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Index .............................................................................................................................................................. 1
SHELL ........................................................................................................................................................... 2
SHELL ........................................................................................................................................................... 3
SHELL ........................................................................................................................................................... 4
SHELL ........................................................................................................................................................... 5
SHELL ........................................................................................................................................................... 6
LINKS- space exploration = colonization ....................................................................................................... 7
LINK- exploration = Christian Domination ...................................................................................................... 8
LINK- NASA = Christian domination .............................................................................................................. 9
LINK- ‘EMPIRE’ VS. IMPERIALISM ............................................................................................................ 10
LINKS: SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY/PROGRESS ......................................................................................... 11
LINKS: SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY/PROGRESS ......................................................................................... 12
LINKS: SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY/PROGRESS ......................................................................................... 13
LINKS: US COMPETITIVENESS CLAIMS .................................................................................................. 14
LINKS: GEO-MORPHOLOGY ..................................................................................................................... 15
SOFT POWER LINKS ................................................................................................................................. 16
SOFT POWER LINKS ................................................................................................................................. 19
SOFT POWER LINKS ................................................................................................................................. 20
Soft power causes imperialism .................................................................................................................... 22
LINK- DEMANDS ON STATE ...................................................................................................................... 23
LINK- NASA................................................................................................................................................. 27
LINK: PRIVATIZATION................................................................................................................................ 28
IMPACT: AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM .................................................................................................. 29
IMPACT: WAR............................................................................................................................................. 31
IMPACT: COLONIALISM............................................................................................................................. 32
IMPACT: COLONIALISM............................................................................................................................. 34
ALT- REFORMS FAIL ................................................................................................................................. 36
FRAMEWORK- SHELL ............................................................................................................................... 37
Discourse is key .......................................................................................................................................... 39
Role of the ballot.......................................................................................................................................... 41
AT: PERM.................................................................................................................................................... 44
AFF-PERM .................................................................................................................................................. 45
AFF-FRAMEWORK ..................................................................................................................................... 46
AFF—FRAMEWORK................................................................................................................................... 47
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Space exploration is driven by the same logic/motives as colonial expansion
Pyne 2006. Pyne, Stephen J. “Seeking Newer Worlds: An Historical Context for Space Exploration,” in Critical Issues in the History of Spaceflight, edited by
Steven J. Dick and Roger D. Launius, National Aeronautics and Space Administration Office of External Relations History Division 2006. Page 29-30.
There are good reasons, then, for considering the Third Age-our age-as continuous with its predecessors. Yet it is also
different, and those differences matter. Most intrinsically, the Third Age is going where no one is or ever has been. The geographic realms of the Third Age are
places where people cannot live off the land. In Antarctica, they can at least breathe. In the deep oceans, beneath the ice sheets, or in space, they can survive
only if encased in artificial life-support systems. These are environs that offer no sustaining biota. There is little reason to believe that much more thrives beyond
Earth. These geographies remain, for all practical purposes, abiotic worlds. They
propel exploration beyond the ethnocentric realm of
Western discovery, but also beyond the sphere of the human and perhaps beyond the provenance of life.
This is a cultural barrier to exploration, in comparison to which the limiting velocity of light may prove a mere technological inconvenience. The reason
goes
to the heart of exploration: that it is not merely an expression of curiosity and wanderlust but involves the encounter
with a world beyond our ken that challenges our sense of who we are. It is a moral act, one often tragic, a strong
nuclear force that bonds discovery to society. It means that exploration is more than adventuring, more than
entertainment, more than inquisitiveness. It means it asks, if indirectly, core questions about what the exploring people are
like. This was unavoidable in the past because almost all previous encounters had involved people. Exploration meant the meeting of one people with another,
the transfer of knowledge and experience from one group to another. Most of the world Europe did not discover, except to itself. Almost every place that could
have people did have them, and those indigenes proved indispensable. They served as interpreters, translators, native guides, hunters, and collectors. Explorers
often succeeded to the extent that they borrowed from or emulated the peoples who already resided in these (for Europe) far and foreign realms. What Europe
did was to stitch these separate someones together into a vast cosmological quilt: its voyages of discovery were needles and threads that joined geographic
patches into new collective patterns.
The Third Age has no such option. No one will live off the land on Deimos, go native on Titan, absorb the art of Venus, the mythology of Uranus, the religious
precepts of Mars, or the literature of Ceres.There will be no one to talk to except ourselves. Discovery will become a colossal exercise in self
reference. Consider some of the iconic images of the American space program. There is the image of Earthrise,
which is a view of ourselves from the Moon. And there is Buzz Aldrin, encased like a high-tech Michelin Man, staring into a camera on the lunar
surface. His visor, however, reflects back the image of the photographer. In a classic image, Caspar David Friederick could position his
painting’s observer peering over the shoulder of a Humboldtean traveler, in turn overlooking a valley of mist. In a comparable
classic, Neil Armstrong could photograph Aldrin, looking at Armstrong, showing the photographer taking the
photograph. That shift in perspective captures exactly the shift from Enlightenment to Modernism and from Second Age to Third. Add to the survey the
curious plaques affixed to Pioneer and Voyager, surely indecipherable to any entity that might find them.They are a message in a bottle dispatched to ourselves.
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Attempts to contain imperialism through existing political institutions fail. The
alternative is to reorient our struggles around broad-based, bottom up resistance to
global empire instead of reactive condemnation of exploration.
Sherman 2010 (Steven, “The Empire of Bases and the American Anti-War Movement”, Dissident Voice, March 10, http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/03/theempire-of-bases-and-the-american-anti-war-movement/ Accessed 6/28/2010 GAL)
The basic narrative of advancing socialism through armed confrontation with the US or its proxies collapsed in 1989. I think a
good chunk of the problem today is that no alternative narrative has replaced it (there has also long been a robust pacifist tradition in the
US, but this often leans towards individualistic bearing witness rather than mass organizing). Instead, we lurch from mobilization to
mobilization with the intuition that war is bad.
When there is some prospect of intervening in public debates — during the drive to war with Iraq in 2003, or when
the elite consensus about maintaining the occupation of Iraq started to crumble around 2005 — the crowds at our
demonstrations swell. When these moments pass, the crowds dwindle. With the exception of a handful of honorable groups, hardly
anyone seems to be doing anything besides grumbling in private.
Rather than a struggle against particular wars, the movement can, inspired by the thinking of the activists
documented in Bases of Empire, think of itself as broadly counterposed to a global empire in which the ‘war on terror’
(or the ‘war in Iraq’, ‘war in Afghanistan’, etc) is simply a particular instance.
This orientation would counter the tendency to go into hibernation whenever debate on particular interventions
recedes. Notwithstanding this tendency, the empire grinds on, sometimes in places like the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia that are
almost unknown in the US (one of the most useful aspects of the book is a map of all known US military bases around the world–particularly heavy in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Japan and Germany, of course, but also including numerous bases in Italy, Spain and Portugal, and throughout the Caribbean and the Andean and
Equatorial portions of Latin America, among others).
The alternative to this empire is not an armed counterpower, but a variety of movements with complex priorities —
feminist, ecological, culturally diverse. This parallels the way the struggle against dogmatic neoliberalism is no longer
obsessed with the imposition of a singular, planned economic model. Rather, when we abandon the simple minded
formulation that what is best for investors is best for the world, complex alternatives gradually emerge. “One no,
many yeses”, as the saying goes.
Similarly, the alternative to equating ’security’ with the US military is a complex picture of what is needed to produce
a meaningful and happy co-existence. US militarism, like neoliberalism, is a one dimensional view of the world
developed from a position of power. The world is simply a space to be controlled by the military, through the endless
gobbling of land for military bases, and the subordination of other needs — cultural, economic, political, etc. — to this
project.
The examples described in The Bases of Empire clarify this dynamic and how to resist it. In places as diverse as the Philippines, Iraq, Hawaii, and Turkey, one
sees similar processes over and over.
The steamrolling of the rights of those considered in the way, perhaps with the support of some local group that has long had it in for them. The destruction of
the environment to facilitate military ’security’. The inability to imagine those outside of the US military complex as equals. The introduction and reinforcement of
regressive gender relations epitomized by prostitution around bases (worth pondering by those who hope that the US will improve the lot of Afghan women
through military occupation). Divide and conquer strategies that involve siding with one local group at the expense of another to secure the former’s support.
To date, changes in the party which controls the White House or congress, and even defeat in wars, has resulted
more in modest shifts in geography and strategy than in fundamental change.
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Sometimes the US seeks rights over a country’s territory, or co-ordination with its military, rather than a formal base,
per se. The pressure on the US to get out of places like the Philippines or Okinawa increases the importance of
other territories, like Guam. Although the bases are gone from the Philippines, the US
remains, now involved as ‘advisors’ in a war on separatists. This tendency for the empire to mutate rather than shrink
can be infuriating.
Yet reading this book, it is difficult not to sense growing isolation for this project. Compounded with the economic weakness, military failures, and diplomatic
isolation of the US (not dealt with in this volume), there are grounds for hope that a military that now strides across most of the globe may someday soon begin to
shrink, and a real discussion of the actual national security needs of the American people (and the people of the world) might begin in earnest.
The Bases of Empire is notably different from most texts about the US empire in its emphasis on non-violent resistance to US military bases and their malign
impact. Feminism, and non-Western spiritualities which assert a sacred relation to the land are recurrent themes. As is the case with social struggles in general,
even when these are not immediately successful in achieving their demands, their impact on individuals and societies can be quite positive.
For example, the anti-war demonstrations in Turkey helped revitalize civil-society based politics in that country. Greenham Common in England made an
enduring impact as a feminist encampment. It also becomes clear that the end of the cold war actually often strengthened the hand of those pushing to close
bases, since this position no longer placed them on the Soviet side of the cold war. They could therefore reach portions of the population who might be anticommunist, but nonetheless aware of the malign impact of the bases on their lives. Puerto Rico is one of the most salient cases of this.
To combat the tendency to go dormant whenever political space in the US starts to close up, the US anti-war
movement — at least its most determined core — might want to consider thinking of itself as instead an anti-empire
movement. This would facilitate building links with these movements around the world. Understanding their visions
would also help undermine the reactive quality of the anti-war movement, wherein we are typically more confident
about what we are against than what we are for.
Although the anti-bases movement is not a unified, singular political actor on the world stage, it does have a coherent
set of demands that provide an alternative to the idea of security for Americans (and, allegedly the world) through a global
network of military bases. These demands include the recognition of all people as equals, rather than as
subordinates of empire. An alteration in the way we interact with the planet that is inflected by spiritual traditions that see the earth as sacred, rather
than as space to be controlled. The valuing of the work of caring, rather than the servicing of the sexual needs of foreign military personnel and the glorification
Finally, a concept of security grounded in the interrelationship between all people and between people and
the wider world, rather than the production of more and more arms and bases.
of warriors.
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High school students should critique the historical myths which inform American
identity—this allows us to come to grips with colonialism and embrace a more
inclusive identity
TROFANENKO 2005 (Brenda, Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Illinois, The Social Studies, Sept/Oct)
The debates about the overwhelming problems, limitations, and disadvantages of social studies education noted in the Fordham report attempt to reconcile and
advance the idea of nation through a collective history. Our more pressing role as educators, in light of the Fordham report, is to discuss a more
nuanced understanding of the U.S. history. This would advance, as noted in La Pietra Report, an understanding about “the
complexity and the contexts of relations and interactions, including the ways in which they are infused with a variety
of forms of power that define and result from the interconnections of distinct but related histories” (OAH 2000, 1).
Taking the U.S. nation as only one example of social analysis involves recognizing the meanings and conditions out of which nations are formed. There is no
one experience of belonging to a nation, no single understanding or enactment of sovereignty, and certainly no one
meaning or experience of colonization or being colonized. There is, then, a need for these issues to be realized and
to be a part of the questioning occurring within our classrooms. That would allow for the substantial reframing of the
basic narrative of U.S. history (OAH 2000, 2). Toward a More Global Sense of the Nation Knowing how history is a site of political
struggle, how we engage with social studies education means emphasizing how power, processes, and practices
bear tangible effects on forging a national (and common) history by reproducing and vindicating inclusions and
exclusions. Such a critique requires questioning how a singular, fixed, and static history celebrates the U.S. nation
and its place in the world as that “common base of factual information about the American historical and
contemporary experience” (27) argues for in the Fordham report. Our world history courses are central to defining, understanding, and knowing not
only other nations but also the position of each nation in relation to the United States. The centrality that the west holds (notably the United
States as an imperial power) is ingrained and willful in framing specific representations of the west that normalize the
imperial practices that established this nation. The role that the United States holds on the world stage frequently remains unquestioned in social
studies classrooms. Certainly, we engage with various images and tropes to continue to advance how the colonialist past
continues to remain present in our historical sensibilities. Moreover, the increasing number and choices of archival sources function as a
complement to further understanding the nation. If students are left to rely on the variety of historical resources rather than
question the use of such resources, then the most likely outcome of their learning will be the reflection on the past
with nostalgia that continues to celebrate myths and colonial sensibility. To evaluate the history narrative now is to
reconsider what it means and to develop a historical consciousness in our students that goes beyond archival and
nostalgic impulses associated with the formation of the nation and U.S. nation building. We need to insist that the
nation, and the past that has contributed to its present day understanding, is simultaneously material and symbolic.
The nation as advanced in our histories cannot be taken as the foundational grounds. The means by which the nation is fashioned calls for examining the history
through which nations are made and unmade. To admit the participatory nature of knowledge and to invite an active and critical
engagement with the world so that students can come to question the authority of historical texts will, I hope, result in
students’ realizing that the classroom is not solely a place to learn about the nation and being a national, but rather a
place to develop a common understanding of how a nation is often formed through sameness. We need to continue
to question how a particular national history is necessary as an educational function, but especially how that element
has been, and remains, useful at specific times. My hope is to extend the current critique of history within social studies, to move toward
understanding why history and nation still needs a place in social studies education. In understanding how the historicity of nation serves as
“the ideological alibi of the territorial state” (Appadurai 1996, 159) offers us a starting point. The challenge facing social
studies educators is how we can succeed in questioning nation, not by displacing it from center stage but by
considering how it is central. That means understanding how powerfully engrained the history of a nation is within
education and how a significant amount of learning is centered around the nation and its history. History is a forum
for assessing and understanding the study of change over time, which shapes the possibilities of knowledge itself. We
need to reconsider the mechanisms used in our own teaching, which need to be more than considering history as a nostalgic reminiscence of the time when the
nation was formed. We need to be questioning the contexts for learning that can no longer be normalized through history’s
constituted purpose. The changing political and social contexts of public history have brought new opportunities for
educators to work through the tensions facing social studies education and its educational value to teachers and
students. Increasing concerns with issues of racism, equality, and the plurality of identities and histories mean that
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there is no unified knowledge as the result of history, only contested subjects whose multilayered and often
contradictory voices and experiences intermingle with partial histories that are presented as unified. This does not
represent a problem, but rather an opportunity for genuine productive study, discussion, and learning.
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LINKS- space exploration = colonization
Space exploration is inseparable from European colonization
Pyne 2006. Pyne, Stephen J. “Seeking Newer Worlds: An Historical Context for Space Exploration,” in Critical Issues in the History of Spaceflight, edited by
Steven J. Dick and Roger D. Launius, National Aeronautics and Space Administration Office of External Relations History Division 2006. Page 13-14.
Of particular value to Americans is the need to segregate exploration from colonization. American
accounts of the Space Age almost
invariably begin with the discovery of North America, preferably by the Norse. This is teleology history: the point, the conclusion, of
exploration was to find a New World and, subsequently, to found the United States. The epic of America is its expansion westward. When exploration completed
its survey of America, it had to continue elsewhere, to the Poles, for example, and then to planetary space, or else that epic would end. It makes a wonderful
national creation story. It works less well as scholarship. The exploration of America was part of a global project, rising and falling with those same geopolitical
tides. So it is proving to be with space. I confess to being a splitter. This is a minority viewpoint without much of a clientele; it may be a singularity. My premises
are these: that exploration as
an institution is an invention of particular societies; that it derives much of its power
because it bonds geographic travel to cultural movements, because it taps into deep rivalries, and because its
narrative conveys a moral message; that, while unbroken, the trajectory of a half millennium of exploration by
Western civilization can be understood best by parsing its long sweep into smaller increments; and that the future of
exploration may become a reversed mirror image of its past. In particular, my splitter history would partition the past
half millennium of European exploration from humanity’s various migrations, and it would then fraction that grand chronicle into three
great ages of discovery, fissioning William Goeztmann’s Second Great Age of Discovery into two, adding a Third Age as distinctive from the Second as the
Second was from the First.
As European expansion failed, space exploration is also bound to be a failure
Pyne 2006. Pyne, Stephen J. “Seeking Newer Worlds: An Historical Context for Space Exploration,” in Critical Issues in the History of Spaceflight, edited by
Steven J. Dick and Roger D. Launius, National Aeronautics and Space Administration Office of External Relations History Division 2006. Page 9-10.
From such a perspective, the exuberant era of exploration that has dominated the past five centuries, bonded to
European expansion, is simply another in a constellation of cultural inventions that have shaped how peoples have
encountered a world beyond themselves. It will, in time, pass away as readily as the others; European-based
exploration may yet expire, even after 500 years, perhaps exhausted like the cod fisheries of the Grand Banks. The
history of exploration bears little similarity to the simplistic narrative of triumphalists. Historians, litterateurs,
humanists, and a significant fraction of ordinary citizens may wonder why a chronicle of past contacts, particularly
when burdened by imperialism and inflated by tired cliches, should argue for doing more. The record suggests that
future worlds will be corrupted as old ones were. The much-abused Earth is world enough. Space exploration may
prove to be a defiant last hurrah rather than a daring new departure.
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LINK- exploration = Christian Domination
Space exploration is underwritten by Christian notions of divine entitlement
Dinerstein 2006. Dinerstein, Joel, “Technology and Its Discontents: On the Verge of the Posthuman,” American Quarterly, Volume 58, Number 3,
September 2006, pp. 569-595. Page 575.
If technology is equivalent to dominion over Nature, then “the religion of technology” (according to Noble) emerged
from a few early medieval monks who resurrected the symbolic ideal of the original Adam. They believed the preFallen Adam, immortal and created in the divine likeness, was recoverable through individual piety and work in the
“mechanic arts,” such that men could
be co-workers with God in making over the planet to prepare for the second coming. The reach of this concept is long
(as I will show), but an American strain took shape in nineteenth-century New England. In his classic work The
American Adam (1955), R. W. B. Lewis showed how American writers secularized the Puritan ideal of a new
Jerusalem by sending male loners out to the frontier, where each could work for “a restoration of Adamic perfection,
knowledge, and dominion, [and] a return to Eden.” For Oliver Wendell Holmes, only science could bring the “new
man,” and such “restoration” would owe much to technological transformation. Lewis illuminates a pattern in the texts
of Cooper, Whitman, and Thoreau, wherein male bodies mark territory
in new (and potentially redemptive) landscapes: The hero of the new adventure [was] an individual emancipated from
history . . . self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and
inherent resources. It was not surprising, in a Bible-reading generation, that the new hero . . . was more easily
identified with Adam before the Fall.20 The concept of the Adamic is invested in recuperating an Edenic purity
earned through virtuous work: it informs the Euro-American myth of Columbus’s discovery, Euro-American dreams of
space, and the posthuman. A quick sketch is in order.
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LINK- NASA = Christian domination
NASA is epitome of a Christian world domination
Dinerstein 2006. Dinerstein, Joel, “Technology and Its Discontents: On the Verge of the Posthuman,” American Quarterly, Volume 58, Number 3,
September 2006, pp. 569-595. Page 579-580.
Rather than cast any doubt on the technological fix, Americans have instead witnessed the rise of the contemporary
Adamic: first, in the white, homosocial world of NASA, which has functioned as a monastic guild for two generations,
and second, in popular culture. From the 1950s through the 1970s, nearly all of NASA’s key positions were filled by
evangelical Christians. NASA’s director, Werner von Braun—ex-Nazi rocket scientist, father of the U.S. space
program, and born-again Christian—declared that the purpose of sending men into space was “to send his Son to the
other worlds to bring the gospel to them” and to create a “new beginning” for mankind. In the 1950s, scientists and
physicists believed new planets and space colonies might become a safety valve for a planet poisoned by nuclear
winter. Physicist Freeman Dyson wrote the “Space Traveler’s Manifesto” in 1958, and he supported the development
of nuclear energy to secure a power source for a starship that was mankind’s best chance to survive apocalypse.
The claim was seconded by Rod Hyde, NASA’s group leader for nuclear development: “What I want more than
anything is to get the human race into space . . . It’s the future. If you stay down here some disaster is going to strike
and you’re going to be wiped out.” Directed by the “spiritual men” of NASA, humanity would restart on another world
so that human beings could still be headed for a redemptive future even as they left behind the mess of the
impure.29
Ninety percent of American astronauts have been “devout Protestants”; many carried Bibles and Christian flags in
their spacesuits. “I saw evidence that God lives,” Frank Borman reflected of his experience as Apollo 8’s commander;
Apollo 11’s Buzz Aldrin received radio silence from NASA to read the first fourteen lines of Genesis while walking on
the moon. Aldrin took communion with a kit packed by his pastor containing “a vial of wine, some wafers, and a
chalice,” as well as “[a] reading from John 15:5”; he later reflected with joy that “the very first liquid ever poured on
the moon and the first food eaten there were communion elements.” In 1969, technology and religion fused with
national myth and political power: President Richard Nixon pronounced the week of Apollo 11’s flight and landing on
the moon “the greatest week since the beginning of the world, [since] the Creation.” Nixon was immediately
reprimanded by Reverend Billy Graham—his personal religious leader—who declared there had indeed been three
greater events: Jesus Christ’s birth, crucifixion, and resurrection.30 If landing on the moon was the fourth greatest
week-long event since the Creation, it is significant that it was accomplished by the first cyborgs: astronauts.
Continually attached to technological networks through spacesuit (synthetic second skin) and spaceship (nurturant,
home, environment), astronauts were the first human-machine interface. Norman Mailer captured the posthuman
shift at the Apollo 11 launch: [Neil] Armstrong . . . space suit on, helmet on, plugged into electrical and environmental
umbilicals, is a man who is not only a machine himself in the links of these networks, but is . . . in fact a veritable high
priest of the forces of society and scientific history concentrated in that mini-cathedral, a general of the church of the
forces of technology.
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LINK- ‘EMPIRE’ VS. IMPERIALISM
the aff resurrects the project of Empire, i.e. the emerging of global governance which
perfects techniques of capitalist exploitation.
Trott ‘8 (Ben, writes for various publications and is a PhD candidate based in Berlin, “Obama: Less Imperialist, More Imperial”, Znet, July 25,
http://www.zcommunications.org/obama-less-imperialist-more-imperial-by-ben-trott Accessed 6/27/10 GAL)
As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, what Obama promised yesterday, and indeed has been promising all
along, is a second attempt at a project interrupted by the Bush administration, and the events which followed
September 11 2001 in particular. But what was that project?
With the publication of their book Empire, in 2000, Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri and American literature
professor Michael Hardt attempted to give it a name. Written in the period following the end of the last Persian Gulf
War and before the war in Kosovo began, they declared that the age of imperialism was over. It had been replaced
by a system of rule in which nation-states were no longer able to effectively project their own sovereignty beyond
their national borders. Nor did they even fully maintain it within them. Rather, it had been transferred to the global
level.
Empire named an emerging networked form of global governance. It included nation-states, multinational
corporations, big NGOs, and international organisations such as the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, NATO and the
UN. It was both the response of global capital to the struggles of workers, students and others during the late 1960s
and 1970s, as well as itself creating conditions in which the ‘multitude’ – the name they gave to the new global
working class, which was very broadly conceived – could thrive.
The book’s authors are Marxists. And just as Marx had celebrated the revolutionary nature of capitalism, in the midnineteenth century, while appealing to the workers of the world to unite against it, Hardt and Negri displayed a similar
ambivalence towards Empire. On the one hand, it represented the perfection of the relationships of exploitation which
have always characterised capitalism: the need for the vast majority of humanity to sell its time on the market,
producing things it will not own, in order to survive. (Empire supposedly thrived by both rendering productive all of
But history does not always unfold neatly along a foreseeable linear path. The years which followed the publication of
Empire saw the emergence of a new trajectory. Whatever the complexity of the motivating factors behind the US-led
military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, they have widely been regarded as a regression to forms of imperialism
characteristic of the early twentieth century. Not least because of the choice of language of many of the interventions’
proponents.
There are few today who would deny that these operations have been disasters. What Obama proposed yesterday
was something like a resurrection of the project of Empire. Much of what he said will have been met with support
around the world: the rebuilding of transatlantic alliances, the strengthening of international institutions, winding down
the war in Iraq, and increasing the ‘fairness’ of free trade. And indeed (and this was astonishingly explicit): A greater
recognition of the limited capacity for the US to ‘go it alone’ in what Bush Senior once, on September 11 1990, called
the ‘New World Order’.
Obama, of course, is the lesser evil. His presidency would, most importantly, very likely take the edge off the global
‘war on terror’. This in turn could well open room, in the US and beyond, for the left to busy itself with something other
than fending off a farcical imitation of early imperialist projects. But setting the world back on track towards something
along the lines of what Hardt and Negri called Empire has everything to do with perfecting techniques of exploitation
and a (very sophisticated) restructuring of the mechanisms which keep this set up in place. Our best ‘hope’ for
‘change we can believe in’ which could come out of an Obama presidency is a resurgence of the multitudinous
‘movement of movements’ which began blossoming the last time around.
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LINKS: SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY/PROGRESS
Obsession with technological advancement is the new American religion Dinerstein 2006. Dinerstein, Joel,
“Technology and Its Discontents: On the Verge of the Posthuman,” American Quarterly, Volume 58, Number 3,
September 2006, pp. 569-595. Page 569.
Immediately after 9/11, a Middle East correspondent for The Nation summarized the coming war on terrorism as
“[their] theology versus [our] technology, the suicide bomber against the nuclear power.”1 His statement missed the
point: technology is the American theology. For Americans, it is not the Christian God but technology that structures
the American sense
of power and revenge, the nation’s abstract sense of well-being, its arrogant sense of superiority, and its righteous
justification for global dominance. In the introduction to Technological Visions, Marita Sturken and Douglas Thomas
declare that “in the popular imagination, technology is often synonymous with the future,” but it is more accurate to
say that technology is synonymous with faith in the future—both in the future as a better world and as one in which
the United States bestrides the globe as a colossus.2 Technology has long been the unacknowledged source of
European and Euro-American superiority within modernity, and its underlying mythos always traffics in what James
W. Carey once called “secular religiosity.”3 Lewis Mumford called the American belief system “mechano-idolatry” as
early as 1934; a few years later he deemed it our “mechano-centric religion.” David F. Noble calls this ideology “the
religion of technology” in a work of the same name that traces its European roots to a doctrine that combines
millenarianism, rationalism, and Christian redemption in the writings of monks, explorers, inventors, and NASA
scientists. If we take into account the functions of religion and not its rituals, it is not a deity who insures the American
future but new technologies: smart bombs in the Gulf War, Viagra and Prozac in the pharmacy, satellite TV at home.
It is not social justice or equitable economic distribution that will reduce hunger, greed, and poverty, but fables of
abundance and the rhetoric of technological utopianism. The United States is in thrall to “techno-fundamentalism,” in
Siva Vaidhyanathan’s apt phrase; to Thomas P. Hughes, “a god named technology has possessed Americans.” Or,
as public policy scholar Edward Wenk Jr. sums it up, “we are . . . inclined to equate technology with civilization [itself
].”4
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LINKS: SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY/PROGRESS
Despite lofty rhetoric about scientific progress, space exploration is always a means
to gaining national power and prestige
Pyne 2006. Pyne, Stephen J. “Seeking Newer Worlds: An Historical Context for Space Exploration,” in Critical Issues in the History of Spaceflight, edited by
Steven J. Dick and Roger D. Launius, National Aeronautics and Space Administration Office of External Relations History Division 2006. Page 12.
And then there are those for whom space is continuous not merely with exploration but with evolution, for whom the
Space Age represents a quantum leap in human existence. The nuances of geographic discovery’s changing
technologies, beliefs, lore, institutions, and personalities become mere background noise, the junk genes of story.
Most practitioners come from literature or natural science, an odd couple joined by conviction and pulp fiction rather
than formal scholarship. History is a loose jumble of anecdotes, like oft-told family stories or the sagas of the clan.
For them, the future is what matters. What preceded contact is only preamble. What follows will be, in Arthur C.
Clarke’s words, childhood’s end.
Regardless, no one questions the linkage of space with exploration. Their analysis of what that bond is, and what
benefits the country might derive, vary. Exploration remains a means to other ends. The recent report of the
President’s Commission on Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy described the goal of the
“vision” as “to advance U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests . . . ,” and not least national prestige. More
realistically, at the time Mariner orbited Mars, Bruce Murray observed simply that “we are exploring,” that the “very
act of exploration is one of the more positive achievements open to a modern industrial society,” that space
exploration is “as important as music, art, as literature,” that it is “one of the most important long-term endeavors of
this generation, one upon which our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will look back and say, ‘That was good.”’
But if space exploration is a cultural enterprise, then it should be examined as such, subject to the same tangible
criteria.’
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LINKS: SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY/PROGRESS
Natural Science is inseparable from politics, both are mutually dependent on one
another in projects of colonial domination
Pyne 2006. Pyne, Stephen J. “Seeking Newer Worlds: An Historical Context for Space Exploration,” in Critical Issues in the History of Spaceflight, edited by
Steven J. Dick and Roger D. Launius, National Aeronautics and Space Administration Office of External Relations History Division 2006. Page 25-26.
The critical players were exhausted, especially Great Britain. The Second Age had kindled with a rivalry between
Britain and France, much as the contest between Portugal and Spain had powered the First Age. Thereafter, virtually
every competition featured Britain, which is why its explorers so dominate the age. Britain and France clashed in
India, the Pacific, and Africa; Britain and the U.S., in North America; Britain and Russia, the Great Game, across
central Asia; Britain and all comers in Antarctica. After the Great War, Britain and France could no longer afford the
enterprise; Russia turned inward with revolution; the U.S. had few places other than Antarctica in which discovery
had geopolitical meaning. The Second Great Age of Discovery, like the First before it, deflated. By the middle 20th
century, Kipling’s “Recessional” had become prophetic: Europe was rapidly disengaging itself from its imperial past
and thus from the exploring energies that had, like lampreys, attached themselves to the institutions of an
expansionist era. Decolonization accompanied an implosion of exploration; Europe turned inward, quelling the
ancient quarrels that had restlessly and violently propelled it around the globe, pulling itself together rather than
projecting itself outward. Antarctica, the deep oceans, interplanetary space-these arenas for geographic discovery
might be claimed, but they would not be colonized. No one was willing to wage war over the asteroid belt or Io.
Other reasons were cultural. The Second Age had served as the exploring instrument of the Enlightenment.
Geographic discovery had bonded with modern science: no serious expedition could claim public interest without a
complement of naturalists, while some of the most robust new sciences like geology and biology relied on exploration
to cart back the data that fueled them. Science, particularly natural history, had shown itself as implacably aggressive
as politics, full of national rivalries and conceptual competitions, and through exploration, it appeared to answer, or at
least could address, questions of keen interest to the culture. It could exhume the age of the Earth, reveal the
evolution of life, celebrate natural monuments to nationalism and Nature’s God. Artists like Thomas Baines and
Thomas Moran joined expeditions or, like John James Audubon, mounted their own surveys; general intellectuals
eagerly studied narratives of discovery (even Henry David Thoreau, nestled into his Walden Pond cabin, read the
entire five volumes of the Wilkes Expedition). Exploring accounts and traveler narratives were best sellers; explorers
became cultural heroes; exploration was part and parcel of national epics; exploration was a means to fame and
sometimes fortune. The Second Age, in brief, braided together many of the dominant cultural strands of its times.
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LINKS: US COMPETITIVENESS CLAIMS
The logic of exploration is driven by and internalized through the obsession with
national competitiveness
Pyne 2006. Pyne, Stephen J. “Seeking Newer Worlds: An Historical Context for Space Exploration,” in Critical Issues in the History of Spaceflight, edited by
Steven J. Dick and Roger D. Launius, National Aeronautics and Space Administration Office of External Relations History Division 2006. Page 27-28.
Yet dazzling technologies and a rekindled curiosity are not enough to sustain an era of exploration: cultural
engagement also demands a sharp rivalry. Those competitive energies flourished with the Cold War. In retrospect,
the Great Game between the United States and the Soviet Union lasted far less than those between Spain and
Portugal, or Britain and France, but the era is young, and if it does in fact mark a Third Age, some other competitors,
keen to secure national advantage or prestige through sponsored discovery, may emerge. China has announced its
intention to land a tikonaut on the Moon; India and Japan have launch capabilities and may choose to compete.
Without the Cold War, however, there would have been scant incentive to erect bases on the Antarctic ice, scour the
oceans for seamounts and trenches, or launch spacecraft. The Cold War allowed a controlled deceleration of
exploring energies, a reversed complement to the British-French competition that helped accelerate the Second Age.
Two geopolitical rivals, both with active exploring traditions, chose to divert some of their contest away from
battlefields and into untrodden landscapes. But perhaps more profoundly, exploration did not wither away because
the culture, the popular culture, did not wish it to. Exploration had become not only institutionalized, but internalized.
This was a civilization that could hardly imagine itself as other than exploring. Explorers flourished, if only in pulp
fiction, movies, and adolescent fantasies. Quickly, it forged new institutions, of which the International Geophysical
Year is an apt annunciation, and in the Voyager missions, it found what is likely to endure as the great gesture of the
Third Age, a traverse through the solar system. Voyager’s Grand Tour may serve for this era as Magellan’s voyage
did for the First and Humboldt’s travels did for the Second. Voyager demonstrated both the power and peculiarities of
the era.26
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LINKS: GEO-MORPHOLOGY
Link to geo-morphology – photo analysis is predicated on the logic of empire
MacDonald 2007.
MacDonald, Fraser, “Anti-Astropolitik: Outer Space and the Orbit of Geography,” Progress in Human Geography, Volume 31, Issue
5, pp. 592-615. Page 597-598.
Aside from military space applications, to which I will later return, one of the most significant geographical
engagements with outer space is in the sphere of ‘planetary geomorphology’. There is a vast literature on surface
processes on the moon and on the other inner planets (Mars, Mercury and Venus) in journals such as Icarus and
Journal of Geophysical Research (for an introduction, see Summerfield, 1991). Terrestrial landscapes become
analogues for interpreting remotely sensed images of planetary bodies, which has in turn heightened the importance
of satellite imagery in understanding Earth surface processes. One of the very few points of common reference in
physical and human geographical considerations of outer space is the imagery from the US Apollo space
programme. While geomorphologists have examined photographs of the lunar surface to cast light on, for example,
cratering and mass movement, Denis Cosgrove has attended to the cultural significance of the now iconic Apollo
photographs ‘The Whole Earth’, ‘Earthrise’ and ‘22727’ (Cosgrove, 1994; 2001a). Cosgrove outlines the momentous
import of the western conception of the Earth as a globe, which culminated in photo-graphing the earth from space to
provide an ‘Apollonian gaze’ that had been dreamed about since the age of Cicero (Cosgrove, 2001a).2 Despite his
claim that ‘geography is not a lunar practice’, Cosgrove is rare among contemporary human geographers in thinking
beyond the terrestrial (Cosgrove, 2001b; 2004). But even the ‘Apollo’s eye’ views, as James Sidaway (2005: 71) has
argued, embody their own particular geography. Sidaway presents a critical visual exegesis of the cover of Hardt and
Negri’s Empire, showing how a photograph of the Earth ‘innocently’ chosen by the publisher is itself predicated on a
matrix of ‘geo-political-ecologies’ – the Cold War; the aeronautical agency of the pre-eminent capitalist state;
corporate copyright controls – whose operations are purportedly the subject of the book (Hardt and Negri, 2000). For
Sidaway, the image signifi es empire in ways unanticipated by the authors of Empire. Another exception to
geography’s prevailing worldliness, though not one that deals with outer space per se, is Rob Kitchin and James
Kneale’s collection of essays on geographies of science fi ction, Lost in space (Kitchin and Kneale, 2002). In these
essays, literary form quite rightly determines the genre rather than necessarily requiring an outer space setting. The
most explicit extraterrestrial treatments by geographers are by Jason Dittmer and Maria Lane who examine how a
Martian geography has been produced through particular discourses of scientifi c advancement, place naming and
colonial exploration (Dittmer, 2006; Lane 2005; 2006).
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SOFT POWER LINKS
The aff’s pursuit of soft power is just an attempt to smooth over the core
contradictions of capitalism.
Everest ‘7 (Larry, Revolution #86, April 29, “Barack Obama & the Bush Doctrine: Shared Assumptions, Tactical Differences & Common Goals”,
http://rwor.org/a/086/obama-en.html, Accessed 6/27/10 GAL)
CAN OBAMA REVERSE THE BUSH AGENDA? DOES HE WANT TO?
The question is, what does Obama actually stand for? What’s his vision of U.S. foreign policy, in the Middle East in
particular? Does he want to--and is he capable of--ending the war in Iraq and preventing war with Iran? Is he for
repudiating the Bush global agenda and reversing the direction the Bush administration has been taking this country
and the world? More fundamentally, whose interests does he represent?
A close look at Obama’s platform and writings--and decoding the buzzwords and phrases of his mainstream politics-shows that he actually agrees with many of the key tenets of Bush’s worldview, global strategy, and overall
objectives--even while having certain differences over how to advance those objectives.
WHAT DOES STRENGTHENING “AMERICA'S POSITION IN THE WORLD” MEAN?
Obama’s foreign policy rests on three premises: First, in his words, that “globalization makes our economy, our
health, and our security all captive to events on the other side of the world,” and “any return to isolationism…will not
work.” (The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, pages 305, 303). Second, that the U.S.
is a force for good in this globalized world: “no other nation on earth has a greater capacity to shape that global
system,” to “expand the zones of freedom, personal safety, and economic well-being” and that a “global system built
in America’s image can alleviate misery in poorer countries.” U.S. capitalism, he argues, can move “the international
system in the direction of greater equity, justice and prosperity” and this will “serve both our interests and the
interests of a struggling world.”
Third, Obama argues his foreign policy would start from the goal of fighting “to strengthen America's position in the
world.” (Obama's website).
What does all this mean? First, that Obama consciously argues for and defends the capitalist system, U.S. capitalism
in particular, and would adopt policies to ensure its functioning and operation--including by attempting to deal with the
very deep contradictions and obstacles it faces today.
These are the same concerns confronting the Bush administration and shaping its actions. So it’s not surprising that
Obama’s agenda sounds eerily similar to core elements of the Bush doctrine as articulated in the Bush National
Security Strategy (2002) which declares that American-defined “values of freedom are right and true for every
person, in every society,” and that an overarching goal of U.S. policy is creating “a balance of power that favors
freedom,” and spreading “free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world.” Combined with the NSS’s
insistence on U.S. military superiority and its right to wage preemptive war, the document’s economic principles can
best be understood as capitalist globalization on U.S. terms, carried out at gunpoint. This is precisely what the U.S.
has been trying to carry out in Iraq through privatizing Iraq's economy and opening its vast oil resources up to U.S.
capital.
Obama rejects the charge that such U.S.-led capitalist globalization is “American imperialism, designed to exploit the
cheap labor and natural resources of other countries,” and claims that critics are wrong “to think that the world’s poor
will benefit by rejecting the ideals of free markets and liberal democracy” (Audacity, p. 315). But the world’s profound
and growing injustices give lie to this attempt to prettify and cover up the actual workings of global capitalism.
Today half the planet — nearly three billion people — lives on less than two dollars a day. Now, after the operation of
capitalism for hundreds of years, the 20 percent living in the developed nations consume 86% of the world’s goods.
Today the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of the poorest 48 nations is less than the combined wealth of the world’s
three richest individuals. This is the obscene, nightmarish reality of “free markets” and a “global system built in
America’s image.” All this has been deepened in recent decades--not alleviated--by the expansion and acceleration
of capitalist globalization. (See Raymond Lotta, “A Jagged, Unjust, and Obsolete World: A Critique of Thomas
Friedman's The World is Flat ” (http://www.rwor.org/a/060/flatworld-en.html) for a deeper discussion of the dynamics
and impact of global capitalism today.)
And what does it mean and where does it lead to “strengthen America's position in the world,” as Obama puts it?
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First, it means strengthening America’s military superiority over other countries, especially powers which could
challenge U.S. hegemony, and against states or movements which threaten U.S. political-military control of key areas
of the world. This too is a core goal of the Bush doctrine. It means strengthening the economic position of the U.S. in
relation to its global rivals. It means, throughout the world and especially in poor, third world countries, having greater
control of global resources, better access to markets and labor, and ensuring that trade and financial agreements
favor the U.S., not others. All in order to strengthen the ability of U.S. imperialism to dominate and exploit hundreds
of millions of people throughout the world.
Obama characterizes the U.S. record around the world as “mixed,” and briefly mentions the slaughter of 500,000
Indonesian communists at the behest of the CIA in the 1960s (Obama lived in Indonesia in his youth). However, he
ascribes such crimes (which he treats as isolated “mistakes”) not to the deepest dynamics of global imperialism, but
to short-sighted, “misguided” policies, “based on false assumptions that ignore the legitimate aspirations of other
peoples.” (p. 280) This ignores the actual workings of imperialism as demonstrated by over 100 years of history. The
U.S. doesn’t have a “mixed” record in the world, it has a long and consistent track record of murderous interventions
and wars: since World War 2, the U.S. has used direct military force against other countries more than 70 times, and
there are now over 700 U.S. military bases in 130 foreign countries. So Indonesia--and Iraq today where over
600,000 Iraqis have been killed--are hardly minor aberrations or exceptions to the rule.
Strengthening America’s position in the world means strengthening its status as the world’s only imperialist
superpower, as well as the dominant position of a handful of industrialized countries over the billions living in the
Third World. How is this just? Why should a country with 4.7 percent of the world’s population control 32.6 percent of
the world’s wealth and consume 25 percent of its energy? (And within the U.S., the richest 1 percent held 32 percent
of the wealth in 2001.) ( New York Times, 12/6/06). How is the further strengthening of all this any good for the
people?
WHERE DOES IT LEAD?
Upholding global capitalism and strengthening the U.S. “position” in the world has led Obama to many of the same
policy conclusions as the Bush regime.
First, on global military dominance and reach, he says: “We need to maintain a strategic force posture that allows us
to manage threats posed by rogue nations like North Korea and Iran, and to meet the challenges presented by
potential rivals like China.” Obama argues the U.S. now needs even more military spending than the record levels
spent by the Bush administration so far: “Indeed, given the depletion of our forces after the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, we will probably need a somewhat higher budget in the immediate future just to restore readiness and
replace equipment.” (p. 307)
Obama sees many of the same challenges to U.S. power in the key strategic region of the Middle East/Central Asia
(home to 80 percent of the world’s energy reserves) that the Bush regime does. He says: "The growing threat, then,
comes primarily from those parts of the world on the margins of the global economy where the international ‘rules of
the road’ have not taken hold…" (p. 305) He shares the Bush Regime concern that "violent Islamic extremists" are a
vastly different kind of adversary than the Soviet Union in the Cold War and must be dealt with differently, possibly
through preemptive war. Obama says: "I think there are certain elements within the Islamic world right now that don't
make those same calculations… I think there are elements within Pakistan right now--if Musharraf is overthrown and
they took over, I think we would have to consider going in and taking those bombs out, because I don't think we can
make the same assumptions about how they calculate risks." ("Obama would consider missile strikes on Iran,"
Chicago Tribune, September 25, 2004)
These concerns also lead Obama to join the Bush regime (and the whole U.S. establishment) in targeting Iran as a
center of Islamic fundamentalism and a rising force in the Middle East/Central Asia. Obama calls Iran “one of the
greatest threats to the United States, Israel and world peace.” He argues, “The world must work to stop Iran's
uranium enrichment program and prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. It is far too dangerous to have
nuclear weapons in the hands of a radical theocracy,” and “we should take no option, including military action, off the
table.” (speech to the pro-Israel America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)).
While Obama may favor placing more emphasis on sanctions and diplomatic pressure at the moment (and the Bush
regime itself is currently employing these weapons as well), his logic will drive him to support preemptive strikes, and
he says, "[U]s launching some missile strikes into Iran is not the optimal position for us to be in." But he then says:
"On the other hand, having a radical Muslim theocracy in possession of nuclear weapons is worse. So I guess my
instinct would be to err on not having those weapons in the possession of the ruling clerics of Iran… realistically, as I
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watch how this thing has evolved, I'd be surprised if Iran blinked at this point." How much different is this than Sen.
John McCain recently singing “bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.” to the tune of the Beach Boys Barbara Ann? (“Obama would
consider missile strikes on Iran,” Chicago Tribune, September 25, 2004).
Obama also foresees having to send U.S. troops into these areas and argues for a larger military: “Most likely this
challenge will involve putting boots on the ground in the ungovernable or hostile regions where terrorists thrive. That
requires a smarter balance between what we spend on fancy hardware and what we spend on our men and women
in uniform. That should mean growing the size of our armed forces…” (p. 307)
Obama has some differences with the Bush regime over how to advance U.S. imperial interests and maintain
hegemony. For example, while he supports the U.S.’s “right” to take unilateral action “to eliminate an imminent threat
to our security,” he limits it to when “as an imminent threat is understood to be a nation, group or individual that is
actively preparing to strike U.S. targets (or allies with which the United States has mutual defense arrangements),
and has or will have the means to do so in the immediate future.” (pp. 308-309) But, he argues, “once we get beyond
matters of self-defense…. it will almost always be in our strategic interest to act multilaterally rather than unilaterally
when we use force around the world.” This is consistent with a major part of the Democratic Party critique of the Bush
doctrine which agrees that the U.S. needs hegemony, but argues that the U.S. needs to work with at least some
other world powers to achieve it.
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SOFT POWER LINKS
The aff arguments about “soft power” are just a re-branding strategy for US
imperialism.
Revolution Magazine ‘8 (Revolution #118, February 3, “Andrew Sullivan on Obama: The ‘Best Face’ for US Imperialism”,
http://revcom.us/a/118/obama-en.html, Accessed 6/27/10 GAL *Emphasis in Original)
“The Most Effective Re-Branding of the United States Since Reagan”
Obama, argues Sullivan, is “the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a rebranding is not trivial—it’s central to an effective war strategy. The war on Islamist terror, after all, is two-pronged: a
function of both hard power and soft power.” (By “hard power,” Sullivan means military force; by “soft power,” he
means non-military dimensions of “winning hearts and minds”—in conjunction with the use of, or threat of, military
power.)
Choosing whether Obama, Clinton, Edwards, McCain or anyone else would actually be the most effective “soft
power” weapon in the “war on terror,” is choosing who will put the best face on the actual source of the worst global
terror—U.S. imperialism. Let’s check back into reality for a moment and reflect on the horrors the “war on terror” has
brought: Up to a million or more dead Iraqis. Five million Iraqis dislocated from their homes or country. Afghanistan,
in ruins, controlled by either the Taliban or drug-growing Islamic fundamentalist warlords aligned with the U.S.
Torture chambers from Bagram in Afghanistan to secret cells in Europe. Rendition to Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia for
more U.S.-sponsored torture. Detention without trial. Guantánamo. And a world trapped in a horrific polarization
between U.S. imperialist aggression, plunder, and terror, and reactionary Islamic fundamentalism that is both the
target of and, in many ways, a product of the “war on terror.”
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The distinction between Empire and “Global Leader” is a false one – The drive toward
global leadership devolves into an Imperial quest.
Maier 06. Charles S. Maier Professor of history at Harvard University 2006 Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors First Harvard
University Press paperback edition pp. 62-65
This last observation reveals the difficulty of shoehorning the United States into the received models of imperial
power. Critics of the term empire have suggested that the United States is instead a hegemonic power. Hegemon is
a Greek term that means preeminence and leadership. According to one of the finest American historians of
European international relations, a hegemon exerts a predominant voice over collective policies, but does not
possess, or chooses not to exploit, the raw power to compel obedience.56 The model for hegemony is the Athenianled coalition that faced the Persians in the early fifth century bce. It was formalized in the Delian League of 477. But
Athens moved beyond mere hegemony over its allies and sought to perpetuate a clear domination, demanding
tribute after the defeat of the Persians and compelling obedience and fealty from states that would have preferred
nonalignment. In taking cognizance of the transition, the historian Thucydides, among others, changed his
description of the city-state’s dominance from hegemony to arche.57 It is true that if the United States is an empire,
its power resembles that of Athens as arche rather than Rome. It does not directly rule a large and extensive area,
but seeks loyalty to its leadership and policy. The question remains whether America now exerts or does not exert
this more exacting direction. A different distinction between empire and hegemon was offered in a valuable work on
empires now twenty years old. Borrowing a distinction again from Thucydides, Michael Doyle suggested that the
hegemon might control its allies’ foreign relations but would not infringe their internal autonomy. Is this distinction
really robust, however? The Greek historian recognized that in the Hellenic convulsion, the allies of Athens had
democratic revolutions if they were not already democracies, and the allies of Sparta remained oligarchies.58 To
control an ally’s foreign alignments usually means helping one’s friends hold power and keeping one’s adversaries
out of government. But this effort cannot really distinguish the empire from the hegemon. A powerful hegemon allows
autonomy only when power in the dependent state is in safe hands. A well-functioning imperial system can also allow
autonomy when allies are in firm control. At best, hegemony seems potential empire, leadership where force has not
become necessary to maintain control, not just a high-minded renunciation of intervention. But hegemony may also
indicate an unstable equilibrium that has yet to be resolved. Sooner or later the inequality of a hegemonic relation will
grate. The lesser partners will carp at the relative lack of culture of those who rule them: Greeks at Romans,
Egyptians or Syrians at Turks, the French at the Americans. Sooner or later, issues will arise that require a new
framework. In that case one must revert to a type of association of equals, such as the British Commonwealth of
Nations, or attempt to impose greater obedience—that is, empire. How might we resolve the issue of whether it
makes sense to call the United States an empire or a hegemon? I would suggest that an empire will punish defectors
from its control, while a hegemon will do no more than rely on common interests and moral suasion. Empires have
tough cops and not just nice cops, if they have the latter at all. As Cleon warned the Athenians when they confronted
the rebellious citystate of Mytilene, “the three failings most fatal to empire” were “pity, sentiment, and indulgence.”
Athens did not make any of these mistakes. The Mytilenian men were slain and the women sold into slavery. Recall,
too, also in the Peloponnesian War, the fate of Melos, whose leaders argued that for the Athenians to punish them
would be to expose their leadership as resting on naked violence. Athens opted for ruling by fear and not love. The
Romans did not let rebellion go unpunished, nor did the Ottomans, nor the Mughals, nor the Soviets who marched
into Budapest when the Hungarian regime was carried away by popular upheaval and threatened to defect from the
Warsaw Pact in autumn 1956. The French special interrogators, desperate to win the battle of Algiers, thought the
same as did Cleon, as their recent memoirs amply confirm.59 The British in most cases shrank from such
measures— they had a compelling parliamentary debate over these issues after General Reginald Dyer, their
commander in the Punjab, gunned down several hundred defenseless protesters—but only once they were in a
process of dismantling their possessions. Not that severity did not have advocates. Liberal imperialists will always
deplore killing and beating, imprisoning and humiliating civilians, burning their homes, and torturing suspects as
aberrant and counterproductive. But if empire is to be maintained, the soldiers assigned the dirty work know that it is
sometimes necessary even at the price of their later disavowal and disgrace. Ultimately a mix of secrecy or
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“deniability” must be developed if leaders are not prepared to renounce the imperial project. Hypocrisy is the tribute
imperialism pays to democracy.60 But repressing a rebellious or even restive population is not what distinguishes
hegemony from empire. Empire involves, when necessary, the enforcement of obedience on elites and populations
that would apparently rather enjoy autonomy. And the point is that a policy of compellance—overt or covert—is no
longer just hegemonic. It rests on force even if it claims the moral high ground. The Soviet Union in 1956 in Hungary,
in 1968 in Prague, and in 1979–1980 in Afghanistan enforced its control and punished defectors. It followed an
imperial policy. The United States in Iran in 1953, in Guatemala in 1954, unsuccessfully in Cuba in 1961, and so on,
tried indirect versions of similar policies. Of course, ascendancy requires what Joseph Nye has labeled “soft power”:
the resources of economy, ideology, attractive values, and cultural production in the arts and learning that also
contribute to a nation’s influence. No empire can be successful without these playing a role; and if imperial organizers
do not have these resources at first, then they must recruit them, as the Mongols did, for instance, when they
conquered China, Persia, and Central Asia. The cultural capital developed by empire—its styles, arts and
architecture, language—can radiate influence throughout successive centuries. But no empire subsists on soft power
alone. “Authority forgets a dying king,” Tennyson’s Arthur recognized. Soft power evaporates if there is no hard
power in reserve.
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Soft power causes imperialism
National Post 2003 (Matthew Fraser National Post (Canada) “It's a small world after all: If the United States , it conquers its foes through the 'soft of its
popular culture” September 22, 2003 lexis Accessed: July 01)
Given these awesome advantages, America is now regarded as a unipolar superpower with no likely rival in the
foreseeable future. However, the American Empire, like all empires, is essentially a cultural construction. Empires are
not merely commercial or military enterprises. Empires also impose normative forms of domination through soft
power. The role of American soft power, consequently, has been crucial to the extension and maintenance of
American imperial power.
Only a few years ago, the notion that America was becoming an imperial power was casually dismissed. Today, it
has become commonplace. It has even become fashionable -- in newspapers, magazines and scholarly journals -- to
describe the United States as an empire ruling the world much like the ancient Romans.
In early January, 2003, Michael Ignatieff published an essay in The New York Times Magazine titled, "American
Empire: Get Used to It." Ignatieff described American imperial power today as "empire lite," which is now the title of
his new book, published this summer.
Much discussion about American Empire has been focused on the formal attributes of U.S. imperialism -- in other
words, the deployment of U.S. hard power and economic resources in the assertion of America's global dominance.
Less attention has been given to the informal attributes of U.S. imperialism -- in other words, the deployment of U.S.
soft power.
As James Kurth put it in The National Interest: "If there is now an American empire, it is best defined by the 'soft
power' of information networks and popular culture rather than by the hard power of economic exploitation and
military force, it is an empire representative of the information age rather than the industrial age."
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LINK- DEMANDS ON STATE
The aff’s use of fiat is an example of the “We should” mentality, which positions us
as consultants to the ruling class. Making these kinds of demands on the state is a
bankrupt political strategy; the policies they criticize are not mistakes or aberrationsthey are the inevitable result of the US pursuit of empire and profit.
Herod 2001 (James, “A Stake, Not a Mistake: On Not Seeing the Enemy”, October, http://www.jamesherod.info/index.php?sec=paper&id=9
Accessed
6/27/10 GAL)
I spent several years in the early sixties studying Underdevelopment. It was frustrating, in that none of the theories I
examined really seemed to explain the phenomenon. That is, the Theories of Development that were prevalent then
(only in mainstream discourse, I later learned) didn't really answer the question: Why are some countries poor? I
would look at US Aid programs, only to conclude that they didn't work, that they didn't help countries develop, and
often got in the way. My response at that time was to argue, and to try to call to the attention of US Aid
administrators, that the programs weren't working, and were not achieving the results they were supposed to. The
programs were not facilitating development and economic growth in the countries they were supposed to be
benefiting. Fortunately for me, with the explosion and re-emergence of radical consciousness in late sixties, I was
able to overcome this naiveté.
Unfortunately though, for much of the American Left (especially for its so-called progressive wing), this naiveté,
this bad habit of not seeing the enemy, this tendency to think that the US government's policies and actions are just
mistakes, this seemingly ineradicable belief that the US government means well, is the most common outlook. It was
certainly the majoritarian belief among those who opposed the Vietnam War. I helped write a broad sheet once,
which we distributed at a big anti-war demonstration in Washington DC in November 1969, and which was titled
"Vietnam is a Stake not a Mistake". In this document we spelled out the imperial reasons which explained why the
government was waging war, quite deliberately and rationally, against Vietnam.
In subsequent decades there has been no end to the commentators who take the 'this is a mistake' line.
Throughout the low intensity (i.e., terrorist) wars against Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1980s we heard this
complaint again and again. It is currently seen in the constant stream of commentaries on the US assault on
Colombia. It has been heard repeatedly during the past two years in the demonstrations against the World Bank and
the World Trade Organization. Protesters complain that the WTO's policies of structural adjustment are having the
opposite effect of what they're suppose to. That is, they are hindering, not facilitating, development, and causing
poverty, not alleviating it.
Two years ago, in 1999, throughout the 78 day bombing attack on Yugoslavia, much of the outpouring of
progressive commentary on the event (that which didn't actually endorse the bombing that is) argued that "this is a
mistake".[1] My favorite quote from that episode, was from Robert Hayden, Director of the Center for Russian and
East European Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, being interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, April
19, 1999. He said: "But we have the Clinton administration that developed a diplomacy that seems to have been
intended to have produced this war, and now the Clinton administration's actions seem determined to produce a
wider war." Amy Goodman: "Why would the Clinton Administration want to produce a war?" Hayden: "Boy, you know
what? You've got me there. And as I say, you have to go back to the simple principles of incompetence. Never
assume competence on the part of these guys." This was surely the bottom of the pit for the 'this is a mistake' crowd.
I could cite quotes like this by the dozen, but instead let me turn to our current "war".
So what has been the response of the 'progressive community' to the bombing of Afghanistan? As usual, they
just don't get it. They just can't seem to grasp the simple fact that the government does this stuff on purpose.
Endlessly, progressives talk as if the government is just making a mistake, does not see the real consequences of its
actions, or is acting irrationally, and they hope to correct the government's course by pointing out the errors of its
ways. Progressives assume that their goals -- peace, justice, well-being -- are also the government's goals. So when
they look at what the government is doing, they get alarmed and puzzled, because it is obvious that the government's
actions are not achieving these goals. So they cry out: "Hey, this policy doesn't lead to peace!" or "Hey, this policy
doesn't achieve justice (or democracy, or development)!" By pointing this out, they hope to educate the government,
to help it to see its mistakes, to convince it that its policies are not having the desired results.[2]
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How can they not see that the US government acts deliberately, and that it knows what it is doing? How can they
not see that the government's goals are not peace and justice, but empire and profit. It wants these wars, this
repression. These policies are not mistakes; they are not irrational; they are not based on a failure of moral insight
(since morality is not even a factor in their considerations); they are not aberrations; they are not based on a failure to
analyze the situation correctly; they are not based on ignorance. This repression, these bombings, wars, massacres,
assassinations, and covert actions are the coldly calculated, rational, consistent, intelligent, and informed actions of a
ruling class determined at all costs to keep its power and wealth and preserve its way of life (capitalism). It has
demonstrated great historical presence, persistence, and continuity in pursuing this objective. This ruling class knows
that it is committing atrocities, knows that it is destroying democracy, hope, welfare, peace, and justice, knows that it
is murdering, massacring, slaughtering, poisoning, torturing, lying, stealing, and it doesn't care. Yet most
progressives seem to believe that if only they point out often enough and loud enough that the ruling class is
murdering people, that it will wake up, take notice, apologize, and stop doing it.
Here is a typical expression of this naiveté (written by an author, Brian Willson, who was in the process of
introducing a list of US interventions abroad!):
"Many of us are continually disturbed and grief stricken because it seems that our U.S. government does not yet
understand: (a) the historical social, cultural, and economic issues that underlay most of the political and ecological
problems of the world; (b) the need to comply with, as legally agreed to, rather than continually defy, international law
and international institutions established for addressing conflict; and (c) that military solutions, including production,
sale, and use of the latest in technological weapons, are simply ill-equipped and wrong-headed for solving
fundamental social and economic problems." [3]
He is wrong on all three counts. (a) The US government has an intimate, detailed knowledge of the social, cultural,
and economic characteristics of every country it intervenes in. It is especially familiar with the ethnic, linguistic,
political, and religious divisions within the country. It is not interested in how these issues "underlay most of the
political and ecological problems of the world", since it is not interested in those problems, certainly not in solving
them, since it is the main creator of those problems. Rather, it uses its expert knowledge to manipulate events within
the country in order to advance its own goals, profit and empire. (b) The US government understands perfectly that it
expressly needs not to comply with international law in order to maintain its ability to act unilaterally, unfettered by
any constraints, to advance its imperial aims. The claim that the US defies international law because of a
misunderstanding is absurd. (c) Who says that the US government is trying to solve "fundamental social and
economic problems"? These are not its aims at all. The objectives that it does pursue, consciously and relentlessly,
namely profit and empire, are in fact the causes of these very "social and economic problems". Furthermore, for its
true aims, military solutions, far from being "ill-equipped and wrong-headed", work exceptionally well. Military might
sustains the empire. Arming every little client regime of the international ruling class with 'the latest in technological
weapons" is necessary, and quite effective, in maintaining the repressive apparatus needed to defend empire, in
addition to raking in lots of profit for the arms manufacturers. But evidently Mr. Willson "does not yet understand" any
of these things.
Let's take another example. Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, otherwise very sensible writers, complain
that "bombing a desperately poor country under the yoke of a repressive regime is a wrongheaded response [to the
"unspeakable acts of violence" committed on Sept. 11]. "The U.S. bombing of Afghanistan should cease
immediately," they say. They discuss three reasons: "1. The policy of bombing increases the risk of further terrorism
against the United States. 2. The bombing is intensifying a humanitarian nightmare in Afghanistan. 3. There are
better ways to seek justice." All three statements are true of course, but irrelevant, because seeking justice, avoiding
humanitarian nightmares, and reducing the risk of terrorism do not enter into the calculations of US policy makers.
Quite the contrary, US policy makers create injustice, humanitarian nightmares, and terrorism, throughout the world,
in pursuit of the imperial objective of making profit, and this has been thoroughly documented in thousands of
scholarly studies. So for Mokhiber and Weissman to talk in this way, and phrase the problem in this way, exposes
their failure to really comprehend the enemy we face, which in turn prevents them from looking for effective strategies
to defeat that enemy, like so many other opponents of the "war". Hence all the moralizing, the bulk of which is
definitely directed at the rulers, not at the ruled. That is, it is not an attempt to win over the ruled, but an attempt to
win over the rulers. [4]
It's what I call the "we should" crowd -- all those people who hope to have a voice in the formation of policy,
people whose stances are basically that of consultants to the ruling class. "We" should do this, "we" shouldn't do that,
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as if they had anything at all to say about what our rulers do. This is the normal stance among the bootlicking
intelligentsia of course. But what is it doing among progressives and radicals? Even if their stance is seen to be not
exactly that of consultants, but that of citizens making demands upon their government, what makes them think that
the government ever listens? I think this attitude -- the "we should" attitude -- is rooted in part at least in the fact that
most progressives still believe in nations and governments. They believe that this is "our" country, and that this is
"our" government, or at least should be. So Kevin Danaher says that "we should get control of the government." They
identify themselves as Americans, or Germans, or Mexicans, or Swedes. So they are constantly advising and making
demands that 'their' government should do this and that. If they would reject nationalism altogether, and states and
governments, they could begin to see another way.
A variation of the 'this is a mistake' theme has appeared in commentaries on the present "war", on Afghanistan.
Progressives argue that the US is "falling into a trap". They argue that Osama bin Laden had hoped to provoke the
US into doing just what it is doing, attacking Afghanistan. In their view, the US government is being stupid, acting
blindly, responding irrationally, and showing incompetence. That is, it is "making a mistake". It never seems to occur
to these analysts that the government may actually be awake, even alert, or that it jumped at the opportunity offered
it by the attacks of September Eleven to do what it had wanted to do anyway -- seize Afghanistan, build a big new
base in Uzbekistan, declare unending war on the enemies of Empire everywhere, and initiate draconian repression
against internal dissent in order to achieve "domestic tranquility".
I saw yet another variation on the theme just recently. John Tirman writes about "Unintended Consequences".[5]
He thinks that "No matter how cautious generals and political leaders are ... unseen and unintended [results] occur,
at times as a bitter riptide which overwhelms the original rationales for engaging in armed combat. This unpredictable
cycle of action and reaction has thwarted U.S. policy in southwest Asia for 50 years." It's the usual mistake: Tirman
imputes policies to the US government which it does not have. US policy has not been thwarted, it has been highly
successful. The US has succeeded in keeping control of Middle Eastern oil for the past half century. This is what it
wanted to do, and this is what it did. Tirman however reviews the history of US intervention in the Middle East,
beginning with the overthrow of Mossedegh in Iran in 1953, and sees it as one long blunder, nothing but bumbling
incompetence, complicated further by 'unintended consequences' which thwart the goals of American foreign policy.
He seems to think that the US was (or "should be") trying to reduce US dependence on Middle Eastern oil, fighting
Islamic fundamentalism, reducing human suffering, assisting in economic development, promoting democracy, and
so on -- anything and everything except what it is actually doing, keeping control of Middle Eastern oil, and using any
means necessary to do so. Tirman is aware of course that this (oil) is the true aim of US policy, because he quotes
directly from US officials who state this objective explicitly, but somehow this doesn't sink in. Instead, he finally asks
in exasperation: "What will be next in this series of haunting mistakes?"
Ariel Dorfman, author of a creative critique of US imperialism, in the form of How to Read Donald Duck:
Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, was being interviewed on Democracy Now by Amy Goodman, on October
25, 2001, about the assassination of Digna Ochoa, the leading civil rights lawyer in Mexico. When asked by
Goodman to put the murder in the larger context of what was happening in the world, like in Afghanistan, Dorfman
replied: "Because the US is in Afghanistan and it needs all its allies behind it, they are going to turn a blind eye to all
the abuses of authority that are happening." Pardon me? A blind eye? Isn't the US government in the business, with
both eyes open, of murdering labor leaders, leftists, progressives, and civil rights activists all over the world?
Dorfman went on to say that now would be "a good moment that President Bush could call his friend Vicente Fox and
say: 'I want the murderers of Digna Ochoa put on trial'." Excuse me! Is he kidding? It's quite probable that Bush did
call Fox, but with a rather different message, namely, to tell him that while the world's attention was focused on
Afghanistan, now would be a good time to kill Digna Ochoa y Placido.
An Afghani man from Kabul escaped into Pakistan carrying a packet of letters addressed to the world's leaders,
"handwritten messages from his panic-stricken community."
"The world must know what is happening in Afghanistan," said Mohammed Sardar, 46, his voice ragged with anxiety
and anger. "The terrorists and the leaders are still free, but the people are dying and there is no one to listen to us. I
must get to President Bush and the others and tell them they are making a terrible mistake." [6]
The widespread belief that the US government has good intentions, a belief held onto tenaciously in spite of
decades of overwhelming empirical evidence refuting it, has got to be one of the greatest phenomena of mass
delusion in history. It would take a twenty-first century Freud to unravel this one. Here is a government that has
already bombed two other countries to smithereens just in the past ten years, first Iraq and then Yugoslavia (not to
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mention endless interventions abroad since its inception [7]). Now it is bombing Afghanistan to smithereens -hospitals, fuel supplies, food depots, electrical systems, water systems, radio stations, telephone exchanges, remote
villages, mosques, old folks homes, UN offices, Red Cross warehouses, clinics, schools, neighborhoods, roads,
dams, airports -- and a victim of the assault escapes to plead for help from the very people who are attacking him. To
have created such an illusion as this is surely one of the greatest feats of propaganda ever seen.[8]
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LINK- NASA
US Space policy was recently restructured with colonization as a central goal
because of the view that our destiny is to conquer the frontier. NASA is now an agent
of furthering the ‘American mission’.
Sage, 08 [Dr. Daniel Sage, “Framing Space: A Popular Geopolitics of American Manifest Destiny in Outer Space”, Institute of Geography and Science at the
University of Wales, PhD in Space, Place, and Politics]
In January 2004, George W. Bush rehabilitated the US space programme, reeling after the loss of Columbia on 1
February 2003, in a speech entitled ‘New Vision for Space Exploration’. Once more political rhetoric gestured
towards a conflation between frontier exploration and universal destiny, or, as Bush put it, “Mankind is drawn to the
heavens for the same reason we were once drawn into unknown lands and across the open sea. We choose to
explore space because doing so improves our lives and lifts our national spirit.”86 Since this speech, US space policy
has been re-structured around an ambitious, future programme of human exploration of the Moon and Mars that
echoes the forecasts by Bonestell and von Braun in the pages of Collier’s magazine. While many scientists have
expressed concern that this focus on human exploration will endanger NASA’s capability to pursue scientific research
in outer space, it has enabled NASA to once again re-configure itself as central to popular nation-building narratives
of American mission, exceptionalism and futurity. According to the current NASA administrator Michael Griffin, for
example: “I believe America should look to its future – and consider what that future will look like if we choose not be
a spacefaring nation.”87 Bush and Griffin’s words echo Werner von Braun’s bombastic rhetoric in Collier’s magazine
in 1952: “Whoever gains that ultimate position gains control, total control over the earth, for purposes of tyranny or for
the service of freedom.”88 Bush and Griffin’s comments re-iterate the image of the American national spirit being
lifted to discover a higher place for America from which to survey and command universal space and eternal time;
this innately evokes the Olympian gaze and the narrative of American mission and exceptionalism that is implicit in
the American landscape sublime. And, perhaps not surprisingly, to envision this sense of destiny, NASA has once
again turned to astronomical artists and Bonestellian visions of the Moon and Mars. See, for example, Jack Olson’s
(year unknown) conception of a future Mars exploration (Figure 8) used on the NASA website to promote NASA’s
‘New Vision’.89 The Bonestellian shape of NASA’s ‘New Vision’, organised around romantic and idealised visions of
frontier-spaces to stage a nationalistic sense of American global mission, testifies to the enduring historical interplay
between the American landscape sublime and American geopolitics. Perhaps the most important question that
remains to be asked is: in a world where Americans find themselves increasingly subjected by the media to the
immanent anxiety of an increasingly unpredictable future – from scripts of the Middle East as a geopolitical quagmire,
to threats to economic sovereignty from Europe and China, and the uncertainty of climate change – how is it that
these mythical, heroic, visions endure as a crucial touchstone in the legitimisation of the US state’s territorial
aggrandisement and destiny?
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LINK: PRIVATIZATION
Companies support space exploration merely to exploit its resources – don’t trust
their authors’ advocacies of the plan.
Marshall, 95 [Alan Marshall, “Development and Imperialism in Space”, published in Space Policy journal, Alan Marshall is in the Institute of Development
Studies at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/026596469593233B]
With the end of the Cold War, those companies that made a living from the supply of military hardware to
governments have experienced a drop in demand for their military goods and an associated drop in profitability. Thus
they are seeking to extend their interests in the space part of their markets in order to secure profits from building
rockets and space stations rather than missiles and military aircraft. The same companies that championed the
causes of national defence against the communist threat through massive military deterence now extol the virtues of
the benefits to be gained from massive investment in space activities.’ In the light of this analysis, it can be explained
that the search for new fields into which surplus capital can be invested, may in fact be promoting human space
expansion (despite the dubiety of it ever becoming a self-funding process). But its lack of success as a singly
powerful enough motivator of Solar System development is shown by the torpidity of current human expanionist
practices into space. Another model of imperialism worthy of attention with regard to outer space development is that
originally put forward by Hobson.* The Hobsonian thesis basically states that imperialism is the manifestation of the
search for new markets. Within the historical period with which Hobson himself was dealing (the Victorian era) this
search was undertaken by the state on behalf of, and for the benefit of, the bourgeois classes. Geopolitical
imperialism was merely a way of ensuring the continued economic expansion of the nation state
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IMPACT: AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
Space exploration and development is fuels american exceptionalism
Gouge, 01 [Catherine Courtney Gouge, Doctor of Philosophy in English @ Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, “Technologies of a “New World”
Citizenship: American Frontier Narratives in the Late-Twentieth Century”,
http://wvuscholar.wvu.edu:8881//exlibris/dtl/d3_1/apache_media/L2V4bGlicmlzL2R0bC9kM18xL2FwYWNoZV9tZWRpYS82MTI3.pdf]
“American” coherence and power, according to this structure, are “things” to be acquired. Furthermore, they are both
the motivation for exploring and conquering frontiers and, ultimately, that in which, on an individual level, U.S. citizens
are expected to invest in order to support frontier exploration. That is, as a nation, we desire to explore the frontier
because we believe that we must do so to secure the sociopolitical power and control of the American nation-state;
however, individually, most Americans must demonstrate their civic loyalty and desire for powerful subjectivity by
admitting both that they fail to occupy the powerful and coherent subject position they seek to secure and that they
will never be able to acquire the coherence and power of whole citizenship. This is characteristic of most American
national myths which, as Donald Pease writes, “presuppose a realm of pure possibility where a whole self
internalized the norms of American history in a language and series of actions that corroborated American
exceptionalism” (24). The myth of the American frontier similarly presupposes just such a realm of pure possibility to
support a fiction of American exceptionalism and, in so doing, sutures over our individual identities with a fiction of a
collective, national identity. In his popular book The Case for Mars (1996), Zubrin invokes Frederick Jackson Turner’s
notion of the role of the originary American frontier in the creation of a distinctly American national identity and
expresses anxiety about the future of American exceptionalism. He argues that contemporary society faces the same
set of questions that Turner posed in his speech before the members of the American Historical Association in 1893:
“What if the frontier is truly gone? What happens to America and all it has stood for? Can a free, egalitarian,
innovating society survive in the absence of room to grow?”74 (Case for Mars 296). For Zubrin, like Turner and
others before him, frontier-exploration is the foundation of American exceptionalism; therefore, a lack of a “new”
frontier is serious grounds for concern. In an interview I conducted with him in 1996, Zubrin offered what he called the
“oppression of the uncertified” as an example of one of the negative consequences of not having “room to grow.”
US expansionism belies racism, chauvinism, and greed.
Fitzgerald, No date. [Michael, journalist, currently a correspondent for the Jacksonville Business Journal and a contributing writer and book reviewer
for The Humanist. He’s written for Folio Weekly in Jacksonville, FL. “Manifest Destiny: American Imperial Myth, Then & Now” <
http://www.leftcurve.org/lc29webpages/manifestdestiny.html> SM]
The U.S., being founded on anti-monarchical and anti-imperialist ideals, is constrained by its own foundation myth.
Expansionism and foreign adventures must be couched in language that obscures the real objective. "Duplicity in
foreign affairs has sometimes served the national interest…. The assumption that the public won’t understand… has
long made it tempting for both Democratic and Republican administrations to make their arguments ‘clearer than the
truth.’"[46] Expansionism can only be presented to the U.S. public with one or more of the following "official"
justifications:
- national security: there must be some threat, real or manufactured;[47] - humanitarianism: we have
a moral responsibility to "liberate" oppressed peoples from ruthless dictators or, in the case of civil wars, each
other;
- idealism: it is our responsibility to protect democracy and/or freedom for the rest of the world. Tacit
elements of racism, religious chauvinism and greed operate below the surface. Away with wretched cant
No U.S.
leader would openly declare, "We’re going in there because there is something we want." But there have been
exceptions. One was Representative William Duer of New York. During the furor leading up to the Mexican-American
War, Duer thundered, "If you wish this plunder, this dismemberment of a sister republic, let us stand forth like
conquerors and plainly declare our purposes…. Away with mawkish morality, with this desecration of religion, with
this cant about Manifest Destiny, a divine mission, a warrant from the Most High, to civilize, Christianize and
democratize our sister republic at the mouth of a cannon!"[48] Racism and religious chauvinism are the primary
components of Manifest Destiny, but they obscure the true objective: plunder.[49] Albert Gallatin, a Swiss immigrant
who became Thomas Jefferson’s and James Madison’s secretary of the treasury, saw racist rhetoric as a
smokescreen for greed: "The allegations of superiority of race and destiny… are but pretenses under which to
disguise ambition [and] cupidity…"[50] The point was put even plainer by George Orwell. In Burmese Days, a
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character very much like Orwell himself--who was once a British imperial policeman in Burma--asks a comrade: "How
can you make out that we are in this country for any purpose except to steal?"[51]
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IMPACT: WAR
Manifest destiny impedes diplomacy, cooperation; undermines individual agency.
Coles, 02 [Roberta Coles, PhD, Manifest Destiny Adapted for 1990s' War Discourse: Mission and Destiny Intertwined, Professor and chair of Department of
Social and Cultural sciences @ Marquette University, http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3712300.pdf]
Clinton also indicated that the United States’ good fortune exacted obligations from America. While bush had pointed
more to the obligations of freedom, Clinton usually pointed to the responsibilities that attended prosperity or being a
superpower. Speaking on American foreign policy to an audience in San Francisco about a month before the war,
Clinton said “Because of…the dramatic increase in our own prosperity and confidence in this, the longest peacetime
economic expansion in our history, the US had the opportunity and, I would argue, the solemn responsibility to shape
a more peaceful, prosperous, democratic world in the 21st century. After the war began, he spoke to the Institute of
Peace, where he argued that “the United States, as the largest and strongest country in the world at this moment –
largest in economic terms and military terms- has the unavoidable responsibility to lead in this increasingly
interdependent world, to try to help meet the challenges of this new era. Posing example and intervention as a
responsibility, obligation, or duty of fortunate nations also frames American military action as a moral imperative,
narrows the range of alternatives, and pricks the conscience of the nation, rendering intervention a must. Combining
the reality of politics with a sense of ‘oughtness’ creates a sense of duty to the collective. The individual identity
shrinks in deference to the national identity, and the need to act in transcendence of self-interest for the sake of some
public good is foremost. At the same time, this discursive strategy redistributes the responsibility for success or
failure from the agent to god, to some unnamed but nonetheless irresistible force, or to the members of the heronation whose inaction or non-compliance would threaten national victory. The commander-in-chief may act, but his
acts are simply obedience to transcendent standards or commands from above. He acts because he must. He
choose, but his choice is only between good or evil.
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IMPACT: COLONIALISM
Viewing space as the frontier recreates colonialism.
Lin, 06.
Patrick, Assistant Professor at California Polytechnic State Univeristy. “Viewpoint: Look Before Taking Another Leap For Mankind- Ethical and Social
Considerationa in Rebuilding Society in Space” Astropolitics. < http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14777620601039701.>
Going back a few centuries to colonial America, our history lessons seemed to have glossed over the fierce ethical
debate that had surrounded English colonialism, which focused on the moral permissibility of settling on lands
already occupied by the indigenous people of America or Amerindians. It was not at all obvious that colonialism was
an unproblematic practice, and in fact, it seemed to be such an intractable and important ethical dilemma that it
inspired some of the most notable thinking in political philosophy. For instance, John Locke’s influential Second
Treatise of Government, which explained the origins of private property and civil govern¬ ment, is now believed to be
a defense of English colonialism,establishing a legitimate mechanism to claim property in lands that are already
occupied, though not ‘‘owned’’ by Amerindians as they were believed to be nomadic and only wandered across the
land rather than have ownership in it.1 The difference between colonialism and space exploration, of course, is that
we do not run immediately into the problem of displacing or interfering with pre-existing inhabitants of whatever space
bodies we explore next, since no such ‘‘alien’’ life-form has yet to be established. And given Fermi’s Paradox, this
may be a problem we need not tackle in the near future. Rather, the point here is if we are taking another giant leap
into the space frontier, our position is not too different from that of colonialists, as we have the unique opportunity to
start a new world, but in doing so, there may be important ethical and social issues we should consider first. Our last
‘‘New World’’ proved to hold many conflicts and challenges—from territorial disputes with other nations to the chaos
of the Wild West to current population-related issues—that may similarly arise in the context of space exploration. But
now, we have the benefit of hindsight and another unique opportunity to identify and defuse those potential
landmines before we step on them. It has not been easy getting from a loose collection of American colonies to
where we are now, and we might expect similar trials on our road to space settlements as well.
Space development is imperialist
Marshall, 95 [Alan Marshall, “Development and Imperialism in Space”, published in Space Policy journal, Alan Marshall is in the Institute of Development
Studies at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/026596469593233B]
If development does occur in space it will be of an imperialistic nature. It will be undertaken by a few technologically
elite space-capable nations who will appropriate the commonly-owned resources of the Solar System for themselves,
without any committed provision for the sharing of the benefits to other, non-space capable, nations. Unfortunately
such imperialistic tendencies are not just a prospect for the future, they are evident in current space activities. Not
throughout the Solar System maybe, but certainly within the confines of the near space of Earth orbit. Imperialistic
tendencies in this realm have provoked a growing sense of resentment amongst those nations being subjected to it.
For instance, with the continued development of the geostationary orbit, concern is being expressed that the space a
satellite occupies in this type of orbit is becoming a scarce resource, and one which is becoming increasingly
unavailable to non-space nations. Some of these nations have banded together under the 1986 Bogota Declaration
to express their right to benefits accumulating to users of geostationary orbits above their territories. Included in this
group of nations are the Third World states of Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Kenya, Uganda, Zaire and Indonesia. None
of these states receives rent for the occupation of their geostationary space, just as no satellite launching nation or
company pays rent to the rest of the global community for occupying a common space that belongs to all the world.
Those nations and firms that launch and operate satellites generally feel that the benefits accrued from satellite
activities are offered throughout the world through the normal market procedures. However, unlike the free-riding
satellite operators, user nations have to pay to receive satellite services. Additional to this is the ability of the spacecapable nations to obtain information about resources in the territories of non-space-capable nations, which is either
made unavailable to the latter or is sold to them at a profit. The highly technological nature of satellite launching and
operations not only means that poorer nations have less access to the benefits of satellite technology, but also that
they are unlikely to initiate their own independent satellite operations. Even when they do, they come up against the
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rules and practices of space operations as governed by the world’s dominant nations, which are often inimical to
Third World space development.
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IMPACT: COLONIALISM
Imperialism makes lives disposable and justifies war as a perpetual means of control
for the state.
Kelly, 10. (M.G.E. Lecturer in Philosophy at Middlesex University and author of The Political Philosophy of Michel Foucault (Routledge, 2008). “International
Biopolitics: Foucault, Globalisation and Imperialism” < http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/3887/1/Theoria_-_final.pdf> sm
Our account is of a biopolitical imperialism, a biopolitical dimension to imperialism as understood in the Marxist
sense.47 It adds the dimension of populationto the existing economic accounts of imperialism.. Economics is of
course closely tied to biopolitics, to the wellbeing of the population and the functioning of administration. The
economic dimension of imperialism is something that has been extensively studied and debated: we cannot deal with
it here. Biopolitical imperialism is not meant to be an historically new form, unlike Hardt and Negri‟s Empire.
Imperialism has been biopolitical for a long time: as long as both biopolitics and imperialism have existed
concurrently. Mike Davis‟ work on nineteenth century imperialism, Late Victorian Holocausts, is instructive in this
regard.48 Davis shows through case studies of India, China and Brazil that imperialism, present either in the form of
direct government or that of economic interest, horribly devastated the welfare apparatuses of these countries, such
as they were, during the nineteenth century. As Davis points out, this pattern is originary to the existence of a „third
world‟, and reverses the situation which existed prior to the French Revolution, in which state welfare provision was
far more advanced in the Orient than Europe.49 Moreover, the populations of these countries were decimated
precisely in order to benefit European populations – the most graphic example of this is the export of foodstuffs in
massive quantities to Britain from India while Indians starved in their millions.50 It would seem the situation a century
later is similar in its broad pattern. The IMF-World Bank complex‟s imposition of „structural adjustment‟ austerity
measures have mandated slashing spending on basic biopolitics and the conversion of economies to exporting to the
First World. Imperialism ensnares through direct investment (buying resources and the means of production) and by
„development loans‟, both of which foster the harvesting of surpluses from the economy, not biopolitics. Investors
may take care of their workforce, but they don‟t take care of the country more generally. Neoliberal economic reform
in the periphery refers precisely to the dismantling of biopolitics. In the centre, neoliberalism is imposed with care and
consideration, not absolutely; although there has been dismantling here, biopolitical protections are not simply
trashed, but they are in the periphery. That is, the introduction of neoliberalism in the centre occurs in the context of a
state that is still fundamentally concerned with the welfare and consent of a population, whereas elsewhere it is
imposed from without, overriding such concerns. The states and civil societies of the First World essentially do not
care about humanity outside their populations and derive a benefit for their own population at the expense of those
outside. As Foucault puts it in explicating the relation of the subject to the pre-biopolitical sovereign, those outside are
„neutral‟ „from the point of view of life and death‟.51 This allows the life of those outside to be actively imperilled for
any benefit, no matter how marginal, accruing to those inside. The biopolity assumes, in respect of the masses
outside its population, „the right to take life or let live‟:52 this „right to take life‟ is an aspect we have yet to examine,
the use of force – war – as the thanatopolitical tool for the regulation of the outside.
Empire building hurts the U.S.
Eland, 02. (Ivan, director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute, is the author of Putting “Defense’” Back into U.S. Defense Policy: Rethinking U.S.
Security in the Post–Cold War World (2001). “The Empire Strikes Out The “New Imperialism” and Its Fatal Flaws” Policy Analysis <
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa459.pdf>
That key question is never addressed by the foreign policy establishment, which derives so much prestige and power
from the U.S. role as an interventionist superpower. This paper has argued that the United States will not get rich by
adopting an imperial pol- icy. Quite the contrary: the massive amount of U.S. taxpayer dollars spent unnecessarily on
excessive military power to police the world and to conduct nation-building missions certainly does not pay for itself in
any benefits to the United States from increased overseas trade or investment because of fewer 20disruptive wars or
from increased economic and commercial concessions from protected nations. And as noted earlier, even Max Boot
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admits that building a better world through nation building is very difficult.138 Having an empire does not make us
safer. The animosity toward the United States of groups and nations in far-flung places— demonstrated graphically
by the attacks of September 11—indicates that imperial over- stretch has quite the opposite effect. The first goal of
any government should be to ensure the safety and well-being of the people. Adopting a strategy of empire is
actually counterproductive to those ends.
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ALT- REFORMS FAIL
Must address structural causes- reforms are derailed and clawed back.
MÉSZÁROS 2006 (ISTVÁN, Monthly Review, September, “The Structural Crisis of Politics)
I would like to begin with a brief survey of the very disquieting—indeed, I should say, of worldwide threatening—
develop-ments in the field of politics and the law. In this respect I wish to under-line that it was no less than twentythree years ago that I became personally acquainted in Paraiba, Brazil with the painful circumstances of explosive
food riots. Twenty years later, at the time of President Lula’s electoral campaign, I read that he had announced that
the most impor-tant part of his future strategy was his determination to put an end in the country to the grave social
evil of famine. The two intervening decades from the time of those dramatic food riots in Paraiba were obvi-ously not
sufficient to solve this chronic problem. And even today, I am told, the improvements are still very modest in Brazil.
Moreover, the somber statistics of the United Nations constantly underline that the same problem persists, with
devastating consequences, in many parts of the world. This is so despite the fact that the productive powers at the
disposal of humankind today could relegate forever to the past the now totally unforgivable social failure of famine
and malnutrition.
It might be tempting to attribute these difficulties, as frequently hap-pens in traditional political discourse, to more or
less easily corrigible political contingencies, postulating thereby the remedy through changes in personnel at the next
suitable and strictly orderly electoral opportu-nity. But that would be a customary evasion and not a plausible explanation. For the stubborn persistence of the problems at stake, with all of their painful human consequences, point to
much more deeply rooted connections. They indicate some apparently uncontrollable force of iner-tia which seems to
be able to turn, with depressing frequency, even the “good intentions” of promising political manifestos into the
paving stones of the road to hell, in Dante’s immortal words. In other words, the challenge is to face up to the
underlying causes and structural deter-minations which tend to derail by the force of inertia many political pro-grams
devised for corrective intervention. To derail them even when it is originally admitted by the authors of such programs
that the existing state of affairs is unsustainable.
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FRAMEWORK- SHELL
Our Interpretation is that debate should be a question of methodologies.
A. Education – debate about methodology is a true debate. A competition of ideas is
critical to learning and fostering democratic politics.
B. Fairness – Method debates is the most predictable and fair ground for the
affirmative. They have to defend the way in which they solve the worlds problems.
You can weigh your impacts as justification to vote affirmative, but that means we are
able to question those assumptions which is the entire 1NC.
C. Politics is no longer a rule by the elite, we must learn how best to interact with
ourselves and others ethically prior to be accountable to the citizenry as a
democratically elected policy maker – this internal link turns their education claims.
Clifford 01
[Michael, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Mississippi State University, Political Genealogy After Foucault: Savage Identities, p. 68-69]
Later, in the Greco-Roman period to the second or third century A.D., the connection between one’s political
subjectivity and one’s sexual subjectivity will be far less isomorphic and much more problematic. In fact, the collapse
of the Greek city-state precipitated a “crisis of the subject” in which the self and its relations to others in the social and
political sphere were put into question as never before. This crisis was characterized by a “problematization of
political activity” that paralleled the political transformations of this period.20 The more complex political structure of
the state brought about a “relativization” in the exercise of power. For the individual, this manifested itself in a Stoical
detachment from one’s status as a political actor, reflecting a growing awareness of the factors that were beyond the
individual’s control. At the same time, the ruler/ruled dichotomy of earlier reflections was replaced with a recognition
of the individual’s “intermediary” function in the exercise of power. Instead of the classical Aristotelian alternation, one
is both ruler and ruled at the same time: “Anyone who exercises power has to place himself in a field of complex
relations where he occupies a transition point” (CS, 88). Where the individual found himself in this complex network
of relations was a matter of birth or the artificial status projected onto him by society—neither of which he had any
control over. But he could control the quality of the power and governance which he exercised from this position—
and it was his moral duty to exercise this power the best way he could. And just as for the earlier Greeks, here also
“the rationality of the government of others is the same as the rationality of the government of oneself” (CS, p. 89).
That is, the object was to control the passions, to cultivate the virtues of discipline and moderation, to develop a selfmastery that would qualify one to govern others. Yet there were two important changes in the relation between selfgovernment and government of others. First, it became less heautocratic, since one had to attend to multiple “levels”
in the exercise of power. Second, self-mastery became a much more intense relation to self. This involved a
separation, on the one hand, of virtue and the actual ethical work (regimen, ascetic practices) necessary to achieve
virtue. On the other hand, while it was recognized that “a whole elaboration of the self by oneself was necessary” for
the tasks of governing others, the exercise of power was based on the relationship the individual established (often
through an arduous effort and attention to oneself) with himself, which tended to undermine the identification of
oneself in terms of one’s socially defined political status. Explains Foucault, “From the viewpoint of the relation to the
self, the social and political identifications do not function as authentic marks of a mode of being; they are extrinsic,
artificial, and unfounded signs” (CS, 93). Rather, the true measure of one’s integrity, and the true register of one’s
subjectivity was, for whatever position or status one held, the quality of character the individual constructed for
himself through the “cultivation of the self.” The Cultivation of Individuality: J. S. Mill’s Manual of Autonomous
Selfhood In Foucault’s analysis of the technologies of the self through which individuals constitute themselves as
ethical subjects, he attempts to trace genealogically the cultural patterns that provide frameworks of self-formation for
the individuals of a given historical period. He is able to identify such patterns by focusing his analysis on various
representative texts, such as Plato’s Republic, Epictetus’s Discourses, and Cassian’s Institutiones. Foucault reads
such texts not so much as philosophical treatises in the traditional sense, but rather as “aesthetic manuals,” as
“manuals for living,” as practical handbooks that delineate for the individual certain values, standards, and practices
the individual can appropriate in order to define a “style of existence,” a mode of being. Reading texts in this way
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allows Foucault to identify the sorts of problematizations that structure a given form of subjectivation—and thus, to
understand the formation of subjectivity under a new dimension. We have seen that in antiquity there was a close
connection between forms of political and sexual subjectivity, that the problematizations that structured the self’s
relation to itself in these domains tended to overlap. Since Foucault was doing a genealogy of the modern self, had
he been able to complete his project, we might have seen similar connections between modern political and sexual
subjectivity.21 A genealogy of the modern political subject would concentrate at some point on the texts of the liberal
tradition. If we were to analyze such texts as “manuals for living,” rather than as juridicophilosophical projects to
define principles of justice that govern the exercise of power (the effect of which is to take the political subject as
given), we would discover in them models of political subjectivation that become attached to—or are appropriated
by—individuals, determining their actions, practices, beliefs, and ideals—that is, models for the constitution of
specific modes of being. Such texts generate views about the ways individuals need to comport themselves politically
toward the state and toward each other. They provide frameworks of self-formation and identity construction, modes
of selfdefinition and conceptualization. They delineate lines of normativity and abnormality, of social acceptability, of
model citizenship and appropriate moral behavior; and they provide points of departure for revolutionary or
reactionary personas. Political subjects emerge, in part, as a result of the self-appropriation of concepts generated
within the texts of traditional political philosophy, and which are disseminated, in various ways and along various
channels, as cultural values. In short, such texts harbor technologies of self through which individuals constitute
themselves as modern political subjects.
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Discourse is key
The affirmative discourse represents the next advocate for space manifest destiny
Miller 97’ Jon H, the national political reporter for National Review, “’Our Next Manifest Destiny America should move to control space now – and decisively”
http://www.radicalcontrapositions.com/Grad%20School/IR%206602/Course%20Materials/Reading%206_Space/nextmanifestdestiny_miller.pdf
In addition to an assortment of high-tech hardware, the United States could use an Alfred Thayer Mahan for the 21st
century. In 1890, Mahan was a captain in the Navy when the first edition of his book, The Influence of Sea Power on
World History, was published. Today it ranks among the classic texts of military theory. Mahan argued that nations
achieve greatness only if they dominate the seas and their various geographic "pressure points," holding up the
example of the British Royal Navy. One of Mahan's early readers was a young man named Theodore Roosevelt, who
began to apply these ideas while working in the Department of the Navy during the 1890s, and later as president.
Mahanian principles shook the country loose from its traditional strategy of coastal defense and underwrote a period
of national dynamism, which included the annexation of Hawaii, victory in the Spanish-American War, and the
construction of the Panama Canal. No writer has clearly become the Mahan of space, though one candidate is
Everett C. Dolman, a professor at the Air Force's School of Advanced Airpower Studies, in Alabama. Dolman's new
book Astropolitik offers a grand strategy that would have the United States "endeavor at once to seize military control
of low-Earth orbit" and impose "a police blockade of all current spaceports, monitoring and controlling all traffic both
in and out." Dolman identifies low-Earth orbit as a chokepoint in the sense of Mahan--anybody who wants access to
space must pass through it. "The United States should grab this vital territory now, when there's no real competition
for it," Dolman tells me. "Once we're there, we can make sure the entry cost for anybody else wanting to achieve
space control is too high. Whoever takes space will dominate Earth." Dolman would benefit from a political
benefactor. Mahan enjoyed the patronage of Roosevelt, who took a scholar's ideas and turned them into policies.
Space has a number of advocates within the military bureaucracy, mostly among its younger members. It does not
have a political champion, with the possible exception of Sen. Bob Smith, a New Hampshire Republican who has
made the subject a personal passion. Smith calls space America's "next Manifest Destiny" and believes the
Department of Defense should establish an independent Space Force to serve alongside the Army, Navy, and Air
Force. Smith, however, may not stay in the Senate much longer, facing stiff political challenges at home. With the
right mix of intellectual firepower and political muscle, the United States could achieve what Dolman calls "hegemonic
control" of space. The goal would be to make the heavens safe for capitalism and science while also protecting the
national security of the United States. "Only those spacecraft that provide advance notice of their mission and flight
plan would be permitted in space," writes Dolman. Anything else would be shot down. That may sound like 21stcentury imperialism, which, in essence, it would be. But is that so bad? Imagine that the United States currently
maintained a battery of space-based lasers. India and Pakistan could inch toward nuclear war over Kashmir, only to
be told that any attempt by either side to launch a missile would result in a boost-phase blast from outer space.
Without taking sides, the United States would immediately defuse a tense situation and keep the skies above
Bombay and Karachi free of mushroom clouds. Moreover, Israel would receive protection from Iran and Iraq, Taiwan
from China, and Japan and South Korea from the mad dictator north of the DMZ. The United States would be
covered as well, able not merely to deter aggression, but also to defend against it. National security always has been
an expensive proposition, and there is no getting around the enormous costs posed by a robust system of spacebased weaponry. It would take a supreme act of national will to make it a reality. We've done it before: Winning the
Cold War required laying out trillions of dollars, much of it on machines, missiles, and warheads that never saw live
combat. Seizing control of space also would cost trillions, but it would lead to a world made immeasurably safer for
America and what it values.
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Exploration mentality is explicit and present in outer space rhetoric.
Gouge, 01 [Catherine Courtney Gouge, Doctor of Philosophy in English @ Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, “Technologies of a “New World”
Citizenship: American Frontier Narratives in the Late-Twentieth Century”,
http://wvuscholar.wvu.edu:8881//exlibris/dtl/d3_1/apache_media/L2V4bGlicmlzL2R0bC9kM18xL2FwYWNoZV9tZWRpYS82MTI3.pdf]
The science-fictional qualities of frontier mythology have been made explicit in the emphasis on “fantastic” frontier
technologies in narratives of new or prospective frontiers, and nowhere more so than in narratives of the exploration
and colonization of outer space.79 Even narratives of the originary frontier often included transportation and
communication technologies which were either relatively unknown to, unnecessary to, or uncommon in the nonfrontier society. A 1956 episode of Annie Oakley with Gail Davis, entitled “Annie Gets the First Phone,” valorizes the
telephone as the new, divine technology which will intervene in and rescue the ranchers from the threat of Indian
raids in the frontier town of Diablo. “Before long,” Oakley boasts, “we’ll have wire hanging all over the valley!” “Oui,”
Mr. Renault (the French man who brings phone service to the town and desires to be American) responds, “We’ll
have the best valley in the world!” Indeed, the frontier/ science-fictional into the night, Spender began to gather the
dry Martian wood and build a small fire.” 79 There are, of course, exceptions to this. Edgar Rice Burroughs, for
example, chooses to leave out the journey to Mars and instead has John Carter in The Princess of Mars (1912)
simply waking up on Mars. 159 narrative aesthetic has always enjoyed the juxtaposition of “new” technologies and a
relatively crude wilderness environment characterized by the threat of lawlessness. Just as science fiction can be
viewed as a thought experiment, so the fantasy of the frontier in American culture presents as a socioeconomic
thought experiment potentially reproducible in other spaces. Like the science fiction alluded to in Dick’s Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), the mythology of the frontier is an historically grounded story which will repeatedly
define our expectations for future frontiers and, ultimately, leave us unfulfilled. Indeed, Dick’s novels are responding
to a tradition of frontierism/consumerism, which became an institution in what Carter calls “Martian Westerns” (62),
developed in the earlier part of the twentieth-century. Different from Time-Slip, Androids is not set on the frontier;
rather, the frontier is elsewhere and our vision of it is mediated through others’ experiences of it. In fact, in Androids,
the everyday life on the Martian frontier is particularly disappointing to those who have read the “pre-colonial fiction”
because such stories are more satisfying than the real thing.
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Role of the ballot
The increasing internationalization of space demands that we examine a SYMBOLIC
history of space. This determines the ROLE OF YOUR BALLOT
Siddiqi, 10.
Asif A. is an assistant professor of history at Fordham University and member of advisory board at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology.[1] He
specializes in the history of science and technology and modern Russian history. “Competing Technologies, National(ist) Narratives, and Universal Claims:
Toward a Global History of Space Exploration” Technology and Culture, Volume 51, Number 2, April 2010, pp. 425443 (Article) Johns Hopkins University Press.
My goal in this essay has been to explore the relationship between nationalism and spaceflight, problematize it, and,
using insights from that process, suggest some possible new avenues in the practice of space history. Although
nationalist narratives (and nationalism) have been essential to the project of space exploration and its retelling,
barring a few exceptions, space historians have not critically explored the relationship between spaceflight and
national identity.43 Deconstructing this relationship has be- come more urgent as a flotilla of non-Western nations are
becoming more visible in the endeavor of space exploration, rendering the old cold-war dynamic—both in reality and
in memorialization—less effective as an ex- planatory tool for understanding the process of space exploration. Deterministic explanations from the cold war often rely on simplistic binary and oppositional divisions; although not trivial,
these display their limitations as tools to fully explain the complexities of space exploration both during and after the
cold war. Without disposing of technological determinism, I would urge historians to incorporate a broader matrix of
approaches, in- cluding, particularly, the highlighting of global flows of actors and knowledge across borders,
communities, and identities. Ultimately, this approach might lend itself to constructing for the first time a global and
transnational history of rocketry and space travel. Since a global history would the- oretically be decentered and a
nation’s space program rendered as a more nebulous transnational process, one might expect a multitude of smaller,
local, and ambiguous processes and meanings to become visible. With a new approach grounded in a global history
of spaceflight, we might learn much more about how individuals, communities, and nations perceive space travel,
how they imbue space exploration with meaning, and espe- cially how those meanings are contested and repeatedly
reinvented as more and more nations articulate the urge to explore space.
Establishing a framework through analogy is a pre-requisite to having any debate
about space policy
Peterson 97’
Professor of Political Science at University of Massachusetts, PhD from Columbia University International Organization Vol. 51, No. 2 (Spring, 1997), pp. 245-274
Scholars focusing on international relations generally or foreign policy decision making are now paying increasing attention to the ways in which mental
constructs- ideas, beliefs, ideologies, or worldviews-affect political actors' perceptions and behavior.'
The influence of mental constructs in political interaction is particularly visible when actors are trying to extend
interaction into new areas or to establish new modes of cooperation. This study will illuminate the impact of mental
constructs in these situations by examining the development of outer space law. The Soviets' successful launch of
Sputnik in October 1957 shifted outer space from the realm of science fiction and speculation to the realm of real
intemational concerns. Governments were faced with the problem of determining not only what they wanted to do in
space but also what sorts of rules for unilateral activity and mutual interaction should prevail there.2 When Sputnik
ushered in the space age, the world was divided into two great power blocs, each consisting of one superpower plus
allies, associates, and clients, and a scattering of European neutral and Third World nonaligned states. The
distribution of space capability was even more starkly bipolar than the distribution of overall capability: until 1972 only
the superpowers possessed the ability to launch large objects into space, place satellites into geostationary orbit, and
send humans into earth orbit or beyond. Some other states could launch small rockets and later developed the ability
to launch large objects, but none expected to match the whole range of superpower space activity.3 Realist theorists
of international relations would expect the superpowers to define the rules for outer space activity because, in 1957,
only they had the capability to act in space. Realists would also expect the superpowers to insist on rules allowing
considerable room for unilateral action, particularly in the security realm. Accep- tance of external constraints on state
action, whether in the strong form of creating an intergovernmental organization for space exploration or the weak
form of mutual monitoring of activity and enforcement of rules would be unlikely in the realist view. Rather,
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cooperation would be limited, and cooperative ventures would follow the lines of interbloc division. These
expectations stem from the basic assumptions of realist theory, which treats states as egoistic rational utility
maximizers and assumes that ability to influence outcomes is directly related to a state's capability relative to that of
others. Particularly in its more structuralist neorealist versions, realist theory assumes that states derive their utility
functions not from any internal source but from the overriding desire to survive and thrive in a severely competitive
environment that imposes steep costs on those who fail to act in conformity with competitive necessities. Assuring
survival in such a milieu requires maintaining or augmenting power and paying careful attention to relative position.
Realists expect, in consequence, that states will seek to maximize freedom to pursue their own policies and forgo
cooperative activity if the benefits seem likely to be distributed in ways that permit rivals to improve their relative
positions. Current rules for and patterns of outer space activity do conform in many respects to these expectations.
Outer space law permits states wide discretion in initiating, continuing, dispensing with, and defining all forms of outer
space activity. Joint activity is common, but formally organized multilateral ventures are confined to the European
Space Agency, the Soviet bloc Intercosmos program, and the global and regional telecommunications satellite
consortia. Even the "global" consortia-the U.S.-led Intelsat and the Soviet-led Intersputnik-reflected bloc divisions
until the mid-1970s. These divisions were first overcome with creation of Inmarsat, a specialized venture in ship-toshore communications. Yet realist expectations are indeterminate at crucial points. In particular, a realist would not
have been able to predict whether outer space would be treated as a common area or as something to be
"conquered" and parceled out among space- faring states. Both conceptions of space were advanced in the early
1950s; some commentators compared space to the high seas, while others compared it to national airspace. Had the
superpowers agreed on one conception and other states on the other, the selection would pose no puzzle for realist
theory: the superpowers could simply have imposed their preferences by agreeing between themselves and acting
accordingly. However, the superpowers initially disagreed, with the U.S. government preferring the high seas
conception and the Soviet government the national airspace conception. Resolution of this disagreement poses a
puzzle that cannot be explained using only the resources of realist theory, because neither superpower was in a
position to coerce (much less impose on) the other.4 When imposition or coercion is not possible, political actors
have to bargain to a compromise or converge through mutual persuasion on a consensus. Compromise involves
trade-off, which in the space case would have involved each superpower accepting some elements of the other's
preferred conception in return for the other's acceptance of some elements of its own. Persuasion involves offering
arguments that bring others to share the same set of presuppositions, assumptions, logic, and conclusions. The
development of outer space law did involve moments of compro- mise, but the decision to treat space as a commons
involved a clear choice of one conception over the other, an outcome that depended on the Soviet government's shift
to accepting the high seas conception. The process by which convergence occurred can be traced in some detail
because outer space law was developed in a well-documented multilateral negotiation. Even imposition involves
some elements of mutually understood meaning, since the target has to understand what acts or statements are
being demanded. Bargaining and persuasion are even more dependent on a shared conceptual framework with
which actors can define the problem, assess the stakes involved, identify potential solutions, and agree on a
particular one.5 Understanding the process by which the superpowers converged on treating outer space as a
common area and developing outer space law accordingly requires understanding the mental mechanisms by which
political actors acquire, transmit, and refine common conceptual frameworks.6 Though analogical reasoning is only
one of several types of human reasoning that can serve as the requisite mental mechanism, it is more successful
than others when actors need to develop a workable conception of a new problem or issue quickly. Inductive
reasoning, for example, fails for lack of enough information about the new concern to permit a "bottom-up" generation
of organizing concepts from particular observations. Deductive reasoning fails for lack of a sufficiently well-developed
theory of the new concern to provide the assumptions and postulates needed for a "top-down" elaboration of
expectations. Reasoning by analogy, which permits the transfer of assumptions and postulates from a well-known
field to an unfamiliar one, provides the necessary cognitive resources for developing a working conception of the new
issue or problem. Understanding the process of reasoning by analogy improves our comprehension of outer space
law development in two ways. First, it explains the development of the superpower consensus defining outer space
as a common area rather than as one subject to national claims. Once this conception was in place, the superpowers
and other states were able to agree on the main outlines of outer space law. Second, the patterns of analogical
reasoning illuminate certain facets of the later evolution of outer space law by indicating which proposals are more or
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less likely to be considered seriously. One subsequent debate, triggered by proposals to treat lunar resources as the
"common heritage of mankind," provides a good example of this sifting effect.
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AT: PERM
This isn’t just a link of omission- starting points matter. The struggle against
imperialism should always be in the foreground- Instead, the plan is just an example
of the kind of “lesser evilism” which strengthens imperialism by advancing the
illusion that capitalism can be reformed.
Workers Vanguard ‘8 (No. 920, Sept. 12, “Obama Offers Facelift for U.S. Imperialism”, http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/920/obama.html, Accessed
6/27/2010 GAL)
The fact is, however, that most of what passes for the left in this country has either explicitly or implicitly endorsed a
Democratic Party victory over the Republicans in the upcoming election. Having built an “antiwar movement”
premised on appeals to bourgeois (Democratic) politicians to “end the war” in Iraq—and only Iraq, not Afghanistan—
the liberals and their reformist supporters have now buried that “movement” in the morass of American electoral
politics. The starting point of the reformist left is not the fight for socialist revolution, but rather the lie that capitalism
can be reformed to serve the interests of working people and the oppressed.
In Imperialism, Lenin denounced such shams, noting that “reactionary, petty-bourgeois critics of capitalist imperialism
dream of going back to ‘free,’ ‘peaceful,’ and ‘honest’ competition,” and insisting that “a ‘fight’ against the policy of the
trusts and banks that does not affect the economic basis of the trusts and banks is mere bourgeois reformism and
pacifism, the benevolent and innocent expression of pious wishes.” That sums up the support by groups like Workers
World to the capitalist Green Party’s presidential candidate and former Georgia Democratic Congresswoman Cynthia
McKinney, who spoke at a “Recreate ’68” rally outside the Democratic convention. She promoted the usual reformist
pabulum about ending occupations abroad and redirecting “excessive” military spending toward higher education,
and other good things like universal health care.
The reformist, anti-Communist ISO, for its part, claims that “Support for Barack Obama is one sign of a deeper shift
to the left” (Socialist Worker, 13 August). The ISO never met a counterrevolutionary “freedom fighter” it didn’t like, so
the Obama/Brzezinski crew’s anti-Communism is right up their alley. Socialist Worker (27 August) reprinted a piece
by Dave Zirin, a regular contributor to that paper, under the title, “What We Didn’t Learn in Beijing.” The article chides
the bourgeois media for insufficient China-bashing during the Olympics, condemning them for supposedly not asking
“why the State Department last April took China off its list of nations that commit human rights violations.” While the
ISO, the Revolutionary Communist Party and Workers World, as well as other reformist leftists, all have articles
“exposing” Obama’s policies, these are thin covers for their actual politics of Democratic Party “lesser evilism,” as all
their various coalitions in one way or another recapitulate the RCP’s classic call, “The World Can’t Wait: Drive Out
the Bush Regime!” This is also the goal—what an amazing coincidence—of the Democrats this year.
The Democrats’ rhetoric about “hope” and “change” is meant to refurbish illusions that the shell game of bourgeois
electoral politics can work in the interests of the working masses. And, indeed, Democratic voter turnout during the
primaries, including among black people and youth, has been very high. But while the Republicans may revel in
inflicting suffering on working people and the oppressed, the Democrats put on a more kindly face and do the same
thing. As Lenin captured it in his 1917 work, The State and Revolution, “To decide once every few years which
member of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament—this is the real essence of
bourgeois parliamentarism.”
This system of imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, cannot be reformed. It cannot be pressured into being
more peaceful or humane. Lenin’s Bolsheviks showed in leading the October Revolution of 1917 that it can and must
be defeated through workers revolution. The Spartacist League stands for forging a working-class party like the
Bolshevik Party to overturn, by socialist revolution, this rotting capitalist order. Thus we stand in implacable
opposition to the dual parties of capitalism, as well as petty-bourgeois would-be reformers like the Green Party.
Break with the Democrats—For a revolutionary workers party to fight for socialist revolution!
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AFF-PERM
The permutation solves—the concept of the frontier can never be rejected but we can reshape it to
encourage cultural harmony and intellectual expansion
BILLINGS 1997 (Linda Billings is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication Studies, Indiana University,
“Frontier Days in Space: Are They Over?” Space Policy, August)
Patricia Nelson Limerick has recommended that the space community abandon the frontier metaphor. But at the
same time she acknowledges that it is 'an enormously persistent and determining pattern of thought'. Ultimately, it
may not be feasible to expunge the frontier metaphor from the public discourse about space exploration. But it
certainly is possible, and practical, to re-examine it as a motivating force for space exploration. What is the space
frontier? It might be useful to think of the space frontier as a vast and distant sort of Brazilian rainforest, Atacama
Desert, Antarctic continent a great unknown that challenges humans to think creatively and expansively, to push their
capabilities to the limits, a wild and beautiful place to be studied and enjoyed but left unsullied. Curiosity is what
brought humans out of caves, took them across oceans and continents, compelled them to invent aeroplanes and
now draws them towards the stars. The broad, deep public value of exploring the universe is the value of discovery,
learning and understanding; thus the space frontier could be a school for social research, a place where new
societies could grow and thrive. This is the space frontier: the vast, perhaps endless frontier of intellectual and
spiritual potential. Consider the popularity of director Ron Howard's film Apollo 13. What appealed to audiences
about this story was that it was about danger, risk, challenges, hard work, human ingenuity, turning failure to
success, life triumphing over death. In his turn of the century essay, 'The moral equivalent of war', American
philosopher William James wrote that 'without risks or prizes for the darer, history would be insipid indeed'. Space
exploration offers tremendous opportunities to take extraordinary risks and thus it promises great challenges to the
human mind and spirit. Intellectual and spiritual growth are more than worthy goals of future space exploration
efforts.
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AFF-FRAMEWORK
Space should be debated in a policy framework—this allows us to predict
consequences and avoid the worst outcomes
HUNTLEY et al 2010 (Wade L. Huntley, US Naval Postgraduate School; Joseph G. Bock, Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies; Miranda
Weingartner, Weingartner Consulting; “Planning the unplannable: Scenarios on the future of space,” Space Policy 26)
These prospects raise many issues. Accordingly, policies shaping current space activities are much debated in many
arenas around the globe. The agenda of issues is wide-ranging, including improving space surveillance data and
traffic management, preventing and mitigating space debris, concerns over space security and possible weapons
deployment, the use of space travel for scientific advancement, the implications of ‘‘space tourism,’’ and the
possibility of eventual ‘‘space colonization’’ for scientific, exploratory and commercial purposes. These debates
benefit from considerable ongoing efforts to generate relevant information, both technical and political. The decisionmaking processes often reflect the input of the many constituencies with near-term stakes in their outcomes. But
lacking from these debates is a comprehensive and informed set of visions for the overarching objectives of the
advancing human presence in space. This absence is ironic, given that human interests in space are intrinsically
visionary. Perhaps no other element of contemporary human life so inspires the imagination. Science fiction
wonderment has motivated careers. In many nations, space-related achievements epitomize national purpose and
pride. At this level, we are rife with visions. But dreams do not constitute a basis for serious public policy planning.
Lacking are what might best be termed ‘‘realistic visions’’ e that is, a set of integrated ideas about possibilities cast
against the background of varying constraints, tradeoffs, and uncertainties. Realistic visions would map out how
interests and forces operating within the expanding human presence in space will interact to produce outcomes over
longer-term time frames. Visions must also account for variance on ultimate aspirations. Hence, no single vision can
suffice; such visions are not themselves policy-setting directions. Rather, creative visions of this nature contribute to
contemporary policy debates by providing a foundation, beyond simple speculation, for tracing the potential longerterm consequences of immediate policy questions. Even in the absence of global value convergence, such visions
can enable policy makers to anticipate and preemptively solve many of the challenges that the advancing human
presence in space will pose. Without such reflection, policy making is driven by extant knowledge, current political
forces and short-term objectives. As in many other areas of human life, the long-term consequences of a perpetually
ad hoc and unintegrated decisionmaking process may please no-one. The incorporation of serious visions into policymaking processes will not insure the ‘‘best’’ outcomes e impossible in the absence of global values consensus e but
they can help avoid the worst outcomes, which are easier to identify.
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AFF—FRAMEWORK
You should evaluate this debate in the framework of switch-side policy analysis—
following the rules and debating policy is critical to effective space efforts
HUNTLEY et al 2010 (Wade L. Huntley, US Naval Postgraduate School; Joseph G. Bock, Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies; Miranda
Weingartner, Weingartner Consulting; “Planning the unplannable: Scenarios on the future of space,” Space Policy 26)
As anticipated, one important merit of the process was that it generated constructive dialogue around complex
issues. Common themes emerged even though participants came from diverse professional backgrounds. Thus
there was a strong desire to continue the dialogue generated by the workshop, both to adjust for ongoing events and
to examine some of the findings in more depth. Areas of potentially deeper analysis include specific turning points
(such as those where conflict emerged), the implications of increasing the commercialization of space, and a
breakdown of the involvement and interests of the various actors (states, institutions, non-state actors). The goal
would be to project common elements likely to be in a family of international instruments cutting across public, private
and communal sectors, or to identify codes of conduct. Workshop participants did note that most were from North
America, and that different sets of assumptions and conclusions may have emerged if the process was held with
Chinese, Indian or European participants. This observation reinforced the conveners’ pre-existing judgment: because
successful scenario building depends upon the ‘‘friction’’ of diverse knowledge and outlooks, international
participation would be vital to the success of more extensive exercises. Moreover, scenario analysis can also be an
ideal vehicle for broaching sensitive topics in an international dialogue. Because the process is designed to identify
shared critical uncertainties and focus on longer-term challenges, it is ideally suited to provide a forum wherein
participants divided by contentious near-term issues can find a common basis for engagement. Thus, scenariobuilding exercises can yield community-building benefits independent of their substantive results. In this vein, the
process can also help generate ‘‘buy-in’’ among divided parties with very different interests to the minimal objective of
identifying a shared set of long-term future concerns (as the Mont Fleur experience shows). It is not necessary for
participants to possess, at the outset, common core values. It is sufficient that there be agreement on common
process values within the exercise, the most important being commitment to the goals of the exercise and a
willingness to think about matters imaginatively. Participants do not need to leave their opinions at the door e indeed,
the ‘‘friction’’ of that diverse input is vital to the success of the process. They need only be ready and able also to
view things from others’ points of view.
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