[eDebate] complete omar reply

[Old Strega]

apologies for the triple post here but i wanted to give omar a clear context 
from which to refute or concede.

at the top, there seems to be some implication in your rhetoric that 
modelling resistance on the vietnam war is weak because it is modelling. the 
history of non-violent civil disobedience is based on modelling. the vietnam 
war resisters modelled their tactics on MLK and the civil rights movement 
who modelled their tactics on the indian indepedence movement. the history 
of resistance of social movements is always informative to the movements of 
the day. the anti-vietnam war resisters knew that civil disobedience works 
from their understanding of history and that is why they chose sit ins.

many students of today "oppose" the war but have no strategy whatsoever. the 
high school and college debate communities -- policy and otherwise -- are a 
perfect example. i challenge these students because many of them and their 
teachers supposedly take critical philosophical and political
literature seriously. i will post soon my explanations in the archives of 
how the french civil disobedience movements supported and engineered by 
foucault have been transformed into purely philosophical classroom 
discussions in the united states. foucault modelled his resistance to the
prison system and other forms of control on the anti-algerian colonial 
movement and the Resistance by the anarcho-syndicalists and others to the 
nazi occupation of france. canguilhem was his philosopher/scientist 
predecessor who played an active role in the disobedience of the Resistance.

talking about resistance will never cross threshold of disobedience until it 
is disallowed. the neoconservative controllers are smart enough to allow 
discussion that "opposes" the war so long as it poses no realistic threat to 
the war.  i think that policy debate students in general have some idea that 
giving a speech somehow is a form of disobedience because it challenges 
assumptions. speeches @ tournaments are NOT disobedient in any way. speeches 
in the president's office during a sit in are disobedient and not well liked 
by the authorities who freak out. debate students have no qualms about the 
regulation of their behavior by university authorities and their inability 
to challenge the terms and conditions of their speeches. unfortunately, the 
main obstacle to debate sit ins is not a proper intellectual justification 
for the sit ins but the overcoming of FEAR of career repurcussions of 
disobedient behavior effectively inculcated since the vietnam war. fear 
motivates defensive responses largely intellectually dictated. gandhi, MLK 
and foucault have many critiques of intellectual
cowardice in the face of injustice and oppression unheeded by debate 
students in the ivory tower of academic security and safety. ultimately, 
these critiques keep circling around to popular consent of state actions and 
micro-complicity which is why they are sparse in y'alls world. debaters 
prefer to demonize the state because it is easy and it gets them out of 
their micro-responsibility. you know that
mass murder is happening and you know from history what works but you do not 
know how to overcome your fears of police/authority backlash!!! that's what 
we are talking about.

there are many problems with the idea that the lack of a draft derails the 
vietnam resistance model.


1) greater military industrial complex grafting onto universities. chomsky 
and the MIT students were protesting complicity with the MIC. given the 
greater level of invasion of student life and greater production of military 
knowledge by universities, this argument should be more compelling this time
around. this is a huge part of the complicity argument. i don't think 
youneed me to document all of the lockheed martin/university contracts. 
debate knowledge in particular is problematic because it is a testing ground 
for propaganda campaigns that informs think tanks of the most effective
strategies ferretted out by participants and judges. university knowledges 
directly contribute to mass murder. university students actually opposed to 
mass murder should sabotage the normal functioning of that institution until 
their tuition no longer pays for murder.

2) the draft link to anti-war sit ins is weak. UT debaters and other 
students occupied the main tower in 1996 over the hopwood decision to 
rollback affirmative action. no military draft was necessary. harvard
students and faculty occupied buildings for fair pay for all university 
workers in 2000, i believe. no draft was necessary. the main factor in both 
of these cases is the overcoming of fear to take a stand. students and 
others took over the seattle downtown in 1999 and shut down the city over 
WTO meetings. for less than mass murder connected to tuition much less a 
draft, students have conducted sit ins all over the place. why they have not 
over the war, i am baffled. the draft argument is based on
self-interest which is not the basis of most community activism. actually, i 
think your argument is a projection of the normalized fear that pervades 
your community. the unfortunate framing of foucault critiques in the form of 
"power bad" misses the boat. foucault was well aware of the necessity of
social movements taking power into their own hands and WIELDING and FORCING 
authorities to behave themselves appropriately. y'all debate @ tournaments 
because you are afraid of wielding power and forcing your authorities to 
stop the killings. your power scares you into submissive discussions about 
power. i say make your arguments on an unfamiliar stage in the president's 
office and don't stop debating this administration until the killings have 
stopped. you may learn something you will never learn in the classroom about 
social movements. you have no reflexive understanding of social movements on 
the sidelines and they are purely a subject matter of inquiry.


3) historically sit ins worked against the vietnam war for the same reason 
that civil disobedience has worked for centuries because sit ins up the ante 
for the powers that be and require them to murder under less conducive terms 
and eventually stop them from indiscriminately murdering. you have no
alternative. competitive debate has been critiqued as a form of obedience 
that poses no threat to the war mongers. you have no new model or historical 
ground of resistance and we know from the kritik lit that historical 
analysis is important post-marx. complacency is not helping to the stop the 
killings. what are you going to do if you don't sit in and how could it 
possibly do more to sabotage the system that is doing the killings and do 
more to force a real public debate about the war where the anti-war team
could actually win the debate?


4) the mass murder of innocent civilians fighting unwinnable guerilla 
warfare is a better link and it's the same now as it was during vietnam, 
hence the model. unlike y'all in the hypothetical game mode on the flow of 
debate rounds, the anti-vietnam war students could not stomach the bombings
of cambodia and the little kids getting blasted with machine guns and so 
they decided to that disobedience was necessary to stop the killings. y'all 
are the product of video game culture, desensitization and numbing. 
intellectually removed from the subject matter on an abstract plane of
discussion, y'all would rather say "and a vote for us will save lives" and 
vote for the team that "saves the most lives" than actually DO SOMETHING TO 
SAVE LIVES. at this point, a hypothetical policy recommendation to save 
lives and its discussion is irrelevant when mass murder is going on in the
ADJACENT CLASSROOM NAMED IRAQ. debate has become the lifeboat ethics of the 
old malthus DA.


i don't think it's going to even be a close debate here, omar. sit ins were 
a key factor in the cessation of the southeast asian murder campaigns. the 
iraq war resistance is weak and the war is going strong with a possible 
iran/syria add on. you have to find a way to wield power and force the 
authorities to do what you want. that is AGENCY. tournament debate 
depoliticizes only when it strips students and faculty of their agency and 
misleads them about the nature of power. that's the korcok/shamaham kritik 
of activist agency as a religious calling to the only true way and i am 
afraid it represents the contest round norm. that kritik is sham because it 
reduces debate into an obedience game where disobedience is ruled out 
supposedly not because students are AFRAID but because their
"intellectual disobedience" is superior. foucault was all over it and i have 
documented this legacy in the archives. don't sit in against mass murder in 
iraq because if you do you are a follower of a religion who is forcing 
his/her views onto the conductors of mass murder. instead give a riotous 
speech at a college debate tournament against mass murder which is OK 
because you are not forcing your view like a religioso and you allow the 
proponents of mass murder to have their fair say while actually their policy 
wins and mass murder continues. y'all is a ridiculous fucking joke...y'all 
"anarchists" who fight traffic tickets like they da plague and 
shit,...scared little chickens...cops might hit you with a stick if you sit 
in...shit that might hurt...you might not get an A in debate this semester 
and damage your GPA...you might get stigmatized in your department...that's 
what all the intellectual searching for a reason against sit ins is really 
all about. take a risk. get real. fuck this war. you can stop it.