Tournament: UMKC | Round: 1 | Opponent: CSUF RR | Judge: Burns
Sadaullah Wazir Narrative
http://www.livingunderdrones.org/victim-stories/

In order to better understand the underpinnings of America’s exceptionalist war on terror and American presence abroad – distinguished professor at binghamton, William V Spanos conducts a destructive genealogy that provides directives for resisting an American momentum that threatens to destabilize the planet and kill off the human species . He begins his 2008 book American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization by saying . . .

william v, professor emeritus at the university of binghamton, American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam, 2008, SUNY Press pp. Ix-xi

In this book I contend that the consequence of America's intervention and conduct of the war in Vietnam was the self-destruction of the ontological, cultural, and political foundations on which America had perennially justified its "benign" self-image and global practice from the time of the Puritan "errand in the wilderness...Indeed, it is my ultimate purpose in this book to provide directives for resisting an American momentum that threatens to destabilize the entire planet, if not to annihilate the human species itself, and also for rethinking the very idea of America.

Waleed Shiraz Narative
http://www.livingunderdrones.org/victim-stories/

THE ABSENCE OF SELF QUESTIONING AND THE EFFORT TO FORGET VIETNAM –WHICH IS ANOTHER WAY OF SAYING FORGETTING ONTOLOGY – IS AN EXTENSION OF THE EXCEPTIONALIST DRIVE TO ELIMINATE DIFFERENCE IN A PARADOXICAL ‘KILL TO SAVE MENTALITY’ THAT JUSTIFIES GENOCIDAL ACTS OF VIOLENCE – SPANOS EXPLAINS
william v, professor emeritus at the university of binghamton, American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam, 2008, SUNY Press pp. 13-14

The war in Vietnam, it should not be forgotten, was inaugurated and  escalated to its most intense and destructive violence by both liberal Democratic and conservative Republican presidential administrations  (Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard  Nixon) and was debated globally, not in terms of the fate of democracy  in America, but of the very idea of liberal capitalist democracy... To put it  concretely and positively, America’s inordinately violent conduct of the  war made visible the polyvalent global imperial will to power that, under  normal conditions, strategically remains invisible in the (onto)logic of the  “free world.”

ANTHONY  PERSONAL NARRATIVE

JUST AS THE UNITED STATES LOST THE WAR IN VIETNAM – IT IS NOW LOSING ON THE GLOBAL FRONTIER OF A WORLD UNWILLING TO BE OCCUPIED – INSTEAD OF ATTEMPTING TO BRING THOSE WHO REFUSE SPONTANEOUS CONSENT TO THE AMERICAN TRUTH INTO THE LIGHT – WE EMBRACE THEIR UNKNOWABILITY THE SAME WAY WE AFFIRM THE RESOLUTION: WE AFFIRM THE TOPICAL “NOTHING” WHICH IS NOT OPPOSED TO, BUT ‘PART OF’ Resolved: The United States Federal Government should substantially increase statutory and/or judicial restrictions on the war powers authority of the President of the United States in one or more of the following areas: targeted killing; indefinite detention; offensive cyber operations; or introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities.

MOST AFFIRMATIVES THIS YEAR WILL DEFEND THE TOPIC AS ‘SOMETHING’: DEFINING THE TERMS OF THE RESOLUTION AND LOCATING A POLICY INSIDE THOSE BOUNDARIES – THIS IS A FORM OF IMPERIAL METAPHYSICS THAT REDUCES BEINGS TO STANDING DISPOSABLE RESERVE - SPANOS EXPLAINS:

William V. Spanos, America’s Shadow: Anatomy of Empire, 2000, pp. 10-11

Metaphysics is thus a circular mode of inquiry that, in beginning from the end, has as its end the (finally futile) total reification and determination of the essential anxiety-activating indeterminacy of the nothing, of temporality, of the differences that temporality disseminates ... The function of metaphysical thinking, in short, is "ideological." It serves to reduce the ineffable be-ing of being to what Heidegger will later call exploitable "standing reserve" (Bestand) and Foucault, "docile and useful body."

IMPERIALISM IS NO LONGER JUST A WAY THAT STATES INTERACT BUT A WAY OF THINKING, BEING AND DEBATING IN THE WORLD – WE REFUSE TO RESPOND TO OUR ANXIETY WITH AN ATTEMPT TO PRESENCE THE RESOLUTION BY BREAKING IT DOWN, STAKING OUT ITS BOUNDARIES IN A WAY THAT TREATS BEINGS AS MANAGEABLE AND EXPLOITABLE. WE ALSO REFUSE TO ABIDE BY DEBATE MANDATES THAT REQUIRE US TO TRADE OUR UNIQUE AGENCY AS YOUTH AND AND STUDENTS NOW FOR SOME IMAGINED FUTURE WORLD AS POLICY-MAKERS.  AS HENRY GIROUX ARGUES, WE HAVE UNIQUE POWER AS STUDENTS:
(Henry A. Giroux, "Channel surfing: racism, the media and the destruction of today's youth." 1998)

But in spite of such social and economic differences between generations, there is much to be leered from the sixties in addressing the "Crisis" of youth as it unfolds the streets, neighborhoods, schools, media, and state apparatuses.
...
we must foster a dialogue with those enduring oppression wherever somebody's struggling to be free. It is absolutely essential that we begin our fight against oppression with those who are rendered abject.

We must begin our fight against oppression with the voices of those oppressed.
Brent R.Henze 2000 “Who Says Who Says?: The Epistemological Grounds for Agency in Liberatory Political Projects.” Found in Reclaiming Identity: Realist theory and the predicament of postmodernism. Edited by Paula Moya and Michael Hames-Garcia

Though I argue against efforts to speak for those otherwise able to produce and enact liberatory agendas for themselves,“starting off thought” from the lives of the oppressed is useful for grounding the knowledge of outsiders seeking to understand their own complex relations to systems of oppression.... the standpoint of the oppressed is necessary to manage our own involvement with systems of oppression so as most effectively to combat oppression as a systemic yet particular effect of power.

FROM OUR LOCATION AS  ACADEMIC INTELLECTUALS AND DEBATERS RESISTING EXCEPTIONALIST OCCUPATION OF THE PLANET -  WE MUST RECONSTELLATE THE HISTORY OF THE VIETNAM WAR INTO THE PRESENT DEBATE TOPIC ABOUT MILITARY PRESENCE ABROAD. ONLY SUCH A RETHINKING CAN INTERRUPT THE AMERICAN DRIVE TO OCCUPY THE PLANET. SPANOS CONTINUES HIS 2008 ESSAY

william v spanos, American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam, pp. 249-254

Let me now return to the content of this book—my retrieval of the singular history of the Vietnam War from its representation in its aftermath and my reconstellation of this history into the post-9/11 global occasion. ...
It is also becoming increasingly evident in the diverse Iraqi peoples' spontaneous cultural and military resistance to the American occupation of their lands, a resistance that, ominously like that of the Vietnamese, refuses to be answerable to the United States' exceptionalist/Orientalist narrative and to the forwarding warfare that is endemic to it.

FORGETTING ONE SIDE OF THE PRAXIS/ONTOLOGY DIALECTIC IS AN AGENT OF BRUTAL VIOLENCE, TORTURE AND DEATH TO ORIGNATIVE THOUGHT THAT DEEMS THE OTHER EXPENDABLE AND JUSTIFIES THE WORST ATROCITIES AND GLOBAL REALITIES THAT LET VIETNAM AND NAZISM HAPPEN.
SPANOS 2008 William V, “Global American: The Devastation of Language Under the Dictatorship of the Public Realm,” symploke Vol. 16 Nos 1-2, 2008 pp. 171-214This argument against the Bush administration and its intellectual deputies by oppositional intellectuals is manifest... this system of language and thought deem expendable, those who, in Michel Foucault’s phrase, do not prove “useful and docile” to the dominant culture.

VOTING AFF REJECTS THE METAPHYSICAL DRIVE THAT RUTHLESSLY ACCOMMODATES OR DESTROYS DIFFERENCE WITH BANISHMENT.  VOTE AFF TO THINK THE NOTHING POSITIVELY.