). Rights may often be more honored in the breach, and controversies may flourish about the application of specific rights, or about their extension to new areas such as the environment and economic development. Yet such questions are aired within an arena that accepts their broad legitimacy. This gives human rights discourse considerable traction on the world stage. American values, given suspicions about great power intentions, cannot be guaranteed a similar level of international acceptance.
Charges of human rights violations can therefore be a potent
(if hardly single-edged) weapon to be wielded internationally by American politicians of whatever party.

Hector
, 3-19-20
, part of Oocities, writer of “The Tower Bolshevik”
, ““Human Rights” Imperialism and the U.S. Empire, part 1: Anti-Communism,” http://www.oocities.org/h_marroquin/human-rights.html
According to the American Dictionary of the English Language, "human rights" is "the basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled, often held to include the right to life and liberty, freedom of thought and expression, and equality before the law". Naturally there is no reason why every person on this planet should not be granted these basic rights. Human rights has become an issue to many in today's world, and is frequently monitered and reported on.
Human rights has
also become the cloak and reason for imperialist military intervention around the globe
, most notably the U.S
imperialists.
It is an excuse in which the U.S rulers use to extend their colonial domination of sovereign nations whom are independent of the imperialists
; be it unilateraly or with their imperialist lackeys: NATO, U.N, and E.U. And with these
"human rights" credentials , they seek to obtain support not just from the right but from much of the left.
Originally "human rights" imperialism was used for the U.S rulers for world support in their war drive against the Soviet Union and the
Eastern Bloc deformed workers states. Hence, now that the Cold War is over, the imperialists need a better excuse to intervene militarily abroad: liberal "human rights" idealism to replace the red scare. "Human rights abuses" is the liberal call for imperialist war much like the conservative call for "homeland security".
Given the history of the behavior of the U.S and western European imperialists, " human rights" imperialism only demonstrates
their hypocrisy .
Carter's "human rights" war drive against the USSR
The
U.S war cry on behalf of "human rights" to achieve
its aggressive imperialist ambition is nothing new.
It began in December of 1975 with the signing of the Helsinki Accords by the United States, the Soviet Union, and 33 other heads of states. The Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy's decision to sign it was another example of their capitulation to imperialist demands in favor of peace co-existence with the U.S imperialists. Their interest in signing the Helsinki Declaration, was that so the imperialists would recognize the borders of the Soviet Bloc, but disagreed with the "human rights" portion, with arguments of the issue being an internal matter. The "human rights" objective was put on the Helsinki Accords by
American liberal politicians (notably Democratic congressman Henry "Scoop" Jackson) seeking to improve the image of the Democratic Party, and pressuring the republicans, then under U.S resident Gerald Ford to put forth the "human rights" rhetoric. With the Helsinki Accords, the imperialists were able to pursue their war drive against the Soviet Union, as well as establishing their Trojan horses for counter-revolution in the USSR and the deformed workers states in Eastern Europe. As a result Helsinki watch groups were set up to moniter "human rights abuses" through out the Eastern Bloc, and inform the imperialists on the issue which was then published all over the capitalist media. The result was renewed anti-Soviet and anti-Communist war drive led by the U.S imperialists against the workers states throughout the world with massive support from the right and the left. U.S imperialism had suffered a severe and humiliating defeat by the Vietnamese workers and peasants. The
U.S attempt to kill the Vietnamese Revolution resulted in the deaths of 3 million in Vietnam and almost the same number as they extended their imperialist bloodbath into Cambodia and Laos. The images of U.S troops destroying village after village, the use of napalm on people, and agent orange made many in the imperialist states and all over the world disillusioned with the U.S rulers. What they saw was a large superpower bombing an undeveloped poor country into oblivion, and the continuous young Americans returning home in body bags in a pointless and useless war. Naturally, as the U.S imperialists had slimed their own image many people no longer believed in the U.S credentials of "freedom" and "democracy" and their crusade against Communism.
So naturally the U.S rulers and their cronies in the U.N, NATO, and E.U needed a fresh plan to once again build up popularity for the anti-Communist war drive. Thus, the imperialists' hypocritical
"human rights" demagogy was born and has been used to this day.
"I was very convinced before I became president that basic human rights, equality of opportunity, the end of abuse by governments of their people, was a basic principle on which the United
States should be an acknowledged champion". Jimmy Carter, U.S President (CNN Cold War Episode 19: "Freeze" 1998) Rarely has there been a stronger hypocrisy. Carter obviously didn't mean the blacks living in ghettos, Latinos working for slave wages, or the Vietnam War. Once Jimmy
Carter took office as U.S President, he maintained connections with pro-imperialist "human rights" dissidents within the Soviet sphere, and repeatedly bellowed at the Soviets when it was known that these dissidents were imprisoned or exiled. Carter had also taken as his National
Security advisor the Polish born crazed anti-Communist liberal hawk Zbigniew Brzezinski for his "human rights" imperialist crusade against the
Soviet Union using their Trojan Horse agents in the Soviet bloc. Brzezinski was Carter's foreign policy advisor during his presidential campaign, and later became Carter's national security advisor during his presidency. Brzezinski had a hand in sending Carter's messages to Soviet dissidents. The pro-imperialist Moscow Helsinki Group was led by Andrey Sakharov and Yuri Orlov, and included members such as Yelena
Bonner, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Anatoly Shcharansky, Vladimir Bukovsky, and Zviad Gamsakhurdia struggling for internal counter-revolution.
They were joined by other anti-Communist Soviet dissidents: feminists such as Tatyana Mamonova and her samizdat Woman and Russia, and right-wing ultra-nationalist "poets" such as Eduard Limonov. All found comfort and a position for the U.S-led imperialist war drive against the
USSR. With Soviet dissidents publicizing anti-Soviet propaganda to the imperialist press, Carter was able to step up his war drive against the
Soviet Union now that he had public support. His "human rights" slanders of the Soviet Union inflamed anti-Soviet mentality in the USA. A clear example was when Shcharansky was imprisoned after he passed Soviet military secrets to the CIA in 1977. Outside the Soviet embassy in
Washington, Zionists, conservatives, liberals, feminists, social-democrats, pacifists, and bourgeois leftists formed a demonstration chanting
"Free Shcharansky Now!". There were many similar demonstrations hailing the pro-imperialist "human rights" reactionaries in the USSR, particulary Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, as well as CIA agent Shcharansky. In Czechoslovakia, the Helsinki Watch group set up Charter 77 with

playwright Vaclav Havel at its head. Charter 77 was a "human rights" document smuggled to the imperialists, further inflaming the imperialists' anti-Communist war drive. In Poland, things looked even more scary. Karol Wojtyla, a native of Poland, was elected as Pope under the alias
John Paul II. With the blessing of the Polish Stalinist leader Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, Pope Wojtyla visited Poland with his message for total counter-revolution, "human rights", anti-abortion, homophobia, and mixture of church and state. Polish workers (historically pro-socialist), after decades of living under Stalinist misrule and corruption threw themselves into the arms of the catholic church. From this grew Solidarity
(Solidarnosc), a company union that was a front for the CIA, MI-6, the Vatican, and western bankers funding and supporting counter-revolution in Poland and in Eastern Europe. Solidarnosc had won 80% of the Polish working class, leaving 20% that were still class conscience. With the U.S and every imperialist propaganda machine ranting about "workers against Communism" in Poland, possible Soviet and Warsaw Pact military intervention in Poland against "freedom"; the imperialists had all the support they could have from the entire bourgeoisie: conservatives, liberals, social-democrats, pacifists, feminists, bourgeois leftist, etc; all rallied behind Carter's U.S military build up against the Soviet Union.
"We said to the President, 'We are not going to let you put pressure on us. This is an internal matter. We are not going to discuss the subject with you'". Anatoly Dobrynin, Soviet Ambassador to the USA (CNN Cold War Episode 19: "Freeze" 1998) At the signing of the Helsinki Accords, the Soviet Stalinists took a very weak position when continuously being addressed about "human rights abuses" in Eastern Europe by merely brushing them off, thus giving the imperialists the upper hand. Once again, all that mattered to the Stalinists was what the imperialists thought.
As opposed to truly taking a Communist stance and throwing bloodshed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Korea, Vietnam, and U.S backed dictators in the Third World in the imperialists' faces and discrediting their "human rights" attacks, the Soviet bureaucrats backed down and allowed
Helsinki groups to be established. Peaceful co-existence was more important to these Stalinists than defending the Soviet Union. Now, their counter-revolutionaries within the Soviet sphere were (in theory) no longer right-wing extremists, terrorists, or ex-Nazis as was during
Eisenhower's "rollback" policy of Cold War I in the 1950s; but "human rights activists" and "peaceful nonviolent protesters" whom the capitalist media painted as the hippies of the Iron Curtain. The result couldn't have been better for the U.S imperialists. The hypocritical "human rights" slanders was Carter's "rollback" policy for Cold War II. The liberal "anti-war" crowd that protested the Vietnam War was now rallying behind
Jimmy Carter, echoing his anti-Communist "human rights" propaganda, and supporting his military build up against the USSR. After several years, the pro-imperialist Soviet dissidents' activities became a serious problem for the Soviet authorities. The Soviets then proceeded to arrest, imprison, and exile the counter-revolutionary dissidents. The other leaderships in the Soviet sphere followed suit crushing the growing counterrevolution in their countries. While there is no doubt that the Eastern European Stalinists smashed the pro-imperialist struggle for their own reasons; however their move did save the workers states from the imperialist-backed counter-revolution, it was nothing less than progressive.
Joan Baez and Susan Sontag were among such people making their peace with the U.S rulers under Carter. Joan Baez, the Chicana folk singer and strong "radical" opponent of the Vietnam War began making her amends with the U.S imperialists as early as 1972 during Nixon's
Christmas bombing of Vietnam. For eleven days non stop, this was the heaviest U.S bombing on North Vietnam during the war. She had joined a delegation to take mail to American POWs, and to report of "human rights abuses" in North Vietnam, the arrests and imprisonment of
American and South Vietnamese agents. During the late 1970s Joan Baez attacked the Vietnamese Stalinist regime for creating a "nightmare" in
Vietnam resulting in the "boat people" fleeing without ever taking into account the affects of over a decade of U.S bombing as the responsibility. While there is no doubt that Stalinist misrule contributed to the "boat people" fleeing, but a decade long of facing heavy bombing and invasion by the most powerful imperialist military in the world: the USA; undoubtfully contributed to economic hardships. As
Carter/Brzezinski proceeded with their "human rights" imperialist war drive against the Eastern bloc deformed workers states, Joan Baez, as well as many other "anti-war" activists were flocking to Jimmy Carter's imperialist policies. In her anti-Communist song "Happy Birthday, Leonid
Brezhnev", Joan Baez criticized the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev for crushing a "budding democracy", refering to the Moscow Helsinki Group's dissolution after its members had been imprisoned. In that same song, she criticized Gen. Jaruzelski for the crackdown on Solidarnosc, and absurdly compared him to the pro-U.S Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet. In that same song, she hailed Lech Walesa, the leader of
Solidarnosc, and CIA stooge. Susan Sontag had also gone to Vietnam at the same time as Joan Baez also denounced the Vietnamese workers state for "human rights abuses". In February of 1982 Sontag famously and grossly proclaimed "Communism in in itself a variant, the most successful variant, of Fascism. Fascism with a human face", after the supression of Solidarnosc the previous year. Many such "anti-war" liberals would echo such calls. With both the United States and the Soviet Union continuing to build nuclear weapons, Carter now had the USSR politically isolated in his "human rights" crusade. Carter/Brzezinski now sought to weaken the Soviets' nuclear capabilites with his new treaty
SALT II (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks). The Kremlin Stalinists led by Leonid Brezhnev, eager to further improve their image to the imperialists, would sign this treaty agreeing not to arm their missiles, and restricted further new programs and major reductions to their current programs.
By doing this the Soviet Stalinists were jeoparizing the defense of the Soviet Union, as they have been doing for decades; placing trust in the imperialists who wanted nothing more than to see every workers state on the planet perish in a bloody counter-revolution. SALT II was signed on 18 June 1979. But six months later, the Soviets intervened in Afghanistan at the request of the new people's government against imperialistbacked mullahs. Defending the emanciptation of Afghan women, and the social programs of the Saur Revolution the Soviet bureaucracy finally would truly take up a Red cause and course of action against the woman-hating Mujahideen butchers armed by the U.S imperialists (See my page Afghanistan: In Defense of Soviet Military Action). Carter's response was ending Detente, and restricting American athletes from particpating in the Olympic games to be held in Moscow in 1980, and initiating a grain embargo against the USSR. Cooking up lies about "Soviet expansionism", he got many to believe that the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan was paving the way for a Soviet takeover of the Persian Gulf's oil supplies. Truly ridiculous, but Carter and Brzezinski really believed it. From that point, Carter threatened the Soviet Union with a third world war by pointing nuclear weapons at the Soviets with a first strike intention, while still maintaining his "human rights" war drive. And just as when he launched his "human rights" anti-Communist crusade, Carter had the support of the "anti-war" liberals. While the conservatives supported Carter's anti-Soviet war drive, they felt Carter was too soft what with making the treaties with the USSR. With the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, Khomeini's Islamic Revolution in Iran causing massive oil shortages in the USA, Reagan would succeed Carter and continue his anti-Soviet war drive, but on a more extreme scale until the end of the Cold War. Carter's "Human Rights" Imperialist Hypocrisy Jimmy Carter's presidency has become a cherished era in the eyes of the liberals. His policies are seen as equal to or at least similar to those of Robert F.
Kennedy or Eugene McCarthy, which is so. These liberal imperialists sought and eventually succeeded through future politicians to present the U.S ruling class as the ultimate defender of civil and human rights , thus winning back all those disillusioned with U.S imperialism due to the U.S war against Vietnam by

implementing the phraseology of the Civil Rights movement. These liberal politicans are or were all members of the bloody Democratic Party. The same party the ruthlessly dropped 2 atomic bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
, Japan after it was defeated at the end of World War II. The same party that mobilized American chauvinism and anti-Japanese racism as a motivation for the interimperialist war in the Pacific; and locked up hundreds of thousands of Japanese-
Americans and immigrants in concentration camps for their internal race war. It was the Democratic Party that led the the United States at the head of a U.N imperialist bloody conquest in Korea that resulted in the deaths of 3 million Koreans. The U.S bloodbath in Vietnam, Laos, and
Cambodia; the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, the starvation of Iraq for over a decade, the rape of Somalia, and the bombing of Yugoslavia back into the stone age was all the handiwork of the Democratic Party, which now portrays itself as the ultimate champion for "human rights". Yet very few liberals acknowledged this before supporting rallying to Jimmy Carter's anti-Soviet war drive.
Behind his "human rights" facade
, Jimmy
Carter behaved no different than any other U.S president
. Specifically, he continued to give aid to extreme right-wing Third World dictatorships
in his anti-Communist crusade. Carter had given support to the
Anastasio Somoza's dictatorship in Nicaragua, contributed to the founding of the Contra terrorists, and provided a safe transport for Somoza to leave Nicaragua in 1979. In El Salvador, despite the constant reports of atrocities committed by the death squad regime of Maj. Roberto
"Blowtorch Bob" D'Aubuisson, Jimmy Carter continued to provide guns and money to the death squads. The Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar
Romero, a Catholic priest who denounced the atrocities of the death squad regime was assassinated on 24 March 1980 by the CIA. For his stance against the death squads, Romero had no support from the Vatican, much less Carter. In the case of the white supremacist Apartheid regime of South Africa, the U.N implemented a phony embargo apparently due to the racist policies. Carter would use this for his "human rights" image. The reality was that it was not in the interests of the U.S government, nor their U.N cronies to supress the strongest anti-
Communist force in Africa. Arms and shipments continued under Carter. During Carter's presidency, he declared unconditional support for
the dictatorship of the Shah Mohammad
Reza Pahlavi
, who was installed against the wishes of the Iranian people by the
USA, and overthrown in 1979. Carter also secretly supported Pol Pot's murderous regime in Cambodia
after he had declared himself against Vietnam and the Soviet Union. Carter had also continued giving aid to the Indonesian dictatorship of Gen. Mohamed Suharto, after
the brutal invasion of East Timor in 1975 and the policies of ethnic cleansing
that
Suharto's cutthroats implemented. There was also the
Mujahideen butchers in Afghanistan
(who hated women and looked at them as merely property) would receive U.S aid from Carter for their terrorism against the social gains of the left-wing government
, and the Soviet intervention. Obviously defending America's interests was more important for the Carter administration than human rights. It is just a code term to keep U.S imperialism in business as they seek to control the resources of the world.
"Human Rights" attacks on the remaining workers states
From 1989 to 1992 as a result of decades of Stalinist mismanagement, and capitulation the Soviet Union and the deformed workers states in Eastern Europe and throughout the world fell to capitalist counter-revolution. This was a moment that represented a defeat for the working class and victory for the ruling class. Extreme proverty followed, and in many cases bloody civil wars under the new capitalist regimes.
Four workers states managed to survive the bloody counter-revolution: China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba. The imperialists' desire to overturn these revolutions has not the least been relaxed, but emboldened it.
The U.S imperialists have two main tactics in restoring their hegemony
in these deformed workers states.
The first is
military threat directed against
China,
Cuba
, and North Korea. Vietnam has been singled out, as they had already repelled a U.S invasion. However, internal counter-revolutionaries receive support from the U.S imperialists.
The second tactic: mobilizing the internal "human rights" counterrevolutionaries to struggle for capitalist restoration.
All forces of internal counter-revolution must be smashed at all costs, and imperialism defeated. As the world has grown more idealistic, the imperialists will use the "human rights" argument as a means to extend their colonial slavery of others.
CUBA
, a workers state under the nose of the U.S imperialists has thwarted all attempts by the
U.S rulers to overturn the Cuban Revolution
(See my page Washington's "Humanists" Target Cuba for more information).
Currently,
Cuba is constantly being lashed at not only by the U.S rulers, but
also self proclaimed "human rights" groups
like Amnesty International or Reporters Without Borders who continue to call for a "peaceful transition to democracy"
backed by the USA and U.N, i.e counter-revolution
from within by pro-imperialist activists
like the
Varela Project of Oswaldo Paya. It must be also noted that Fidel Castro also shares the blame in the emergence of counter-revolutionaries in
Cuba. Running the Cuban deformed workers state along Stalinist lines, social inequality has made an appearance as well as opening the doors to imperialist penetration. On 1 September 1977, the U.S Interests Section in
Havana opened when Castro decided to pursue normal relations with the U.S imperialists now under
Jimmy Carter with his "human rights" policy, in exchange for a Cuban Interest Section in the USA. The
U.S interests section had then been the connection between the U.S government and internal counter-revolutionaries.
In 2003, James Cason was head of the U.S Interests Section in Havana and was funding and hosting the proimperialist Varela Project, an action which led the mass arrests of these activists for counter-revolution by the Cuban authorities. This was a

necessary crackdown to supress those working for capitalist restoration. On 13 May 2002, Castro even hosted Jimmy Carter in Cuba, greeting him with a performance of the star spangled manner by the Cuban military band. Carter was even allowed to meet with Varela Project, emboldening their drive for counter-revolution, and was given a spot on Cuban TV and radio to spread his "human rights" rhetoric imperialist propaganda. In 1998 Castro welcomed the visit by the reactionary Pope John Paul II to Cuba.
The pope condemned Castro for his
"human rights abuses" and called for greater privileges to the catholic church in Cuba. Castro has hosted two reactionaries who wanted nothing more than to see the world eradicated of any traces of
Communism
, and supported the most extreme insurgents and regimes that burtally supressed Communists, leftists, and trade unionists.
Castro is not without guilt of the imperialist Trojan Horse existing within Cuba.

Peter
Philosophy @ San Diego State University, 20
, http://ghansel.free.fr/atterton.html
The task of "rediscovering" the uniqueness of the Other is reserved for philosophy. This is not merely one area of philosophical inquiry among others, e.g., epistemology, logic, and aesthetics. Rather, it changes the very meaning of philosophy insofar as it transforms the thinker's vocation from the search for truth to the search for a better justice. In Otherwise Than Being, Levinas writes: Philosophy serves justice by thematizing the difference and reducing the thematized to difference. It brings equity into the abnegation of the one for the other, justice into responsibility. (AE 210; OB 165) This "reduction" of philosophy by philosophy constitutes an "an incessant unsaying [dédire] of the said [le dit]" (AE 228; OB
181) or an "endless critique" (AE 57; OB 144) of its own ontological language, which is incapable of saying the identity of the Other without distortion and violence, and which thus remains to be "unsaid" or retracted in turn if the difference (or what Levinas in Totality and Infinity called "separation" [e.g., TeI
75; TI 102]) between me and the Other is to be maintained. In the concrete, this amounts to the
continual reexamination, revision, and amendment of existing governmental policies, political and judicial procedures, laws, statutes, and institutions conforming to the liberal State. While Levinas confesses to a Platonic or "a utopian moment" in his thinking here, one that is governed by ideal of a polis that "holds justice as the absolutely desirable end and hence as a perfection" (PM 177), he also considers it obvious that "a liberal state is more moral than a fascist state, and closer to the morally ideal state" (PM 178) inasmuch as it is presided over by "the consciousness that the justice on which the
State is founded is, at this moment, still an imperfect justice" (QV 118; IR 68). The liberal State is thus
said to have within it "an institution that is not of the State" (QV 119; IR 68). Such is the surplus of ethics qua charity that founds the just State and counteracts its tendency to become Stalinist or totalitarian. Levinas asserts: in the State where laws function in their generality, where verdicts are pronounced out of a concern for universality, once justice is said there is still, for the person as unique and responsible one, the possibility of or appeal to something that will reconsider the rigor of this always rigorous justice. To soften this justice, to listen to the personal appeal, is each person's role. It is in that sense that one has to speak of a return to charity and mercy. Charity is a Christian term, but it is also a general biblical term: the word hesed signifies precisely charity or mercy. (QV 119; IR 68-9) Having judged the face justly according to universal laws it is necessary once again to place oneself under the judgment of the face so as to soften this justice, lessening its severity. Needless to say, charity here does not simply cancel or annul the justice it "arouses." It follows justice, which becomes perverted without it. If the most just procedure is that which is concerned to correct its own injustices and blind spots, then the most just procedure is that which accommodates charity. Levinas gives the abolition of the death penalty as a fine example of the "coexistence of charity with justice" in (QV 97; IR 51). This is not simply because la peine de mort clearly destroys the condition for the possibility of charity after justice, but also because the abolition is an obvious instance where the face and the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" is respected. Nevertheless, it is the death penalty, i.e., killing as retribution and punishment, that "no longer belongs to justice" (AP 58), according to Levinas. As Cicero says: "When weapons reduce laws to silence, they no longer expect one to await their pronouncements. For people who decide to wait for these will have to wait for justice, too—and meanwhile they much suffer injustice first." Killing is permissible only when there is no other way to protect the lives of innocents. Charity becomes an

option only when lives are no longer at risk and the initial danger has been averted. In Shakespeare's words: "The quality of mercy is not strained" (The Merchant of Venice 4.1.183).
Steven
, in Who, Exactly, is the Other?,
20
, p. 67-68
Is an ethical community possible? How can it be conceived? The very idea of an ethical community is possible only if we move from the representation of the theatrical presence of the different members of society to the non-representable nature of the pre-ontological and primordial face-toface encounter as a model for the inter-subjective relationship. For Levinas, the reality of this encounter with the infinite and with transcendence is the only possible foundation of an ethical community. Levinas here recalls the biblical prohibition against images and idolatry.' In the face of the other, the subject experiences a transcendence of the ego that imposes on that subject a gratuitous and non-transferable responsibility for the other. This notion of responsibility based on the transcendence of the ego, made possible in the face-to-face encounter with the other, is what separates Levinas's idea of ethical community from different ideas of community conceived in contemporary philosophy. I am thinking here of George Bataille's idea of a community of death and of Jean-Luc Nancy's notion of an inoperative community. For Jean-Luc Nancy, If the community is revealed by the death of the other person, it is because death is itself the true community of mortal beings: their impossible community. The community therefore occupies the following singular space: it takes upon itself the impossibility of its own immanence, the impossibility of a communitarian being as subject. In a way the community takes upon itself and inscribes in itself the impossibility of the community.... A community is the presentation to its members of their mortal truth.... It is the presentation of finitude and of excess without possibility of return that founds the finite-being ... " This idea of community is not political and representational because, as with
Levinas's idea of community, it puts at the basis of human society something non-representable, namely death. Jean-Luc Nancy links this idea of death as the only possible basis for community to what he calls unworking, because the community of the dead resists the work of totaliza tion, which is the work that communities have traditionally undertaken. Bataille's and Nancy's ethical concerns stop here, in pointing out the need for a community without essence, a community born out of an exposure to human finitude, a community that consists precisely of the sharing of finite existence.
Peter
in the French Department at
, translator of Badiou’s works,
20
, Badiou: A Subject to Truth, p. 228-29
The OP is conditioned by four distinctive principles: the first two are essentially formal, concerning the nature of politics as prescription and as justice; the other two are more emphatically concrete, concerning the subjective status of workers and immigrants under conditions that have become increasingly hostile since the late 1970s. 1.The status of universal political principles, like the status of all forms of truth, is necessarily axiomatic (or nondefinitional). Because equality is subjective, justice—the political principle par excellence—can be only prescriptive. Justice cannot be defined; it is a pure
“affirmation without guarantee or proof.” Rather than an ideal state that any given situation can only approximate, “justice indicates a subjective figure that is effective, axiomatic, immediate [...; it]

necessarily refers back to an entirely disinterested subjectivity.” We are either subjectively disinterested, or objectively interested, with nothing in between; we either think (in justice), or avoid thought (in interest) (AM, 112—13). That politics is thus axiomatic or “thought” means that it is not a representation or a reflection of something else (the economy, the state, society, etc.)

20 When the enslaved call for freedom, for instance, or the colonized for liberation, or women for equality, the declaration of freedom or liberation or equality is itself primary or unconditioned, and not a matter of investigation or confirmation. Equality is not something to be researched or verified but a principle to be upheld. The only genuinely political question is What can be done, in the name of this principle, in our militant fidelity to its proclamation? This question can be answered only through a direct mobilization or empowerment that has nothing to do with the condescendingly “compassionate” valorization of certain people as marginal, excluded, or mis~rables.21 The prescriptions of the OP are invariably simple, minimally theoretical principles—for example, that every individual counts as one individual, that all students must be treated in the same way,22 that “everyone who is here is from here~’ that factories are places of work before they are places of profit, and so on. A political situation exists only under the prescription of such transparent statements, whose universality is as clear as it is distinct.23 Pressure, resistance, or outrage, even mobilized or organized outrage, is not enough. The OP is adamant that only political organizations, not movements, can sustain prescriptions (which may then be presented or carried by movements)

24 In this respect, the OP remains true to its Leninist roots: the formulation of a true consciousness is a quite separate operation from the spontaneous development of a movement.
25
2.All genuine politics seeks to change the situation as a whole, in the interest of the universal interest.
But this change is always sparked by a particular event, one located in a particular site and carried by a particular interest (the sans-culottes, the soviets, the workers, the sans-papiers, and so on). 1792 in
France, 1917 in Russia, 1959 in Cuba, 1988 in Burma: each time, the event opposes those with a vested interest in the established state of the situation to those who supported a revolutionary movement or perspective from which the situation was seen as for all. Other, more narrow, principles and demands, however worthy their beneficiaries might be, are merely a matter of syndicalism or trade union—style negotiation, that is, negotiation for an improved, more integrated place within the established situation.
Clearly, what goes under the label of politics in the ordinary day-to-day sense amounts only to
“revendication and resentment..., electoral nihilism and the blind confrontation of communities” (AM,
110).

Emmanuel LEVINAS, Face to Face with Levinas, 1986, p. 23-24
The approach to the face is the most basic mode of responsibility. As such, the face of the other is verticality and uprightness; it spells a relation of rectitude. The face is not in front of me (en face de
moi) but above me; it is the other before death, looking through and exposing death. Secondly, the face is the other who asks me not to let him die alone, as if to do so were to become an accomplice in his death. Thus the face says to me: you shall not kill. In the relation to the face I am exposed as a usurper of the place of the other. The celebrated ‘right to existence’ that Spinoza called the conatus
essendi and defined as the basic principle of all intelligibility is challenged by the relation to the face.
Accordingly, my duty to respond to the other suspends my natural right to self-survival, le droit aitale.
My ethical relation of love for the other stems from the fact that the self cannot survive by itself alone, cannot find meaning within its own being-in-the-world, within the ontology of sameness. That is why I prefaced Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence with Pascal's phrase, "'That is my place in the
sun: That is how the usurpation of the whole world began." Pascal makes the same point when he declares that "the self is hateful." Pascal's ethical sentiments here go against the ontological privileging of ‘the right to exist.’ To expose myself to the vulnerability of the face is to put my ontological right to existence into question. In ethics, the other's right to exist has primacy over my own, a primacy epitomized in the ethical edict: you shall not kill, you shall not jeopardize the life of the other. The ethical rapport with the face is asymmetrical in that it subordinates my existence to the other. This principle recurs in Darwinian biology as the "survival of the fittest" and in psychoanalysis as the natural instinct of the ‘id’ for gratification, possession, and power - the libido dominandi

Lucas
@
University, “Justice, Ethics, and Piracy,” 2005, p. 4 http://www.le.ac.uk/ulmc/cppe/levinas/papers/introna.pdf
For Levinas, ethics is happens—or not—when the self-certain ego becomes disturbed (shaken, questioned) by the proximity, before me, of the absolute Other, the absolute singular (the Infinite). The wholly Other that takes me by surprise, overturns and overflows my categories, themes and concepts; it shatters their walls, makes their evident sense explode into non-sense. For Levinas the claim of conventional ethics (Ethics with a big ‘E’ as Caputo calls it) that we can know, the right thing to do, is to claim that the absolute singular can become absorbed into, domesticated by, the categories of my consciousness. Once the Other, this singular face before me, has become an instance in my categories or themes it (the face) can no longer disturb the self-evidentness of those categories. Nothing is more selfevident than my categories, and likewise with the singular now absorbed as an instance of them. As jew, nigger, rich, poor, homeless, rapist, criminal, capitalist, idealist, realist, (and every other category we care to name) the singular disturbing face disappear in the economy of the category. In the category, we can reason about rights, obligations, laws and principles, and yet ethics may never happen—actual faces starve, die, are humiliated, scorned as they circulate in the economy of our categories. They fall through the cracks of our debates, arguments and counter-arguments, and yet we feel justified—we have our reasons; it was the right thing to do after all.
—Michael, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Difficult Freedom: Levinas,
Language, and Politics, Diacritics http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/4621042?uid=3739256&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21102552429107
The difficulty is that Levinas's ethics, like the doctor's encounter with the sick patient, takes place one individual and one situation at a time. But "[i]n the real world there are many others" ["Ideology and
Idealism" 247]. If we think of politics in its classical formulation as the art of statecraft, then the radically individual nature of ethics on Levinas's terms seems to require an intermediate step between
it and an the formulation of consensus or the development of policy. If we think of politics in a more contemporary sense—the development of a communitarian or national identity that can be deployed so that benefits may be accrued to its members—then Levinas's principle of nonidentity (the idea that the pronominal "I" cannot name or substitute for the subject) seems to rule that sense of politics out of court as well. But as with his approach toward language and ethics, Levinas's politics works against the orthodoxies of the classical (and even modern) tradition. As Derrida puts it in Adieu, it "require[s] us to think law and politics otherwise" [20–21]. Derrida goes so far as to suggest that there is a "hiatus" between ethics and politics in Levinas's work, which may well be true. But it's precisely that hiatus—the idea of a rupture or aporia between that which can be known and that which compels us to know it—
that lies at the heart of Levinas's political thought. One of Levinas's principal notions in Totality and
Infinity is that of hospitality or of welcoming, a notion that is closely connected to the idea of proximity and approach in Otherwise than Being. Playing on the double meaning of the French hôte as both "host"

and "guest," Levinas's implication is that when an individual engages another in discourse—at the ethical moment—[they act] he acts at once as host and as guest. Derrida glosses the term's double meaning this way: apropos Rosenzweig, there is a divine law "that would make of the inhabitant a guest
[hôte] received in his own home, that would make of the owner a tenant, of the welcoming host [hôte] a welcomed guest [hôte]" [42]. The displacement involved here is not just a conceptual or epistemological one; it's also, potentially, a physical one. When the individual engages the other, she resides in a kind of no-man's-land, in which she is both at home and in exile, neither completely apart from, nor completely a part of, the community or the location from which she speaks. [End Page 66] Derrida goes even further—the host is a not only a host or a guest; the host [hôte] is also a hostage [ostage]. He writes in
Adieu, paraphrasing Otherwise than Being [111–12] that the host is a hostage insofar as he is a subject put into question, obsessed (and thus besieged), persecuted, in the very place where he takes place, where, as emigrant, exile, stranger, a guest from the very beginning, he finds himself elected to or taken
up by a residence before himself electing or taking one up. [56] In ethical terms, the individual is
vulnerable because she is troubled by the presence of that other. She is, in this sense, the other's hostage, forced to put herself in the other's place with no way to know whether her (charitable) act will be returned in kind. In political terms, the subject is noncoincident both with herself and with the location of her utterance: there is no place that she can comfortably call home, or domicile, or community, or nation. Though she may speak from a location that is home, or domicile, or nation, her relation to that place is, like her relation with the other, "thrown out of phase with itself": it isn't
"natural," a point of origin from which everything else may be easily understood. The state, not unlike biblical cities of refuge, should be seen as places for the exile—the individual "put into question"—to find respite; in that respite, the individual becomes committed (or, in the case of the refugee, recommitted) to the possibility that what sent him[THEM] into exile—what is beyond being, beyond the utterance—might be redeemed [see Levinas, Beyond the Verse 38–47]. THIRD PARTY What allows ethics to become politics is what Levinas calls "the third." While the subject's relation to the other is always fraught and always tenuous, what raises the stakes is the presence of a third party to whom both the speaker and the other are also responsible. The third—"the neighbor and the one far off" [Isaiah 57:
19]—introduces the notion of justice. "The third introduces a contradiction in the saying. [. . .] A question of conscience, consciousness. Justice is necessary, that is, comparison, coexistence, contemporaneousness, assembling" [OTB 157]. Individuals must be responsible not only for one another but also for those they cannot see. This is different from the Kantian categorical imperative, whereby one must assume that his actions would be determinative of the law for everyone else. Instead,
Levinas's third acts as a witness: anything I might do or say will be seen, even only potentially, by the third, and forces me to compare my individual, unique act with other acts, other utterances, that might be carried out by someone I do not know. It forces, in Levinas's terms, "a weighing, a thinking, a calculation, the comparison of incomparables, and consequently, the neutrality—presence or representation—of being" ["Peace and Proximity" 168]. And yet it is justice, ironically, that potentially corrupts ethics—the ethics in which the other's response might be violent and in which the speaker's utterance itself may require a certain traumatic undoing (denucleation) of the self—but makes politics possible. It is this comparison of incomparables that allows the ethical actor to think the radical individuality of his act as something other than solitary or unique, despite (oddly) its uniqueness. While saying and acting make evident an aspect of being that is beyond language and beyond action, the act and the utterance are made in the context of "the calculations, knowledge, science, and consciousness that nonetheless condition it" [Adieu 116]. Acting in the context of justice gives a "content" to what we do—meanings can be assigned to it by our neighbors in spite of whatever meaning or meaninglessness we ourselves assign—though that content must always be acted upon in its turn
ethically. For Levinas, ethics and politics occur in the same act; one acts ethically, politics comes after
("whether in logical consequence or chronological sequence" [Adieu 83]): one acts toward one

individual at a time, knowing—given the presence of the third, the neighbor—that that act [End Page
67] takes place in a community of other individuals who we can't see at the moment but on whom our action may have a palpable effect. Levinas at times talks about the possibility that the political process invented in Israel might bring peace. Of these instances Derrida asks whether "this political invention in
Israel ever [will] come to pass" and then goes on to say that "this is perhaps not the place to pose this question, certainly not to answer it" [Adieu 81]. But Levinas has in fact answered the question himself, for he sees in Israel—struggling with its Jewish identity and its identity as a city of refuge of sorts— something like a testing ground for the ethics/politics he lays out in the philosophical works. Perhaps the first and most important influence on Levinas's political and philosophical texts is a pair of events that neither he nor political philosophy in general can ignore: the destruction of the Jewish communities of
Europe in the Final Solution, and the war of 1947–48 that led to the creation of the state of Israel. As he says in the afterword or "signature" to Difficult Freedom, his biography "is dominated by the presentiment and the memory of the Nazi horror" [291]. Levinas actively works against a notion of politics in which the name of the individual is subsumed—and in the case of the Final Solution, eliminated—by the name of the universal. The name—the "we" of nation, or community, or race— produces the sense of an origin, and what doesn't originate from it is a surplus that must be consumed.
Levinas works from the opposite assumption: all action produces a surplus; the danger to it is a politics that reduces it to a repetition of the same. In the philosophical texts, Levinas is alert to a politics "for
itself": justice is necessary because (to paraphrase Simon Critchley) its relation to the one-to-one, face-
to-face continually interrupts the tendency toward totalitarianism [see Critchley 223]; the metaphysical relation of the I to the Other moves into the form of the We, aspires to a State,
institutions, laws, which are the source of universality. [P]olitics left to itself bears a tyranny within itself; it deforms the I and the other who have given rise to it, for it judges them according to universal
rules, and thus as in absentia. [TI 300; emphasis added] The difference between the ethical that aspires to the law and the ethical that becomes the law—the metaphysical relation—is the difference between a politics that acknowledges a place for the guest and the host, and one that sees the exile, the Other, as a corrupt instance of the same and thus in need of elimination.

(Michèle, MD, Professor of Medicine and Tropical Diseases, Senior Associate Dean for Global Health, Stanford School of
Medicine, Director of the Center for Innovation in Global Health and Stanford Health Policy Associate, “Effect of the U.S. Embargo and
Economic Decline on Health in Cuba,” Annals of Internal Medicine, Vol. 132, No. 2, From the Yale School Medicine, 1-18-00, http://www.hawaii.edu/hivandaids/Effect_of_the_U.S._Embargo_and_Economic_Decline_on_Health_in_Cuba.pdf)
The U.S. embargo against Cuba
, one of the few that includes both food and medicine, has been described as a war against public health with high human costs
(10). Although the Cuban government’s curtailment of individual liberties and privacy may be seen as an abridgment of personal freedom, we as health care professionals have a moral duty to protest an embargo that engenders human suffering to achieve political objectives. Medicine, food, and water purification materials should be made available or, preferably, should be exempt from sanctions. Official monitoring of the effects of economic sanctions on civilian populations should become a high priority.

—Richard, University of North Carolina, “Political Monotheism” Levinas on Politics, Ethics, and Religion http://www.scribd.com/doc/148941413/Richard-Cohen-2003-Political-Monotheism-Levinas-on-politicsethics-and-religion-pdf
Because there are many ends of human life, there are many forms of utopian politics. Underlying differences regarding means (revolution, evolution) or chronological self-interpretations (progressive, regressive), are the more fundamental differences regarding the supra-political goals or ends toward which such politics aims. One can differentiate and classify these ends in a variety of ways, according to a variety of different schemata. For our purposes, however, I will first distinguish between politics aiming for justice and politics aiming for what I call mundane ends.
The one sort, justice politics, pursues ends that are moral, aiming for the good. The other sort, mundane politics, pursues pragmatic ends, such as secure private property, reliable commercial relations, safety from crime or war, and the like, ends that are not directly moral themselves. Such ends, however, are very often presented in moral terms
as if they were the pre- eminent moral ends. And it is in fact no easy matter, and there are no simple or hard and fast rules for distinguishing moral ends from moral means in this regard. What we can say is that the politics of Levinas is a justice utopian politics. The goal of politics, as Levinas says in too many places to require citation, is justice. While we cannot rest with this broad claim, and we must and will provide further specification of what Levinas means by “justice,” there can be no ambiguity whatsoever that for Levinas justice is the primary and highest goal of politics. 8 But we must also be clear from the start that the utopian politics of justice includes the pragmatic goals that rule mundane utopian politics, though obviously they are included as subordinate ends, subordinate to justice.
Pragmatic concerns for economic prosperity, national security, minimum standards of living, scientific and technical progress, coordinated systems of transportation and communication, educational opportunities, health care and ecological standards, for instance, are included in and are regulated according to the values of justice. Without including these real and basic concerns as integral parts of its own interest, justice would be an empty word, mere rhetoric. Still, we must not forget that the satisfaction of such needs, however real and basic, is not by itself equivalent to justice. While we must all, minimally, eat to live, we do not, as the saying goes, live to eat. One dies from lack of bread, to be sure, but one also dies for the justice that would make bread available to the starving, or that would eliminate starvation from the earth.
The distinction between mundane and justice politics, difficult to make in practice, is nevertheless important to make because the language of all utopian politics, in contrast to the usurpation of 8 such language by Machiavellian politics, must essentially utilize the language of morality and justice. All partisans will call the
“beyond” of their brand of utopian politics “justice.” It is intuitively clear, I think, that
such political goals as security against crime and war, or universal health care, or full employment, while certainly worthy aims, cannot by themselves be the sole or even the primary aims of a just government. This is a point that Aldous Huxley, in Brave
New World, has made quite clear regarding the twin goals of full employment and a pleasurable life.
Perhaps an even clearer example can be taken from the so-called “Green” parties. While environmental protection and ecological responsibility are certainly valuable and worthy goals, I think few people would be prepared to say that by themselves they constitute all that is meant by the struggle for political justice. Rather, such mundane interests, each with its own relative legitimacy, must be subordinated to and coordinated by a politics aiming at justice. For Levinas the primary aim of politics, and the more specific meaning of justice - including its necessary concerns regarding work, pleasure, knowledge, health, security, the environment, etc. - lies in its service to the moral improvement of
each individual as a social being. That is to say, quite simply, politics must be regulated according to justice but justice must serve morality. Humanity, or what Levinas calls “the humanity of the human,” is determined neither by the state, in contrast to a “state of nature” which would be essentially brutal and violent, nor by a state of nature, in contrast to the state which would be essentially brutal and violent.
Rather and foremost, moral character – individual and social at once – determines the humanity or
the morality of the human. Clearly, then, what Levinas is defending, namely, a state regulated by justice, and justice guided by morality, and morality understood as that of independent individuals in social relation, is what has been known in modern political theory as liberal politics, “liberal” in the
classic sense first articulated by John Locke. Contrary to the totalitarian politics of a Spinoza or a Hegel, the state, though regulated by justice does not establish what is just or what is good. Rather, the state

institutionalizes and promotes justice to the extent that it ensures and promotes the moral independence of individuals in their social relations. “The capacity to guarantee … that
independence,” Levinas writes, “defines the liberal state and describes the modality according to which the conjunction of politics and ethics is intrinsically possible.” One must never lose sight of this vision of the liberal state when attempting to understand Levinas’s conception of the proper relation between politics and ethics. The justice utopian politics of the liberal state is neither self-serving nor does it mistake mundane values for the justice that ensures individuals a moral life in their social relations, however mundane those social relations may be. The utopian politics of the liberal state defended by Levinas aims beyond the state toward, and is guided by, a justice that is itself subordinate to, and ultimately derived from, the moral life of its citizens. The liberal state is that noble effort that at once uses power and regulates power according to the strictures of justice. It must be said, too, that the fact that Levinas supports the liberal state cannot be psychologized as a personal reaction to the terrible harm that he personally suffered at the hands of totalitarian and fascist states, though no doubt these very real experiences contributed powerfully to his convictions. Rather and more profoundly, his vision is based in the positivity of his ethical metaphysics and the deeply religious life that is consistent
–at least for Levinas and his co-religionists - with those ethics.

Alasdair
University, After Virtue, 19
, p. 68
I take it then that both the utilitarianism of the middle and late nineteenth century and the analytical moral philosophy of the middle and late twentieth century are alike unsuccessful attempts to rescue the autonomous moral agent from the predicament in which the failure of the Enlightenment project of providing him with a secular, rational justification for his moral allegiances had left him. I have already characterized that predicament as one in which the price paid for liberation from what appeared to be the external authority of traditional morality was the loss of any authoritative content from the would-be moral utterances of the newly autonomous agent. Each moral agent now spoke unconstrained by the externalities of divine law, natural teleology or hierarchical authority; but why should anyone else now listen to him? It was and is to this question that both utilitarianism and analytical moral philosophy must be understood as attempting to give cogent answers; and if my argument is correct, it is precisely this question which both fail to answer cogently. Nonetheless almost everyone, philosopher and non-philosopher alike, continues to speak and write as if one of these projects had succeeded. And hence derives one of the features of contemporary moral discourse which I noticed at the outset, the gap between the meaning of moral expressions and the ways in which they are put to use. For the meaning is and remains such as would have been warranted only if at least one of the philosophical projects had been successful; but the use, the emotivist use, is precisely what one would expect if the philosophical projects had all failed.
Contemporary moral experience as a consequence has a paradoxical character. For each of us is taught to see himself or herself as an autonomous moral agent; but each of us also becomes engaged by modes of practice, aesthetic or bureaucratic, which involve us in manipulative relationships with others. Seeking to protect the autonomy that we have learned to prize, we aspire ourselves not to be manipulated by others; seeking to incarnate our own principles and stand-point in the world of practice, we find no way open to us to do so except by directing towards others those very manipulative modes of relationship which each of us aspires to resist in our own case. The incoherence of our attitudes and our experience arises from the incoherent conceptual scheme which we have inherited.
(H.J., Philosopher published over 20 articles in philosophy journals, “Utilitarianism: Two
Difficulties,” Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, Vol. 24, No. 1,
Jan 1973, pp. 62-63, JStor)
It would seem that two major objections to utilitarianism are
presently being overlooked or ignored
.
The one relates to the principle ‘Ought implies can’, and the other to the duty to respect persons as persons.
Act utilitarianism in all its forms stresses the importance of consequences as crucial to the morality of an action. The right action, the action we ought to perform, is that which will maximise good (pleasure, or happiness).
If the utilitarian takes Moore’s view that an act is right
(obligatory) only if
it in fact produces the greatest good
possible then he is committed to the view that there may be right, obligatory actions which we cannot know to be such
. For instance a man may be acting in a benevolent way taking orphans to a picnic at the beach, and be involved in a serious accident due to a reckless, drunken driver in another car.
He ought, on utilitarian theory, to have acted in some other way, yet he could not know in advance what was the right act.
This difficulty

is even more serious if the utilitarian adopts Mill’s view
of the obligatory (and right) act, namely that it is that which if not performed deserved the infliction of punishment.
(See Chapter 5 of Utilitarianism).
Knowledge is a precondition of oblìgation
, and of freedom. Indeed, knowledge is part of freedom, and ignorance involves a lack of freedom. We are not truly free to do the right or obligatory act if we cannot in advance know what is the right act. ‘Ought implies can’, and ‘Can’ implies ‘Can know’. This truth is recognized in the Thomist and most subsequent claims that for law to be binding it must be promulgated, i.e. knowable.
This is most evidently true of the moral law. Yet if utilitarianism is to remain the success theory, that it is actual consequences that count, then it is committed to the view that we may be subject to obligations of which it is impossible for us to be aware.
If
, on the other hand, it is argued that utilitarianism involves the view
adopted by Mill in the essay Bentham, that what make an act right and obligatory are the foreseeable and not actual consequences
, utilitarianism becomes a theory commending good intentions
(combined even with bad motives) rather than good results. It by doing so moves towards the duty- for-duty’s sake ethic, yet in a strange way and without any apparent ground for accepting such an ethic being offered
. The second difficulty arises from the claims that pleasure is a good and pain an evil, whether they be animal or human pleasure or pain. As Mill put it in Utilitarianism, the principle
‘Each to count for one and none for more than one’ means for the utilitarian simply that equal amounts of pleasure must be counted equally.
Obviously ¡t is essential for any serious ethical theory that animal pain and pleasure, if there be animal pleasure, be counted in reaching moral decisions. Any ethic which disregarded animal suffering would be seriously incomplete. Yet this general claim involves the utilitarian in the contention that if we are faced with the choice of saving one human being from being burnt to death (he being old and arthritic and with limited prospect of pleasures and especially of higher pleasures and goods, his life’s interest being horse racing) or rescuing twenty horses, where the fire is one in stables and the man the caretaker and unable to free himself because of a fallen wall, and such that both he and the horses cannot be saved, the calculus would seem to dictate the saving of the horses. If it is claimed that the saving of twenty horses would not justify this, the example can be modified by increasing the number of horses. At some point, the utilitarian must agree that it is right and obligatory to save the horses and let the man die. I wish to argue here that this kind of approach to the situation would be morally inadequate and inappropriate.
To attempt to reach a moral decision here by estimating the balance of pleasures
, including in the calculus Mill’s higher pleasures, or even to estimate the balance of goods in general, is to ignore the over-riding relevant value, the value of persons as persons .
As Kant long ago pointed out, it is not morally reasonable to weigh the pleasure of animals (value) against the worth of a person as a person.
The utilitarian approach to such a situation is morally completely inadequate because of its rejection of the principle that persons should be respected as ends in themselves, as possessing worth.

First, in all of these thinkers we find a general critique of the pathological enterprise of thought that
glorifies and pursues totality, uniformity, unification, and systemization. This totalizing tendency has
caused the domination and marginalization of various types of incommensurability, multiplicity, conflict, and difference. This critique against the essentialist urge is raised by Levinas in its ethical
dimension as he describes the violence of reducing the other to the same, and by Sunstein and others who doubt the very ability of thought to achieve a comprehensive universal framework. From the
Platonic tradition philosophy seeks to "essentialize," to define, and to absolutize. Such idealist aspirations have been debunked epistemologically and ethically. Western philosophy obliterates and normalizes alterity, and these practices must be reformed in order to reduce the parallel forms of
political domination, renew ethics, and promote a more tolerant Democracy.

(Craig E., Ph.D. University of Denver, Professor of Leadership Studies at George Fox University,
Newberg, Oregon, “Ethical Perspectives,” Sage Publications, 10-25-06, http://www.sagepub.com/upmdata/12905_Chapter1.pdf)
Despite its popularity, Utilitarianism suffers from serious deficiencies . 2 Sometimes identifying
possible consequences can be difficult or impossible. Many different groups may be affected,
unforeseen consequences may develop, and so on. Even when consequences are clear, evaluating
their relative merits can be challenging. Being objective is difficult because we humans tend to
downplay long- term risks in favor of immediate rewards (see Box 1.1) and to favor ourselves when making decisions. Due to the difficulty of identifying and evaluating potential costs and benefits,
Utilitarian decision makers sometimes reach different conclusions when faced with the same
dilemma. States have opted to raise highway speeds but they don’t agree as to what the new limits
should be. Some state legislatures deter- mined that traveling at 65 miles per hour produces the greatest good; others decided that 70 or 75 miles per hour generates the most benefits.
[Latest Copyright] (Texas A&M University, “Moral Concepts and Theories,” Zachry Department of Civil
Engineering Ethics, http://ethics.tamu.edu/Portals/3/Essays/ethics.tamu.edu_ethics_essays_moral.pdf)
The utilitarian ideal is a persuasive one and has been very influential in individuality and public policy in America in the twentieth century. It is an essential perspective in engineering ethics, there technological decisions are often made in terms of cost-benefit or risk-benefit analysis.
These types of analysis are simply applications of utilitarianism. However, there are
two major drawbacks to the utilitarian perspective on morality.
First, implementation of the utilitarian perspective requires extensive knowledge of facts, and sometimes this knowledge is not available. This is especially evident in the case of cost/benefit and risk/benefit analysis.
In order to balance the cost or negative utility of an engineering project, such as the Aswan Dam in Egypt against the benefit or positive utility, we must be able to calculate the long-term effects of the project on all the numbers of the audience. This requires an enormous amount of knowledge, some of which we do not have
. Insofar as we do not know the long-term positive and negative consequences of an action or policy, we do not know how to evaluate it from a utilitarian perspective
. Sometimes utilitarians are reduced to a “best guess” approach, and this is obviously not
very satisfactory
. The second problem with utilitarianism is that it can lead to injustice to certain individuals.
A mining operation that is unsafe and leads to black lung disease for some of the miners may produce more utility than harm, from an overall standpoint, but it may be unjust to the miners themselves.
Maximizing utility at the expense of individuals produces serious ethical problems which utilitarian theory is not wellequipped to handle.
The next theory is more satisfying in this regard.

—Achille,, Senior researcher at the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the
University of the Witwatersrand, Necropolitics, Public Culture 15.1, Translated by Libby Meintjes
In this essay I have argued that contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death (necropolitics) profoundly reconfigure the relations among resistance, sacrifice, and terror. I have demonstrated that the notion of biopower is insufficient to account for contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power [End Page 39] of death. Moreover I have put forward the notion of necropolitics and necropower to account for the various ways in which, in our contemporary world,
weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.
The essay has also outlined some of the repressed topographies of cruelty (the plantation and the colony in particular) and has suggested that under conditions of necropower, the lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom are blurred. Continues. Biopower and the Relation of Enmity Having presented a reading of politics as the work of death, I turn now to sovereignty, expressed predominantly as the right to kill. For the purpose of my argument, I relate Foucault’s notion of biopower to two other concepts: the state of exception and the state of siege.16 I examine those trajectories by which the state of exception and the relation of enmity have become the normative basis of the right to kill. In such instances
, power (and not necessarily state power) continuously refers and appeals to exception, emergency, and a fictionalized notion of the enemy. It also labors to produce that same exception, emergency, and fictionalized enemy. In other words, the question is: What is the relationship between politics and death in those systems that can function only in a state of emergency?
In Foucault's formulation of it, biopower appears to function through dividing [End Page 16] people into those who must live and those who must die. Operating on the basis of a split between the living and the dead, such a power defines itself in relation to a biological field—which it takes control of and vests itself in. This control presupposes the distribution of human species into groups, the subdivision of the population into subgroups, and the establishment of a biological caesura between the ones and the others. This is what Foucault labels with the (at first sight familiar) term racism. 17 That race (or for that matter racism) figures so prominently in the calculus of biopower is entirely justifiable. After all, more so than class-thinking (the ideology that defines history as an economic struggle of classes), race has been the ever present shadow in Western political thought and practice, especially when it comes to imagining the inhumanity of, or rule over, foreign peoples. Referring to both this ever-presence and the phantomlike world of race in general, Arendt locates their roots in the shattering experience of otherness and suggests that the politics of race is ultimately linked to the politics of death. 18 Indeed, in
Foucault's terms, racism is above all a technology aimed at permitting the exercise of biopower, "that old sovereign right of death." 19 In the economy of biopower, the function of racism is to regulate the distribution of death and to make possible the murderous functions of the state.
It is, he says, "the condition for the acceptability of putting to death." 20 Foucault states clearly that the sovereign right to kill (droit de glaive) and the mechanisms of biopower are inscribed in the way all modern states function; 21 indeed, they can be seen as constitutive elements of state power in modernity. According to Foucault, the Nazi state was the most complete example of a state exercising the right to kill. This state, he claims, made the management, protection, and cultivation of life coextensive with the sovereign right to kill. By biological extrapolation on the theme of the political enemy, in organizing the war against its adversaries and, at the same time, exposing its own citizens to war, the Nazi state is seen as having opened the way for a formidable consolidation of the right to kill, which culminated in the project of the
"final solution." In doing so, it became the archetype of a power formation that combined the characteristics of the racist state, the murderous state, and the suicidal state. [End Page 17] It has been argued that the complete conflation of war and politics (and racism, homicide, and suicide), until they are indistinguishable from one another, is unique to the Nazi state
. The perception of the existence of the Other as an attempt on my life, as a mortal threat or absolute danger whose biophysical elimination would strengthen my potential to life and security
—this, I suggest, is one of the many imaginaries of sovereignty characteristic of both early and late modernity itself. Recognition of this perception to a large extent underpins most traditional critiques of modernity, whether they are dealing with nihilism and its proclamation of the will for power as the essence of the being; with reification understood as the becoming-object of the human being; or
the subordination of everything to impersonal logic and to the reign of calculability and instrumental rationality.
22 Indeed, from an anthropological perspective, what these critiques implicitly contest is a definition of politics as the warlike relation par excellence. They also challenge the idea that, of necessity, the calculus of life passes through the death of the Other; or that sovereignty consists of the will and the capacity to kill in order to live. Taking a historical perspective, a number of analysts have argued that
the material premises of Nazi extermination are to be

found in colonial imperialism on the one hand and, on the other, in the serialization of technical mechanisms for putting people to death— mechanisms developed between the Industrial Revolution and the First World War. According to Enzo Traverso,
the gas chambers and the ovens were the culmination of a long process of dehumanizing and industrializing death, one of the original features of which was to integrate instrumental rationality with the productive and administrative rationality of the modern Western world (the factory, the bureaucracy, the prison, the army). Having become mechanized, serialized execution was transformed into a purely technical, impersonal, silent, and rapid procedure. This development was
aided in part by racist stereotypes
and the flourishing of a class-based racism that, in translating the social conflicts of the industrial world in racial terms, ended up comparing the working classes and
"stateless people" of the industrial world to the
"savages" of the colonial world. 23 In reality, the links between modernity and terror spring from multiple sources. Some are to be found in the political practices of the ancien régime. From this perspective, the tension between the public's passion for blood and notions of justice [End Page 18] and revenge is critical.
Foucault shows in Discipline and Punish how the execution of the would-be regicide Damiens went on for hours, much to the satisfaction of the crowd. 24 Well known is the long procession of the condemned through the streets prior to execution, the parade of body parts—a ritual that became a standard feature of popular violence—and the final display of a severed head mounted on a pike. In France, the advent of the guillotine marks a new phase in the "democratization" of the means of disposing of the enemies of the state. Indeed, this form of execution that had once been the prerogative of the nobility is extended to all citizens. In a context in which decapitation is viewed as less demeaning than hanging, innovations in the technologies of murder aim not only at "civilizing" the ways of killing.
They also aim at disposing of a large number of victims in a relatively short span of time. At the same time
, a new cultural sensibility emerges in which killing the enemy of the state is an extension of play. More intimate, lurid, and leisurely forms of cruelty appear.
19
—Leonard, professor of philosophy at Farleigh Dickinson University, Ethics After the
Holocaust, p. 8-11
This face-to-face encounter is thus no cognitive event. As we have seen, I cannot know the Other as Other without diminishing his or her otherness. I can, however, encounter that Other in what Levinas terms an ethical event. Indeed, it is only with the rending of the ontological schema that ethics first becomes possible. Prior to my meeting with the Other, there is no ethics as such. Within the totality of being, I am limited in my egoist ambition only by a lack of power. The Other who meets me face-to-face challenges my very right to exercise power. In so doing, ethics is born. Cognition no longer represents the highest activity of which a human is capable; it is replaced by "revelation" of the Other as an ethical event in which, for the first time, I come to realize the arbitrariness of my egoist ambitions. The thematizing of the cognitive subject is replaced by nothing short of an act of witness on the part of a being who now becomes an ethical subject. The Other who contests me is an Other truly independent of my appropriative powers and thus one to whom I can have, for the first time, ethical obligations. As Levinas puts it, this Other is the first being whom I can wish to murder. Before the totality is rent by the manifestation of the face, there can be no will to act immorally, as there can be no will to act morally, in any ultimate sense of that word. If one begins with the "imperial I" appropriating its world, ethics as such can never be founded. The other with whom I inter- act is simply a datum, an aspect of my universe. Morality makes its first appearance when I confront the Other who is truly Other.
Although the Other appears to me now, on principle, as someone I could wish to kill, he or she in fact summons me to respond with nonviolence: I am called to willingly renounce my power to act immorally. What I hear from the Other, Levinas claims, are the words "Thou shalt not kill." Harkening to this injunction constitutes my inaugural act as an ethical being
.
In Levinas's words, "Morality begins when freedom, instead of being justified by itself, feels itself to be arbitrary and violent." Addressing the face of the Other I become ethical. In a turnabout from what has been the norm in the history of Western thought, ethics now is seen, by Levinas, to constitute the essence of philosophy. Ethics is now "first philosophy," a position usurped until now by the ontological enterprise. The meeting with the Other-who-is-truly-Other is a primordial event: "Since the Other looks at me," Levinas exclaims, "I am responsible for him, without even having taken on responsibilities in his regard " In encountering the Other, I assume responsibility for him.
"Responsibility," Levinas proclaims, "is the essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity....
Responsibility in fact is not a simple attribute of subjectivity, as if the latter already existed in itself, before the ethical relationship."'" In other words, my structure as a human being, in any significant sense of that word, is to be responsible to the Other. My personhood is not to be identified with that of the solitary ego appropriating its world; it is rather a personhood fundamentally oriented toward the Other. Ethics, for Levinas, is thus not to be identified with any ethical or even meta-ethical position. Levinas speaks neither as deontologist nor consequentialist. He does not attempt to articulate any list of rights or obligations, or even the principles on which the latter would be based.
All ethical theories, he implies, are secondary to, or derivative from, a primordial or founding moment: the encounter with the face of the Other. It is this moment-of-all-moments which institutes the very possibility of the "ethical" systems so hotly debated within the history of Western thought. Before there can be any ethical positioning— before there can be discussions of virtue, happiness, duties—there is the meeting with the Other. Ethics is no set of directives; rather, in Levinas's words, “Already of itself ethics is an 'optics,'” a way of seeing which precedes—and founds—all that has heretofore been identified as ethical philosophy. The import of this notion of the primacy of ethics for a rethinking of philosophy in the post-Holocaust age cannot be emphasized strongly enough. For Levinas, philosophy-as-ontology reveals being as nothing short of

"war": The visage of being that shows itself in war is fixed in the concept of totality which dominates
Western philosophy. Individuals are reduced to being bearers offerees that command them unbeknown to themselves. The meaning of individuals (invisible outside of this totality) is derived from the totality.
Individuals within the "being" constructed by philosophers are merely creatures of the schematizing mind. Such a concept of philosophy is ill-equipped to address the great ethical issues which arise in the study of the Holocaust.
Indeed, for Levinas, "War is not only one of the ordeals—the greatest—of which morality lives; it renders morality derisory."
Within the terms of warfare, lying, stealing—even killing—lose whatever ethical import they might have. I simply engage in these acts as "necessary" within the universe created by war. If the being studied by traditional philosophy is conceived of as war, morality loses its core meaning. Not only is no fundamental ethical critique of the events of the Holocaust possible within the terms of philosophy-as-ontology, but, as I have noted above, it can be argued that the mode of appropriative thinking of philosophers in our Western tradition has contributed to the creation of a climate in which genocide can flourish. If, in ontological terms, individual beings are said to have their meaning solely within the totality in which they find themselves, totalizing thinking may well become totalitarian.
Jews and other victims of Nazi oppression were dehumanized precisely by being viewed in terms of racial categories applied to them as a whole.
If philosophy is a mere egology, as Levinas claims, the totalizing cognitive subject can, at the far end of a continuum, be seen to pass over into the autocratic "I" of the leaders of the Third Reich
. In contrast to that appropriative thinking which can lead to the brutal dehumanization of the kind present in war, the face-to-face relationship is a pacific one. It is a relationship which establishes a peace which is no mere truce, no temporary cessation of inevitable hostilities. For traditional philosophy, knowledge is power, a power capable of harnessing technology to evil ends. The absolute end of philosophy is its goal of achieving total mastery of being; it is thus not at all illogical to foresee a progression from conceptual to physical mastery of one's world. Once the locus of an "absolute" is placed in the powers of the "I," the other person cannot fail to become merely another datum in a world whose meaning derives itself entirely from me. Often I may treat her or him in terms of what in the West has been called "goodness." Yet such goodness, for Levinas, is accidental, the product of a determination on my part that it is in my self-interest to act in a given manner in a given situation. The fundamental reference point remains the "I." Goodness thus established, I argue, along with
Levinas, is a goodness which is simply not good enough!

and Contributor - International Studies Association
CIAONet 41 st ISA Convention Celebrants and Celebrations in the Discipline of International Relations http://citation.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/4/1/7/0/7/pages417072/p417072-
36.php
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Samuel P. Huntington , director of Harvard's Centre for International
Affairs, joined his opinions with those earlier expressed by Stanford's Thomas Bailey t o the effect that the foreign policy elite were even right to deceive the citizenry about the true nature of American interventions and other military actions essentially on the grounds that (i) deception was an inescapable attribute of the process of government; (ii) some people no longer accepted their inferiority to the governing classes; (iii) democracy is possessed of a "distemper" or "excess" which facilitates "previously passive or unorganised groups in the population ..... blacks, Indians, Chicanos, white ethnic groups, students, and women [ to embark] on concerted efforts to establish their claims to opportunities, positions, rewards, and privileges , which they had not considered themselves entitled to before," and (iv) effective democracy "usually requires some measure of apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups."
59
At other times — in the 1960s
— Huntington designed the forced urbanisation of the South Vietnamese peasantry as a legitimate instrument of US strategy and in so doing was the architect of the reduction of the rural population of the country by some 30 per cent, the consequential transformation of Vietnam from a food exporter to a food importer, and the parallel legitimation of a rural bombing campaign over five times more intense than the US campaigns against Germany and Japan in World War II combined .
60
In the same decade he also advocated that political scientists become social engineers rather than theoreticians, and, somewhat consistently, that US foreign policy concern itself less with the development of democratic government among its allies and other states with which it had influence, and more with supporting those who were, no matter their

undemocratic character, effective.
61
None of this was an impediment to his appointment to President
Carter's National Security Council or his continued tenure and standing at Harvard. Henry Kissinger , too, was welcome in this milieu , no objection being raised to his presence, let alone academic status, despite the fact that his record of foreign policy stewardship is, literally, strewn with support for assassination, murder, and coup d'etat ( Chile, 1973 ), betrayal in the name of power politics ( Kurdistan/northern Iraq, 1975 ), invasion and subsequent genocide ( East Timor, 1975), just to name three representative examples, the last two of which produced a combined death toll of at least 150,000 , and 600,000 refugees .
62
In the light of these examples, and the International Studies Association — South Region's decision to invite former Director of Central
Intelligence, William Colby, to give the keynote address at its annual meeting in 1993,
63
it seems reasonable to infer that such persons and their exploits exert an almost pornographic attraction upon the mainstream discourse; it provides a voyeuristic association with those who have, or had power over the life and death of nations and their peoples, an occasion of encouragement for their would-be imitators, and stimulation for the more passive . Certainly, it was implicit in the invitation to Colby that his direction of the Phoenix program — a computer-directed campaign within the war in Vietnam, made notorious by its
"assassination, torture, and systematic savagery," which resulted in the deaths of between 20,000 and
60,000 Viet Cong and suspected communist sympathisers — was absolved, declared irrelevant, or even retrospectively endorsed.
64
As well, it confirms, under the guise of a scholarly enterprise, the close historical affinity between the mainstream discourse of international relations and successive theories, practices, and practitioners which countenance genocide .
65
And, should it be doubted, the ongoing status enjoyed by people such as Colby, Kissinger, and Huntington in the University, confirms the organic nature of the relationship between the state, university faculty, and significantly, students.

—Judith, professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at UC Berkeley, Precarious Life:
The Powers of Mourning and Violence, preface
To decide what views will count as reasonable within the public domain, however, is to decide what will and will not count as the public sphere of debate. And if someone holds views that are not in line with the nationalist norm, that person comes to lack credibility as a speaking person, and the media is not open to him or her (though the internet, interestingly, is). The foreclosure of critique empties the public domain of debate and democratic contestation itself, so that debate becomes the exchange of views among the like-minded, and criticism, which ought to be central to any democracy, becomes a fugitive and suspect activity. Public policy, including foreign policy, often seeks to restrain the public sphere from being open to certain forms of debate an d the circulation of media coverage. One way a hegemonic understanding of politics is achieved is through circumscribing what will and will not be admissible as part of the public sphere itself. Without disposing populations in such a way that war seems good and right and true, no war can claim
popular consent, and no administration can maintain its popularity. To produce what will constitute the public sphere, however, it is necessary to control the way in which people see, how they hear, what they see. The constraints are not only on content, certain images of dead bodies in
Iraq, for instance, are considered unacceptable for public visual consumption-but on what "can" be heard, read, seen, felt, and known. The public sphere is constituted in part by what can appear, and the regulation of the sphere of appearance is one way to establish what will count as reality, and what will not. It is also a way of establishing whose lives can be marked as lives and whose deaths will count as deaths. Our capacity to feel and to apprehend hangs in the balance. But so, too, does the fact of the reality of certain lives and deaths as well as the ability to think critically and publicly about the effects of war.
Paul
PhD in Political Theory at Johns Hopkins University and Assistant
, 3/1/19
, “‘I Mistrust all Systematizers and Avoid
Them’: Nietzsche, Arendt and the Crisis of the Will to Order in International Relations Theory,”
Millennium Journal of International Studies, Volume 25, Number 1
The Human Condition and Political Action
In contradistinction to labour, Arendt suggests that the activity of work involves the production of the
`human artifice' and the durable material world where humans live." The primary characteristic of work is that it is the realm of violence in which force is used to manipulate natural material. It is a process of fabrication guided from start to finish by an idea or model, whose goal is simply the realisation of this form in the human physical world of appearance. The worker is the master of the entire process and conceives of a definite beginning and end through which the ideal is realised. As opposed to labour,

then, work is the realm of mastery and control. Moreover, by erecting a durable, `objective', and relatively stable world of human artifacts, `homo faber rescues animal lahorans from the endless flow of biological life and transcends his own subjectivity by constructing a durable world of his own which stands apart from both the maker and the natural world'." Through homo faber, humanity both affirms and escapes the inexorable cycle of birth and death by fabricating a realm of objects in which the communal reification of memory is possible. Work is therefore a critical human activity which allows action to give human existence a sense of immortality, of `endurance in time, deathless life on this earth', and of meaning beyond simple survival. Despite the necessity of both labour and work, action is
the most uniquely human activity because only through action can humanity realise the fundamental
universality and individuality of human existence. According to Arendt, action is the activity that allows humanity to comprehend and reproduce the existential and irreducible human condition of plurality
and natality. As Arendt suggests, `the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting. In this sense of initiative, an element of action, and therefore of natality, is inherent is all human activities'." This inherent individuality creates human plurality as `the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives or will live'.`
While action is only possible because of the `human condition' of plurality and natality, action also
reproduces it. In other words, only action can realise the potential plurality and natality of the human world. As James Knauer suggests, plurality is a potential given by the fact of natality, the birth of new human individuals, but it can be realized only through political association. It is in their acting and speaking together that unique individuals emerge out of the sameness and eternal recurrence of the species. And it is only when living together as acting beings in political association that human beings encounter other human beings, that plurality is realised 21
According to Arendt, then, the purpose of a public sphere is to create the condition of unmediated human interaction as the realisation of the human condition through political action.

Paul
PhD in Political Theory at Johns Hopkins University and Assistant
, 3/1/19
, “‘I Mistrust all Systematizers and Avoid
Them’: Nietzsche, Arendt and the Crisis of the Will to Order in International Relations Theory,”
Millennium Journal of International Studies, Volume 25, Number 1
Arendt contends that this rule-based conception of political action assumed a hegemonic and `natural' status only when the philosophical transformation of Western civilisation created an intellectual
framework which necessitated interpreting politics as rulership. From this perspective, the importance of Arendt's thought is that she reveals the way in which the Will to Order/Truth has created the parameters of the modem understanding of politics. According to Arendt, our modern notion of politics is an inevitable consequence of the Platonic Will to Truth/Order. After Plato's Republic, politics could no longer be conceived of as the freedom to act with equals, but could be conceptualised only as the ordering of society according to the world of forms. With this paradigmatic substitution of making for acting, homo faber becomes the model political actor, and the realm of human affairs can be interpreted only in terms of work. Further, through this transformation, the concepts of mastery, control, and violence are inextricably imposed onto the realm of politics. As Arendt notes, '[i]n the
Republic, the philosopher-king applies the ideas as the craftsman applies his rules and standard; he
"makes" his City as the sculptor makes a statue; and in the final Platonic work these same ideas have even become laws which need only be executed'.`' The politician is idealised as the craftsman whose skill lies first in perceiving the ideal form of the product-to-be, and second, in organising the means to execute its production. This transformation inverts both the practice and the meaning of politics on at least two levels. First, the `end' of political action becomes measured in terms of the ability of actors to replicate an ideal form. As Arendt notes, this instrumentalised model of politics evaluates action solely on the grounds of a means-ends calculus which risks devolving into an eternal regression of
ungroundable utility. Arendt states that `[t]he trouble with the utility standard inherent in the very activity of fabrication is that the relationship between means and end on which it relies is very much like a chain whose every end can serve again as a means in some other context'. The only possible way to stabilise this chain is to posit an eternal and perfect end, such as justice, order, or God, which acts as an unquestioned goal due to its perfect truthfulness. The essence of the Platonic, and later Christian and
Enlightenment, conceptions of political action, then, is the ability to ground the final end through recourse to an unquestionable `truth'. By resituating political judgement in the realm of ideals, this model denies that meaning derives from the apparent world of human affairs, and replaces debate, action, and plurality with absolutes and ideals. The dichotomisation of the ideal and apparent worlds results in a second inversion. The notion of politician as craftsman undermines the possibility of action in the political sphere by attempting to deny the very condition of plurality and natality. The prerequisite qualities of equality and persuasion are replaced by the precepts of fabrication: mastery and violence.
Plural political action is renounced in favour of the unquestioned order of rulership and mastery (which destroys the potential for natality and plurality), or by the coercion of violence (which simply overwhelms any possibility of action through sheer strength). This consequence is then circularly justified by the belief that the end of action can be nothing more than the realisation of the Real World

in the Apparent World. The conception of community through equality and difference is inexorably
replaced by the understanding of political community constructed through mastery, control, and rule.
The dual inversion of politics-as-making explicitly reveals the profound impact of the philosophical foundation of the Will to Order/Truth on the modern conception of politics. Within this philosophical order, politics must be understood as a process of fabrication in which the end utopian goal justifies and underpins rulership, control, and domination. From this perspective, the development of a variety of
Real World ideals (Platonic justice, Christian salvation, or vulgar Marxist utopianism) which guide political action have disguised the entrenched consistency of the understanding of politics-as-making. It is precisely this 'definition' of politics that must be exposed and problematised. For politics-as-making is
neither a 'natural' nor `realistic' conception of politics, but rather a historical consequence of a specific philosophical foundation. As such, it is neither factual nor beyond critique.

—Judith, professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at UC Berkeley, Precarious Life:
The Powers of Mourning and Violence, preface
The five essays collected here were all written after September 11, 2001, and in response to the conditions of heightened vulnerability and aggression that followed from those events. It was my sense in the fall of 2001 that the United States was missing an opportunity to redefine itself as part of a global community when, instead, it heightened nationalist discourse, extended surveillance mechanisms, suspended constitutional rights, and developed forms of explicit and implicit censorship. These events led public intellectuals to waver in their public commitment to principles of justice and prompted journalists to take leave of the time-honored tradition of investigative journalism. That US boundaries were breached, that an unbearable vulnerability was exposed, that a terrible toll on human life was taken, were, and are, cause for fear and for mourning; they are also
instigations for patient political reflection. These events posed the question, implicitly at least, as to what form political reflection and deliberation ought to take if we take injurability and aggression as two points of departure for political life. That we can be injured, that others can be injured, that we are subject to death at the whim of another, are all reasons for both fear and grief. What is less certain, however, is whether the experiences of vulnerability and loss have to lead straightaway
to military violence and retribution. There are other passages. If we are interested in arresting cycles of violence to produce less violent outcomes, it is no doubt important to ask what,
politically, might be made of grief besides a cry for war. One insight that injury affords is that there are others out there on whom my life depends, people I do not know and may never know. This fundamental dependency on anonymous others is not a condition that I can will away. No security measure will foreclose this dependency; no violent act of sovereignty will rid the world of this fact.
What this means, concretely, will vary across the globe. There are ways of distributing vulnerability, differential forms of allocation that make some populations more subject to arbitra ry violence than others. But in that order of things, it would not be possible to maintain that the US has greater security problems than some of the more contested and vulnerable nations and peoples of the world. To be injured means that one has the chance to reflect upon injury, to find out the mechanisms of its distribution, to find out who else suffers from permeable borders, unexpected violence, dispossession, and fear, and in what ways. If national sovereignty is challenged, that does not mean it must be shored up at all costs, if that results in suspending civil liberties and
suppressing political dissent. Rather, the dislocation from First World privilege, however temporary, offers a chance to start to imagine a world in which that violence might be minimized, in which an inevitable interdependency becomes acknowledged as the basis for global political community. I confess to not knowing how to theorize that interdependency. I would suggest, however, that both our political and ethical responsibilities are rooted in the recognition that radical forms of self-sufficiency and unbridled sovereignty are, by definition, disrupted by the larger global processes of which they are a part, that no final control can be secured, and that final control is not, cannot be, an ultimate value.

BY OPENING YOURSELF TO APOCALYPTIC HOPE, YOU TAKE THE COMPARATIVELY MORE POWERFUL
STEP OF BREAKING FROM YOUR SLAVERY TO ABSOLUTES AND TECHNOLOGICAL MASTERY
Fasching, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of South Florida, 1992
Darrell, Narrative Theology After Auschwitz, p. 155-156. First-first.
This paradox is expressed in Ellul's contrast of the sacred and the holy, which parallels Voegelin's distinction between cosmological and anthropological ethics (distinctions that I have adopted as foundational for my own work). Ellul departs from ordinary usage here by treating the terms sacred and holy as antonyms rather than as synonyms. The sacred performs the sociological function of integration and legitimation. Its positive function is to create a sense of order within which human life can be carried on. But its demonic propensity is to create an absolute or "closed" order (in which Is = Ought) that prevents the continuing transformation of self and society.
Without such a self-transcending openness to the future, life ceases to be either human or free. Thus for human life to be creative, Ellul argues, the claims of the social order to be sacred and unalterable must be relativized by that which is its opposite—the holy. The holy is that which is Wholly Other than society.
Where the sacred demands integration and closure, the holy (as the Hebrew word qadosh indicates) demands separation and openness to transformation. A consciousness of the holy creates a feeling of tension and separateness between self and society. That tension prevents the social order from becoming absolute because it prevents the total integration of the self into society. This, in turn, forces the institutional structures of society to remain fluid and open to further development. The paradox of freedom is that it is always an act of revolt against a limit. But the real limit, for Ellul, is a "combination of what is actually impassable and the inviolably sacred."3 Our sense of sacral awe makes us accept the limits of a given social order as absolute and also makes us seek to conform to these limits. Only our consciousness of the holy can enable us to desacralize and rehabilitate the sacred so as to open a social order to further development in the name of the infinite. The possibility of ethical freedom depends on the possibility of having a hope in something radically other than our technological civilization and its promises of fulfillment. For the hopes promoted by the mass media of our civilization serve only to integrate us into the collective social order as a sacred status quo. By contrast, a radically other hope would individuate persons, set them apart from the collectivizing influences of mass media, and give them the critical autonomy that belongs to an anthropological ethic. Ellul's designation for this unique hope is "apocalyptic hope ." When he speaks of apocalypse, however, he is not speaking of it in the literal and popular sense. On the contrary, "hope . . . can be situated only in an apocalyptic line of thought, not that there is hope because one has an apocalyptic concept of history, but rather, that there is apocalypse because one lives in hope."4 Hope is apocalyptic not because it expresses a literal expectation of the end of the world but because the hope expressed in the book of
Revelation breaks radically with the present order of things in order to inaugurate a new creation.
An apocalyptic hope is a hope in the one who is both Wholly Other and the end (telos) of all things.
Every person who is moved to embrace such a hope participates in the transcending freedom of God and inserts that freedom into society as a limit on its claims to absoluteness. Such a hope ruptures one's psychological dependence on "this (technological) world" and permits one to break free and engage in acts that violate the sacral status of efficient technique, the ideological or mythological hopes of consumerism, and the political illusions that dominate our technical civilization.

Duane L.
University, 19
, From Warism to Pacifism, pg 46-47
In our consideration of the means/ends interrelationship it is important to recognize that the moral issues, especially regarding whole nations of people, are complex and subtle, rarely simple matters of right and wrong. Commenting on what he calls word sickness in international communication, which he sees to be worse in since World War II, Thomas Merton points out the “unconscious aspiration to definitive utterance, to which there can be no rejoinder.” His reference is to pompous and sinister jargon of war mandarins in government offices and military thinktanks. Here we have a whole community of intellectuals, scholars who spend their time playing out “scenarios” and considering
“acceptable levels” in megadeaths….They are scientifically antiseptic, businesslike, uncontaminated with sentimental concern for life…One proves one’s realism along with one’s virility by toughness in playing statistically with global death. The ultimate danger of this language of finality is that anyone who disagrees is thereby wrong, negotiations are fruitless or not to be trusted, and governments resort to violence on the grounds that the adversary does not understand anything else. This sort of speaking and thinking precludes consideration of peaceful options by defining them out of existence. When the enemy is caricatured as incapable of understanding anything by violence, then only violence is a live option. Where the adversary “cannot be trusted” and dialogue is forsaken for manipulative rhetorical posturing, all words become unsure and the temptation to make one’s meaning clear with blows become irresistible. It is crucial to expose the language of finality because it helps create the context in which violence becomes the best or only option. The wrongness that the pacifist sees in war may be due to just this failure to choose another option, a less evil means. The judgment is not so much one of right versus wrong as it is a preference for better over worse, challenging the exaggerated extremes.

12/5, Louis, professor at Princeton University, staff writer at The New Republic and The New Yorker,
Distinguished Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York,
Everybody’s an Expert
Prediction is one of the pleasures of life. Conversation would wither without it. “It won’t last. She’ll dump him in a month.” If you’re wrong, no one will call you on it, because being right or wrong isn’t really the point. The point is that you think he’s not worthy of her, and the prediction is just a way of enhancing your judgment with a pleasant prevision of doom. Unless you’re putting money on it, nothing is at stake except your reputation for wisdom in matters of the heart. If a month goes by and they’re still together, the deadline can be extended without penalty. “She’ll leave him, trust me. It’s only a matter
of time.” They get married: “Funny things happen. You never know.” You still weren’t wrong. Either the marriage is a bad one—you erred in the right direction—or you got beaten by a low-probability outcome. It is the somewhat gratifying lesson of Philip Tetlock’s new book, “Expert Political Judgment:
How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” (Princeton; $35), that people who make prediction their business—people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables—are no better than the rest of us.
When they’re wrong, they’re rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either. They insist that they were just off on timing, or blindsided by an improbable event, or almost right, or wrong for the
right reasons. They have the same repertoire of self-justifications that everyone has, and are no more inclined than anyone else to revise their beliefs about the way the world works, or ought to work, just because they made a mistake. No one is paying you for your gratuitous opinions about other people, but
the experts are being paid, and Tetlock claims that the better known and more frequently quoted they are, the less reliable their guesses about the future are likely to be. The accuracy of an expert’s predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a
certain point, depth of knowledge. People who follow current events by reading the papers and newsmagazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote. Our system of expertise is completely inside out: it rewards bad judgments over good ones. “Expert Political Judgment” is not a work of media criticism. Tetlock is a psychologist—he teaches at Berkeley—and his conclusions are based on a long-term study that he began twenty years ago. He picked two hundred and eighty-four people who made their living “commenting or offering advice on
political and economic trends,” and he started asking them to assess the probability that various things would or would not come to pass, both in the areas of the world in which they specialized and in areas about which they were not expert. Would there be a nonviolent end to apartheid in South Africa? Would Gorbachev be ousted in a coup? Would the
United States go to war in the Persian Gulf? Would Canada disintegrate? (Many experts believed that it would, on the ground that Quebec would succeed in seceding.) And so on. By the end of the study, in
2003, the experts had made 82,361 forecasts. Tetlock also asked questions designed to determine how they reached their judgments, how they reacted when their predictions proved to be wrong, how they evaluated new information that did not support their views, and how they assessed the probability that
rival theories and predictions were accurate. Tetlock got a statistical handle on his task by putting most of

the forecasting questions into a “three possible futures” form. The respondents were asked to rate the probability of three alternative outcomes: the persistence of the status quo, more of something (political freedom, economic growth), or less of something (repression, recession). And he measured his experts on
two dimensions: how good they were at guessing probabilities (did all the things they said had an x per cent chance of happening happen x per cent of the time?), and how accurate they were at predicting
specific outcomes. The results were unimpressive. On the first scale, the experts performed worse than
they would have if they had simply assigned an equal probability to all three outcomes—if they had given each possible future a thirty-three-per-cent chance of occurring. Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing
monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices. Tetlock also found that specialists are not significantly more reliable than non-specialists in guessing what is going to happen in the region they study. Knowing a little might make someone a more reliable forecaster, but Tetlock found that knowing a lot can actually make a person less reliable. “We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly,” he reports. “In this age of academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals—distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on—are any better than journalists or attentive readers of the New York Times in ‘reading’ emerging situations.” And the more famous the
forecaster the more overblown the forecasts. “Experts in demand,” Tetlock says, “were more
overconfident than their colleagues who eked out existences far from the limelight.”
People who are not experts in the psychology of expertise are likely (I predict) to find Tetlock’s results a surprise and a matter for concern. For psychologists, though, nothing could be less surprising.
“Expert Political Judgment” is just one of more than a hundred studies that have pitted experts against statistical or actuarial formulas, and in almost all of those studies the people either do no better than the formulas or do worse. In one study, college counsellors were given information about a group of high-school students and asked to predict their freshman grades in college. The counsellors had access to test scores, grades, the results of personality and vocational tests, and personal statements from the students, whom they were also permitted to interview. Predictions that were produced by a formula using just test scores and grades were more accurate. There are also many studies showing that
expertise and experience do not make someone a better reader of the
evidence.
In one, data from a test used to diagnose brain damage were given to a group of clinical psychologists and their secretaries. The psychologists’ diagnoses were no better than the secretaries’. The experts’ trouble in Tetlock’s study is exactly the trouble that all human beings have: we fall in love with our hunches, and we really, really hate to be wrong. Tetlock describes an experiment that he witnessed thirty years ago in a Yale classroom. A rat was put in a T-shaped maze. Food was placed in either the right or the left transept of the T in a random sequence such that, over the long run, the food was on the left sixty per cent of the time and on the right forty per cent. Neither the students nor (needless to say) the rat was told these frequencies. The students were asked to predict on which side of the T the food would appear each time. The rat eventually figured out that the food was on the left side more often than the right, and it therefore nearly always went to the left, scoring roughly sixty per cent—D, but a passing grade. The students looked for patterns of left-right placement, and ended up scoring only fifty-two per cent, an F. The rat, having no reputation to begin with, was not embarrassed about being wrong two out of every five tries. But Yale students, who do have reputations, searched for a hidden order in the sequence. They couldn’t deal with forty-per-cent error, so they ended up with almost fifty-per-cent error.
The expertprediction game is not much different. When television pundits make predictions, the more ingenious their forecasts the greater their cachet. An arresting new prediction means that the expert has discovered a set of interlocking causes that no one else has spotted, and that could lead to an outcome that the conventional wisdom is ignoring. On shows like “The McLaughlin Group,” these experts never lose their reputations, or their jobs, because long shots are their business. More serious commentators differ from the pundits only in the degree of showmanship. These serious experts—the think tankers and area- studies professors—are not entirely out to entertain, but they are a little out to entertain, and both their status as experts and their appeal as performers require them to predict futures that are not obvious to the viewer. The producer of the show does not want you and me to sit there listening to an expert and thinking, I could have said that. The expert also suffers from knowing too much: the more facts an expert has, the more information is available to be enlisted in support of his or her pet theories,
and the more chains of causation he or she can find beguiling. This helps explain why specialists fail to outguess non-specialists. The odds tend to be with the obvious. Tetlock’s experts were also no different from the rest of us when it came to learning from their mistakes. Most people tend to dismiss new
information that doesn’t fit with what they already believe. Tetlock found that his experts used a double standard: they were much tougher in assessing the validity of information that undercut their theory
than they were in crediting information that supported it.
The same deficiency leads liberals to read only The Nation and conservatives to read only National Review. We are not natural falsificationists: we would rather find more reasons for believing what we already believe than look for

reasons that we might be wrong. In the terms of Karl Popper’s famous example, to verify our intuition that all swans are white we look for lots more white swans, when what we should really be looking for is one black swan. Also,
people tend to see the future as indeterminate and the past as inevitable. If you look backward, the dots that lead up to Hitler or the fall of the Soviet Union or the attacks on September 11th all connect. If you look forward, it’s just a random scatter of dots, many potential chains of causation leading to many possible outcomes. We have no idea today how tomorrow’s invasion of a foreign land is going to go; after the invasion, we can actually persuade ourselves that we knew all along. The result seems inevitable, and therefore predictable. Tetlock found that, consistent with this asymmetry, experts routinely misremembered the degree of probability they had assigned to an event after it came to pass. They claimed to have predicted what happened with a
higher degree of certainty than, according to the record, they really did. When this was pointed out to them, by Tetlock’s researchers, they sometimes became defensive. And, like most of us, experts violate a fundamental rule of probabilities by tending to find scenarios with more variables more likely. If a prediction needs two independent things to happen in order for it to be true, its probability is the product of the probability of each of the things it depends on. If there is a one-in-three chance of x
and a one-in-four chance of y, the probability of both x and y occurring is one in twelve. But we often feel instinctively that if the two events “fit together” in some scenario the chance of both is greater, not less.
The classic “Linda problem” is an analogous case. In this experiment, subjects are told, “Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.”
They are then asked to rank the probability of several possible descriptions of Linda today. Two of them are “bank teller” and “bank teller and active in the feminist movement.” People rank the second description higher than the first, even though, logically, its likelihood is smaller, because it requires two things to be true—that
Linda is a bank teller and that Linda is an active feminist—rather than one.
Plausible detail makes us believers.
When subjects were given a choice between an insurance policy that covered hospitalization for any reason and a policy that covered hospitalization for all accidents and diseases, they were willing to pay a higher premium for the second policy, because the added detail gave them a more vivid picture of the circumstances in which it might be needed. In
1982,
an experiment was done with professional forecasters and planners. One group was asked to assess the probability of “a complete suspension of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the Soviet
Union, sometime in 1983,” and another group was asked to assess the probability of “a Russian invasion of Poland, and a complete suspension of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, sometime in 1983.” The experts judged the second scenario more likely than the first, even though it required two separate events to occur. They were seduced by the detail.

Roger
, 44 Cross
Currents 2, 19
http://www.crosscurrents.org/feministecology.htm
Levinas seeks to overcome the fundamental rationalist, egocentric presuppositions of Western philosophical ethics. His project centers on a basic assertion about human relationships, which can be summarized thus: Other philosophies of human existence have tended to describe our ethical obligations as consequences of historically, conceptually, or developmentally prior structures of social life, rational thought, or experience. These philosophies generate the need for ethics out of the contradictions of a life without ethics (as in contract theory or, to some extent, Hegel); or out of the dialectical development of self-consciousness; or out of ontological assumptions about the nature of humanity, nature, reason, or God. Traditionally, in short, ethics is secondary to knowledge of "things"
(with that term construed as broadly as possible), including knowledge of or concerns about oneself.
It is this sense of knowledge of things that Levinas tries to capture under various rubrics -- most importantly, in his two major philosophical works, as "totality," "essence," and "being." (Levinas believes that the attempt to generate ethics out of self-knowledge or interest is simply a form of war.) For him, knowledge is necessarily aimed at or inevitably leads to objectification, alienation, and domination.
Therefore knowledge cannot be the basis of ethical life -- that is, of a kind of transcending concern for other people, a concern untouched by our own needs, desires, or attempts to control. As Hume could not get an "ought" from an "is," Levinas finds an unbridgeable gap between knowledge and ethics. If we begin with knowledge -- in the guise of science or philosophy, technique or ontology, rational reflection or psychoanalysis -- we will never respect the other person as irreducibly other. Knowledge is something acquired, dispensed, and instrumentally used by us. Consequently, knowledge of others necessarily reduces the other to something we possess, something we have acquired, and something -- ultimately -- we will use.(3) If the foundation of our relation to others is knowledge, the other will be reduced to the same. Otherness will not be allowed to coexist with the agent of sameness.

—Jacques, Directeur d’Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in
Paris, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, p.
This being- “hostage” of the subject surely is not, any more than its being- “host,” some late attribute or accident that would supervene upon it. Like the being-host, the being-hostage is the subjectivity of the subject as a “responsibility for the Other”. Responsibility for the Other is not an accident that happens to a subject, but precedes essence in it, has not awaited freedom, in which a commitment to the Other would have been made, I had not done anything and I have always been under accusation—persecuted.
The ipseity, in the passivity without arche characteristic of identity, is hostage. The word I means here I am, answering for everything and, for everyone.
rd
—David, professor of international politics at the University of Newcastle, Moral
Spaces, p. 36-37
Levinas's philosophy, although clearly nonindividualist and antihumanist in its rendering of subjectivity, is nonetheless located within the logic of an individual, one-to-one relationship with the Other. Which is not to say that it is asocial. Aside from the fact that the basic premise of the one-to-one relationship is the interdependent character of sub- jectivity, Levinas clearly recognizes that the world does not simply com- prise one-to-one relationships. "In the real world there are many others," he writes. But can Levinas's articulation of ethics as first philosophy, and of responsibility as the primary structure of subjectivity, be ex- panded from the one-to-one to the one-and-the-many?
And if so, how is this expansion achieved? While some have argued it cannot, Levinas's discussions of "the third person," the state, and morality indicate that transference is considered within his thought.' The question is, then, whether the means by which that transference is possible fulfill the radical promise of Levinas's argument. If ethics is "a responsible, non-totalizing relation with the Other," then tiers, to all others, to the plurality of beings that make up the commuity„"43 "There is thus a distinction derived from the existence of the third party in Levinas's thought concerning others, which contrasts the Other as neighbor, the participant in the one-to-one relationship, with all others, those with whom my neighbor is the third party.44 Additionally, the neighbor appears to exercise the primary demand of responsibility, and then serves as the basis for my relationship with all others: "My relationship with the other as neighbor gives meaning to my relations with all the others.” Levinas recognizes that the
(inevitable) entry of the third party poses a dilemma: "The responsibility for the other is an immediacy antecedent to questions, it is proximity. It is troubled and becomes a problem when a third party enters.""" The concern arises because the third party dissolves the uniqueness of the one-to-one relationship, not just because it presses the numerical claim that the world comprises many others, but because it establishes that "the third party is simultaneously other than the other, and makes me one among others. However, as Lingis observes, "[T]o find that the one before whom and for whom I am responsible is responsible in his[her] turn before and for another is not to find his[her] order put on me relativized or cancelled."

Claudia
Rens
,
20
, “Governing Terrorism and the (Non-) Politics of Risk,” Political Science
Publications No. 11, pg 14-18
IV Taking precautions against terrorism and the (non-)politics of risk The effects and tensions that the precautionary approach gives rise to do not tell us much about its political implications. The legal system can be subject to transformation as much as the citizen’s subjectivation through identity-assessment practices. The political effects of the new paradigm of risk appear not from the contradictions that seem to be created (and which could be ultimately accommodated), but through what it disavows and negates. Slavoj Žižek has pointed out that what is missing from Rumsfeld’s categories of known/unknown are the ‘unknown knowns’, the things we do not know that we know, the disavowed beliefs and suppositions, the obscene practices we pretend not to know about (Žižek 2004). The new risk approach brings to the fore the ‘unknown knowns’ of politics and social struggle. We will interrogate the political consequences, the disavowals and suppositions of the precautionary principle through two related questions. First, how does the precautionary logic relate to oscillation between science and representation that characterises politics? Second, what is the governmentality of precautionary risk trying to avoid, to ‘normalise’? To begin with the former, from the Enlightenment on, politics has been defined in relation to representation (e.g., the people, the masses, the electorate) and through relation with science. To an extent, politics is defined by the uncertainty and necessity of decision ‘in the dark’.
Politics is not about reading an open book, but about decision in certain situation of invisibility, of nonbeing and non-visibility. Through the imaginary and the technologies of risk, however, politics has also attempted to become ‘management’, to govern the future and tame uncertainty (Hacking 1991).
Between science and representation, politics becomes the counting and objectifying of social groups.
The governmentality of risk was based on scientific calculus and group profiling. Profiling can only function for risks that we know, it does not tell anything about the unknown. Thus a commentator of risk could warn that post-September 11, prevention has entailed a ‘series of expensive Maginot lines against risk, each of which does a wonderful job at protecting security against a known risk, while doing nothing to protect society from the unknown’ (Baker 2002a: 356). The new paradigm of risk turns the objectifying representative principle into disarray. Political decisions cannot be based upon the certainties of science, as the precautionary principle between science and politics finds itself severed or rather exposed in its contingency. Tony Blair’s response to criticism brings to the fore a concept of politics which has severed its relation with science, with expertise or with management: Sit in my seat.
Here is the intelligence. Here is the advice. Do you ignore it? But, of course, intelligence is precisely that: intelligence. It is not hard fact. It has its limitations. On each occasion, the most careful judgment has to be made taking account of everything we know and advice available. But in making that judgment, would you prefer us to act, even if it turns out to be wrong? Or not to act and hope it’s OK? And suppose we don’t act and the intelligence turns out to be right, how forgiving will people be? (Blair 2004). Let us say one thing. If we are wrong we will have destroyed a threat that, at its least, is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. That is something I am confident history will forgive. If our critics are wrong, if we are right as I believe with every fibre of instinct and conviction I have that we are, and we

do not act, then we will have hesitated in the face of this menace when we should have given leadership; that is something history will not forgive (Blair 2003). Blair’s approach to the war in Iraq has wavered between an initial reliance on intelligence and a later invocation of the ‘uncertainty’ of knowledge. Because precautionary risk simultaneously evokes and disavows politics as uncertain decision, many commentators from the left and right have criticised the principle for leading to inaction and extreme risk aversion (see e.g., Miller and Conko 2001, Sunstein 2005). Yet, when the precautionary principle is tied to security politics the opposite seems to be happening. Here, risk aversion is translated into policies that actively seek to prevent situations from becoming catastrophic at the some indefinite point in future. Prevention does thus not just mean to abstain from doing anything when confronted with a uncertain future; it is also introduces a pure sovereign logic of decision: ‘It does not follow that scientific expertise is useless, but that it will not release the politician from the sovereignty of his or her decision’ (Ewald 2002: 298). In contrast to Beck’s assumption that the risk society will reinvent politics along more democratic lines with slow procedures where expertise knowledge is deliberated in global public forums (Beck 1992, 1999) the precautionary principle instead privileges a politics of speed based on the sovereign decision on dangerousness. If confronted with the possibility of catastrophic risk,
George W. Bush argues, ‘we cannot wait for the final proof – the smoking gun – that could come in form of a mushroom cloud’ (cited in Daalder and
Lindsay 2003: 157). The new paradigm of risk turns the objectifying representative principle into disarray. Yet, this does not mean that profiling ceases to play a role in security practices. To the contrary, as the precautionary principle changes the security problematique from ‘being-dangerous’ to
‘becoming-dangerous’,10 profiling becomes increasingly important as a means of establishing the potential dangerousness of individuals or groups of individuals. In 2004, for instance, precaution on the basis of intelligence warnings led to the cancellation of several British Airways and Air France flights to the United States (Levi and Wall 2004: 200). Because the underestimation of intelligence and knowledge is considered irresponsible from the viewpoint of precautionary risk, the scope and field of intelligence needs to be enlarged accordingly. Thus, 9/11 has given way to more proactive forms of surveillance of
suspect populations, leading to a surplus supply of data and an overprediction of threats (Lyon 2003,
Levi and Wall 2004, Amoore and de Goede 2005). For instance, the US Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), a joint initiative of the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, the Intelligence
Community, the FBI and the State Department, seeks to install surveillance and data collection as a routine of everyday life within and outside the United States. As Attorney General Ashcroft argues: ‘The
Terrorist Screening Center will provide ‘one-stop shopping’ so that every federal anti-terrorist screener is working of the same page – whether it’s an airport screener, an embassy official issuing visas overseas, or an FBI agent on the street’ (Department of Homeland Security 2003). The ethos of precaution does not however remain limited to the public sector. Since the attacks on 9/11 the US
Government has explicitly sought to inscribe individuals as active participants in the war on terror.
Indeed, an important function of the Department of Home Land Security is to enforce preparedness upon individual citizens. It describes in great detail how individuals can contribute in the war against terrorism by being vigilant in their daily undertakings. To quote Žižek at some length: The official aim of
Homeland Security appeals to the US population in early 2003, intended to make them ready for a terrorist attack, was to calm people down: everything is under control, just follow the rules and carry on with your life. However, the very warning that people must be ready for a large-scale attack sustained the tension: the effort to keep the situation under control asserted the prospect of a catastrophe in a negative way. The aim was to get the population used to leading their daily lives under the threat of a looming catastrophe, and thus to introduce a kind of permanent state of emergency … We should therefore interpret the different levels of the Alert Code (red, orange) as a state strategy to control the necessary level of excitation, and it is precisely through such a permanent state of emergency, in which we are interpellated to participate through our readiness, that the power asserts its hold over us (Žižek

2003: 98-99, emphasis in original). A considerable part of Homeland Security, then, is dedicated to the enforcing preparedness upon individuals by engaging them in programs such as Freedom Corps, Citizen
Corps and community neighbourhood watches through which citizens are mobilised to be on guard and to report suspicious and unfamiliar things to authorities.11 These developments in profiling towards pro-active forms of surveillance that seek to involve everybody expose the uncertainty of risk and the uncertainty of representation, the impossibility of objectifying political subjects as social groups. While profiling is still key in the war on terror, its targets are increasingly arbitrary. Security procedures tend to more and more indiscriminately target everybody, from old ladies to children. As Slavoj Žižek has pointed out, we are all homo sacer, i.e. potentially excluded in a permanent state of emergency (Žižek
2002). The impossibility of representation is more than merely an echo of Lyotard’s post-modern distrust of ‘metanarratives’ inasmuch as it exposes the eternal dilemma of politics: should politics be the government of the city left to ‘the philosophical use of speech and the mathematical use of numbers’?
(Rancière 1995: 95). Politics cannot be the privilege of the philosopher or of the expert, while excluding those who do not know. Simultaneously the ‘affair’ of those who know, politics is also the realm in which all the others find representation. The subject of a political action is always somewhere else.
Politics has been made ‘due to improvisation by unprogrammed actors, by surplus interlocutors: a noisy crowd occupying the street, a silent crowd crossing their arms in a factory and so on’ (Rancière 1995:
103). The renunciation of the political actor that cannot be calculated, whose actions are unpredictable and indeterminate is the second disavowal implied by precautionary risk. Why are politics and nonrepresentation, non-visibility disavowed while obviously present in a discourse? Insurance appeared as a strategy of solidarity against social inequalities. Precaution can lead to a form of ‘negative solidarity’,
create a community whose only commonality is that of risk. Yet, such an interpretation obscures the antagonism to which insurance and risk technologies have given an answer. Although Ewald claims that insurance risk is divorced from any idea of danger or peril, there is a more serious risk that is being avoided by the technology of insurance; namely the danger that the poor, the working class can pose to the state. Through preventing accidents, illness, poverty, risk actually prevents a higher risk, namely that of claims to the re-structuring, re-ordering of society in the name of injustice. Risk management never calls for the reorganisation of society but to compensation of damages caused by the social division of labour – and this is not done in the name of a fundamental injustice (Donzelot 1988: 138). Insurance as a technology of governance ‘normalised’ social struggles and avoided the partisan appropriation of the state. Precaution itself, rather then being targeted against potential terrorist attacks, could also target
resistance, resistance that directly challenges the state. In fact, unlike insurance or other forms of risk assessment, the precautionary principle makes an explicit value statement about the status quo. It portrays the status quo as worth preserving, as a value in itself: ‘It is concerned with ensuring the continuity of the future with the past. The precautionary principle is counter-revolutionary. It aims to restrict innovation to a framework of unbroken progress’ (Ewald 2002: 284). Indeed, the state of emergency that derives from the precautionary principle in fact prevents the real exceptional event
(strike, popular unrest, the rise of the masses) from happening. The precautionary principle thus tries to avoid the real emergency and return to the ‘normal’ course of things (Žižek 2002: 108). Unlike insurance which disavowed the Real of ‘class struggles’ through a reliance on knowledge, the precautionary paradigm can only rely on a sovereign decision. It thus also disavows the fact that politics emerges in
relation to other subjects, as Rancière has pointed out. ‘What if’, Slavoj Žižek asks rhetorically, ‘the war on terror is not so much an answer to the terrorist attacks themselves as an answer to the rise of the anti-globalization movement, a way to contain it and distract attention from it?’ (Žižek 2004: 61).
Whether one disagrees or not with the framing of Žižek’s question, it is important to be aware of the
political subjects that are being denied, disavowed as such by the practices of precautionary risk. The status quo that the precautionary logic enforces is that of neo-liberal capitalism. One need only think of the transferral of precautionary risks to the capital market, where they are subjected not to calculations

of frequency and severity but to capital market speculations.12 The transferral of precautionary risk to the capital market does not just transforms the forces of catastrophes into business opportunities. It also constructs a ‘security continuum’ where the catastrophic risk of terrorism is connected to (other) risks to the global liberal economy such as re-nationalisation, the re-imposition of taxes and tariffs, government interference in international investment and the re-regulation of financial markets.13 As one expert comments, ‘securitized CAT(astrophe) instruments are likely to be the most efficient way to cover catastrophic events, including terrorism’ (cited in Bougen 2003: 271). For instance, US Governor responsible for Iraq’s reconstruction Paul Bremer, in his former capacity as chairman for the company
Crisis Consulting, identified terrorism as an international business risk without drawing distinctions between terrorism, the anti-globalisation movement or nationalist sentiments (Cooper 2004, p. 15). Also
Gordon Woo, one of the best-known risk analysts of the London-based firm Risk Management Solutions, draws a direct parallel between terrorism and the anti-globalisation movement. Lumping together terrorists, anarchists, anti-globalists and students, he argues: What would be especially puzzling to security forces is the apparently haphazard variation in the commitment of a specific individual to the terrorist cause. Such individuals would not be classified as hard-liners, and would soon disappear from the terrorist radar screen … These individuals may not themselves have any prolonged history of links with radical groups, so they would be hard to identify in advance as potential suspects … Being spontaneously generated, such a group would be almost impossible to infiltrate. An emergent network is essentially a virtual one, in respect both of physical presence and web-based communication. The capability of militant anarchists and anti-capitalists to cause mayhem at the economic summits in
Seattle and Genoa shows the potency of an emergent network. The ranks of the hard-core anarchists were swelled by middle-class students and young professionals. An alarming future prospect would be the rapid recruitment to the militant Islamic cause of well educated but disaffected Moslems, especially to those born and raised in the West, whose loyalty to al-Qaeda may be all but invisible to security forces (Woo 2002). As the war on terror becomes linked to the pursuit of neo-liberal globalisation, the precautionary principle becomes a sovereign decisionist politics that disavows that political decisions
can be linked to contingently emerging political subjects that challenge that status quo. The ‘unknown knows’ offer us access to the true functioning of the war on terror and the global neo-liberal order.
Characterised by uncertainty and radical contingency, precautionary technologies of risk try to systematically avoid their political impact and attempt to ‘govern’ them both. Yet, politics continually haunts the attempt at governing and reclaims decision, struggle and contingency.

Ulrich
in Munich, World
Risk Society,
pp. 137-8
Believed risks are the whip used to keep the present day moving along at a gallop. The more threatening the shadows that fall on the present day from a terrible future looming 'in the distance, the more compelling the shock that can be provoked by dramatizing risk today. This can be demonstrated not only with the discourse on the environmental crisis, but also, and perhaps even more emphatically, with the example of the discourse on globalization. For instance, the globalization of paid labour does not (as yeti exist to a large degree; it threatens or, more accuratelyl transnational management threatens us with it.
The exchange of (expensive) labour in Europe for (cheap) labour in India or Korea, after all, amounts to at most 10 per cent (in Germany) and primarily affects the lower wage and skilled groups (Kommission fdr Zukunftsfragen, 1997: ch. 7). The brilliantly staged risk of globalization, however, has already become an instrument for reopening the issue of power in society. By invoking the horrors of globalization, everything can be called into question: trade unions, of course, but also the welfare state, maxims of national policy and, it goes without saying, welfare assistance. Moreover, all of this is done with an expression of regret that it is - unfortunately - necessary to terminate Christian compassion for the sake of Christian compassion. Established risk definitions are thus a magic wand with which a stagnant society can terrify itself and thereby activate its political centres and become politicized from within.
The public (mass media) dramatization of risk is in this sense an antidote to current narrow-minded
'more-of-the-same' attitudes. A society that conceives of itself as a risk society is, to use a Catholic metaphor, in the position of the sinner who confesses his or her sins in order to be able to contemplate the possibility and desirability of a 'better' life in harmony with nature and the world's conscience.
However, few sinners actually want to repent and instigate a change. Most prefer for nothing to happen whilst complaining about that very fact, because then everything is possible. Profession of sins and the identification with the risk society allow us simultaneously to enjoy both the bad good life and the threats to it.

.
David
/ Michael
, “The end of philosophy and the end of international relations,” The
Political Subject of Violence, 19
, pp. 29-30
As violence is the ultima ratio of politics, so security is the foundational value around which the political subject of violence revolves; from which it derives its teleological structure; and to which it constantly appeals in legitimation of its ordering way. Security, then, as it orders and informs the political discourses of modernity, is the vehicle by which the ethic of technology is discreetly conveyed in modern politics. From that ethic derives the characteristic way in which the politics of security makes political order present in specific material conditions of social existence. Subject to scrutiny from within the interpretive frame of the end of philosophy, it turns out, however, that security is more than a mere goal, even the chief goal, of the rationally ordered means-ends calculus which defines the political subject of violence. It is, rather, the generative and immanent principle of formation of that political
subject. To bring security into question, therefore, is to bring the entire axiomatic foundation and architecture of this political construction into question. In the process, that questioning further
problematises the foundation of epistemic realism which underpins the intellectual discourses which claim to account for and speak the truth about the political subject of violence; notably the discipline of international relations, whose disciplinary response to this un-securing of its own boundaries has naturally been to elicit, from the grip of epistemic realism in which it seeks to fasten itself ever more strongly, more security against its new enemies. It is security, then, which furnishes the foundation of the modern political subject; which subject is the political subject of violence. Security is the condition, better to say state (in order to allow the play of this word to do further work for us), which that subject
is ostensibly driven to seek for itself and, in pursuing its own security, seek to deny to its enemy. The politics of security has, therefore, to be summoned before the end of philosophy thesis also, and it is precisely that task which James Der Derian's chapter - 'The value of security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard'- commences. "The goal of this inquiry', he notes, 'is to make philosophically problematical what has been practically axiomatic in international relations.’ Adopting a Nietzschean voice, he begins by arguing that the first step is to ask, ‘whether the paramount value of security lies in its abnegation of the insecurity of all values’. Der Derian proceeds by offering a 'tentative and preliminary' genealogy of security; designed, as all genealogies are, to stimulate our appreciation of 'the discursive power of the concept, to remember its forgotten meanings, [and] to assess its economy of use in the present'. He begins by observing, first, that ‘within the concept of security lurks the entire history of Western metaphysics'. This marks the extent of its discursive register. He, therefore, commends Derrida's description of onto-theological thought -'as a series of substitutions of center for center' in a perpetual search to locate a secure 'transcendental signified' - as an equally accurate description of the politics of security as well. The political subject of violence, rapaciously invoking security, comes in a variety of guises, however, depending upon where its particular idiomatic expression happens to locate the centre: God; rational subject; nation; state; people; class; race ... The very plurality of candidates indicates what we already experience phenomenologically. There is no
secure centre. Metaphysically, therefore, the enemy is that very uncertainty which causes the doubt, of which Caygill tells, that the rational subject of both thought and politics was designed to dispel. As a metaphysically determined conception of the political and form of political order, modernity's politics of security must, therefore, also always have uncertainty as its generic enemy. This is what Der Derian

means when he indicates, following Nietzsche, that the paramount value of security is its abnegation of the insecurity of all values. The enemy of the politics of security is the very heterogeneity, difference and otherness - in Levinasian terms, radical alterity that cannot and will not be assimilated into rational
thought or practice because it simply always exceeds their categories - that threatens the knowledgeably- secure self-possession which is the ideal of the sovereign subject. With the dissolution of the Soviet empire and the total effacement of the face of the post-war enemy of the Western powers, that is precisely what their leaders have admitted. The enemy of political modernity is uncertainty and contingency itself.
David
l\Michael
, “The end of philosophy and the end of international relations,” The
Political Subject of Violence, 19
, pp. 33-6
That trajectory is an independent and powerful one. Part of it may be summarised somewhat like this. In a clear echo of Caygill's pithy observation that the rational is no longer appropriate to the real, Shapiro explores how the dense mediums of technological and rational representation through which we live life in late modern times, while insistently pursuing the realistic, ironically effect a de-realisation and a de-materialisation of life. The stridency of realism is in inverse proportion to the reality of the excess of life experience which its densely mediated realisms of technology claim so adequately to represent. The more powerfully these de-realise, the more insistently they seek this reality's further de-realisation.
Such applies especially in respect of the mediums of violence. Enemies are specified with extraordinary
precision as targets of lethal violence on television, video, radar and laser screens but rarely
encountered or seen directly. The more tele-vivid they are represented the more obscure they become as real people in real places (note, for example, Der Derian's account of the Vincennes incident). In addition, the instruments of modern warfare compound the exigencies of mortal conflict intensifying the de-historicisation of specific conflicts to which, ironically, the deployment of history in conflict always gives rise. For the event of any bloody conflict always exhibits an excess of history over the inevitably partial and partisan historical representations which are mobilised in explanation of it. One might even add that the imperatives of mobilisation, particularly in mass societies, necessarily entail a
narrativising which must violate the genealogy of conflict if mobilisation of meaning and
understanding is to be successful in its mission to draw the boundaries that constitute the
friend/enemy and casus belli distinctions upon which war making relies.
These mediums of representation are not only the electronic, optical, computational, surveillance and guidance mechanisms whose performance was artfully foregrounded in the official narrativising of the
Gulf conflict. For Shapiro, they also include the intellectual technologies of thought by which warfare has been theorised in the modern age, classically through the Clausewitzian tradition, so that it too becomes articulated as an instrument of the reason of states and of the policies of politics. 'Men have fought during the past two hundred years', a distinguished military historian has written, ,neither because they are aggressive nor because they are acquisitive animals, but because they are reasoning ones'." Rather than offering a progressive advance towards liberating us from an excess of political violence, however, the conjunction of war and reason is a classic illustration of Heidegger's argument that the modern age is distinguished by the way technology extends its sway over modern life. Clausewitz's dictum that war is the extension of politics by other means is often reversed because clearly the reverse is also true. But
Heidegger's thesis allows us to see why this is so. The reason is that both war and politics in the modern age are manifestations of technology: 'War has become a distortion of the consumption of beings which is continued in peace."' They are also expressions of the point we made earlier concerning the ethic of technology. For epistemology applied to war and politics alike is a clandestine courier for ethics of self-

hood and ontologies of violence which seek to instantiate themselves through the intellectual movements and instrumental devices of technology itself. Modern politics, as technology, technologises war; translating it from, say, an expression of aristocratic virtue into a rational instrument of statecraft governed by its characteristically instrumental rationality. Conversely, war technologises politics as it subordinates being-together in the world into a struggle for survival against the danger of violent
death at the hands of other men. It thereby submits life to the determination of the logistical imperatives, managerial impulses and means-ends rationality invoked by radical insecurity. As Arendt noted, 'the very substance of violent action is ruled by the means-end category'." And so human being becomes figured as 'the man-in-the-loop' of the sighting systems of modern weapons, and the citation systems of modern adversarial politics, which exemplify the violent expressions of the technology of modern life. It is here, then, that Shapiro intersects directly not only with Howard Caygill's critique of the predicament of modem reasoning, but also with the Heideggerian thesis concerning technology which informs Critchley's chapter.1
There could be few better practical illustrations of what might otherwise appear to be difficult philosophical points, then, than those offered by Shapiro as he makes the constitutive powers of the dense systems of representation and mediation on display in the Gulf conflict his central concern. But he provides an additional theme by focusing that analysis around what he calls 'the question of abstract enmity'. Here, increasingly, there are no specific people, communities or places only targets, currencies, commodities and theatres of (violent/military) exchange; that is to say, economies of violence constituted by systems of signification and indices of valuation increasingly subject to processes of abstraction comparable with those exhibited in the formation and globalisation of market economies of material exchange.

—
Winter/Spring, Hans, philosophy and theology at the Gregorian University (Rome), the Sorbonne and the
Instuit Catholique de Paris, President of the Foundation for a Global Ethic, Professor of Ecumenical
Theology and Director of the Ecumenical Research at the university of Tübingen, Global Politics and
Global Ethics
One misunderstanding must be avoided from the start: a global politics with an ethical orientation does not mean a complete subordination of politics to ethics , since this does not do justice to the autonomy of politics. Furthermore, it leads to a mor- alism which asks too much of morality; calculations of power and self-interest cannot be neglected in domestic or foreign policy.
Conversely, however, a global politics with an ethical orientation is resolutely opposed to a complete detachment of politics from ethics. Such ‘Realpolitik’ is ultimately unrealistic: it violates the universal validity of ethics nd leads to amoralism. Values, ideals and criteria must not be neglected by politics if it is to serve humankind. In the face of a largely individualistic society and any militarized foreign policy that may occur, ethical responsibility is to be emphasized. Here political science must indeed realistically start from what is, but it must not neglect what should be. Political science must certainly begin from the highly am- bivalent reality of human beings and their world. At the same time – in contrast to the ‘realist’ school of Hans Morgenthau, (Morgenthau was a major influence on Henry Kissinger. I have analysed both these figures at length in my book A Global Ethic for Global Politics and Economics ), it must not lose sight of the humanity of human be- ings and the great unexhausted possibilities of humankind, in particular in relation to power. Also, the supreme criterion for political action may not simply be reality, which can also mean bestiality in politics, but rather the humanity in which morality is rooted. In this way and degree, ethics always goes against the facts. That ethics, for example those found in the Decalogue, are time and again flouted is not an argument against them but an argument for them. Without ethics , human beings and their world would be even more inhuman. If a new post-modern paradigm of politics is to become established in today’s world despite some general resistance it does not need unscrupulous oldstyle strategists of power. Rather, it needs more authentic statesmen like the great figures of post- war
Europe: statesmen who show intelligence, resolution, effectiveness and steadfast- ness, but who at the same time have an ethical vision and concrete concepts of co- operation who, with a high awareness of their responsibilities, know how to actualise them. So a politics based on an ethic of responsibility in the spirit of Max Weber and Hans Jonas means a middle ground between amoral Realpolitik and moralizing
Idealpolitik.
– PROF IR BIKENT
ALTERNATIVE FUTURE FOR THE MIDDLE EAST, FUTURES, NO 33 http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~pbilgin/Bilgin-futures2001.pdf
However, although the Middle East remained chronically insecure for most of the twentieth century, the question that should be asked is whether recent history justifies one author’s observation that the
Middle East is a region that ‘best fits the realist view of international politics’ [2] and is therefore destined to relive the past. This is a question that should be asked because when such stereotypical representations of the Middle East are coupled with a cyclical view of history that is part and parcel of
the realist approach, the future of the region looks bleak. The significance of such pessimistic

presentations of the future of the Middle East is that they are used to justify heavily militarised
security policies that do not enable this vicious circle to be broken. Furthermore, such pessimistic conjectures and prognoses have the potential to become self-fulfilling, thereby making it difficult if not impossible to invent a new tomorrow for the Middle East.
Paul
, PhD in Political Theory at Johns Hopkins University and Assistant
3/1/
“‘I Mistrust all Systematizers and
Avoid Them’: Nietzsche, Arendt and the Crisis of the Will to Order in International Relations Theory,”
Millennium Journal of International Studies, Volume 25, Number 1
The notion that Realism is a highly normative perspective is no longer a contentious statement in contemporary IR theory.36 Although Morgenthau postulates the existence of `objective' laws of politics, this is only possible through a series of normative manoeuvres which take the state as the ultimate realisation of political interaction. By accepting that human nature is characterised by a lust for power which creates danger for individual (and later state) survival, Morgenthau follows an essentially Hobbesian conception of the justification of domestic politics." The establishment of civil society through the rule of law and centralised state power is viewed as a necessary result of human nature. As such, Morgenthau accepts the state as a self-evident goal, because only its hierarchical rule can tame `natural' conflict and ensure survival and security. This normative bias is also betrayed in the work of Kenneth Waltz, his strenuous claim to objectivity notwithstanding. In fact, Waltz's claim to objectivity is conspicuous for the fact that it implicitly privileges the status quo (the state) by default. Waltz's theory of anarchy, however, also seems to suggest a more assertive moral framework. Insofar as he views anarchy as a uniform consequence of the existence of autonomous units," it seems clear that Waltz merely adopts his own reading of Rousseau's state of nature to justify the normative primacy of the state. In other words, Waltz justifies the moral legitimacy of the state simply by assuming that it is the only effective form of civil society that can mitigate the logic of anarchy by ensuring hierarchical control.
Waltz thus replaces Morgenthau's embarrassing assumptions about power with the sanitised notion of structural self-interest, while continuing to justify the state in terms of hierarchical security. In both cases, the domestic order is privileged because `progress and perfection', or at least the mitigation of the state of nature, is assumed to be possible only through control and rule. This conception appears coherent only because non-order, understood as the lack of hierarchical rule, is a
priori defined as a state of nature/conflict. It is only by a perfectly circular tautology, then, that realism
manages to privilege the state. Once anarchy is defined as dangerous, politics can be conceptualised only as a process of fabrication through which a secure community is forged by rule and control.
Moreover, once security/community is understood in these terms, the logic can only circulate back and reinforce the understanding of political action as mastery and control over human affairs through the
authority or violence of rulership. When considering international relations, then, it is completely consistent for realism to label `the international' as anarchic and thus dangerous because it is beyond control. Yet, because realism has previously defined non-order as inherently dangerous to survival, the
drive for state security compels the attempt to impose order on the international realm.
In a sense, the international must seem both political (a space in need of hierarchical control) and apolitical (a space beyond hierarchical control). This dichotomy leads to the double strategy of realism as (1) the attempt to impose order on the international through `reasoned foreign policy' and power, while (2) retreating into the normative value of the state, and its circular normative justification of domestic order and state survival. In this light, it is absolutely paradoxical and yet completely consistent for Morgenthau to decry the international as the realm of irrationality and emergency, while nostalgically yearning for objective scientific laws which would allow the statesman to impose theoretical order on international politics, and thus lead to the actual control and mastery of the international realm."' As such,
realism manages to privilege the normative value of the domestic realm while simultaneously
idealising the domestication of the international through an extension of control and order."
What is startling about this strategy is not so much its circular logic, nor even its contradictory tendencies, but rather what they suggest about the direction, origin, and function of realist assumptions. It has always been understood that the theories of Hobbes and Rousseau, and thus Morgenthau and Waltz, flow logically from their a priori assumptions about human nature. But what if the relationship is backwards in this understanding? What if their assumptions of human nature flow logically from their theories of political action? The importance of Hobbes might not be that he theorised the emergence of a new mode of political action after the demise of
Christianity, but rather that he preserved the traditional understanding of politics-as-making by endowing it with a new absolute: human nature. From this perspective, Hobbes conserves the traditional interpretation of political action by simply substituting the Truth of eternal human nature for the declining ideal of
God. In other words,
Hobbes' thought takes as natural the instrumental nature of politics and merely creates
a new anchor for the means-end calculation.
Thus, while Hobbes can be viewed as innovative and indicative of the emergence of a modern resolution of spatial politics," I would suggest that the continuity manifested in his understanding of politics-as-making is perhaps the more remarkable of the two tendencies. In this sense, the normative foundation and limitations of realism lie not merely in the Hobbesian assumption of human nature, but rather in the tradition of politics-as-making which remains intact despite Hobbes' `revolutionary' strategy.

Matthew
, 9-16-20
,
Research Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London and UK Houses of
Parliament, former research analyst at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security
Studies (RUSI Qatar)
, “Derrida and the Other Islam: In What Ways If at All, Does Derrida Provide For a New Perception of Islam in the
West Post 9/11?” http://www.matthewmachowski.com/2010/09/derrida-islam-9-11.html
The war on terrorism
, as a destructive weapon pointed at the perpetrators of 9/11, has
indeed turned into a selfdestructive tendency that “works to regenerate … the causes of the evil it claims to eradicate,”
argues
Derrida.[49]
‘Terrorism’
, in his mind, is a terribly illusive concept that does not allow for a precise definition or a clear-cut distinction between “war and terrorism,” as noted by Borradori, “state and non-state terrorism, terrorism and national liberation movements, national and international terrorism.”[50] But instead, it encourages constant conflict , serves to further strengthen the sense of purpose of the terrorist organisations, and “constantly reminds [us all] of the futurity of the terrorist threat,”
claims Borradori.[51] Moreover, the call for a ‘war on terror’ is in fact “doubly suicidal,” as it aims to further antagonise the West and the world of Islam; another “autoimmunitary pervasion,”
as
Derrida would call it.[52] Furthermore, Derrida’s concept of ‘autoimmunity’ perfectly indicates that the ‘terrorist
Islamic other’
, one that we in the West can no longer, or could not even ever understand, is not so other after all.
Most of the perpetrators of the recent terrorist attacks lived in the West, were trained in the West, shared the same experience of globalisation, used the same means of media communication to gain their support, and faced the same challenges of modernity with its supposed demise of religion from the public realm that they arguably wanted to confront. These terrorists are indeed “the closest of all possible neighbours.”
[53]
Derrida however, does not stop at just indicating what went wrong and how the West was partly to be blamed for 9/11 itself, but he also suggest a way forward, even though a very idealistic one at that. He argues that the media and the governments have a duty to facilitate the process of reconciliation
, which Derrida wishes to achieve through
the acts of forgiveness and hospitality .
[54] He argues that although
“forgiveness is mad [and] remains heterogeneous to the order of politics,” and that the unconditional forgiveness
“ would entail taking risk
, for the other can be the best or the worst – we can be greeted by the other or we can be killed,” it is indeed the only way forward.
[55] He further argues, “
Nothing essential will be done if one doesn’t allow oneself to be called forth by the other.
”[56] The only reconciliation comes through forgiving the unforgivable. But are the humans really capable of that? This Derrida doesn’t clearly specify. The unreserved forgiveness is
, in his eyes, always both met
by and facilitated by
the unconditional hospitality , which does not
simply stop at tolerating the other but welcomes them to your community unconditionally.
He argues: “Pure and unconditional hospitality does not contain in an invitation (‘I invite you, I welcome you into my home, on the condition that you adopt to the laws and norms of my territory' [etc.].)
Pure and unconditional hospitality
, hospitality itself, opens … to someone
who is neither expected nor invited, to whomever arrives as an absolutely foreign visitor….
I would call this a hospitality of visitation rather than invitation."[57] Here, Derrida clearly refers to the millions of the French immigrants; mostly Muslims; and the French integrationist and assimilatory policies, which most of Muslims perceive as xenophobic and racist strategies that aim at stripping them of their real Muslim identity.[58] For him hospitality is “the unconditional acceptance of the other beyond all differences,” as purported by Chérif.[59]
Derrida’s thought may indeed be perceived as overly idealistic and arguably useless in terms of any real policy solutions. David-West has argued that his “pseudo-communist social Utopianism … works up from a leap of faith.”[60] But as “he came from the edge of the world,” as maintained by Chérif, he always advised people to push the boundaries and act on the limits of reality. His life experience of ‘being on the limits’ strongly influenced him to extensively deliberate on the notion of the other, so crucial to this article. Moreover, although Derrida never wrote any full-length article or book on Islam itself, he was very attentive to the recent return of the religion in general, and Islam in particular.
His deconstructive method of analysis allows for a new dimension of Islam in the West and enables us to see beyond the contemporary propaganda.
This research also indicates that deconstruction is not alien to Islamic thinking but in fact is deeply rooted in the Islamic Sufi theology. Deconstructive analyses of the Qur’an seem to also eliminate the Islamist argument for both Islam’s and Qur’an’s singularity. Derrida and Ibn al-‘Arabi demonstrate that Islam is not only inherently plural but also allows for the

existence of multiple Islams that do not exclude each other. Moreover, although Derrida does recognise the existence of the horrendous
Islamist and terrorist organisation that claim the name of Islam, he also demonstrates their heterogeneity from the ‘true’ Islam. A very innovative reading of terrorism and the 9/11 attacks, pursued by Derrida, uncovers their complex origin and a new significance of these murderous acts. As a result of denying 9/11 the label of a ‘major event’ and determining its autoimmunitary characters, Derrida brings the
‘other’ Islam much closer to home for many Westerners. He also maintains that whilst waging a ‘war on terror’
as a result of the
‘Muslim’ assault, the world continuous on its ‘suicidal’ path of self-destruction.
The acts of the largely undefined, idealistic, and unconditional forgiveness and hospitality are
, in Derrida’s view, the only way forward and the only peaceful solution.
20
—Judith, professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at UC Berkeley, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and
Violence
If violence is done against those who are unreal, then
, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated.
But they have a strange way of remain ing animated and so must be negated again
(and again).
They cannot be mourned because they are always already lost or, rather, never “were,” and they must be killed, since they seem to live on
, stub— bornly, in this state of deadness. Violence renews itself in the face of the apparent inexhaustibility of its object.
The derealizanon of the “Other” means that it is neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral.
The infinite paranoia that imagines the war against terrorism as a war without end will be one that justifies itself endlessly in relation to the spectral infinity of its enemy, regardless of whether or not there are established grounds to suspect the continuing operation of terror cells with violent aims
. How do we understand this derealization? It is one thing to argue that first, on the level of discourse, certain lives are not considered lives at all, they cannot be humanized
, that they fit no dominant frame for the human, and that their dehumanization occurs first, at this level, and that this level then gives rise to a physical violence that in some sense delivers the message of dehumanization that is already at work in the culture.
It is another thing to say that discourse itself effects violence through omission. if
zoo,ooo
Iraqi children were killed during the Gulf War
and its aftermath,7 do we have an image, a frame for any of those lives, singly or collectively? Is there a story we might find about those deaths in the media? Are there names attached to those children?
There are no obituaries for the war casualties that the U nited
S tates inflicts, and there cannot be. If there were to be an obituary, there would have had to have been a life
, a life worth noting
, a life worth valuing and preserving
, a life that qualifies for recognition. Although we might argue that it would be impractical
to write obituaries for all those people, or for all people, I think we have to ask
, again and again, how the obituary functions as the instrument by which grievability is publicly distributed. It is the means by which a life becomes, or fails to become, a publicly grievable life, an icon for national seLf-recognition, the means by which a life becomes note worthy.
As a result, we have to consider the obituary as an act of nation-building. The matter is not a simple one, for, if a life is not grievable, it is not quite a life; it does not qualify as a life and is not worth a note. It is already the unburied, if not the unburiable. It is not simply, then, that there is a
“discourse” of dehuman— ization that produces these effects, but rather that there is a limit to discourse that establishes the limits of human intelligibility.
It is not just that a death is poorly marked, but that it is unmarkable.
Such a death vanishes
, not into explicit discourse, but in the ellipses by which public discourse proceeds.
The queer lives that vanished on September ii were not publicly welcomed into the idea of national identity built in the obituary pages, and their closest relations were only belatedly and selectively (the marital norm holding sway once again) made eligible for benefits. But this should come as no surprise
, when we think about how few deaths from AIDS were publicly grievable losses, and how, for instance, the extensive deaths now taking place in Africa are also, in the media, for the most part unmarkable and ungrievable.

20
—Judith, professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at UC Berkeley, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and
Violence
That we can be injured, that others can be injured
, mat we are subject to death
at the whim of another, are
all reasons for
both fear and grief.
What is
less certain
, however, is whether
the experiences of vulnerability and loss have to lead
straightaway to
military violence and retribution.
There are other passages. If we are interested in arresting cycles of violence to produce less violent outcomes, it is no doubt important to ask what
, politically, might be made of grief besides a cry for war.
One insight that injury affords is that there are others Out there on whom my life depends, people 1 do not know and may never know. This fundamental dependency on anonymous others is not a condition that I can will away. No security measure will foreclose this dependency; no violent act of sovereignty will rid the world of this fact. What this means, concretely, will vary across the globe. There are ways of distributing vulnerability, differential forms of allocation that make some populations more subject to arbitrary violence than others. But in thai order of things, it would not be possible to maintain that the US has greater security problems than some of the more contested and vulnerable nations and peoples of the world.
To be injured means that one has the chance to reflect upon injury, to find out the mechanisms of its distribution, to find out who else suffers from permeable borders, unexpected violence, dispossession, and fear, and in what ways. If national sovereignty is challenged, that does not mean it must be shored up at all costs, if thai results in suspending civil liberties and suppressing political dissent. Rather, the dislocation from First World privilege, however temporary, offers a chance to start to imagine a world in which that violence might be minimized, in which an inevitable interdependency becomes acknowledged as the basis for global political community. I confess to not knowing how to theorize thai interdependency. I would suggest, however, that both our political and ethical responsibilities are rooted in the recognition that radical forms of selfsufficiency and unbridled sovereignty are, by definition, disrupted by the larger global processes of which they are a part, that no final control can be secured, and that final control is not, cannot be, an ultimate value. These essays begin the process of that imagining, although there are no grand utopian conclusions here. The first essay begins with the rise of censorship and anti-intellectualism that took hold in the fall of zoot when anyone who sought to understand the “reasons” for the attack on the
United States was regarded as someone who sought to “exonerate” those who conducted that attack.
Editorials in the New York Time4 criticized “excuseniks,” exploiting the echoes of “peaceniks”— understood as naive and nostalgic political actors rooted in the frameworks of the sixties—and
“refuseniks”—those who refused to comply with Soviet forms of censorship and control and often lost employment as a result. If the term was meant to disparage those who cautioned against war, it inadvertently produced the possibility of an identification of war resistors with courageous human rights activists. The effort at disparagement revealed the difficulty of maintaining a consistently negative view of those who sought a historical and political understanding of the events of September i t much less of those who opposed war against Afghanistan as a legitimate response. I argue that it is not a vagary of moral relativism to try to understand what might have led to the attacks on the United
States. Further, one can__and ought to—abhor the attacks on ethical grounds (and enumerate those grounds), feel a full measure of grief for those losses, but let neither moral outrage nor public mourning become the occasion for the muting of critical discourse and public debate on the meaning of historical events. One might still want to know what brought about these events, want to know how best to address those conditions so that the seeds are not sown for further events of this kind, find sites of intervention, help to plan strategies thoughtfully that will not beckon more violence in the future. One can even experience that abhorrence, mourning, anxiety, and fear, and have all of these emotional dispositions lead to a reflection on how others have suffered arbitrary violence at the

hands of the US, but also endeavor to produce another public culture and another public policy in which suffering unexpected violence and loss and reactive aggression are not accepted as the norm of political life.

Chengxin
, 6-xx-20
,
Lecturer, School of Humanities and Social Sciences @ Deakin University
, “The "China
Threat" in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics,” http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/40645119?uid=3739256&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21102547054707
While
U.S. China scholars argue fiercely over “what China precisely is,”
their debates have been underpinned by some common ground
, especially in terms of a positivist epistemology. Firstly, they believe that China is
ultimately a knowable object , whose reality can
be, and ought to be, empirically revealed by scientific means.
For example, after expressing his dissatisfaction with often conflicting Western perceptions of China, David M. Lampton, former president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, suggests that “it is time to step back and look at where China is today, where it might be going, and what consequences that direction will hold for the rest of the world.” (2) Like many other China scholars, Lampton views
his object of study as essentially “something we can stand back from and observe with clinical detachment .
” (3) Secondly, associated with the first assumption, it is
commonly believed that China scholars merely serve as “disinterested observers” and that their studies of China are neutral , passive descriptions of reality .
And thirdly, in pondering whether China poses a threat or
offers an opportunity to the U nited
S tates, they rarely raise the question of “what the United States is.”
That is, the meaning of the United States is believed to be certain and beyond doubt. I do not dismiss altogether the conventional ways of debating China. It is not the purpose of this article to venture my own “observation” of “where China is today,” nor to join the “containment” versus “engagement” debate per se. Rather, I want to contribute to a novel dimension of the China debate by question ing the seemingly unproblematic assumptions shared by most China scholars in the mainstream IR community in the U nited
S tates. To perform this task, I will focus attention on a particularly significant component of the China debate; namely, the “China threat” literature. More specifically, I want to argue that
U.S. conceptions of China as a threatening other are always intrinsically linked to how U.S. policymakers/mainstream China specialists see themselves
( as representatives of the indispensable, security-conscious nation
, for example). As such, they are not value-free, objective descriptions of an independent, preexisting Chinese reality
out there, but are
better understood as a
kind of normative , meaninggiving practice that often legitimates power politics in U.S.-China relations and helps transform the
“China threat” into social reality .
In other words, it is self-fulfilling in practice, and is always part of the
“China threat” problem it purports
merely to describe.
In doing so, I seek to bring to the fore two interconnected themes of self/other constructions
and of theory as practice inherent in the “China threat” literature—themes that have been overridden and rendered largely invisible by
those common positivist assumptions.
These themes are of course nothing new nor peculiar to the “China threat” literature. They have been identified elsewhere by critics of some conventional fields of study such as ethnography, anthropology, oriental studies, political science, and international relations. (4) Yet, so far, the China field in the
West
in general and the U.S. “China threat” literature
in particular have shown remarkable resistance to systematic critical reflection on both their normative status as discursive practice and their enormous practical implications for international politics.
(5) It is in this context that this article seeks to make a contribution.

Chengxin
, 6-xx-20
,
Lecturer, School of Humanities and Social Sciences @ Deakin University
, “The "China
Threat" in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics,” http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/40645119?uid=3739256&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21102547054707
I have argued above that the "China threat" argument in mainstream U.S. IR literature is derived
, primarily, from a discursive construction of otherness.
This construction is predicated on a particular narcissistic understanding of the U.S. self and on a positivist-based realism, concerned with absolute certainty and security
, a concern central to
the dominant U.S. self-imaginary. Within these frameworks, it seems imperative that China be treated as a threatening, absolute other since it is unable to fit neatly into the U.S.-led evolutionary scheme or guarantee absolute security for the U nited
S tates, so that U.S. power preponderance in the post-Cold War world can still be legitimated.
Not only does this reductionist representation come at the expense of understanding China as a dynamic, multifaceted country but it leads inevitably to a policy of containment that
, in turn, tends to enhance the influence of realpolitik thinking, nationalist extremism, and hard-line stance in
today's
China.
Even a small dose of the containment strategy is likely to have a highly dramatic impact on U.S.-China relations
, as the 1995-1996 missile crisis and the 2001 spy-plane incident have vividly attested. In this respect, Chalmers Johnson is right when he suggests that "a policy of containment toward China implies the possibility of war
, just as it did during the Cold War vis-a-vis the former Soviet Union. The balance of terror prevented war between the
United States and the Soviet Union, but this may not work in the case of China." (93) For instance, as the
U nited
S tates presses ahead with a missile-defence
shield to "guarantee"
its invulnerability from
rather unlikely sources of
missile attacks, it would
be almost certain to intensify China's sense of vulnerability and compel it to expand its current small nuclear arsenal so as to maintain the efficiency of its limited deterrence.
In consequence, it is not impossible that the two countries, and possibly the whole region, might be dragged into an escalating arms race that would eventually make war more likely.
Neither the U nited
S tates nor China is
likely to be keen on fighting the other. But
as has been demonstrated, the
"China threat" argument
, for all its alleged desire for peace and security, tends to make war preparedness the most
"realistic" option
for both sides. At this juncture, worthy of note is an interesting comment made by Charlie Neuhauser, a leading CIA
China specialist, on the Vietnam War, a war fought by the United States to contain the then-Communist "other." Neuhauser says, "
Nobody wants it.
We don't want it, Ho Chi Minh doesn't want it; it's simply a question of annoying the other side.
" (94) And, as we know, in an unwanted war some fifty-eight thousand young people from the United States and an estimated two million Vietnamese men, women, and children lost their lives. Therefore, to call for a halt to the vicious circle of theory as practice associated with the "China threat" literature, tinkering with the current positivist-dominated U.S. IR scholarship on China is no longer adequate.
Rather, what is needed is to question this un-self-reflective scholarship itself, particularly its connections with the dominant way in which the U nited
S tates and the West
in general represent themselves and others via their positivist epistemology, so that alternative, more nuanced, and less dangerous ways of interpreting and debating China might become possible.

Paul Craig
, 8-26-20
, writer for Rense
, “War with Russia is on the agenda,” http://rense.com/general83/wifde.htm
Thinking about the massive failure of the US media to report truthfully is sobering.
The U nited
S tates, bristling with nuclear weapons and pursuing a policy of world hegemony, has a population that is kept in the dark --indeed brainwashed--about the most important and most dangerous events of our time.
The power of the Israel
Lobby is an important component of keeping Americans in the dark. Recently I watched a documentary that demonstrates the control that the
Israel Lobby exercises over Americans' view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The documentary is available here: As a result of the US media's one-sided coverage, few Americans are aware that for decades Israel has been ethnically cleansing Palestinians from their homes and lands under protection of America's veto in the United Nations. Instead, the dispossessed Palestinians are portrayed as mindless terrorists who attack innocent Israel. If one reads Israeli newspapers, such as Haaretz, or publications from Israeli organizations, such as the Israeli Committee
Against House Demolitions, one gets a radically different view of the situation than the propagandistic version delivered by US media and evangelical pulpits. Most Americans know of the 2000 attack by Muslim terrorists on the USS Cole in Aden harbor that resulted in 17 dead and
39 wounded American sailors. But few have heard of Israel's 1967 attack on the USS Liberty that left 34 American sailors dead and 174 wounded. Pressured by the Israel Lobby, President Johnson ordered Admiral McCain, father of the Republican presidential nominee, to cover up the attack. To this day there never has been a congressional investigation. The failure of the American media is
again evident in the coverage of
the
Georgian-Russian conflict. The US
media presented the conflict as a
Russian invasion
of Georgia, whereas in actual fact the American and Israeli trained and equipped Georgian military launched a sneak attack to kill and to drive the Russian population out of South Ossetia, a separatist province. Russian peacekeepers, together with Georgian ones, had been stationed in South Ossetia since the early 1990s. On orders from Mikheil Saakashvili, the American puppet "president" of
Georgia, the Georgian peacekeepers turned their weapons on the unsuspecting Russian peacekeepers and murdered them. This action by
Saakashvili, elected with money from the neoconservative National Endowment for Democracy, an election-rigging tool of US hegemony, was a war crime. In truth, the Russians should have hung Saakashvili, as he is far more guilty than was Saddam Hussein. But it is Russia
, not
Saakashvili, that the US
media has demonized . Americans have become perfect subjects for George
Orwell's Big Brother. They sit stupidly in front of the TV news or the New York Times or Washington
Post and absorb the lies fed to them. What is wrong with Americans?
Why do they put up with it? Are Americans the nation of sheep that Judge Andrew P. Napolitano says they are? Americans flaunt "freedom and democracy" and live under a Ministry of
Propaganda. Two decades ago, President Reagan reached agreement with Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev to end the dangerous cold war.
But every one of Reagan's successors has sought to pick a new fight with Russia. In violation of the agreement, NATO has been taken to Russia's borders, and the US is determined to put former constituent parts of Russia herself into NATO. In an effort to neutralize Russia's nuclear deterrent and compromise her independence, the US is putting anti-ballistic missile bases on Russia's borders. The gratuitously aggressive US
military policy toward Russia will lead to nuclear war.
I am confident that if
Americans elect John McCain, or the Republicans steal another presidential election, there will be nuclear war in the second decade of the 21st century.
The neocon lies , propaganda , macho flag-waving , and use of US foreign policy in the interests of a few military-security firms
, oil companies, and Israel are all leading in that direction.

Edward S.
1
David
2, 10-21-20
, professor emeritus of finance at the Wharton School,
University of Pennsylvania and has written extensively on economics, political economy, and the media
1
, an independent journalist and researcher based in Chicago
2
, “The Construction of the Iran “Threat”: The Iran Versus the
U.S.-Israeli-NATO Threats,” http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-construction-of-the-iran-threat-the-iran-versus-the-u-s-israeli-natothreats/15760
It is spell-binding to see how the U.S. establishment can inflate the threat of a target, no matter how tiny, remote, and (most often) non-existent that threat may be, and pretend that the real threat posed by its own behavior and policies is somehow defensive and related to
that wondrously elastic thing called
“national security.”
We should recall that this establishment got quite hysterical over the completely non-existent threat from Guatemala in the years 1950-1954, a very small and very poor country, essentially disarmed, helped by a U.S. and “allied” arms boycott, quickly overthrown in
June 1954 by a minuscule U.S.-organized proxy force invading from our ally Somoza’s Nicaragua. But a telegram drafted in the name of
Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles shortly before the 1954 regime change in Guatemala warned that this country had become a
“challenge to Hemisphere security and peace” and was “increasingly [an] instrument of Soviet aggression in this hemisphere” and a “menace to
[the] stability of strategic Central America and Caribbean area,” so that U.S. policy was “determined [to] prevent further substantial arms shipments from reaching Guatemala.”1 And the New York Times featured this terrible threat repeatedly (one favorite, the lying headline of
Sidney Gruson’s “How Communists Won Control of Guatemala,” March 1, 1953), a propaganda campaign dating back to 1950 that extended throughout the media, even reaching The Nation magazine (Ellis Ogle, “Communism in the Caribbean?” March 18, 1950). Nicaragua under the
Sandinistas, even tinier Grenada, the nutmeg capital of the world, and of course Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction,” all posed dire threats that caused the U.S. Free Press to leap into active propaganda service. So the present intense focus on Iran’s supposed nuclear weapons threat is in a great tradition. But it never ceases to amaze the extent to which the media journalists and editors, reliably following the official party line, are able to apply a truly laughable double standard
as well as to make another victim into an aggressor and dire threat.
It’s déjà vu all over again, for the umpteenth time! With minor exceptions journalists are now
, and have been for many years, spiritually “embedded” in the military and corporate system.
“Free trade” and the U.S. right to intervene and straighten out everybody across the globe
– while of course protecting our “national security”
– are premises of the professional embedsmen and embedswomen.
Harking back again to Guatemala in 1954, we have the classic but still salient and cynical observation of United Fruit Company’s PR man Thomas McCann about the journalists given guided “fact-finding” tours of
Guatemala in the late democratic era (1952-1954): “It is difficult to make a convincing case for manipulation of the press when the victims prove so eager for the experience.”2 Think William Broad, Michael Gordon, David Sanger, Judith Miller, Marlise Simons, Steven Erlanger, Ethan
Bronner, Seth Mydans, Simon Romero, Bill Keller, etc., etc., just scratching the surface of one large U.S. newspaper.
This has to be coming from the deep structure of the U.S. system, with the corporate and financial sectors and military-industrial complex increasingly affluent and powerful in a system of growing inequality, shaping and limiting political choices and interlocked with and dominating the media via ownership and advertising power.
3
The pro-Israel lobby
, closely linked to the military-industrial-complex and other elements of the power structure, pushes politics
, the media, and foreign policy in the same direction.
There is much talk these days about the growth of a lunatic fringe on the right
that threatens political rationality
and even the governability of the country.
But much more important is the structural lunacy that causes supposed “centrists” to choose the funding of a growing war machine, constantly improved methods of killing, and permanent war as an unchallengeable centerpiece of policy and resource use in a world of growing inequality, huge infrastructure needs, and major environmental threats. Indeed, structural lunacy is now built into the system and poses a greater threat than rightwing lunacy, which flows in good part from the impact and propaganda of the primary lunacy.4 A sad fact is that
U.S. power and
global (mainly Western) elite interests are so great that U.S. and Israeli imperial projects can also mobilize the support of the “international community”
(i.e., political leaders and international institutions, not popular majorities), which regularly transforms the chosen villain into the target, not only of the superpower, but also of the U nited
N ations – especially the Security Council and some of the UN agencies. A dramatic case in point

has been the U.S. and U.K. use of the UN in their attacks on Iraq over two decades, first with the Persian Gulf war and follow-up “sanctions of mass destruction” (1990-2003), then with their outright aggressions beginning in the spring of 2002 and in their classic “shock and awe” attack and invasion starting in March 2003.

Morten
, 9-[8-13]-20
,
PhD in the Department of Political Science @ Aarhus University
, “Culture Blind and Culture Blinded: Images of Middle Eastern Conflicts in International Relations,” http://pure.au.dk/portal/en/publications/culture-blind-andculture-blinded-images-of-middle-eastern-conflicts-in-international-relations(e70d7680-0a8c-11db-bee9-02004c4f4f50).html
From this perspective, it is irrelevant to discuss whether the Middle East should be regarded as a region like all the others, as it is the case in the IR mainstream, or as a region like no other
, as the essentialists would claim.
Rather, regions should be seen as social constructions that are produced through specific discursive practices just like the international system and its various actors. Instead of discussing what the
Middle East is, the relational conception of culture regards the Middle East as an imaginary region, where
, first and foremost, it is important to focus on how the Middle East has been constructed through discursive practices and how this has extensive consequences on its international relations.
This focus characterizes Edward Said's Orientalism (1995), one of the principal works dealing with the Middle East in applying a relational conception of culture. Despite his principle recognition of the mere existence of societies with a location southeast of the Mediterranean, Said almost completely refrains from dealing with what characterizes these societies (1995: 5). Instead, he focuses on how European and
American contexts have described and imagined the Middle East and how a particular "orientalist" way of thinking has functioned as a filter through which the Middle East is constructed as a unique oriental cultural entity.
Even though the orientalist representations of the Middle East should have less to do with the Middle East than with the orientalists' own context
(1995: 12), this does not mean that these representations are innocent or ineffectual.
The European and American identity and way of performing power are thus closely interwoven with the conception of the Middle East as oriental and alien. The orientalist conception of the Middle East functions as a constituting counterimage of European and American identity, of a so-called occidental culture whose supposedly democratic, rational, and enlightened character is contrasted by the depictions of a despotic, irrational, arid barbaric Orient.
According to Said
, "the Orient has helped to define
Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image"
(Said, 1995: 1-2
). But orientalism also formed a central element of "a western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient
" (Said,
1995: 3).
The
French and British colonial representation of Middle Eastern societies as passive, backward, and inferior justified and subsequently legitimized their colonization. This close connection between orientalist descriptions of the Middle East and different kinds of performance of power allegedly does not belong only to the past.
According to Said, the situation of today bears a lot of resemblance to the time of British and French colonialism.
He points to how U.S. military interventions, the Carter Doctrine, and the establishment of Rapid Deployment Forces often have been preceded by popular and academic discussions on the threat from "political Islam" and the like
(Said, 1997: 28; see also Farmanfarrnaian, 1992; Sidaway,
1998; McAlister, 2001). As a consequence of this very different approach to international relations in the Middle East, subscribers to a relational conception of culture, instead of asking what makes the Middle Eastern international relations conflict-ridden, will ask how representations of the Middle East as an unstable "Arc of
Crises"
-to phrase Zbigniew Brezezinski, President Carter's National Security Advisorhave made "the West" appear impressively peaceful, and made Western military engagement in this part of the world possible, necessary, and for the benefit of the people of the Middle East themselves.

20
[Robert Jay, Visiting Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Superpower Syndrome: America’s Apocalyptic
Confrontation with the World, pg 174-178]
The world's
only superpower is haunted by
a fear of weakness.
From psychiatric experience with individuals, we know that underneath expressions of megalomania and claims to omnipotence there tend to be profound feel¬ings of powerlessness and emptiness. Feelings on that
order may affect our leaders' projections of world control.
These could take the form of fear of the political frag¬mentation of our society, with accompanying death anx¬iety related not just to 9/11 but to the potential collapse of the superpower entity itself.
Underneath our leaders' arrogant certainties concerning the world, there may lie profound doubts about our own social and national inte¬gration, about America's control of itself. Fear of being out of control can lead to the most aggressive efforts at total control of everyone else.
Helping to overcome such fear is the claim to transcen¬dent American virtue, to providing beneficent and liber¬ating service to the world.
That sense of a mission both altruistic and sacred can generate a surge of power that, in turn, suppresses feelings of powerlessness and weakness. Fear of weakness is
, of course, bound up with related feelings of vulnerability, with a superpower's sense of being a very visible target, and with its unrealizable requirement of omnipotence.
The world's only superpower has become a target not just because it is so dominant but because its recent policies
and attitudes, emerging from superpower syndrome
, have antagonize d just about everyone
. Its unre¬alizable omnipotence has caused its leaders to embark on an aggressive quest for absolute security via domination, which is another form of entrapment in infinity. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, coming out in support of the Bush administration, made a case for invading Iraq based on a principle of "ultimate national security." But as the political scientist David C. Hendrickson pointed out at the time, Kissinger seemed to have forgotten his own earlier criticism of the "absolute security" sought by revolutionary powers, noting then that
"the desire of one power for absolute security means absolute insecurity for all the others." In this sense and in the way that the present administration has sought to overthrow world diplomatic procedures and restraints on war-making, the United States has certainly become a "revolutionary power" in pursuit of absolute security and absolute invulnerability.
But the fear of weakness will not go away.

David
, 4-xx-20
,
PhD (Philosophy) @ University of Warwick, BA (Hons) First Class, Philosophy @
Manchester, Centennial Professor of Philosophy @ Vanderbilt University
, “Greening Derrida: The Eleventh Plague,” sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/files/jv5UKk/The%20Eleventh%20Plague.doc
Obviously part of the point
of using this language is to induce a sense of connectedness between human beings and other beings
that may not at be the forefront of our everyday experience. Indeed, we try not to share our domestic and intimate lives with noxious bacteria and viruses, with ticks, leeches, headlice, bedbugs, hornets, mosquitos, rodents, spiders, or snakes. Hospitality has its limits. But the argument never was that we might not legitimately want to keep clean and avoid disease. All creatures protect their bodily integrity in that way. The argument is that what we take to be ‘other’, what we categorize as utterly alien, as dispensable for our existence, as outside our space of concern, may reflect a myopic prejudice.
‘We’ are human. But equally, ‘we’ are white, ‘we’ are men, we are ‘semi-affluent English speaking academics’ etc. Who are we really? ‘We’ mammals?
And yet when intent on a frog breathing we notice the rise and fall of our own chest, what is it we are registering? Who are ‘we’? If you my friend see nothing, are we a we? We intellectuals are quite rightly afraid of anthropomorphizing, but perhaps we lean over backwards so far that we eliminate a quite legitimate biomorphizing, legitimate because being alive just does give us imaginative and projective access to all kinds of living being. Even when they are very unlike us in body or habit, we can deploy schematic analogies to forge bridges.
When Derrida speaks of animals, he tends to use scare quotes, not least because the very word (which he plays with as animot) encourages a homogenizing differentiation from the human, as if being different from us made them similar to each other. Are not humans essentially different from animals? Well, which humans, and which animals! And why do we suppose that there are differences and then essential differences? What Derrida is encouraging is a radical de-essentializing, and a persistent suspicion of the language of anthropocentric convenience. But we cannot pretend that there is not a play of both analogy and difference in the extension of our response-ability to other living creatures. This was something of the point of his reading of Levinas in
“Violence and Metaphysics”. What I have done is to propose a biocentric pathway for such analogizing, even as we must give our morphological imagination full rein. I do not need to be able to imagine being a six foot squid to respect its right to exist. But if I have tried to chart new analogical pathways to other species, do we not need to hold onto a certain stable sense of our own species? Those opposed to Darwin demonstrate a high level of anxiety at this point. And it is worth sharpening what Derrida would call the undecidable dimension of this issue rather than aiming for a premature resolution. The idea that the human species has a lineage that connects it in evolutionary time with the higher apes is a threat to those with a certain understanding of essentialistic identity, one that cannot not allow that something quite new could develop in time from something different. This. however, is a genuine cognitive mistake. We know a butterfly develops from a crysalis.
We know there is a qualitative difference between a bike kit and the fully assembled bike. In neither case is the product compromised by its origin. Rather it is made possible by it. Resistance to evolution is sufficiently explained by the fear that we may not have complete control over those aspects of our animal ancestry that might still lie within us. The need to stabilize the boundaries of our own species is also political in that it serves to unify the various human races under the common legal framework of human rights (which is a good thing). But would this strategic political consideration arise if we accorded apes and monkeys an appropriate respect?
Can we imagine a world in which respect for all other beings in their deep singularity was sufficiently firmly ingrained that our own species identity no longer operated as a license to kill, mistreat and neglect others?
In his The Other
Heading, Derrida takes up the question of European privilege, the kind of privilege that would give Europe a pre-eminence in human history. He concludes that this could only be justified if Europe were to offer unconditional hospitality to the Other
, were to welcome the rest of the world.
One could rework the form of this argument as a way of reformulating the distinctive privilege of the human – that we
alone are
perhaps capable
both of extraordinary destructiveness and blindness to the fate of other beings, and of the far-reaching responsibility , compassion and hospitality towards other living beings. Can we seriously claim the privileges of the human when we deal with other creatures in such a beastly way?

Paul
, PhD in Political Theory at Johns Hopkins University and Assistant
, 3/1/19
, “‘I Mistrust all Systematizers and Avoid
Them’: Nietzsche, Arendt and the Crisis of the Will to Order in International Relations Theory,”
Millennium Journal of International Studies, Volume 25, Number 1
Arendt contends that this rule-based conception of political action assumed a hegemonic and `natural' status only when the philosophical transformation of Western civilisation created an intellectual
framework which necessitated interpreting politics as rulership. From this perspective, the importance of Arendt's thought is that she reveals the way in which the Will to Order/Truth has created the parameters of the modem understanding of politics. According to Arendt, our modern notion of politics is an inevitable consequence of the Platonic Will to Truth/Order. After Plato's Republic, politics could no longer be conceived of as the freedom to act with equals, but could be conceptualised only as the ordering of society according to the world of forms. With this paradigmatic substitution of making for acting, homo faber becomes the model political actor, and the realm of human affairs can be interpreted only in terms of work. Further, through this transformation, the concepts of mastery, control, and violence are inextricably imposed onto the realm of politics. As Arendt notes, '[i]n the
Republic, the philosopher-king applies the ideas as the craftsman applies his rules and standard; he
"makes" his City as the sculptor makes a statue; and in the final Platonic work these same ideas have even become laws which need only be executed'.`' The politician is idealised as the craftsman whose skill lies first in perceiving the ideal form of the product-to-be, and second, in organising the means to execute its production. This transformation inverts both the practice and the meaning of politics on at least two levels. First, the `end' of political action becomes measured in terms of the ability of actors to replicate an ideal form. As Arendt notes, this instrumentalised model of politics evaluates action solely on the grounds of a means-ends calculus which risks devolving into an eternal regression of
ungroundable utility. Arendt states that `[t]he trouble with the utility standard inherent in the very activity of fabrication is that the relationship between means and end on which it relies is very much like a chain whose every end can serve again as a means in some other context'. The only possible way to stabilise this chain is to posit an eternal and perfect end, such as justice, order, or God, which acts as an unquestioned goal due to its perfect truthfulness. The essence of the Platonic, and later Christian and
Enlightenment, conceptions of political action, then, is the ability to ground the final end through recourse to an unquestionable `truth'. By resituating political judgement in the realm of ideals, this model denies that meaning derives from the apparent world of human affairs, and replaces debate, action, and plurality with absolutes and ideals. The dichotomisation of the ideal and apparent worlds results in a second inversion. The notion of politician as craftsman undermines the possibility of action in the political sphere by attempting to deny the very condition of plurality and natality. The prerequisite qualities of equality and persuasion are replaced by the precepts of fabrication: mastery and violence.
Plural political action is renounced in favour of the unquestioned order of rulership and mastery (which destroys the potential for natality and plurality), or by the coercion of violence (which simply overwhelms any possibility of action through sheer strength). This consequence is then circularly justified by the belief that the end of action can be nothing more than the realisation of the Real World in the Apparent World. The conception of community through equality and difference is inexorably
replaced by the understanding of political community constructed through mastery, control, and rule.

The dual inversion of politics-as-making explicitly reveals the profound impact of the philosophical foundation of the Will to Order/Truth on the modern conception of politics. Within this philosophical order, politics must be understood as a process of fabrication in which the end utopian goal justifies and underpins rulership, control, and domination. From this perspective, the development of a variety of
Real World ideals (Platonic justice, Christian salvation, or vulgar Marxist utopianism) which guide political action have disguised the entrenched consistency of the understanding of politics-as-making. It is precisely this 'definition' of politics that must be exposed and problematised. For politics-as-making is
neither a 'natural' nor `realistic' conception of politics, but rather a historical consequence of a specific philosophical foundation. As such, it is neither factual nor beyond critique.
THE COUNTERPLAN SACRIFICES ETHICS FOR APOLTICAL ACQUIESCENCE
Emmanuel
Face to Face with Levinas, 19
, p. 28
Is not the ethical obligation to the other a purely negative ideal, impossible to realize in our everyday being-in-the-world? After all, we live in a concrete historical world governed by ontological drives and practices, be they political and institutional totalities or technological systems of mastery, organization, and control. Is ethics practicable in human society as we know it? Or is it merely an invitation to apolitical acquiescence? This is a fundamental point. Of course we inhabit an ontological world of technological mastery and political self-preservation. Indeed, without these political and technological structures of organization we would not be able to feed mankind. This is the great paradox of human existence: we must use the ontological for the sake of the other; to ensure the survival of the other we must resort to the technico-political systems of means and ends. This same paradox is also present in our use of language, to return to an earlier point. We have no option but to employ the language and concepts of Greek philosophy, even in our attempts to go beyond them. We cannot obviate the language of metaphysics, and yet we cannot, ethically speaking, be satisfied with it: it is necessary but not enough. I disagree, however, with Derrida's interpretation of this paradox. Whereas he tends to see the deconstruction of the Western metaphysics of presence as an irredeemable crisis, I see it as a golden opportunity for Western philosophy to open itself to the dimension of otherness and transcendence beyond being.

Jacques
, 10-28-20
,
French philosopher
, “Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility: A dialogue with Jacques Derrida,” http://site.douban.com/126693/widget/notes/5335823/note/180821612/
In fact it is the same logic which is at work in both cases. How could we relate briefly the gift and hospitality? Of course, it is obvious that hospitality is supposed to consist in giving something, offering something.
In the conventional scene of hospitality, the guest gives something in gratitude. So there is this scene of gratitude among hosts and guests. In the same way that I have tried to show that the gift supposes a break with reciprocity, exchange, economy and circular movement, I have also tried to demonstrate that hospitality implies such a break; that is, if I inscribe the gesture of hospitality within a circle in which the guest should give back to the host, then it is not hospitality but conditional hospitality.
That is the way hospitality is usually understood in many cultures, such as the Greek and Islamic cultures.
The host remains the master
in the house, the country, the nation, he controls the threshold, he controls the borders, and when he welcomes the guest he wants to keep the mastery. ‘I am the master of the house , the city, the nation’—that is what is implied in this form of conditional hospitality.
This conditionality, which is also the conditionality of the gift as exchange, finds a number of examples in the history of our cultures. The one which interests me most, however, is Kant’s example in ‘Perpetual Peace’,in which he advocates universal hospitality as the condition of perpetual peace. To summarize very briefly, he says that peace must be perpetual; if you make peace only provisionally in order to resume the war, this would not be peace but armistice or cease-fire. For a peace really to be a peace, a promise of eternal peace must be at work.
Such a concept of peace implies
, therefore, universal hospitality
; that is, all the nation-states should guarantee hospitality to the foreigner who comes, but only under certain conditions
: first, being a citizen of another nation-state or country
, he must behave peaceably in our country
; second, he is not granted the right to stay, but only the right to visit. Kant has a number of sharp distinctions about this. I would call this ‘conditional hospitality’, and I would oppose it to what I call
‘unconditional ’ or ‘pure’ hospitality
, which is without conditions and which does not seek to identify the newcomer
, even if he is not a citizen. Today this is a burning issue: we know that there are numerous what we call ‘displaced persons’ who are applying for the right of asylum without being citizens, without being identified as citizens. It is not for speculative or ethical reasons that I am interested in unconditional hospitality, but in order to understand and to transform what is going on today in our world.
—Michael, University of Wisconsin, Madison, April, Rhetoric, Politics, Ethics, http://www.rpe.ugent.be/Bernard-Donals_paper.doc
One of Levinas’ principal ideas is that of hospitality and welcoming, one related closely to his notion of proximity. Playing on the double meaning of the French term hôte as both “host” and “guest”, Levinas’ writes that when an individual engages another in discourse, he acts at once as host and as guest.

Derrida, apropos of Rosenzweig, explains (in Adieu, for Emmanuel Levinas) that there is a law “that would make of the inhabitant a guest [hôte] received in his own home, that would make of the owner a tenant, of the welcoming host [hôte] a welcomed guest [hôte]” (42). The displacement involved here is not just a conceptual or epistemological one; it’s also, potentially, a physical one. When the individual engages the other, she is both at home and in exile, neither completely apart from, nor completely a part of, the community or the location from which she speaks. The host is a not only a host or a guest; the host [hôte] is also a hostage [ostage]. [T]he host is a hostage insofar as he is a subject put into question, obsessed (and thus besieged), persecuted, in the very place where he takes place, where, as emigrant, exile, stranger, a guest from the very beginning, he finds himself elected to or taken up by a residence before himself electing or taking one up. (Derrida 56) In political terms, there is no place the subject can comfortably call home, or domicile, or community, or nation. Though she may speak from a location that is home, or domicile, or nation, her relation to that place, like her relation with the other, isn’t “natural,” a point of origin from which everything else may be understood. The state, not unlike the biblical cities of refuge, should be seen as places for the exile – the individual “put into question” – to find respite and in what is beyond being and the utterance, be redeemed (see Beyond the Verse 38-
47). [CONTINUES] The question with which to conclude is how such a politics can be made possible.
There are three fundamental hurdles to such a politics, in Israel or any other national community. Israel, as a state that is inescapably religious (and in Levinas’s writing it’s hard to separate “Judaism” from
“Israel”), might serve as a model for other national entities with a religious character: the Islamic states in the middle east, particularly Iran, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia; the Catholic countries of Europe, particularly Ireland, Poland, and Italy; and, increasingly, the United States with its conservative politics heavily inflected with a religious fundamentalism of its own. The difficulty is to separate the
“universalism” implied by religious belief – regardless of the exclusionary character of their belief systems – and the particularity of an ethical social law. Cleary, looking at the state of parliamentary politics in Israel today, this hasn’t happened yet. One reason why it hasn’t is that the state hasn’t reconciled itself to being both host and guest, host and hostage. Israel is not the only nation having trouble dealing with this issue: recent work in diaspora studies and on the influence of emigration on world culture and politics has suggested that this century more than any other might be seen as one of both cosmopolitanism and of exile. And it is fundamentally difficult to understand oneself as both a stranger and a host, which is precisely what the state of Israel has become: torn between establishing a city of refuge for Jews around the world and erecting barriers to the stranger, Israel’s policy for the Palestinians has become abhorrent in the eyes of many of its own citizens. Repulsed by Paul Claudel’s question – “What does all this Bedouin caper matter to us?” -- Levinas warns that we are perhaps prisoners of “outmoded sociological categories” (131). The way out of the conundrum is to understand that
the problem of suffering is what each individual faces and thus has in common. To approach the other is to become exceptionally vulnerable, and to do so exposes the individual to the possibility that she will be rebuffed, in some cases violently.
This was, in fact, the horror of the Shoah, which haunts Levinas and Israel: the individual was crushed by the “we” of National Socialism. But this same horror also haunts Israel. While he recognizes that
“the Arab peoples would not have to answer for German atrocities, or cede their lands to the victims of Hitler” (131), Levinas also recognizes that Arabs have ceded their land, often involuntarily, and also suffer. Though the right to a birthplace is important, the “local colour” of the landscape is less important than engagement.
“Every survivor of the Hitlerian massacres – whether or not a Jew – is Other in relation to martyrs. [Each one] is consequently responsible and unable to remain silent” (132; emphasis in original). Suffering, non-coincidence, and survival require engagement on the part of each individual, regardless of their location of origin or their personal or national affiliation with the dead.
To obey the obligation to speak and act, both ethically and politically, one may have to find another language. Lyotard and Blanchot suggest something similar, that after
Auschwitz, the disaster which has ruined everything, the language of history and of politics may not do justice to the future. It is only in such a language that a reality may be written which, if it doesn’t establish a foundation for political thought, clearly establishes the ethical ground on which such a politics might he enacted. It remains to be seen whether, in the language of displacement and of patient and painful encounters with individual others, a politics will emerge that will abandon claims to the land, or to language -- in Hebrew terms to yad v’shem – in favor of claims on individuals as hosts, hostages, and guests. The problems of nation states, and in particular the problems of Israel and its Palestinian

neighbors, seem intractable. But if Levinas is right, it is in squarely facing the neighbor as the person who demands justice that gives a politics of hope a chance.
—Darrell, professor of religion at the University of South Florida, The Ethical Challenge
of Auschwitz and Hiroshima: Apocalypse or Utopia?, p. 125-126
Transcendence, as the literal meaning of the word suggests, means to "go beyond." Transcendence is the uniquely utopian capacity of human beings to go be beyond what they are to become what they are not, as a society and as individuals. Although other dimensions may be relevant to individual religious traditions, for the purposes of theology of culture or social ethics, transcendence is to be understood not in terms of either spatial metaphors e.g., above and below) or metaphysical categories (e.g., being and nonbeing) but rather in temporal, historical and sociological terms. Indeed, theologyof culture, as I imagine it in the tradition of Paul Tillich, is an empirical discipline similar to history or sociology.' Transcendence is to be recognized through the identification of the ability of certain forms of human community to go beyond their original social, cultural, and historical contexts to profoundly influence other times and places. At the individual level transcendence expresses itself in the utopian capacity to become other than what one is through a surrender to the inner demand to be open to the infinite. The infinite need not be hypostatized into "being" or "a being." It is simply a way of naming a category of experiences whose primary characteristic is just this radical openness to the possible that cannot be limited or defined. The most ordinary form of this openness is the experience of doubt and questioning, for although our life span is finite our questions themselves have no finite limit. Doubt is an experience that opens the self to the infinite by putting the self in question. Doubt releases the self from every given social order and social role and opens the abyss of infinite possibilities. As such, it is a radical experience of transcendence, an erotic experience of seduction by otherness. For by putting ourselves and our culture in question, doubt relativizes both and opens us up to seduction by our utopian possibilities, our infinite possibilities to become other than what we are. 125-6

Berta E.
, 1-01-20
,
Mabie, Levin & Mabie Professor of Law @ University of Florida,
Levin College of Law
, “Embargo or Blockade? The Legal and Moral Dimensions of the U.S. Economic Sanctions on Cuba,” http://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1219&context=facultypub
In the middle of this debate squarely sits the elephant in the room: the almost fifty-year old U.S. economic policy towards Cuba
- the embargo that is the topic of this essay. Indeed, not even on the naming of the economic policy can the camps agree. To those antagonistic to the revolution the policy is an embargo
- an economic sanction constituting a legitimate government action
that legally restricts the flow of goods, services and capital to the island in order to try to influence the Castro regime into changing its undemocratic ways. Such lawful restrictions simply signal justifiable disapproval
of another country's policy with the goal of changing the state's behavior that is perceived as a threat to the sanction-imposing state's national security or economic well-being.
To those supportive of the regime, however, the U.S. action is a
"blockade," an illegitimate use of power to try to make the state march to a different tune - one not of its own sovereign imagination or desire.
(Vilma, professor of macroeconomics at the University of Havana, Milagros, Research Fellow at the
University of Havana, working with the Centro de Estudios sobre Estados Unidos (CESEU), “Is the U.S. Economic Embargo on Cuba Morally
Defensible?,” muse.jhu.edu/journals/logos/v003/3.4hidalgo.html, Project Muse)
The Economic Costs: Embargo or Blockade?
¶
The year 1959
, with the triumph of the Cuban Revolution
, marked a dramatic turning point in relations between Cuba and the United States. From that year to the present, relations have been conducted within a framework of stark confrontation. Economic sanctions have been one of the mainstays of an openly hostile U.S. foreign policy toward the Cuban political regime. For a small nation like Cuba,
dependent in large measure on a meager array of principal exports with increasingly depressed prices in the international market, having to face an economic blockade
throughout the course of four decades has unquestionably been one of the greatest challenges in its history.
¶
The set of economic sanctions imposed against Cuba cannot be aptly characterized using the term "embargo"
; rather, as we shall argue in this essay,
given their scope, nature and strategic implementation, we are justified in using the term "blockade."
There are two additional reasons that validate the distinction between these terms in the case of Cuba. First, the economic sanctions are not applicable exclusively to bilateral economic relations between Cuba and the United States but rather have been extended to apply to third countries
, and second
, they constitute economic aggression involving agencies of the highest level in the U.S. government, with the strategic objective of bringing down the political system in Cuba and without flinching at the prospect of subjecting the Cuban people to penury, hunger , and shortages of staple goods as a means to this end.

Peter
in the French Department at
, translator of Badiou’s works,
20
, Badiou: A Subject to Truth, p. 228-29
The OP is conditioned by four distinctive principles: the first two are essentially formal, concerning the nature of politics as prescription and as justice; the other two are more emphatically concrete, concerning the subjective status of workers and immigrants under conditions that have become increasingly hostile since the late 1970s. 1.The status of universal political principles, like the status of all forms of truth, is necessarily axiomatic (or nondefinitional). Because equality is subjective, justice—the political principle par excellence—can be only prescriptive. Justice cannot be defined; it is a pure
“affirmation without guarantee or proof.” Rather than an ideal state that any given situation can only approximate, “justice indicates a subjective figure that is effective, axiomatic, immediate [...; it] necessarily refers back to an entirely disinterested subjectivity.” We are either subjectively disinterested, or objectively interested, with nothing in between; we either think (in justice), or avoid thought (in interest) (AM, 112—13). That politics is thus axiomatic or “thought” means that it is not a representation or a reflection of something else (the economy, the state, society, etc.)

20 When the enslaved call for freedom, for instance, or the colonized for liberation, or women for equality, the declaration of freedom or liberation or equality is itself primary or unconditioned, and not a matter of investigation or confirmation. Equality is not something to be researched or verified but a principle to be upheld. The only genuinely political question is What can be done, in the name of this principle, in our militant fidelity to its proclamation? This question can be answered only through a direct mobilization or empowerment that has nothing to do with the condescendingly “compassionate” valorization of certain people as marginal, excluded, or mis~rables.21 The prescriptions of the OP are invariably simple, minimally theoretical principles—for example, that every individual counts as one individual, that all students must be treated in the same way,22 that “everyone who is here is from here~’ that factories are places of work before they are places of profit, and so on. A political situation exists only under the prescription of such transparent statements, whose universality is as clear as it is distinct.23 Pressure, resistance, or outrage, even mobilized or organized outrage, is not enough. The OP is adamant that only political organizations, not movements, can sustain prescriptions (which may then be presented or carried by movements)

24 In this respect, the OP remains true to its Leninist roots: the formulation of a true consciousness is a quite separate operation from the spontaneous development of a movement.
25
2.All genuine politics seeks to change the situation as a whole, in the interest of the universal interest.
But this change is always sparked by a particular event, one located in a particular site and carried by a particular interest (the sans-culottes, the soviets, the workers, the sans-papiers, and so on). 1792 in
France, 1917 in Russia, 1959 in Cuba, 1988 in Burma: each time, the event opposes those with a vested interest in the established state of the situation to those who supported a revolutionary movement or perspective from which the situation was seen as for all. Other, more narrow, principles and demands, however worthy their beneficiaries might be, are merely a matter of syndicalism or trade union—style negotiation, that is, negotiation for an improved, more integrated place within the established situation.
Clearly, what goes under the label of politics in the ordinary day-to-day sense amounts only to
“revendication and resentment..., electoral nihilism and the blind confrontation of communities” (AM,
110).

OUR AFFIRMATIVE IS A RECONFIGURATION OF POLITICAL ACTION IN A WAY THAT ENSURES A MORE
FLUID UNDERSTANDING OF THE SUBJECT THAN THEIR CRITICISM ASSERTS. THE PERMUTATION IS
NECESSARY TO SOLVE THE CRITICISM WITHOUT COLLAPSING INTO DECADENT NIHILISM.
Paul Saurette, PhD in Political Theory at Johns Hopkins University and Assistant Professor of Political
Science at the University of Ottawa, 3/1/196, “‘I Mistrust all Systematizers and Avoid Them’: Nietzsche,
Arendt and the Crisis of the Will to Order in International Relations Theory,” Millennium Journal of
International Studies, Volume 25, Number 1
Arendt radically questions the tradition of the Will to Order/Truth and politics-as-making by reconceptualising political action as a process which can create meaning and justify a renewed ethic of community through difference. This conception of political action as an `end in itself"' allows her to challenge the twin assumptions of politics-as-making while also responding to the crisis of meaning after the Death of God. By locating the realisation of individuality and community within political action,
Arendt rejects the Real/Apparent World dichotomy and questions the value of hierarchical rule. In doing so, Arendt grounds two of the key normative claims of post-structuralism--(1) a renewed understanding of identity politics, and (2) the call for equality, difference, and freedom-without recourse to the Will to
Truth/God. On one hand, she offers an alternative understanding of the creation of identity. Rather than looking to God, Reason, the Nation, or even Gender to give inflexible meaning and identity to individuality, Arendt views political interaction as one manner of establishing the relation between individuality and community, and identity and difference. In opposition to the understanding of politics as the creation of ordered and universalised identity, Arendt's notion of political interaction posits a crucial interdependence between individuality and the common public sphere in which community through distinction and otherness is not merely possible, but necessary. In fact, her conception of political action ensures the possibility of fluid and mobile identity through creative and shifting action.
As Lisa Disch suggests, Arendt rejects the view that political communities must constitute themselves on the basis of a shared and stable identity, because 'identity-based foundings and maintenances, just like those based in the contestation of God, Truth or natural law, threaten to close the spaces of politics, to
homogenize or repress the plurality and multiplicity that political action postulates'.S9 Rather than resolving the tension between individuality and community under the sign/ authority of absolute identity or difference (or attempting to dissolve all identity through the myth of transparent selfconsciousness), Arendt offers an understanding of politics in which the 'end' of politics is the very process by which individuality and otherness, as well as universality, can be realised.
Arendt's reconceptualisation of political action also critiques the second fundamental characteristic of politics-as-making: the idea that hierarchical rule is inherent to politics. Her understanding of political action as the realisation and reproduction of the human condition of plurality and natality (and individuality and community) ensures that equality (but not sameness) and freedom (but not
atomisation) must be central to political action. On the one hand, Arendt suggests that equality is
intrinsic to political action, because without equality in the public realm, the realisation of individuality is established not through distinction, but through domination. In this context, plurality and natality cannot be realised, because individualisation becomes atomisation through autonomy, which destroys any possibility of a simultaneous and comprehensive realisation of human universality. Arendt therefore reconceptualises freedom not as the liberal utopia of absolute liberation, sovereignty, and autonomy, but rather as the process of free spontaneity and creation through communal political interaction." In this sense, Arendt profoundly reconsiders freedom and equality, and grounds them not as ideal goals, but rather as constitutive elements of the process of political interaction. In doing so, she manages to revitalise the foundation for equality and freedom, while focussing on the importance of the
participatory process, not the ideal end, of political action. This is not to suggest that Arendt's work represents the `next stage' of IR theory. Rather, Arendt's importance is that she recognises both the necessity of foundation and the fact that the self-overcoming of the Will to Truth/Order undermines the

traditional conception of foundationalism. By offering a renewed foundation-the importance of politics as a process through which to resolve the existential experience of plurality-without grounding it in an untenable Will to Order/Truth, Arendt forwards an important and appropriate reconsideration of the
`political' which underlines the historicity of politics-as-making, while also offering a renewed model of
the possibility of politics. Fusing politics and philosophy by recognising the politics of philosophy as well as the potentially philosophical role of politics, Arendt fulfils Nietzsche's call and affirms both the
Death of God and the end of politics-as-making while avoiding a decadent and nihilistic will to
nothingness. The question is not, therefore, whether Arendt's foundation is `true' and thus represents the only response to late modernity. Rather, we must consider whether we could use this understanding to reground and reconceptualise the normative possibilities of political action. For if Arendt and
Nietzsche stress anything, it is that the question of foundation no longer relies on the threadbare and familiar chorus of Truth. Instead, it must be open to the harmony and discord of political debate.

—David, professor of international politics at the University of Newcastle, Moral
Spaces, p. 40-41
Even though Levinas's limited reservations about the state are here restricted to the nature of (domestic) political order, the idea that "the state may have to be challenged in the name of our ethical responsibility to the other" at least allows for the possibility of extending political action in terms of the ethical relation beyond the bounds suggested by Levinas's previous reflections on the third party and the state. There is no doubt, however, that to fulfill the promise of Levinas's ethics with respect to international politics, this possibility for challenge has to be carried a good deal further. Moreover, I would argue, this possibility for challenge has to be pursued in order to maintain fidelity with Levinas's conviction that neither politics nor warfare can obliterate the relationship of the self to the other as a relation of responsibility. Indeed, this endeavor might be thought of in terms of making Levinas's thought more "Levinasian," for pursuing this possibility of challenge flows from the recognition that “injustice—not to mention racism, nationalism, and imperialism—begins when one loses sight of the transcendence of the Other and forgets that the State, with its institutions, is informed by the proximity of my relation to the other.
Paul
, PhD in Political Theory at Johns Hopkins University and Assistant
, 3/1/1
, “‘I Mistrust all Systematizers and Avoid
Them’: Nietzsche, Arendt and the Crisis of the Will to Order in International Relations Theory,”
Millennium Journal of International Studies, Volume 25, Number 1
Arendt radically questions the tradition of the Will to Order/Truth and politics-as-making by reconceptualising political action as a process which can create meaning and justify a renewed ethic of community through difference. This conception of political action as an `end in itself"' allows her to challenge the twin assumptions of politics-as-making while also responding to the crisis of meaning after the Death of God. By locating the realisation of individuality and community within political action,
Arendt rejects the Real/Apparent World dichotomy and questions the value of hierarchical rule. In doing so, Arendt grounds two of the key normative claims of post-structuralism--(1) a renewed understanding of identity politics, and (2) the call for equality, difference, and freedom-without recourse to the Will to
Truth/God. On one hand, she offers an alternative understanding of the creation of identity. Rather than looking to God, Reason, the Nation, or even Gender to give inflexible meaning and identity to individuality, Arendt views political interaction as one manner of establishing the relation between individuality and community, and identity and difference. In opposition to the understanding of politics as the creation of ordered and universalised identity, Arendt's notion of political interaction posits a crucial interdependence between individuality and the common public sphere in which community through distinction and otherness is not merely possible, but necessary. In fact, her conception of political action ensures the possibility of fluid and mobile identity through creative and shifting action.
As Lisa Disch suggests, Arendt rejects the view that political communities must constitute themselves on the basis of a shared and stable identity, because 'identity-based foundings and maintenances, just like those based in the contestation of God, Truth or natural law, threaten to close the spaces of politics, to
homogenize or repress the plurality and multiplicity that political action postulates'.S9 Rather than

resolving the tension between individuality and community under the sign/ authority of absolute identity or difference (or attempting to dissolve all identity through the myth of transparent selfconsciousness), Arendt offers an understanding of politics in which the 'end' of politics is the very process by which individuality and otherness, as well as universality, can be realised.
Arendt's reconceptualisation of political action also critiques the second fundamental characteristic of politics-as-making: the idea that hierarchical rule is inherent to politics. Her understanding of political action as the realisation and reproduction of the human condition of plurality and natality (and individuality and community) ensures that equality (but not sameness) and freedom (but not
atomisation) must be central to political action. On the one hand, Arendt suggests that equality is
intrinsic to political action, because without equality in the public realm, the realisation of individuality is established not through distinction, but through domination. In this context, plurality and natality cannot be realised, because individualisation becomes atomisation through autonomy, which destroys any possibility of a simultaneous and comprehensive realisation of human universality. Arendt therefore reconceptualises freedom not as the liberal utopia of absolute liberation, sovereignty, and autonomy, but rather as the process of free spontaneity and creation through communal political interaction." In this sense, Arendt profoundly reconsiders freedom and equality, and grounds them not as ideal goals, but rather as constitutive elements of the process of political interaction. In doing so, she manages to revitalise the foundation for equality and freedom, while focussing on the importance of the
participatory process, not the ideal end, of political action.
This is not to suggest that Arendt's work represents the `next stage' of IR theory. Rather, Arendt's importance is that she recognises both the necessity of foundation and the fact that the self-overcoming of the Will to Truth/Order undermines the traditional conception of foundationalism. By offering a renewed foundation-the importance of politics as a process through which to resolve the existential experience of plurality-without grounding it in an untenable Will to Order/Truth, Arendt forwards an important and appropriate reconsideration of the `political' which underlines the historicity of politicsas-making, while also offering a renewed model of the possibility of politics. Fusing politics and
philosophy by recognising the politics of philosophy as well as the potentially philosophical role of politics, Arendt fulfils Nietzsche's call and affirms both the Death of God and the end of politics-as-
making while avoiding a decadent and nihilistic will to nothingness. The question is not, therefore, whether Arendt's foundation is `true' and thus represents the only response to late modernity. Rather, we must consider whether we could use this understanding to reground and reconceptualise the normative possibilities of political action. For if Arendt and Nietzsche stress anything, it is that the question of foundation no longer relies on the threadbare and familiar chorus of Truth. Instead, it must be open to the harmony and discord of political debate.
Emmanuel
, Face to Face with Levinas, 19
, p. 28
Is not the ethical obligation to the other a purely negative ideal, impossible to realize in our everyday being-in-the-world? After all, we live in a concrete historical world governed by ontological drives and practices, be they political and institutional totalities or technological systems of mastery, organization, and control. Is ethics practicable in human society as we know it? Or is it merely an invitation to apolitical acquiescence?
This is a fundamental point. Of course we inhabit an ontological world of technological mastery and political self-preservation. Indeed, without these political and technological structures of organization we would not be able to feed mankind. This is the great paradox of human existence: we must use the

ontological for the sake of the other; to ensure the survival of the other we must resort to the technicopolitical systems of means and ends. This same paradox is also present in our use of language, to return to an earlier point. We have no option but to employ the language and concepts of Greek philosophy, even in our attempts to go beyond them. We cannot obviate the language of metaphysics, and yet we cannot, ethically speaking, be satisfied with it: it is necessary but not enough. I disagree, however, with
Derrida's interpretation of this paradox. Whereas he tends to see the deconstruction of the Western metaphysics of presence as an irredeemable crisis, I see it as a golden opportunity for Western philosophy to open itself to the dimension of otherness and transcendence beyond being.

Richard
, Philosophy, Loyola College, Face to Face with Levinas, 19
, p. 6-8
1. Ethics exceeds knowledge by beginning in what lacks an origin, a radical exteriority: the absolute alterity of the other person. For Levinas what makes the other person other is not a unique attribute or a unique combination of attributes but the "quality" of alterity itself. The other is other because his alterity is absolute, indeterminate and indeterminable. Of course, the other is always a specific other, a fellow citizen, a widow, an orphan, a magistrate, but the other is never only that, never only a phenomenon. The utter nakedness of the other's face pierces all significations , historical or otherwise, that attempt to mask or comprehend it. 2. Ethics exceeds knowledge in its "terminus," an "agency" without its own origin, a radical passivity: the inalienable responsibility to respond to the other person. The radical alterity of the other person contacts the subject beneath and prior to its powers and abilities, including its acts of consciousness. Prior to the reciprocal relations that may voluntarily or traditionally bind one to another, prior to the reasons the subject may propose in response to the other, prior to the respect one may have for the other, and prior to the sensu ous receptivity that may welcome the other, the self is subjected to the excessive alterity of the other. In relation to the other the self is reconditioned, desubstantialized, put into question. Put into relation to what it cannot integrate, the self is made to be itself "despite itself." Hence one is "in some sense," as Descartes says, - a sense indeterminable by knowing - for the other before being for oneself. Hence one is radically passive in a superlative passivity equal only to the superlative alter ity of the other person. 3. The ethical relation holds together what knowing can not hold together: the absolute alterity of the other person and the absolute passivity of the self despite-itself. The other's alterity is experienced as a command, an order which as it orders ordains the self to its inalienable selfhood. It is the other who "awakens" the subject and the abilities which make the life of the ego continuous and ultimately complacent, a homecoming. The other disturbs, pierces, ruptures, disrupts the immanence into which the subject falls when free of unassimilable alterity. The other, then, contacts the self from a height and a destitution: from the height of alterity itself and from the destitution to which the frailty and ultimately the mortality of the human condition make the other destined. The unspoken message which appears in the face of the other is: do not kill me; or, since the message has no ontological force, but is the very force of morality: you ought not kill me; or, since the alterity of the other's face is alterity itself: thou shalt not kill. 4. Subjected to subjectivity by the excessive alterity of the other and the demand this places on me, the I becomes responsible: responsible to and for the other. Here again, responsibility is not an attribute of the self, but the self itself, the self-despite-itself is responsible to and for the other. In the face of the other, and only in the face of the other, the self becomes noninterchangeable, nonsubstitutable, which is to say, it becomes inalienably itself, "in the first person," responsible. To be oneself is to be for the other. Further, the responsibility to respond to the other is an infinite responsibility, one which increases the more it is fulfilled, for the other is not an end that can be satisfied. The self is responsible for all the frailty of the other, the other's hungers, wounds, desires; and for the very responsibility of the other - I am my brother's keeper; as well as for the very death of the other, so that the other may not die alone, forsaken.

Emmanuel
, Face to Face with Levinas, 19
, p. 23-24
The approach to the face is the most basic mode of responsibility. As such, the face of the other is verticality and uprightness; it spells a relation of rectitude. The face is not in front of me (en face de
moi) but above me; it is the other before death, looking through and exposing death. Secondly, the face is the other who asks me not to let him die alone, as if to do so were to become an accomplice in his death. Thus the face says to me: you shall not kill. In the relation to the face I am exposed as a usurper of the place of the other. The celebrated ‘right to existence’ that Spinoza called the conatus
essendi and defined as the basic principle of all intelligibility is challenged by the relation to the face.
Accordingly, my duty to respond to the other suspends my natural right to self-survival, le droit aitale.
My ethical relation of love for the other stems from the fact that the self cannot survive by itself alone, cannot find meaning within its own being-in-the-world, within the ontology of sameness. That is why I prefaced Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence with Pascal's phrase, "'That is my place in the
sun: That is how the usurpation of the whole world began." Pascal makes the same point when he declares that "the self is hateful." Pascal's ethical sentiments here go against the ontological privileging of ‘the right to exist.’ To expose myself to the vulnerability of the face is to put my ontological right to existence into question. In ethics, the other's right to exist has primacy over my own, a primacy epitomized in the ethical edict: you shall not kill, you shall not jeopardize the life of the other. The ethical rapport with the face is asymmetrical in that it subordinates my existence to the other. This principle recurs in Darwinian biology as the "survival of the fittest" and in psychoanalysis as the natural instinct of the ‘id’ for gratification, possession, and power - the libido dominandi

.
Michael
—Lancaster,
Another Justice, Political Theory; Vol. 27 Issue 2; p. 164-166
Quite the reverse. The subject was never a firm foundation for justice, much less a hospitable vehicle for the reception of the call of another Justice. It was never in possession of that self-possession which was supposed to secure the certainty of itself, of a self-possession that would enable it ultimately to adjudicate everything. The very indexicality required of sovereign subjectivity gave rise rather to a commensurability much more amenable to the expendability required of the political and material economies of mass societies than it did to the singular, invaluable, and uncanny uniqueness of the self. The value of the subject became the standard unit of currency for the political arithmetic of States and the political economies of capitalism ." They trade in it still to devastating global effect. The technologisation of the political has become manifest and global. Economies of evaluation necessarily require calculability.
'' Thus no valuation without mensuration and no mensuration without indexation. Once rendered calculable, however, units of account are necessarily submissible not only to valuation but also, of course, to devaluation. Devaluation , logically, can extend to the point of counting as nothing. Hence, no mensuration without demensuration either. There is nothing abstract about this: the declension of economies of value leads to the zero point of holocaust. However liberating and emancipating systems of value—rights—may claim to be, for example, they run the risk of counting out the invaluable.
Counted out, the invaluable may then lose its purchase on life. Herewith, then, the necessity of championing the invaluable itself. For we must never forget that, "we are dealing always with whatever exceeds measure.
" But how does that necessity present itself? Another Justice answers: as the surplus of the duty to answer to the claim of Justice over rights. That duty, as with the advent of another Justice, is integral to the lack constitutive of the human way of being. The event of this lack is not a negative experience. Rather, it is an encounter with a reserve charged with possibility. As possibility, it is that which enables life to be lived in excess without the overdose of actuality!
' What this also means is that the human is not decided. It is precisely undecidable. Undecidability means being in a position of having to decide without having already been fully determined and without being capable of bringing an end to the requirement for decision. In the realm of undecidability, decision is precisely not the mechanical application of a rule or norm. Nor is it surrender to the necessity of contingency and circumstance. Neither is it something taken blindly, without reflection and the mobilisation of what can be known. On the

contrary, knowing is necessary and, indeed, integral to 'decision'. But it does not exhaust
'decision', and cannot do so if there is to be said to be such a thing as a 'dec ision'. We do not need deconstruction, of course, to tell us this. The management science of decision has long since known something like it through the early reflections of, for example, Herbert Simon and
Geoffrey Vickers?
' But only deconstruction gives us it to think, and only deconstructively sensible philosophy thinks it through. To think decision through is to think it as heterogeneous to the field of knowing and possible knowing within which it is always located.
'' And only deconstruction thinks it through to the intimate relation between 'decision' and the assumption of responsibility, effect egress into a future that has not yet been—could not as yet have been—known: The instant of decision, if there is to be a decision, must be heterogeneous to this accumulation of knowledge. Otherwise there is no responsibility. In, this sense only must the person taking the decision not know everything.40 Ultimately one cannot know everything because one is advancing into a future which simply cannot be anticipated, and into which one cannot see.
—
Victor
, Between Ethics and Aesthetics, 20
, p. 202
It is with such an ethics in mind that I want to examine a name, a word that has entered our lexicon and our consciousness with great force. The word is, of course, "globalization," a word that has ambitions to become a master word that will name the overwhelming processes shaping our contemporary world.
The very term globalization presents itself as a universal, and an all-inclusive theoretical concept that is sufficient unto itself. As I will argue, not only are there theoretical inconsistencies in the totalizing or universalizing claims of globalization, but there is also the danger that "globalization," as a master term or metanarrative, may swallow up and encompass even those discourses or narratives opposing it. Such a danger has been noticed, for example, by political economist J. K. Gibson-Graham, who confesses that in her earlier work she had ignored the performative character of conceptual categories and as a result discovered that her critical portrayal of a powerful global capitalism merely confirmed and further entrenched its monolithic, all-encompassing power. In her words: When theorists depict patriarchy, or racism, or compulsory heterosexuality, or capitalist hegemony they are not only delineating a formation they hope to see destabilized or replaced. They are also generating a representation of the social world endowing it with performative force. To the extent that this representation becomes influential it may contribute to the hegemony of a hegemonic formation. Similarly, in our critical depiction of globalization, we may in fact end up confirming its globality, its universality, and, as a consequence, we may end up accepting its inescapability. To talk about globalization may be to entrench it further, to
"acknowledge that we live within something large that shows us to be small ... [and] in the face of which all our transformative acts are ultimately inconsequential" (EC, 253). No wonder, then, that an astute critic of globalization like Ian Robert Douglas has provocatively counseled us to "forget globalization.""
For, indeed, we have to forget globalization in its constative form as a statement describing the reality of our contemporary world in order to remember its performative status as a discourse that actively constitutes and shapes the very reality it names. We must understand that globalization does not name a reality that has already taken place; globalization is a tautological, performative discourse actively seeking to convince us that globalization is our inescapable contemporary reality. Consequently, its performative, rhetorical force can be challenged, contradicted, and rearticulated differently. The name
"globalization," which pretends to totality or universality, can thus be shown to be partial in all senses of

the word-a name that is both incomplete and ideologically selective. An ethical approach to the name
"globalization" will challenge its claim to hegemony, singularity, and globality and seek to reveal its unavoidable duplicity, the otherness that disrupts it.
Ernesto
,
, Contingency,
Hegemony, Universality, p. 53-56
Let us now return to our text by Marx on political emancipation, and consider the logical structure of its different moments. We have, in the first place, the identification of the aims of a particular group with the emancipatory aims of the whole community How is this identification possible? Are we dealing with a process of alienation of the community which abandons its true aims to embrace those of one of its component parts? Or with an act of demagogic manipulation by the latter, which succeeds in rallying the vast majority of society under its own banners?
Not at all. ‘the reason for that identification is that this particular sector is the one which is able to bring about the downfall of an estate which is perceived as a ‘general crime’. Now, if the ‘crime’ is a general one and, however, only a particular sector or constellation of sectors — rather than the ‘people’ as a whole — is able to overthrow it, this can only mean that the distribution of power within the ‘popular’ pole is essentially uneven. While in our first quotation from Marx universality of the content and formal universality exactly overlapped in the body of the proletariat, we have in the so-called political emancipation a split between the particularism of the contents and the formal universalization deriving from their irradiation over the whole of society. This split is, as we have seen, the effect of the universality of the crime combined with the particularity of the power capable of abolishing it. Thus we see a first dimension of the hegemonic relation: unevenness of power is constitutive of it. We can easily see the difference with a theory like Hobbes’s. For Hobbes, in the state of nature power is evenly distributed among individuals, and, as each tends towards conflicting aims, society becomes impossible. So the covenant which surrenders total power to the Leviathan is an essentially nonpolitical act in that it totally excludes the interaction between antagonistic wills. A power which is total is no power at all. If, on the contrary we have an originally uneven distribution of power, the possibility of ensuring social order can result from that very unevenness and not from any surrender of total power into the hands of the sovereign. In that case, however, the claim of a sector to rule will depend on its ability to present its own particular aims as the ones which are compatible with the actual functioning of the community — which is, precisely what is intrinsic to the hegemonic operation. This, however, is not enough. For if the generalized acceptance of the hegemony of the force carrying out political emancipation depended only on its ability to overthrow a repressive regime, the support it would get would be strictly limited to such an act of overthrowing, and there would be no ‘coincidence’ between the ‘revolution of the nation’ and the
‘emancipation’ of a particular class of civil society. So, what can bring about this coincidence? I think that the answer is to be found in Marx’s assertion that ‘a particular estate must be looked upon as the notorious crime of the whole of society, so that liberation from that sphere appears as general self-liberation’. For this to be possible, several displacements become necessary, all of which point towards an increasing complexity in the relation between universality and particularity. In the first place, a system of domination is always, ontically speaking, a particular one, but if it is to be seen as the notorious crime of the whole of society’, its own particularity has in turn to be seen as a symbol of something different and incommensurable with it: the obstacle which prevents society from coinciding with itself - from reaching its fullness. There is no concept, of course, which would correspond to that fullness and, as a result, no concept corresponding to a universal object blocking it, but an impossible object, to which no concept corresponds, can still have a name: a borrows it from the particularity of the oppressive regime — which thus becomes partially universalized. In the second place, if there is a general crime, there should be a general victim. Society, however, is a plurality of particularistic groups and demands. So if there is going to be the subject of a certain global emancipation, the subject antagonized by the general crime, it can be politically constructed only through the equivalence of a plurality of demands. As a result, these particularities are also split: through their equivalence they do not simply remain themselves, but also constitute an area of universalizing effects — not exactly Rousseau’s general will, but a pragmatic and contingent version of it. Finally what about that impossible object, the fullness of society, against which the ‘notorious crime sins, and which emancipation tries to reach? It obviously lacks any form of direct expression, and can accede to the level of representation, as in the two previous cases, only by a passage through the particular. This particular is given, in the present case, by the aims of that sector whose ability to overthrow the oppressive regime opens the way to political emancipation — to which we have to add only that, in this process, the particularity of the aims does not remain as mere particularity: it is contaminated

by the chain of equivalences it comes to represent. We can, in this way, point to a second dimension of the hegemonic relation: there is hegemony only if the dichotomy universality/particularity is superseded; universality exists only incarnated in — and subverting — some particularity but, conversely, no particularity can become political without becoming the locus of universalizing effects.