Tournament: GSU | Round: 1 | Opponent: na | Judge:
Soldier K
Our current national discourse surrounding soldiers is a result of the blindness of politics.  Individual narratives of war are swallowed up in favor of a simplified version capable of consumption during the five o clock news.  Soldiers are solicited to act on the nation’s libidinal imaginary, called forth to perform again and again until their bodies are broken.  As a result, war rhetoric creates us into a collectively acting, yet unthinking body.  The AFF’s resolve of war through fiat as the end byproduct, and not an experience, is an example of how the unseen director constructs our field of vision towards an ever-closing finalé.  The epistemological blindness created by this politics overcomes all social movements.

Grand 07, "Maternal Surveillance: Disrupting the Rhetoric of War", Grand, Sue. Psychoanalysis, Culture 26 Society12.4 (Dec 2007): 305-322.Dr. Sue Grand is faculty and supervisor at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis.
War rhetoric always conjures this blindness. It relies on a shuttered, and redundant
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through the war zone. It will not assent to its own obscurity.
The violent reality of war is never questioned by modern politics.  Support-the-troops rhetoric shuts down the discussion surrounding national war policy, locking in support for endless wars.  Acquiescence of the political to the president and policymakers simulated by the 1AC is required to be a good citizen, leaving political rhetoric a hollow shell.  Only by questioning war on the whole can we truly reclaim the discourse surrounding it.

Engels and Sass, 2013:
Jeremy Engels is an Associate Professor, and William O. Saas is a Ph.D. Candidate, in the Department of Communication Arts 26 Sciences, Penn State University, "On Acquiescence and Ends-Less War," Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 99(2)

A number of tropes and techniques are used today to promote acquiescence, to cultivate
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creating space for talk where we have previously been content to remain silent.
Thus, The Alternative:
In This Round, We Should Welcome And Affirm The Voices Of Veterans. The Role Of The Ballot Is The Critic Should Vote For The Team That Best Welcomes And Affirms The Voices Of Veterans.
Storytelling is the only way for returning veterans to reclaim their identities.  In fact, the status quo academe Silences The Voices And Experiences Of Veterans, Putting Them At Risk Of Terminal Education Failure. This isn’t like their nuclear war scenarios.  This is real, and the way we construct our conversations about war makes our activity complicit in it.  Veterans desperately need to reclaim their identity from liminality.  The academic setting is a unique site for the possibility of dialogue between students, both veteran and civilian.  This open discussion Is Key To Understanding Our National War Policy, making the alt a prerequisite to topical education..

Moore, 2012:
Ellen Moore, PhD candidate, Graduate School of Education, U Cal Berkeley. "From Combat to College: Student Veterans in Academic ’Contact Zones’". http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/92m9r81k. September 11
In this paper I have discussed pedagogical and cultural disjunctures felt by veterans who attend
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achieve the educational promise for which they have paid an extraordinarily high price.