Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Genocide
Turns
Genocide destroys culture this turns life and death impacts
Card 03 (Claudia Card is professor of philosophy at University of Wisconsin, Winter 2003, Hypatia, vol.
18 issue 1, JSTOR #!tylerd)
At the end of this train of genocidal thought lies not only the destruction of the evil
other, but goodness itself, and with it the meaning of life. The slaughter of
innocents so fills the world with evil that there is no escape from its contamination.
Only the destruction of self and world -or rather, only an act of destruction that finally sees
no difference between them, as the metaphor of the corporate body comes to be
taken literally-can protect the self from the evil it has unleashed. Here is the link
between envy and ideological reversal. Both eliminate goodness in the world,
making it a fearful and worthless place to live. But, whereas the former does so by rejecting and
attacking goodness directly, the latter does so by so filling the world with one's own
badness that goodness is displaced, driven out, swamped. Like Richard, the bad crowds out the good.
Greenberg and Mitchell( 1983, p. 126) describe the consequences this way: As a result of his rages. . . the child
imagines his world as cruelly depopulated, his insides as depleted. He is a sole
survivor and an empty shell. However, unlike the child, who has his mother's continued
presence to reassure him that his badness need not obliterate all goodness in the
world, the Nazi doctor has his victims, whose silent witness confirmed his deepest
fears: that he is alone in a wholly evil world, made so by his own badness
Framing
weigh genocide first util is bankrupt and normalizes genocide
Destexhe 95 (Alain Destexhe is fmr secretary-general of Doctors Without Borders, fmr president of
the Intl Crisis Group and secretary of the Belgian Senate Special Committee of Inquiry into the Genocide in
Rwanda, Rwanda and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, pp. 9-11, NYU Press, google books, #!tylerd)
Another reason why it is of fundamental importance to make distinctions between different kinds of catastrophes is that they are then revealed to
vary greatly both in nature and in degree. However, the increasing amount of exaggerated news coverage
given to any disaster, natural or manmade, nearly always infers that these events have one
common denominator: they are seen as the product of fate and misfortune rather
than the deliberate policy of any one individual or group. This results from the
inability of the general public to make clear distinctions (value judgements) between a
genocide and a civil war, a mugging and a road accident, famine, cholera epidemics
and natural disasters. Massacres and killings are put down to barbarism, age-old
hatreds, ancient fears and tribal wars: ambiguous terms rooted in the racial thinking
of the nineteenth century which often sowed the seeds of much later hostility . For
example, die first real signs of antagonism between the Serbs and Croats only surfaced at the beginning of the twentieth century; and it was after
1960, in the countrysides of Burundi and Rwanda, where the populations mainly lived, thai the social differences between Hutu and Tutsi ceased
to be seen as such and became an ethnic divide. This simplification of issues can be seen everywhere, not only within the media but also in
supposedly learned works on the subject, such as a recent collection with the already ambiguous tide L 'histoire inhumane: massacres et
genocides des origines d nos jours. From the first page onwards, we are told that at the root of all massacres 'there is always fear, from whence
comes haired', and the author concludes: The world seemed to have known the heights of horror with Nazism, the extermination camps and the
holocaust of the Jews (the Shoah), but on 6 August 1945, the United States, the world's leading democratic country... dropped the first atomic
bomb in history on Hiroshima.... Thus did terror make its entry into history on a global scale.11 The author, Guy Richard, not only
trivialises the genocide committed by the Nazis, but, no doubt involuntarily, he
implies that the two atrocities can be measured within the same set of values,
oblivious to the totally different motivations that lay behind each of them. By giving
equal significance to both events he even infers that the United States could be
held responsible (guilty perhaps?) for a new and worse form of barbarism. In the face of this slanted
argument, one almost hesitates to point out that it was Japan and Germany that declared war on the rest of the world and not the other way
around, and that the aims of the Nazis and their system of values were far from the same as those of the Allies. The destruction
of
Dresden, unnecessary and criminal as it was, must also be understood as the response - albeit exaggerated,
horrendous and futile - to Coventry, Rotterdam and Warsaw. But the bombs that fell on
Dresden and the shells fired by both sides in the First World War (and if any war can be termed a
butchery it is this) did not pre-select a race or a people as their victims, The pilot who
dropped the bomb on Hiroshima was involved in fighting a war, not trying to
exterminate die Japanese and deny their right to live as any other people. Although the
government was prepared to commit a crime in order to hasten the end of the war, it did not do so by selecting the Japanese or the Germans as
enemies and categorising them as a sub-human species. It should be clear that fear was not the source of
the Second World War but rather, as with all widespread massacres, the source lay in
individuals and their ideologies. It cannot be denied, therefore, that ultimately it must always be possible to
pinpoint certain individuals responsible for carrying the guilt of their actions and making them face the consequences. It is totally unacceptable
and even dangerous to group together all those who die in tragic circumstances, regardless of the way in which they die. It should be
obvious that it is not at all the same thing to die from cholera in a refugee camp or
as the targetted victim of ethnic cleansing in one's own home. If it were all one and
the same, then there would be no more at stake than the right of all victims to our
compassion. Crime and guilt then cease to be significant and the particularly
horrible murder of one individual would be measured with the same stick as a mass
killing.
Moral Imperative
Obligation to suffering
Being aware of suffering creates an obligation to solve it
Smith 3 (Michael, associate professor of French at Berry College, Emmanuel Levinas' Ethics of
Responsibility, http://www.kennesaw.edu/clubs/psa/pdfs/Smith_2003_PSA.pdf) Showers
One of the most surprising aspects of Levinass ethicsperhaps meta-ethics, or better yet
proto-ethics, would be a preferable term, since Levinass philosophical work is really a
revamping of philosophy that replaces ontology by ethics: his ethics is not simply layered onto
thinking-as-usualone of the most surprising aspects of this protoethics, then, is that there is no
parity between my situation and yours from an ethical standpoint. You are always better than me.
I am responsible, not only for my transgressions, but for yours as well! There are two aspects or
stages of Levinass ethical thought: my relation to you (as if you were the only other person in
the world) and my relation to you seen in relation to the other of you, my other. Your other may
have conflicting claims, so that I am put in the position of comparing incomparables, to the
extent that each person is a world. From the relation of me to my other, you, love is enough. To
realize the intention of love in a broader sociality, justice is necessary. Justice, the harsh name of
love, must realize loves intentions, and in doing so may lose sight of its original intent, become
alienated into a self-serving institution. This risk, in Levinass view, is one that must be taken.
Here Levinas seldom develops his thought along the lines of strict reasoning. One senses that the
stays of being are relaxed and we would have no possible means of directing our thought beyond
this point without a certain inspiration. Knowledge is no longer sought after: it is inescapable.
We are the hostage of the other. No discussion, even as brief a one as this, can be complete
without some mention of the face. This is a term that Levinas elevates to status of a
philosopheme, a term endowed with a specific philosophical role. The face does not refer to the
plasticity of a visual form in Levinas, nor is it just the look of the other, since the face speaks in
Levinas. It is perhaps the phenomenal basis, or as Levinas sometimes says, the mise-enscne
or theatrical production of the appearance of the person, and it is the way in which we may
become aware of God. I quote: The face puts into question the sufficiency of my identity as an
I, it compels me to an infinite responsibility.4 It is by substitution for the other, or by taking on
the fate of the other, that I embrace a responsibility for which I never signed up. Here Levinas
diverges from the usual notion of responsibility, since the ethical meaning of responsibility is
bound up with the notion of freedom. We are not to imagine that Levinas is involved in some sort
of Skinnerian beyond freedom, but Levinas does enter a realm that is distinct from the dialectic
of promise and promise-keeping and freedom such as we find in the thinking of Jean-Paul Sartre,
for example. This taking up of responsibility is not a virtue (virtue in the sense of strength), nor
is it a weakness (as suggested by the late Michel de Certeau), but precisely the carrying out of
the mitzvah, or commandment of God. We should not expect gratitude, for this would entangle
us in an endless dialectic of quid pro quos. (It is interesting to note in passing that Levinas
praises the institution of money, despite its possible abuses, because if frees us from having to
have a personal relation with each person with whom we deal in life. We can carry on without
this burden.) If we should expect anything, it is rather ingratitude. There is an impersonal
transpersonal?sense in which action, good conduct, is nothing more nor less than a going
beyond the bog of being. What is ethical behavior? It is (I quote) the original goodness of man
toward the other in which, in an ethical dis-inter-estednessword of Godthe inter-ested effort
of brute being persevering in its being is interrupted.5
Patriarchy
Root Cause
Patriarchy fuels war and environmental destruction
transcending this system is key to preserve life on earth
Warren and Cady 96 Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Macalester University;
and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Hamline University
[Karen and Duane, Bringing peace home: feminism, violence, and nature, p. 12-13]
These hierarchies of men over women and officers over recruits, Radical feminists insist, lay
the basis for hierarchies in the international system. For example, Strange argues that
"international politics closely resembles gang fights in the playground. The leader is the one
acknowledged to have superior force: his power is then augmented by his position--in effect, the
power of his underlings is added to his own. They give this power to him and get certain
benefits--protection, enhanced prestige from the relationship to the leader." 3 Thus, from the
Radical feminist view, the international system of unequal and competitive states can be
seen as one big male-protection racket wherein the strong extort the weak to enter into
various military and economic alliances or relationships that mostly benefit the strong.
Radical feminists argue that this male-protection racket has its origins in patriarchal thinking that
assumes that "man" should have dominion over natural resources. In particular, Western
patriarchal thinking, which Radical feminists claim is reflective of the worldview of largely
white men in power in the West, considers not only the natural world but also white women
and Third World peoples as raw materials that can be exploited for political and economic
gain. This constant extraction of resources--which increasingly impoverishes women, Third
World peoples and states dependent on "aid" from elite men and First World states--is what
makes the male-protection racket possible. This racket undermines any attempts to develop
self-reliance that might release dominated peoples and states from the contemporary
international hierarchy. Thus, for Radical feminists, the struggles of "weak" states against
"strong" are related to the struggles of women against patriarchal domination. "The aim of self-
reliance is paralleled by the struggle of many women who refuse to be victims any longer, yet
also refuse to become oppressors. What is being struggled against is at root the same thing--a
hierarchy grounded in and perpetuated by sexual dominance." 4
Chapter 2 deals with war, peace, and securityissues that continue to be central to the discipline. While realists see the
contemporary system as only a temporary lull in great-power conflict, others see a change in the character of war,
with the predominance of conflicts of state building and state disintegration driven by ethnic and national identities as well as by material
interests. Since feminists use gender as a category of analysis, issues of identity are central to their approach; chapter 2 explores the ways in
which the gendering of nationalist and ethnic identities can exacerbate conflict. Feminists are also drawing
our attention to the increasing impact of these types of military conflicts on civilian populations. Civilians now account for about
90 percent of war casualties, the majority of whom are women and children. Questioning traditional IR
boundaries between anarchy and danger on the outside and order and security on the inside, as well as the realist focus on states
and their interactions, feminists have pointed to insecurities at all levels of analysis; for example, Katharine Moon
has demonstrated how the unofficial support of military prostitution served U.S. alliance goals in Korea,
thus demonstrating links between interpersonal relations and state policies at the highest level.15
Feminist analysis of wartime rape has shown how militaries can be a threat even to their own populations;16
again, feminist scholarship cuts across the conventional focus on interstate politics or the domestic determinants of foreign policy. Feminists have
claimed that the
likelihood of conflict will not diminish until unequal gender hierarchies are
reduced or eliminated; the privileging of characteristics associated with a stereotypical masculinity in states
foreign policies contributes to the legitimization not only of war but of militarization more generally.
Wary of what they see as gendered dichotomies that have pitted realists against idealists and led to overly simplistic assumptions about warlike
men and peaceful women,17 certain feminists are cautioning against the association of women with peace, a position that, they believe,
disempowers both women and peace. The growing numbers of women in the military also challenges and complicates these essentialist
stereotypes. To this end, and as part of their effort to rethink concepts central to the field, feminists
define peace and security,
not in idealized ways often associated with women, but in broad, multidimensional terms that include the elimination of
social hierarchies such as gender that lead to political and economic injustice.
War has always been the most well organized and destructive form of violence in which human beings have engaged. However, physical or
direct violence, particularly military violence, in the twentieth century appears to be more varied and is certainly more
potentially destructive than it has ever been. Armed conflict itself is a common condition of life
throughout the world. Low-intensity conflict, the constant and pervasive warfare that has plagued Central America, the
Philippines, and other areas where internal violent struggles characterize politics, has become the most common form of war
in our time. It is waged by government, political factions, and drug lords. Such civil conflicts, and the excessive violence that
currently plagues urban society, take more civilian lives than lives of combatants, and disrupt and debase
the life of entire societies. For example, gunfights have occurred between rival gangs in cities; children have been shot on
playgrounds and have shot each other in their schools. In the fall of 1991, the New York Times reported that many children, some as young as
nine, carry guns for protection. While
the media and policy-makers focus more on the major events of
armed conflict among nations, such as that which has kept the Middle East in a constant state of hostility, these other
incidents of warfare go on unabated.
Dehumanization/VTL Impact
While the purpose of this book is to introduce gender as a category of analysis into the discipline of international relations ,
the
marginalization of women in the arena of foreign policy-making through the kind of gender
stereotyping that I have described suggests that international politics has always been a gendered activity in the modern state system.
Since foreign and military policy-making has been largely conducted by men, the discipline that
analyzes these activities is bound to be primarily about men and masculinity. We seldom realize we think in
these terms, however; in most fields of knowledge we have become accustomed to equating what is human with
what is masculine. Nowhere is this more true than in international relations, a discipline that, while it has for the most part resisted the
introduction of gender into its discourse, bases its assumptions and explanations almost entirely on the activities and experiences of men. Any
Masculinity
attempt to introduce a more explicitly gendered analysis into the field must therefore begin with a discussion of masculinity.
and politics have a long and close association. Characteristics associated with "manliness," such as
toughness, courage, power, independence, and even physical strength, have, throughout history,
been those most valued in the conduct of politics, particularly international politics. Frequently,
manliness has also been associated with violence and the use of force, a type of behavior that, when conducted in the international arena, has been
valorized and applauded in the name of defending one's country. This celebration
of male power, particularly the
glorification of the male warrior, produces more of a gender dichotomy than exists in
reality for, as R. W. Connell points out, this stereotypical image of masculinity does not fit most men.
Connell suggests that what he calls "hegemonic masculinity," a type of culturally dominant masculinity that
he distinguishes from other subordinated masculinities, is a socially constructed cultural ideal
that, while it does not correspond to the actual personality of the majority of men, sustains
patriarchal authority and legitimizes a patriarchal political and social order. 6 Hegemonic
masculinity is sustained through its opposition to various subordinated and devalued
masculinities, such as homosexuality, and, more important, through its relation to various
devalued femininities. Socially constructed gender differences are based on socially sanctioned,
unequal relationships between men and women that reinforce compliance with men's stated
superiority. Nowhere in the public realm are these stereotypical gender images more apparent than in the
realm of international politics, where the characteristics associated with hegemonic masculinity
are projected onto the behavior of states whose success as international actors is measured in
terms of their power capabilities and capacity for self-help and autonomy.
Disabilities Module
Questioning urban geography encompasses a wide range of
cultural studies including disabilities
Law 99 (Robin, Department of Geography, University of Otago New Zealand, "Progress in
Human Geography", http://phg.sagepub.com/content/23/4/567.full.pdf . Noparstak)
It is significant, however, that the less glamorous practice of daily mobility has to date been little
affected by developments in social theory. Some scholars of disability have begun to connect
concepts of difference, exclusion, access and justice with concrete issues of daily movement
(e.g., Butler and Bowlby, 1997), but this work still tends to be interpreted as about
disability and thus outside mainstream concerns. Yet the topic offers a great deal of scope for
study. Daily mobility incorporates a range of issues central to human geography, including
the use of (unequally distributed) resources, the experience of social interactions in transport-
related settings and participation in a system of cultural beliefs and practices. Attention to flows
of people through the daily activity-space animates our understanding of geographic
location of home and work, and links spatial patterns with temporal rhythms. It reminds
us that while residential and employment location may be stable, human beings are not rooted in
place, and that activity-space is not divided into a sterile dichotomy of (male) public and
(female) private. Mobility is also a potent issue for local political struggles, drawing on the
interests of individuals variously identified by class, gender, disability, age and neighbourhood
residence. How then might we link the recent theoretical interest in mobility with the issues of
daily mobility more commonly addressed in urban and transport geography? I suggest that
instead of pursuing the metaphors of mobility which populate abstract theory, we turn
instead to some new developments under the broad ambit of cultural studies, from fields
including cultural geography, anthropology, history, sociology, disability studies, literature and
feminist studies. This work offers insights into both practices and meanings (especially gendered
meanings) of daily mobility, through grounded studies of specific situations, and so forms a
useful counterpoint to the behavioural and policy driven focus of existing transport research.
What in fact is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of
life that is under power's control: the break between what must live and what must die .
The appearance within the biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction among races,
the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are described as good and that others, in contrast, are
described as inferior: all this is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls. It is a
way of separating out the groups that exist within a population. It is, in short, a way of establishing a
biological type caesura within a population that appears to be a biological domain. This will allow power
to treat that population as a mixture of races, or to be more accurate, to treat the species, to subdivide the
species it controls, into the subspecies known, precisely, as races. That is the first function of racism: to
fragment, to create caesuras within the biological continuum addressed by biopower. Racism also has a
second function. Its role is, if you like, to allow the establishment of a positive relation of this type: "The
more you kill, the more deaths you will cause" or "The very fact that you let more die will allow you to
live more." I would say that this relation ("If you want to live, you must take lives, you must be able to
kill") was not invented by either racism or the modern State. It is the relationship of war: "In order to live,
you must destroy your enemies." But racism does make the relationship of war-"If you want to live, the
other must die" - function in a way that is completely new and that is quite compatible with the exercise
of biopower. On the one hand, racism makes it possible to establish a relationship between
my life and the death of the other that is not a military or warlike relationship of confrontation, but
a biological-type relationship: "The more inferior species die out, the more abnormal individuals
are eliminated, the fewer degenerates there will be in the species as a whole , and the more
Ias species rather than individual-can live, the stronger I will be, the more vigorous I will be. I will be
able to proliferate." The fact that the other dies does not mean simply that I live in the sense that his death
guarantees my safety; the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the
degenerate, or the abnormal) is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer.
This is not, then, a military, warlike, or political relationship, but a biological relationship. And the reason
this mechanism can come into play is that the enemies who have to be done away with are not adversaries
in the political sense of the term; they are threats, either external or internal, to the population and for the
population. In the biopower system, in other words, killing or the imperative to kill is acceptable only if it
results not in a victory over political adversaries, but in the elimination of the biological threat to and the
improvement of the species or race. There is a direct connection between the two. In a normalizing
society, race or racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable . When you have a
normalizing society, you have a power which is, at least superficially, in the first instance, or in the first
line a biopower, and racism is the indispensable precondition that allows someone to be killed,
that allows others to be killed. Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can
justify the murderous function of the State. So you can understand the importance-I almost said the vital
importance-of racism to the exercise of such a power: it is the precondition for exercising the right to kill.
If the power of normalization wished to exercise the old sovereign right to kill, it must become racist.
And if, conversely, a power of sovereignty, or in other words, a power that has the right of life and death,
wishes to work with the instruments, mechanisms, and technology of normalization, it too must become
racist. When I say "killing," I obviously do not mean simply murder as such, but also every form of
indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or,
quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on. I think that we are now in a position to
understand a number of things. We can understand, first of all, the link that was quickly-I almost said
immediately-established between nineteenth-century biological theory and the discourse of power.
Basically, evolutionism, understood in the broad sense-or in other words, not so much Darwin's theory
itself as a set, a bundle, of notions (such as: the hierarchy of species that grow from a common
evolutionary tree, the struggle for existence among species, the selection that eliminates the less fit)
naturally became within a few years during the nineteenth century not simply a way of transcribing a
political discourse into biological terms, and not simply a way of dressing up a political discourse in
scientific clothing, but a real way of thinking about the relations between colonization, the necessity for
wars, criminality, the phenomena of madness and mental illness, the history of societies with their
different classes, and so on. Whenever, in other words, there was a confrontation, a killing or the risk of
death, the nineteenth century was quite literally obliged to think about them in the form of evolutionism.
And we can also understand why racism should have developed in modern societies that function in the
biopower mode; we can understand why racism broke out at a number of .privileged moments, and why
they were precisely the moments when the right to take life was imperative. Racism first develops
with colonization, or in other words, with colonizing genocide. If you are functioning in the
biopower mode, how can you justify the need to kill people, to kill populations, and to kill civilizations?
By using the themes of evolutionism, by appealing to a racism. War. How can one not only wage
war on one's adversaries but also expose one's own citizens to war, and let them be
killed by the million (and this is precisely what has been going on since the nineteenth century, or
since the second half of the nineteenth century), except by activating the theme of racism? From
this point onward, war is about two things: it is not simply a matter of destroying a political adversary, but
of destroying the enemy race, of destroying that [sort] of biological threat that those people over there
represent to our race. In one sense, this is of course no more than a biological extrapolation from the
theme of the political enemy. But there is more to it than that. In the nineteenth century-and this is
completely new-war will be seen not only as a way of improving one's own race by eliminating the
enemy race (in accordance with the themes of natural selection and the struggle for existence), but also as
a way of regenerating one's own race. As more and more of our number die, the race to which we belong
will become all the purer.
To study racism is to study walls. We have looked at barriers and fences, restraints and limitations,
ghettos and prisons. The prison of racism confines us all, people of color and white people
alike. It shackles the victimizer as well as the victim. The walls forcibly keep people of color
and white people separate from each other; in our separate prisons we are all prevented from
achieving the human potential that God intends for us. The limitations imposed on people of
color by poverty, subservience, and powerlessness are cruel, inhuman, and unjust; the effects
of uncontrolled power, privilege, and greed, which are the marks of our white prison,
will inevitably destroy us as well. But we have also seen that the walls of racism can be
dismantled. We are not condemned to an inexorable fate, but are offered the vision and
the possibility of freedom. Brick by brick, stone by stone, the prison of individual,
institutional, and cultural racism can be destroyed. You and I are urgently called to join
the efforts of those who know it is time to tear down once and for all, the walls of
racism.
Environmental racism
Waste dumping on native land is cultural genocide and
environmentally racist
Edwards 11 (Nelta Edwards, PhD in sociology, works with Department of Sociology, University of Alaska
Anchorage, 11.2.11, Environmental Justice, Vol. 4, No. 2, Nuclear Colonialism and the Social Construction of
Landscape in Alaska, http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1089/env.2010.0023 )
Colonial powers have constructed the landscape as remote, empty, and sparsely populated to
justify the violence of nuclear weapons testing. The site selection committee that came up with
Project Chariots location noted the remoteness of the site from any existing population. 18
In a Popular Mechanics article, Edward Teller assured readers that fears of radioactive
contamination were irrelevant because the site was so remote. 19 Project Chariot promoters
drew on images of Alaska popular at that time: one of Alaska as a barren wasteland and the site
of the proposed harbor as a bleak spot and located in a wilderness, far away from any
human habitation. 20 Similarly, the Chief of Naval Operations wrote to the commander of the
Joint Task Force in 1951 saying that he thought that using Amchitka for nuclear testing could
be easily justied because of its extended land area and remote position. 21 The
author of the AECs environmental report went as far as to say that Amchitka was empty of
people for the simple reason that nobody would ever want to live on Amchitka. 22 Whereas
archaeological evidence shows people have lived on Amchitka off and on for at least 3,600 years.
Archeologists have identied 78 sites on Amchitka, indicating that it has supported relatively
large populations. Since the midnineteenth century no one had lived on the island but this should
be seen as a temporary description rather than an indication of its habitability. 23 Of course, the
people who live in these places, and whose ancestors have inhabited these lands for hundreds or
even thousands of years, do not consider them remote. People have lived and thrived near Cape
Thompson and in the Aleutian Islands for millennia and consider these places central to their
way of being. In a community meeting held in Point Hope in October of 1994, after people
learned about the radioactive tracer experiments, an Inupiaq man says, I would like to educate
some of you who are visitors here. You are in Point Hope; it is recognized as the oldest
continuously inhabited communities in North America. Since the coming of the Europeans to this
country they have elbowed their way from one end of the country to the other. And what have
you learned? To displace people. 24 The speaker refers to the fact that archeologists estimate
that people have been living in Point Hope for 2,000 years. This long tenure makes Point Hope,
central, not remote in terms of human habitation. The speaker also points out that Europeans are
relative newcomers to the region and notes the displacement of native peoples by colonial
powers. When nuclear superpowers describe population as sparse to justify nuclear testing,
they employ a utilitarian logic in which harm for the few is justied by protection of the many.
On the face of it, this seems to make sensethe greatest good for the greatest number.
However, this sort of logic is generally used by those who are not being asked to, or forced to,
sacrice their lives or livelihood; that is, the argument is made by the powerful instead of the
powerless, the colonial power rather than its subjects. 25 This logic diminishes the value of the
lives of the people who live near nuclear test sites, as if by virtue of the fact that they are few in
number, their lives are less important. Alaska Native people understand this logic. As one elder
Inupiaq woman said, I guess that at that time in 1962 that there were not that many people
living in Point Hope they just wanted to attack because theres not many people there. But
she counters the immorality of the logic by continuing, They thought we were guinea pigs. We
are not. We are human beings like you. I have a heart like you. 26 Community members used
the words guinea pigs, specimens, and being treated like a plant to describe their
treatment as objects by colonial powers. When colonial powers construct the land as empty, it
discursively erases the people who live there, making it impossible for the colonial powers to
consider the interests of the existing inhabitants. Colonial powers, replete with a sense of
entitlement and racism, overlook nonwhite people, ignoring them and their way of life. An
Inupiaq man reminds others at a community meeting that his people were not then and are not
now, expendable: Now lets see you, you dont get me wrong, ask the white people, take note
of this: we are human, as much as you are. Its just a color difference. 27 It is as if colonial
culture prevented those in power from even seeing the people who lived there as real people,
who have hopes and desires and who have a right to say what happens on their land. An elder
introduces herself at a community meeting by saying, My name is Alice Webber. I have lived
here all of my life and worked here for my village. I am also a signer of the Project Chariot
No. I said NO. Everyone said no and yet they turn around and leave [the tracer experiment
materials] there. Although Point Hope community members very clearly expressed their
disapproval of Project Chariot, their sentiments were ignored by colonial powers. After the
cancellation of Project Chariot in the 1960s, colonial powers conducted the tracer experiments
without the permission of the local people and defying their express wishes. The assumed
superiority of the colonial power, fueled by self-interest, caused them to disregard the people
who lived near nuclear test sites. This colonial hubris is revealed by an Inupiaq woman who
wonders what would happen if Inupiat people treated colonial peoples in a like manner, Thats
why I think, I wonder how it would be to go down to Washington [DC], set some dynamite
around the Capitol, to see whether it will sink or not. 28 In a later meeting, another Inupiaq
woman speculates, If it were the other way around and Point Hope people put nuclear waste
[break in tape] I know they would take us to court right away and solve it right away. If it were
the other way around, what would they have done to us? 29 By reversing the roles, putting
Inupiat people in the position of harming colonial people, these women cleverly make the power
imbalance and absurdity of the situation obvious. When the nuclear superpowers decided that
people in the Pacic should sacrice their lives, land, and livelihood for the good of
mankind, the good of mankind meant to be the military and economic interests of world
superpowers. 30 In the American Southwest, the United States decided that nuclear bomb
testing and mining should take place on Indian land, making Indian people sacrice their lands
and their way of being in the name of American imperialism. 31 This circumstance, where
nonwhite people are made to bear the ecological burden of industrial societies, goes to the heart
of the environmental justice struggle. An Inupiaq woman expresses incredulity, anger, and hurt
at such treatment. They risked our lives, our childrens lives. My god, you know, what are we,
nothing? Why did the government want to harm us, just because of <their> curiosity? Just
because they wondered how radiation would affect us? We never did any harm to them, we
never did. Why did they want to harm us, just because of the land, because they wanted it? 32
The AEC did want to use the land for testing. Superpower militaries have a history of using
native land for military testing and practice. A study of American formerly used defense sites
(FUDS) quantied the burden of U.S. militarism on Native Americans. The study found that the
more acres owned by Native Americans, the greater the number of extremely dangerous sites in
that area and that Native Americans experience a disproportionate exposure to the most
dangerous unexploded ordnance. Importantly, these ndings underestimate the impact of
military pollution on Native Americans because they are only able to look at former sites and
not sites currently in use. In addition, this analysis leaves out the counties with the most
pollution because the Army Corps of Engineers has yet to complete the assessment of these
sites. The term, treadmill of destruction, describes the harm done on Native American land due
to militarism and coercive state policies.
Structural violence
Systemic death
Structural violence causes systemic death
Galea 11(Sandro, Estimated Deaths Attributable to Social Factors in the United States, American
Journal of Public Health, MD,DrPH, Sandro Galea was with the Department of Epidemiology,
University of Michigan)
The evolution of these four themes of societal beliefs about conflict delegitimization of the
opponent, self-victimization and patriotism is, then, directly related to the
intensity and length of the violence endured. As the violent conflict
becomes protracted, these beliefs become embedded in the societal
repertoire and enter the collective memory. They are frequently presented
through societal channels of communication. Thus, as of the public agenda, they
are disseminated through cultural, educational and societal institutions .
That is, these described societal beliefs become "enduring products" which appear as recurrent
themes in literature, school books, films, theatrical plays, painting and
cultural other products (Bar-Tal, 2000; Winter, 1995). In consequence, they become
more and more central in the personal repertoire of the society's
members. These beliefs, therefore, represent the epistemological pillars of the
culture of violence, as they are widely disseminated, maintained through time and
imparted to the new generation.
Other
Poverty has become so crushing that the poor sell their organs
to meet the demand made by the wealthy
Heron, Manager of the Social Development the Planning Institute of
Jamaica, 3
(Taitu, Human Agency in an Era of Neoliberal Globalization, Pg. 5, SD)
. The value
increases rapidly with increasing GNP/p. Among the "rich" countries, life expectancy is consistently high and is relatively unaffected by GNP. The dividing line between these two groups turns out to also be the world average GNP per person
of the life expectancy curve at that point (for 1979) is 70 years. Thus,
other things being equal, if the world's wealth was distributed equally
among the nations, every country would have a life expectancy of 70
years. This value is surprisingly close to the average life expectancy for
the industrial countries (72 years), and is even not that far below the
maximum national life expectancy of 76 years (Iceland, Japan, and
Sweden). Kohler and Alcock use this egalitarian model as a standard to compare the actual world situation against. The procedure is as
follows. The actual number of deaths in any country can be estimated by dividing the population (P) by the life expectancy (LE). The difference
between the actual number of deaths and the number of deaths that would occur under egalitarian conditions is thus P/LE - P/70. For example,
in 1979 India had a population of 677 million and a life expectancy of 52
years. Thus India's actual death rate was 13 million while if the life
expectancy had been 70, the rate would have been 9.7 million. The
difference of 3.3 million thus provides an estimate of the number of extra
deaths. Calculating this difference for each country and then adding them
up gives the number of extra deaths worldwide due to the unequal
distribution of resources. The result for 1965 was 14 million, while for
1979 the number had declined to 11 million . (China, with a quarter of the world's population, is responsible for 3/4 of this drop since it raised its life expectancy from
50 in 1965 to 64 in 1979.) How legitimate is it to ascribe these deaths to the structural violence of human institutions, and not just to the variability of nature? Perhaps the best in-depth study of structural violence comes from the Institute for Food and Development Policy (1885 Mission St,
San Francisco, CA 94103). What they find throughout the Third World is that the problems of poverty and hunger often date back hundreds of years to some conquest - by colonial forces or otherwise. The victors became the ruling class and the landholders, pushing the vast majority either on
to poor ground or into being landless laborers. Taxes, rentals, and the legal system were all structured to make sure that the poor stayed poor. The same patterns continue today. Additional support is provided by the evidence in the above figure, which speaks for itself. Also, according to