WNDI 2k6 Statism K – Aff Answers 1

Statism K – Aff Answers

1. index
2. perms
3-4. no alt to the state
5-6. state not so bad
7. state will re-remerge
8. rejecting state  war
9. rejecting state  environmental destruction
10. international revolution  war
11. state solves famine
12-13 rejecting state  extinction
14. state failure  laundry list
15. state addressing hiv/aids
16. foreign aid helps millions
17. heg good

summary:
these are responses to the k of the state. there is some perm evidence and some reasons why the state is
good. anything here can be read with anything else.
WNDI 2k6 Statism K – Aff Answers 2

Helping people through the system is always the right thing to do—you can criticize the system at the same
time
Noam Chomsky Professor of philosophy and linguistics for MIT, 2001, PROPAGANDA AND THE
PULIC MIND: Conversations with Noam Chomsky, p 132

Comment on an African American Proverb that perhaps illustrates what we’re talking about: “the
master’s tools will never be used to dismantle the master’s house.”
If this is intended to mean, don’t try to improve conditions for suffering people, I don’t agree. It’s true
that centralized power, whether in a corporation or a government, is not willingly going to commit suicide.
But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t chip away at it, for many reasons. For one thing, it benefits suffering
people. That’s something that always should be done, no matter what broader considerations are.
But even from the point of view of dismantling the master’s house, if people can learn what power they
have when they work together, and if they can see dramatically at just what point they’re going to be
stopped, by force, perhaps, that teaches very valuable lessons in how to go on. The alternative to that is to
sit in academic seminars and talk about how awful the system is.

Certain state institutions are necessary to protect human rights—we can use these institutions and try to
dismantle State power at the same time
Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at MIT, Canadian Dimension, May 15, 1997

Goals and visions can appear to be in conflict, and often are. There’s no contradiction in that, as I think we
all know from ordinary experience. Let me take my own case, to illustrate what I have in mind. My
personal visions are fairly traditional anarchist ones. According to this anarchist vision, any structure of
hierarchy and authority carries a heavy burden of justification, whether it involves personal relation or a
larger social order. If it cannot bear the burden – sometimes it can – the it is illegitimate and should be
dismantled.
I share that vision, though it runs directly counter to my goals. My short-term goals are to defend and even
strengthen elements of state authority which, though illegitimate in fundamental ways, are critically
necessary right now to impede the dedicated efforts to ‘roll back’ the progress that has been achieved in
extending democracy and human rights. State authority is now under severe attack in more democratic
societies, but not because it conflicts with the libertarian vision. Rather the opposite: because it offers
(weak) protection to some aspects of that vision.
In today’s world, I think, the goals of a committed anarchist should be to defend some state institutions
from attack against them, while trying at the same time to pry them more open to more meaningful public
participation – and ultimately, to dismantle them in a much more free society; if the appropriate
circumstances can be achieved.
WNDI 2k6 Statism K – Aff Answers 3

Changing the shape of society is not a functional goal

Tom Wetzel, August 29, 2003, accessed July 16, 2006 at
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=5&ItemID=4106

I think that a very basic thing is the building of movements and organizations that are directly self-managed
by their participants. It's hard to see how society could be changed in ways that overcome class division
and other ways in which people are subordinated or oppressed without this being through movements that
develop confidence and ability of people to run their lives and the society themselves, movements that give
people the power to shape the way society is configured.

There is no viable alternative to the State

Tom Wetzel, August 29, 2003, accessed July 16, 2006 at
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=5&ItemID=4106

But a movement for self-emancipation on a very massive scale is required -- a movement that is internally
democratic, and self-managing. Sometimes American anarchists don't adequately appreciate fully what
would be needed for this, in terms of the level of organization and a culture of popular democratic
discussion and resistance among the masses of the population.

No such movement could emerge spontaneously, though there are episodes or outburtsts of struggle that
may happen in ways that are unforeseen, for sure.

Some anarchists think of a self-managed society as a "spontaneous order". But the tendency of people is to
"spontaneously" fall back into old habits and ways of doing things. We're raised and live day to day in a
society where people are expected to defer to people in authority, to experts, to employers and so on.

A tendency in all kinds of organizations is for the people who bring certain advantages to end up in control
or to exercize disproportionate influence -- because of their educations or higher level of knowledge, their
greater self-confidence, or their speaking abilities, or other advantages. Due to class, race and gender
divisions, there is a tendency for certain people to have more of these advantages than others. Thus the
"spontaneous" tendency is for those with the advantages to use those advantages, even unconsciously, for
greater influence. A hierarchy in organizations can emerge in which decision-making and knowledge gets
concentrated into the hands of a few.

We know from the experience of the Communist revolutions that there is a tendency for this sort of
hierarchy to congeal into a class system. To avoid this sort of outcome, we need to consciously work from
the beginning to demoratize knowledge, share opportunities to learn leadership skills and work to
consciously develop skills in participants of movements.
WNDI 2k6 Statism K – Aff Answers 4

"From each according to ability, to each according to need" is an unworkable mentality

Tom Wetzel, August 29, 2003, accessed July 16, 2006 at
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=5&ItemID=4106

Yes. I think it isn't possible to get "beyond economy" as some anarchists think. The planet's resources are
limited, our time is limited. There are only 24 hours in the day. So, we inevitably need some institutions for
allocation of scarce resources -- such as our work time -- that ensure they will not be wasted, but will be
used in ways that optimally meet the desires and needs that people have.
"Libertarian communism," if taken strictly, means that allocation is to be govered by the principle, "From
each according to ability, to each according to need." I think this makes sense sometimes. We provide
sidewalks and firefighter services on this basis now, and that seems to work. If someone is injured in an
accident, i think they should receive health care just simply because of need, irrespective of what their
income is.
But I don't think an entire, complex industrial economy with many millions of people could be run on that
basis. Individuals and various subgroups of the population have different desires, interests, tastes. Referring
simply to general assemblies as a decision-making method isn't adequate. Different production possibilities
have different social opportunity costs. If no price attaches to things people consume, how do they know
how to make responsible decisions about what to consume?
There needs to be some way that individuals can allocate their share of production for private consumption
without this having to be filtered through collective approval such as meetings.

The state is needed to manage complex economic workings of society

Brian Oliver, “Is Anarchism Suitable For Complex Societies,” December 8, 2002, accessed July 18, 2006
at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=41&ItemID=2717

The charge has often been made that the anarchist economic model is ill suited for complex societies. The
multi-faceted nature of advanced industrial economies; their scope of operation and breadth of distribution;
the extensive refinement in their division of labor - all these and more are held up as examples of the
labyrinth of problems that nothing as "simplistic" as anarchism could ever hope to address. Anarchism,
according to many modern critics, could only hope to work in limited, small- scall economies. And even
then, only possibly.
WNDI 2k6 Statism K – Aff Answers 5

There is no monolithic state entity so predicting state action is impossible

Forrest D Colburn, “Statism, Rationality, and State Centrism,” Comparative Politics, July 1988, p 488-490
While it is important to study the state and recognize it as an autonomous actor, an adequate appreciation of
the state can emerge only from an understanding of the interaction between state and society. The state does
not act in a vacuum. It may be the single most consequential actor in most polities, but what it does is
conditional upon civil society. Inescapably, to fathom the behavior of the state it is necessary to study its
interplay with other actors.
There are a number of difficulties, though, with studying state-society interaction. The first difficulty is the
interactive relationship between state and society behavior. So often there is a chain reaction between state
and society that concludes with an outcome neither party predicted or desired. For example, in many Third
World states the private sector engages in capital flight, provoking the state to enact foreign exchange
controls., frightening the private sector into sending more capital abroad, further provoking the state, and so
on. This dialectical relationship can make it virtually impossible to isolate causal relationships.
A second difficulty is the fragmentation of civil society. Society is differentiated in countless ways: class,
race, ethnicity, religion, ideology, ubiety, and economic activity, to name the most obvious. These
differences can lead to variable behavior, complicating efforts at generalization. Certain sectors of society
may be little more than sacrificial victims of state policies, so thee is no generic society. And just as the
behavior of the state can be apparently irrational, so often are the collective decisions of societal actors.
Another problem in studying state-society interaction is that opposition to state behavior rarely takes the
form of collective outright defiance, a form of resistance which is easily studied. Instead, resistance is more
tacit: foot dragging, false compliance, feigned ignorance, and sometimes even more violent forms of
sabotage. These everyday forms of resistance require little or no coordination or planning; they often
represent a form of individual self help; and they typically avoid any direct symbolic confrontation with the
state. These forms of resistance make no headlines, but they are consequential.
Recognizing the difficulties in studying state-society interaction leads the authors and editors of Bringing
the State Bank in and Market and State to a cautious approach, one that eschews positivism. Implicit in the
books’ conclusions is the belief in an approach that has four characteristics: (1) it must conceive of the state
as an actor having identifiable behavior of its own that sets it apart from other actors with whom it may
cooperate or spar; (2) it must recognize that neither state nor society is a unitary actor, that both are
fragmented ad riddled with conflict; (3) it must recognize that there are many locuses and kinds of power;
and (4) it must recognize that the distribution of power between state and society and, equally important,
among their many different components is likely to be unpredictable, or at least not distributed in neat
hierarchy. Telling variations in state structures and capacities often occur among states that appear to be of
the same type. Hence it is erroneous to assume a single dimension of “state strength” that conflates
different features of state organization and resources or, worse, to confound state autonomy with the
capacities a state has for performing tasks.
WNDI 2k6 Statism K – Aff Answers 6

Universal suffrage is a powerful check on government abuse

Axel Van der Berg, THE IMMANENT UTOPIA: from Marxism on the state to the state of Marxism,
1988, p 449

Yet it is precisely in raising the empirical data of pluralist theory to a “higher analytic level” that the
contributions of the various “class struggle” approaches become somewhat elusive. To put it bluntly, these
“class struggle” approaches are not only empirically virtually identical to plain “bourgeois” pluralism, they
are equally indistinguishable in their theoretical arguments, aside from radical-sounding terminology. The
“bourgeois reformist” argument, it is worth recalling, was that government policy is the resultant of
competing pressures from various organized interests, which include, of course, corporate interests and
organizations representing working class constituencies (unions, labor parties). There are, clearly, vast
differences in the resources various groups and potential groups have at their disposal for effectively
organizing themselves into interests with political clout; in this respect corporate interest possess by far the
greatest organizational resources of any of the groups that might or do participate in the political arena,
including organized labor; however, in formally democratic polities the nonprivileged majority has one
crucial resource, universal suffrage; through its ability to elect a new government, the majority can in
principle, and occasionally does in practice when it is sufficiently united and determined, impose its will
even over united opposition from corporate interests; thus, in principle at lease, the majority may use its
formal democratic power to counter and gradually reduce the power of the privileged minority.
WNDI 2k6 Statism K – Aff Answers 7

Government power structures re-emerge

David Weick, ANARCHISM, 1970, p 96

Progress toward freedom consists of the awakening of desire for freedom in the apathetic masses. It
consists in resisting and undermining even the revolutionary institutions, when they do not yet represent the
free actions of the people. Even theoretically, this idea is difficult; but by it, we can understand why
revolutions have turned out so badly, why a revolution is desirable only if it can lead toward freedom.
People who are deprived of masters, but do not desire to be free, have never had difficulty in finding new
masters.

Any revolution creates a new state

Nikolay Bukharin, editor of The Bolshevik, THE POVERTY OF STATISM, 1981, p 27

Any governing body is an impediment to the real organization of the broad masses, the majority. Where a
government exists, then the only really organised people are the minority that make up the government;
and, this notwithstanding, if the masses do organize, they do so against it, outside it, or at the very least,
independently of it. In ossifying into a government, the revolution as such would fall apart, on account of
its awarding that government the monopoly of organisation and of the means of struggle.
The outcome would be that a new government - battening on the revolution and acting throughout more or
less extended period of its “provisional” powers – would lay down the bureaucratic, military and economic
foundations of a new and lasting state organisation, around which a compact network of interests and
privileges would, naturally, be woven. Thus in a short space of time what one would have would not be the
state abolished, but a state stronger and more energetic than its predecessor and which would come to
exercise those functions proper to it – the ones Marx recognised as being such – “keeping the great
majority fo producers under the yoke of a numerically small exploiting minority.”
WNDI 2k6 Statism K – Aff Answers 8

The ruling class will never give up control—not without a serious fight
Murray Bookchin, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies at Ramapo College, “Whither Anarchism?
A Reply to Recent Anarchist Critics,” 1998, accessed July 10, 2006 at
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/whither.html

The system cannot be ended without conflict: indeed, the bourgeoisie will categorically not give up its
privileges and control over social life without a ruthless struggle. What can be said with certainty is that it
will not be overthrown by adopting a quietistic mysticism, or by mindless denunciations of “civilization in
bulk” and technology. Nor will it be overthrown by the creation of Temporary Autonomous Zones, or by
“closing down a government or commercial center for a few hours or even a day, or by routing tussles with
the ublic, or by having a street festival with black flags draped from lampposts. It will not be overthrown by
Hakim Bey-esque “happenings,” or by poetic effusions of “surregionalism.”

Anarchy destroys peace

Alan Ritter, Professor of Political Science, NOMOS XIX: ANARCHISM, 1978, p 134

The anarchists’ commitment to rational deliberation seems to prevent them not only from backing the
limited authority De George says they favor but from backing authority of any kind. For any authority,
however limited, sometimes keeps its subjects from following their own deliberations about the merit of the
action it prescribes. If anarchists really do oppose all kinds of authority, they make the task of maintaining
peace in their ideal society extremely difficult, because authority is an effective and reliable method of
behavior control.
WNDI 2k6 Statism K – Aff Answers 9

Radical environmentalism undermines protection of the environment by creating backlash

Martin Lewis, GREEN DELUSIONS: An Environmentalist Critique of Radical
Environmentalism, 1992, p 6

The most direct way in which eco-extremists threaten the environment is simply by fueling the anti-
environmental countermovement. When green radicals like Christopher Manes (1990) call for total
destruction of civilization, many begin to listen to the voices of reaction. Indeed, the mere linking of
environmental initiatives to radical groups such as Earth First! often severely dampens what would
otherwise be widespread public support (see Gabriel 1990:64).

Anarchy causes unchecked war and ecological destruction

William Ophuls, professor emeritus, Cornell, ECOLOGY AND THE POLITICS OF SCARCITY, 1977, p
168
As with classical scarcity in the past, however, ecological scarcity would create the potential for conflict
between locally autonomous city states, “utopian” or not, so that microautonomy must inevitably be
accompanied by some form of macroauthority capable of preventing warfare or antiecological acts likely to
produce the “tragedy of the commons.” Thus, local polities would have to exist within a regional or global
empire of some kind.
WNDI 2k6 Statism K – Aff Answers 10

International revolution foments world war

Mikhal Titarenko, Director of Far Eastern Studies, Russia, The Korean Journal of International Studies,
1993, p 103.

The latter point implies that international relations should be deideologized and security must be addressed
as a universal human objective and the number one priority of all states that can be big or small, developed
or backward, and different I social and political systems. Therefore, at both the global and regional levels it
is most important to escape a new ideological classification of the countries. Any Messianism—whether
communist or “democratic,” as well as any attempts to remake the rest of the world by the image of any
existing social and development models—would be detrimental for peace and international relations in the
world. It is clear in advance that such attempts, even if they are backed by a unique material force of some
power or a group of powers, would inevitably provoke increasing resistance and counteraction. This, in
turn, could lead to a new spiral of international confrontation that would start at the regional level and
continue to the global scale.
WNDI 2k6 Statism K – Aff Answers 11

Anarchy leads to mass famine

Alan Wertheimer, NOMOS XIX: Anarchism, 1978, p 183

Regardless of the problems for anarchy which stem from the size of the world’s population, that population
is not surviving at its present level of productivity. While anarchy may claim to minimize domination by
other persons, it may not speak to those who feel most dominated by the needs of their bodies and their
inability to control the natural world. A response to this problem will certainly require and increase in
agricultural productivity in the “third world,” a goal not likely to be achieved under conditions favorable to
anarchy.
WNDI 2k6 Statism K – Aff Answers 12

Post scarcity is a prerequisite for stateless society—otherwise we risk extinction

Murray Bookchin, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies at Ramapo College, “Whither Anarchism?
A Reply to Recent Anarchist Critics,” 1998, accessed on July 15, 2006 at
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/whither.html

Not even Watson can deny that foraging societies experienced hunger, although it contradicts his own
image of "original affluence": he acknowledges that hunter-gatherer societies "periodically suffered" (BB,
p. 110).[29] But his justification for their suffering is astonishingly callous. In societies such as our own, he
points out, only some sectors of the population starve during times of hunger. But "during tough times in
most aboriginal societies," he writes with amazing sang-froid, "generally, everyone starves or no one does"
(BB, p. 94). Indeed, "even when primal people starve, 'the whole group as a positive cohesive unit is
involved. In consequence, there is generally no disorganization or disintegration either of individual or of
the group as such, in stark contrast with the civilized" (BB, p. 95). They all starve to death--and that is that!
Are we expected to admire a situation where "everyone starves" because they do so in an organized
fashion? Allow me to suggest that this anything but a consolation. Scarcity conditions--conditions of
generalized want and hunger--that could result in famine are precisely those that, historically speaking,
have led to competition for scarce goods and eventually the formation of class and hierarchical societies.
Far more desirable to develop the productive technologies sufficiently to avoid famine altogether! If such
technologies were sufficiently developed, then put to use ethically and rationally in a libertarian communist
society, everyone could be freed from material uncertainty. This condition of postscarcity would give us the
preconditions for one day achieving a truly egalitarian, free, and culturally fulfilling social order. It might
be supposed that, in weighing these two alternatives--scarcity, with the possibility of a community's entire
extinction, against postscarcity, with the potentiality to satisfy all basic human needs--Watson might choose
the latter prospect over the former. But farbe it from Watson to agree with anything Bookchin has to say! Watson, it
seems, would prefer that "everyone starve" together rather than that they have sufficient means to enjoy well-being
together. So cavalier is his attitude about human life, that when I object to it, he reproaches me for being "utterly
affronted by affirmative references to death as part of the ecological cycle" (BB, p. 114). As a humanist, allow me to
state categorically that I am indeed "utterly affronted" by such references, and by Watson's blatant callousness. It is this
kind of stuff that brings him precariously close to the thesis of his erstwhile antihero, Thomas Malthus (in HDDE),
namely that mass death would result from population growth, whose geometric increase would far outstrip a merely
arithmetically increasing food supply. Indeed, it was precisely the productivity of machines that showed thinking
people that the Malthusian cycle was a fallacy. Yes--better machines than death, in my view, and Watson is welcome to
criticize me for it all he likes! If Watson is callous toward the objective aspects of primitivism, his attitude toward its
subjective aspects, as I have noted, resembles the vagaries of a flower child. An essential feature is his belief that the
mental outlooks of aboriginal peoples can override the material factors that might otherwise alter their lifeways. "Most,
if not all, aboriginal peoples practiced careful limits on their subsistence activities," he tells us, "deliberately
underproducing, expressing gratitude and consideration in their relations with plants and prey" (BB, p. 52).[30]
Moreover, "Primal society . . . refused power, refused property" (CIB, p. 11). In effect, for Watson, social development
was a matter of conscious selection, choice, and even lifestyle, as though objective realities played no role in shaping of
social relations. In SALA I tried to correct this romantic, idealist, and frankly naive view by pointing out that among
most tribal peoples--indeed, among most peoples generally--not only economic life but even much of spirituality is
oriented toward obtaining the means of life. "With due regard for their own material interests--their survival and well-
being," I wrote, "prehistoric peoples seem to have hunted down as much game as they could, and if they imaginatively
peopled the animal world with anthropomorphic attributes, . . . it would have been to communicate with it with an end
toward manipulating it, not simply toward revering it" (SALA, p. 41). Not only does Watson take issue with this
statement as economistic, he rejects any economic motivations in aboriginal society: "Economic motivation," he
declares, "is the motive within class societies, not aboriginal communities" (BB, p. 63). Presumably people whose
societies are structured around dancing, singing, and dreaming are immune to the problems--social as well as material--
of acquiring and preparing food, fending off predators, building shelter, and the like. Where I present contradictory
evidence--such as the many cases of foragers "stampeding game animals over cliffs or into natural enclosures where
they could be easily slaughtered," or "sites that suggest mass killings and 'assembly-line' butchering in a number of
American arroyos," or the Native American use of fire to clear land, or the likelihood of Paleoindian overkills of large
mammals (SALA, p. 42)--he maintains a prudent silence. In fact, the demanding endeavor to gather the means for
supporting everyday life may well be the major preoccupation of aboriginal peoples, as many of their myths and
cosmic dramas reveal to anyone who examines them without romantic awe. At some point, clearly, primal peoples in
prehistoric Europe and the Near East stopped "refusing" power and property, and from their "loosely knit" band and
tribal societies, systems of domination developed--hierarchies, classes, and states--as part of civilization itself. Why this
happened is by no means an academic question; nor is the approach we take to understanding the processes of social
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WNDI 2k6 Statism K – Aff Answers 13

Continued from page 12

change a matter of trivial concern. Social changes, both major and minor, do not come about solely as a result of choice
or volition. Even in inspired moments, when people believe they are creating an entirely new world, their course of
action, indeed their thinking, is profoundly influenced by the very history from which they think they are breaking
away. To understand the processes by which the new develops from the old, we must closely examine the conditions
under which human beings are constrained to work and the various problems with which they must contend with at
particular moments in history--in short, the inner dialectic of social development. We must look at the factors that cause
apparently stable societies to slowly decompose, giving rise to the new ones that were "chosen" within the limitations
of material and cultural conditions. I followed this approach in The Ecology of Freedom, for example, when I examined
the nature and causes of the rise of hierarchy. There I tried to show that hierarchy emerged from within the limitations
and problems faced by primal societies. I made no pretense that my presentation constituted the last word on this
problem; indeed, my most important goal was to highlight the importance of trying to understanding hierarchical
development, to show its dialectic and the problems it posed. Watson not only dismisses this vitally important issue but
arrogantly rejects any endeavor to look into "the primordial community to find the early embryonic structure that
transformed organic society into class society" (BB, p. 97). Needless to say, he claims that I fail to understand power in
aboriginal societies, "where the so-called chief is usually a spokesman and a go-between" (BB, p. 98). This was
probably true at one time in the early development of chiefdoms, but it is evidence of Watson's static, absolutist
mentality that he fails to see that many chiefdoms gradually and sometimes even precipitously transformed themselves,
so that chiefs became petty despots and even monarchs long before there were "megamachines" and major
technological advances. Watson's reckless farrago of obfuscation merely beclouds his own ignorance. The fact is that he
himself simply cannot answer the question of how social development occurs. Although the pages of BB are bereft of
an explanation for the origin of domination, in an earlier work he once brightly suggested: "Somehow [!] . . . the primal
world unravel[ed] as the institutions of kingship and class society emerged. How it happened remains unclear to us
today" (CIB, p. 10). I hate to think how desiccated social theory would become if all its thinkers exhibited the same
paucity of curiosity and speculative verve that this off-handed remark reveals. Instead of making any attempt to account
for social evolution, Watson merely times the passage of millennia of hominid and human evolution with his stopwatch
("ninety-nine percent"), as though timing were more important than examining the causes ("which remain unclear for
us today") that impelled hominids and humans to make those major decisions that eventually removed them from their
simple lifeways and landed them in the complex coils of the "megamachine." If we ever do arrive at the "revolution
[that] will be a kind of return" (BB, p. 154), then with Watson to guide us, and lacking any understanding of the
processes of change, then we will have little or nothing to prevent our new society from once again, during the next
historical cycle, recapitulating the rise of hierarchical and class society. If there is one thing on which everyone--
Watson, the anthropologists, and myself--agrees, it is that among foraging peoples today, their subjectivity has failed to
prevent either the invasion of commoditiesfrom the industrialized world or its colonization of material life. But it is
worth asking how much deliberate resistance tribal societies have put up against this invasion. For their part, the !Kung,
the flagship culture of "original affluence" theorists, seen to be greatly attracted to modern "goodies." As John E.
Yellen, to cite only one of several accounts, found when he visited Dobe in the mid-1970s, !Kung were planting fields
and wearing mass-produced clothing; indeed, they had given up their traditional grass huts for "more substantial mud-
walled structures." Significantly, their hearths, which had formerly been located in the front of their huts--where they
were "central to much social interaction"--were now located away from the community center, and the huts themselves,
once spaced close together, were now farther apart.[31] Moreover, the acquisition of commodities has now become of
major important. Where once, as Lee put it, the charge of "stinginess" was one of "the most serious accusations one !
Kung [could] level against another,"[32] commodities are now shamelessly hoarded: With their newfound cash [the !
Kung] had also purchased such goods as glass beads, clothing and extra blankets, which they hoarded in metal trunks
(often locked) in their huts. Many times the items far exceeded the needs of an individual family and could best be
viewed as a form of savings or investment. In other words, the !Kung were behaving in ways that were clearly
antithetical to the traditional sharing system. Yet the people still spoke of the need to share and were embarrassed to
open their trunks for [the anthropologist]. Clearly, their stated values no longer directed their activity.[33] It must be
supposed that the !Kung think so little of their "original affluence" that, even in the decades since the 1960s, many of
them have discarded primitive lifeways for the amenities of the "megamachine" and exhibit an eagerness to obtain
more than they already have. It may also be that the bourgeois commodity has an enormous capacity to invade
primitive economies and undermine them disastrously--Watson's certainties to the contrary notwithstanding. Reason
and Irrationalism As a man whose vision is turned to the past--whether it be the technology of the Middle Ages, or the
sensibility of the Paleolithic or Neolithic--it should come no a surprise that Watson favors the more primal imperatives
of intuition over intellectual reflection and has very little to say about rationality that is favorable. In this respect, he is
nothing if not trendy: the current explosion of interest in irrational charlatans--psychics, divinators, mystics, shamans,
priestesses, astrologers, angelologers, demonologers, extraterrestrials, et cetera ad nauseam--is massive. Humorless
though I may be--as Watson tells his readers, on the authority of someone who "knows" me "intimately" (surely not
John Clark!) (BB, p. 39)--I would regard this irrationalism as laughable, were it not integral to his anarchism and to his
gross misrepresentation of my own views.
WNDI 2k6 Statism K – Aff Answers 14

State failure is characterized disease, poverty, war, and environmental destruction – the power vacuum is
filled by private armies and drug cartels
Robert Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy,” THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, February 1994, accessed
July 18, 2006 at http://dieoff.org/page67.htm

West Africa is becoming the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental, and societal stress, in
which criminal anarchy emerges as the real "strategic" danger. Disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime,
scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and international borders,
and the empowerment of private armies, security firms, and international drug cartels are now most
tellingly demonstrated through a West African prism. West Africa provides an appropriate introduction to
the issues, often extremely unpleasant to discuss, that will soon confront our civilization. To remap the
political earth the way it will be a few decades hence--as I intend to do in this article--I find I must begin
with West Africa.

There is no other place on the planet where political maps are so deceptive--where, in fact, they tell such
lies--as in West Africa. Start with Sierra Leone. According to the map, it is a nation-state of defined
borders, with a government in control of its territory. In truth the Sierra Leonian government, run by a
twenty-seven-year-old army captain, Valentine Strasser, controls Freetown by day and by day also controls
part of the rural interior. In the government's territory the national army is an unruly rabble threatening
drivers and passengers at most checkpoints. In the other part of the country units of two separate armies
from the war in Liberia have taken up residence, as has an army of Sierra Leonian rebels. The government
force fighting the rebels is full of renegade commanders who have aligned themselves with disaffected
village chiefs. A pre-modern formlessness governs the battlefield, evoking the wars in medieval Europe
prior to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ushered in the era of organized nation-states.

As a consequence, roughly 400,000 Sierra Leonians are internally displaced, 280,000 more have fled to
neighboring Guinea, and another 100,000 have fled to Liberia, even as 400,000 Liberians have fled to
Sierra Leone. The third largest city in Sierra Leone, Gondama, is a displaced-persons camp. With an
additional 600,000 Liberians in Guinea and 250,000 in the Ivory Coast, the borders dividing these four
countries have become largely meaningless. Even in quiet zones none of the governments except the Ivory
Coast's maintains the schools, bridges, roads, and police forces in a manner necessary for functional
sovereignty. The Koranko ethnic group in northeastern Sierra Leone does all its trading in Guinea. Sierra
Leonian diamonds are more likely to be sold in Liberia than in Freetown. In the eastern provinces of Sierra
Leone you can buy Liberian beer but not the local brand.

In Sierra Leone, as in Guinea, as in the Ivory Coast, as in Ghana, most of the primary rain forest and the
secondary bush is being destroyed at an alarming rate. I saw convoys of trucks bearing majestic hardwood
trunks to coastal ports. When Sierra Leone achieved its independence, in 1961, as much as 60 percent of
the country was primary rain forest. Now six percent is. In the Ivory Coast the proportion has fallen from
38 percent to eight percent. The deforestation has led to soil erosion, which has led to more flooding and
more mosquitoes. Virtually everyone in the West African interior has some form of malaria.

Sierra Leone is a microcosm of what is occurring, albeit in a more tempered and gradual manner,
throughout West Africa and much of the underdeveloped world: the withering away of central
governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains, the unchecked spread of disease, and the growing
pervasiveness of war. West Africa is reverting to the Africa of the Victorian atlas. It consists now of a series
of coastal trading posts, such as Freetown and Conakry, and an interior that, owing to violence, volatility,
and disease, is again becoming, as Graham Greene once observed, "blank" and "unexplored." However,
whereas Greene's vision implies a certain romance, as in the somnolent and charmingly seedy Freetown of
his celebrated novel The Heart of the Matter, it is Thomas Malthus, the philosopher of demographic
doomsday, who is now the prophet of West Africa's future. And West Africa's future, eventually, will also
be that of most of the rest of the world.
WNDI 2k6 Statism K – Aff Answers 15

Federal money treats those living with HIV/AIDS

AIDS Action Council, “HIV/AIDS in the United States,” June 2004, accessed July 18, 2006 at
http://www.thebody.com/aac/statefact/usa_2004.html

While the federal government's investment in treatment and research is helping people with HIV/AIDS live
longer and more productive lives, HIV continues to spread at a staggering national rate of over 40,000 new
infections per year. The following data represent the total reported AIDS cases in the United States through
year-end 2002, the most current information available as of June, 2004:

Federal money prevents the spread of HIV/AIDS

AIDS Action Council, “HIV/AIDS in the United States,” June 2004, accessed July 18, 2006 at
http://www.thebody.com/aac/statefact/usa_2004.html

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provided the United States with $320,142,357 for HIV
prevention programs. These funds were allocated to state and local health departments and community-
based organizations to finance counseling and testing programs, public information and health
education/risk reduction activities, and monitoring/surveillance programs.

Federal money houses HIV/AIDS patients

AIDS Action Council, “HIV/AIDS in the United States,” June 2004, accessed July 18, 2006 at
http://www.thebody.com/aac/statefact/usa_2004.html

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) provided the United States with $259,304,000
in formula grants under the Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS (HOPWA) program in 2003.15
HOPWA provides housing assistance and related supportive services for low-income persons with
HIV/AIDS and their families. Ninety percent of funding is provided through "formula grants" to qualified
states with the largest number of AIDS cases, and the remaining ten percent is provided on a competitive
basis, to projects that are of potential national significance. The United States provided $9,809,626
nationwide in competitive funding and $1,500,000 in technical assistance grants for 2003.16
Beginning in 2002, HUD began providing additional competitive funding to support existing programs that
address permanent housing and service challenges for persons with HIV/AIDS and their families. The
United States provided selected programs $14,851,002 in permanent housing renewal grants for 2003
WNDI 2k6 Statism K – Aff Answers 16

US Foreign aid helps millions around the world

Brian Atwood, Administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development, “The Future of Foreign Aid"
May 9, 1995, accessed July 18, 2006 at http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/usaid_frnAid.html

Budget cuts of these levels could result in hundreds of thousands of easily preventable deaths of children in
the developing world. It is possible that four million children would not be vaccinated, that there would
likely be 600,000 more unintended pregnancies around the globe each year, and that at least 100,00
children could die because they were denied oral rehydration therapy.
These proposals would abandon America's longstanding commitment to advancing both free markets and
democracies. America would still provide assistance to refugees, but would deny nations the support
needed to ensure their citizens don't become refugees. America would be sending a clear signal to the
international community that development was no longer a U.S. priority. As a result, The United States
would lose the leadership that it needs to work with our international partners.

The reorganization of the U.S. government's foreign policy structures could cause major disruptions in the
conduct of U.S. foreign policy for years to come. Instead of undertaking a top-to-bottom review of the full
range of foreign affairs conducted by the U.S. government, Congress would be shotgunning through
legislation opposed by the Administration . The reorganization proposal would likely add layers of
unneeded bureaucracy to our foreign affairs operations, diminish U.S. flexibility in meeting pressing
foreign policy challenges and sacrifice long-term development to short-term political gain. Deep cuts in the
150 account could also cause immediate, and expensive, reductions in force at these agencies.
WNDI 2k6 Statism K – Aff Answers 17

Only by exploiting our unipolar power will America prevail in the war of terrorism

Charles Krauthammer, “Democratic Realism,” American Enterprise Institute, February 12, 2004,
accessed July 16, 2005 at http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.19912,filter.all/pub_detail.asp

And our problem is 9/11 and the roots of Arab-Islamic nihilism. September 11 felt like a new problem, but
for all its shock and surprise, it is an old problem with a new face. September 11 felt like the initiation of a
new history, but it was a return to history, the twentieth-century history of radical ideologies and existential
enemies.
The anomaly is not the world of today. The anomaly was the 1990s, our holiday from history. It felt like
peace, but it was an interval of dreaming between two periods of reality.
From which 9/11 awoke us. It startled us into thinking everything was new. It’s not. What is new is what
happened not on 9/11 but ten years earlier on December 26, 1991: the emergence of the United States as the
world’s unipolar power. What is unique is our advantage in this struggle, an advantage we did not have
during the struggles of the twentieth century. The question for our time is how to press this advantage, how
to exploit our unipolar power, how to deploy it to win the old/new war that exploded upon us on 9/11.

Another terrorist attack would trigger nuclear war

John L. Petersen, founder of The Arlington Institute, October 3, 2002, “The Next Sound You
Hear,” accessed July 13, 2005 at http://www.wfs.org/mmpetersen.htm

But there seems to be a rather specific objective behind all of this. There is an end-game that these terrorists
seem to have in mind, and it is not just to kill a bunch of Americans. The analysis that I read points to all of
this being the Islamic radicals’ first assault in a war aimed at elevating Islam to being the major influential
religion and political system in the world. How might they do that with the relatively limited resources that
they have? Again, the most salient thinking that I’ve found suggests that they’d like to turn America against
Islam, and vice-versa. A holy war between Islam and the West. How do you do that? Get the U.S. to
overreact. Focus the unhappiness of the vast numbers of desperately poor Muslims around more high-
profile injustice visited on them indiscriminately by American retaliation for the September 11 attacks.
Mobilize them around a gross inequity . . . the same way that Americans (and the West) have mobilized
around a great inequity. The third principle is therefore: Provoke Over-Reaction. Get the West to seemingly
strike out against "Islam" — again. Give them the basis for moving their religious war into high-gear. If this
is the framework for a second strike, then where should we look? We should look for places where a
relatively small, sophisticated effort can produce inordinate social pain and anger. Produce an event that
will cause Americans, in the fury of the aftermath, to look with hate upon every Arabic-looking person they
see and strike out in vengeance. (That, of course, is the predictable way in which things work in many
places on the planet.) The best of all worlds would be a nuclear counter-strike that wiped out a bunch of
innocent Muslims — that would start the war for sure. Where are our vulnerabilities in this kind of scenaric
world? Obviously, there is the possibility of a nuclear or biological attack, and that is where we will
immediately put up our defenses.