Disaster Porn Africa

Gonzaga Debate Institute 2007 1
Scholars Lab Disaster Porn
DISASTER PORNOGRAPHY
DISASTER PORNOGRAPHY .....................................................................................................................................1

Disaster Pornography 1NC (1/5) ...................................................................................................................................3
Link: Atrocity Exploitation (1/4)...................................................................................................................................8
Link: Atrocity Exploitation (2/4)...................................................................................................................................9
Link: Atrocity Exploitation (3/4).................................................................................................................................10
Link: Atrocity Exploitation (4/4).................................................................................................................................11
Link: Generic...............................................................................................................................................................13
Link: AIDS ..................................................................................................................................................................14
Link: Food Crisis .........................................................................................................................................................15
Link: Sudan .................................................................................................................................................................16
Link: Children .............................................................................................................................................................17
Link: Relief Workers ...................................................................................................................................................18
Link: “Tribe” ...............................................................................................................................................................19
Link: US Key...............................................................................................................................................................20
Link: Prioritize Crisis Over Africa ..............................................................................................................................22
Link: Disaster ..............................................................................................................................................................23
Link: Afro-Pessimism..................................................................................................................................................24
Link: Newsbites...........................................................................................................................................................25
Impact: Consumption (1/2)..........................................................................................................................................26
Impact: Consumption (2/2)..........................................................................................................................................28
Impact: Spread Cap (Foreign) .....................................................................................................................................29
Impact: Consumption = Cap (Domestic) .....................................................................................................................30
Impact: Cap - Terminal................................................................................................................................................31
Impact: Capitalist Exploitation ....................................................................................................................................32
Impact: History Erasure / Capitalist Exploitation........................................................................................................33
Impact: Racism ............................................................................................................................................................34
Impact: African Self-Hate............................................................................................................................................35
Impact: Indifference / No Solvency.............................................................................................................................37
Impact: Dependency ....................................................................................................................................................38
Impact: Humanitarian Intervention..............................................................................................................................39
Impact: Afro-pessimism ÆPoverty / Root of War ......................................................................................................40
Impact: Turns Case + Systemic Harms / Alt Key (1/2) ...............................................................................................41
Impact: Turns Case + Systemic Harms / Alt Key (2/2) ............................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
Impact: Structural Violence Outweighs.......................................................................................................................42
Turns Case (1/4) ..........................................................................................................................................................43
Turns Case (2/4) ..........................................................................................................................................................44
Turns Case (3/4) ..........................................................................................................................................................45
Turns Case (4/4) ..........................................................................................................................................................46
Cap 2NC (1/2) .............................................................................................................................................................47
Cap 2NC (2/2) .............................................................................................................................................................48
Aff Impacts Are Suspect..............................................................................................................................................49
African Progress Uniqueness.......................................................................................................................................50
Alternative: Counter - Discourse solves ......................................................................................................................51
Alternative: Media Change..........................................................................................................................................53
Discourse Determines Policymaking (1/2) ..................................................................................................................54
Discourse Determines Policymaking (2/2) ..................................................................................................................55
Text = Imagery ............................................................................................................................................................56
Refugees 1NC (1/4) .....................................................................................................................................................57
Refugees 1NC (2/4) .....................................................................................................................................................58
Refugees 1NC (3/4) .....................................................................................................................................................59
Refugees 1NC (4/4) .....................................................................................................................................................60
Link: Refugee Movement ............................................................................................................................................61
Link: Refugee Assistance ............................................................................................................................................62
Link: Refugee Camps ..................................................................................................................................................63
Link: Satellite Imagery ................................................................................................................................................64
Impact: Aerial Image ...................................................................................................................................................65
Impact: Tied to Place...................................................................................................................................................66
Impact: Afro-Pessimism ..............................................................................................................................................67
Impact: Eliminates Agency..........................................................................................................................................68
Impact: Refugee Dehumanization ...............................................................................................................................69
Aff Can’t Solve............................................................................................................................................................70
AT: Case Outweighs....................................................................................................................................................71
AT: Case Solves ..........................................................................................................................................................72
AT: Moral Obligation..................................................................................................................................................73
AT: Altruism ...............................................................................................................................................................74
AT: Complicity............................................................................................................................................................75
AT: Knowledge / Mobilization....................................................................................................................................76
AT: Perm – Reps Matter..............................................................................................................................................95
AT: Bear Witness / Mobilize Relief ............................................................................................................................77
AT: “They need us/It’s a real problem”.......................................................................................................................78
AT: “We Help Africa (One Entity)”............................................................................ Error! Bookmark not defined.
AT: “Our stories are true”............................................................................................................................................80
AT: “NGO Reforms Solve”.........................................................................................................................................81
AT: “Media Doesn’t Control Perceptions”..................................................................................................................82
AT: “Disaster Porn is Necessary/We Outweigh” (1/2)................................................................................................83
AT: “Disaster Porn is Necessary/We Outweigh” (2/2)................................................................................................84
AT: “Negative Portrayals Key” ...................................................................................................................................85
AT: “Floating PIKs Bad” ............................................................................................................................................86
AT: Politics of Compassion - Inauthenticity ...............................................................................................................87
AT: Politics of Compassion - Ethics of Pity................................................................................................................88
AT: Politics of Compassion – Justifies Oppression.....................................................................................................89
AT: Politics of Compassion – Imagery Becomes Enough...........................................................................................90
AT: Perm – Desire For More.......................................................................................................................................91
AT: Perm – Silences Alternatives................................................................................................................................93
AT: Perm .....................................................................................................................................................................91
AT: “Its our evidence, not us” .....................................................................................................................................96
***AFF ANSWERS***..............................................................................................................................................97
Aff: Disaster porn key to solve: Public Interest...........................................................................................................98
Aff: Disaster porn key to solve: Gov’t Pressure ..........................................................................................................99
Aff: Disaster porn key to solve: Media demystification ............................................................................................100
Aff: Representations good: Global moral conscience................................................................................................101
Aff: Representations good: Force us to address issues ..............................................................................................102
Aff: Representations are justified if true (1/2)...........................................................................................................103
Aff: Representations are justified if true (2/2)...........................................................................................................104
Aff Perm – Politics of Compassion ...........................................................................................................................105
Perm is Unconditional Responsibility .......................................................................................................................106
Compassion ID w/ Other ...........................................................................................................................................107
Compassion opens space for alts ...............................................................................................................................108
Compassion is Interconnected Ontology ...................................................................................................................109
Compassionate Identifying Solves Needs..................................................................................................................110
Compassion solves Marginalization ..........................................................................................................................111
Compassion Solves Absolute Dichotomy / Inclusion-Exclusion...............................................................................112
Reps place Other before us ........................................................................................................................................113
***REFUGEES ANSWERS*** ...............................................................................................................................114
Reps Give Advocacy .................................................................................................................................................115
Reps Spur Organizational..........................................................................................................................................116
Metaphors Give Refugees History / Culture – Ivory Tower Turn .............................................................................117
Imagery Sparks Politics .............................................................................................................................................118
Disaster Pornography 1NC (1/5)

The affirmative is only interested in the technical artificiality that the images of
catastrophe and suffering provide them in the 1ac – this destroys the distance and
ambiguity necessary for reflection and understanding of catastrophe – this mentality
extends itself from this debate round and into everyday life where we then become
complicit to suffering we see everyday
Taylor 06 [Paul, Professor of Communication Studies, “The Pornographic barbarism of the Self-reflecting sign”,
IJBS, Volume 4 Number 1, published 2006]
Jean Baudrillard has compared the West’s relationship to images in terms of obscenity. In the light of
events in Iraq, frequent accusations that his work is willfully abstruse should be reconsidered. Baudrillard
takes the notion of the obscene literally. An etymological analysis of the word gives us “ob” – a prefix
meaning hindering – and “scene” – from the Latin and Greek words for “stage”. Ignoring its conventional
connotation of depravity, his re-reading of the term obscene gives us the notion that Western media-
dominated society is ob-scene because its proliferation of images has imploded the traditional,
symbolically coded distance between the image and viewer that is implied with a stage. Baudrillard’s
writing contains the repeated theme that in the West we suffer from a virus-like proliferation of
immediate images that replace the distance needed for either considered reflection or a developed
sensitivity to the ambiguities of cultural meanings. Baudrillard’s analysis illuminates the present
mediascape. For example, he argues: “… we shouldn’t underestimate the power of the obscene, its
power to exterminate all ambiguity and all seduction and deliver to us the definitive fascination of
bodies without faces, faces without eyes, and eyes that don’t look”. This has chilling pertinence to the
dehumanized images of Iraqi prisoners in which their faces are hooded, deliberately pixilated, or only
appear as minor details within a broader tableau (e.g., the naked man cowering in front of snarling guard
dogs). Originally used in a different context, Baudrillard also provides an unwittingly prescient description of
the furor over the Daily Mirror pictures’ authenticity:…we don’t look for definition or richness of
imagination in these images; we look for the giddiness of their superficiality, for the artifice of detail, the
intimacy of their technique. What we truly desire is their technical artificiality, and nothing more.
Beyond the manifest obscenity of the Pornography of the Abu Ghraib photographs, Baudrillard’s broader
theoretical point relates to how their staging paradoxically relies upon the actual absence of a stage. A
surfeit of images is presented to us so that: ”Obscenity takes on all the semblances of modernity. We are
used to seeing it, first of all, in the perpetration of sex, but it extends to everything that can be
perpetrated in the visible – it becomes the perpetration of the visible itself”. In a form of semiotic
potlatch, images become their own justification for the decontextualized consumption for its own sake
of such formats as MTV Cribs and Bumfights. Everything becomes a potential image for the voyeuristic
gaze and less and less is ruled out on grounds of taste or any other consideration. The pornography of
the image lies here in its explicitness. Nothing is left to the imagination and all is revealed to the passive
viewer. An apparently overwhelming sexual will-to-reveal that Welsh identified in the rise of gonzo porn
may at least partially explain the sexual aspect of the Abu Ghraib pictures. As Sontag recently argued, we
live in a world where, increasingly: An erotic life is for more and more people what can be captured on
video. To live is to be photographed, to have a record of one’s life, oblivious or claiming to be oblivious to
the camera’s non-stop attentions ...Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would
have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamour to get on a television show to reveal.

Specifically- The Affirmative perpetuates an artificial afro-pessimistic mindset through
their false representations of African atrocity
Olujobi 06 (Gbemisola “The Africa You Need to Know”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20061128_the_africa_you_need_to_know/ ; Posted on Nov 28, 2006)
Rod Chavis says in “Africa in the Western Media”: “Nouns and adjectives like hut, dark, tribe, King
Kong, tribalism, primitive, nomad, animism, jungle, cannibal, savage, underdeveloped, third world,
developing, etc., are pervasive when Africa is the story. Images of Africa in the Western Media, many
times, are deeply troubling psychologically and emotionally, especially to those claiming her as
primordial heritage, lineage, and descendancy. They portray a no there there: no culture, no history, no
tradition, and no people, an abyss and negative void. “With the stroke of a journalist’s pen,” Chavis
continues, “the African, her continent, and her descendants are pejoratively reduced to nothing [but] ...
a bastion of disease, savagery, animism, pestilence, war, famine, despotism, primitivism, poverty, and
ubiquitous images of children, flies in their food and faces, their stomachs distended. These ‘universal’
but powerfully subliminal message units, beamed at global television audiences, connote something not
good, perennially problematic unworthiness, deplorability, black, foreboding, loathing, sub humanity,
etc.”
And, This turns case- the perpetuation of Afro-Pessimism via the Aff’s disaster
pornography creates more and more negative perceptions about Africa, and deters aid.
This is the root cause of the Affirmative harms
How does this negative portrayal affect Africa’s fortunes? These former heads of state, who should know,
because of their former and relatively still vantage positions, were unanimous that this negative portrayal
“has profound relevance to everything— including the world considering Africa as a worthy
investment venue and viewing Africa as a valuable trading partner ...it is reasonable to posit that
negative perceptions lead to negative outcomes, namely, lower levels of aid and lower levels of
investment.” Facts are sacred and the truth must be told. Despite generous human and natural endowments,
Africa is home to 32 of the 38 highly indebted countries of the world and remains the only continent where
the proportion of the population in extreme poverty is growing. Thirty-six and two-tenths percent of
Africans live on less than a dollar a day. Most African countries are at the bottom of the United
Nations’ overall human development index, which also measures education, life expectancy, gross
domestic product and other indicators of development. The overwhelming majority of African countries
are not on target to meet any of the Millennium Development Goals agreed upon at the United Nations in
2000. Sad, but all true.

Additionally- The “efforts to alleviate” catastrophe posed by the aff is entrenched in a self-
serving mentality- they will inevitably result in perpetuation and recreation of the harms
they try to solve
Baudrillard 94 (Jean, Professor of Media;“The Illusion of the End” p. 66-71)
We have long denounced the capitalistic, economic exploitation of the poverty of the 'other half of the
world' [['autre monde]. We must today denounce the moral and sentimental exploitation of that poverty
- charity cannibalism being worse than oppressive violence. The extraction and humanitarian reprocessing
of a destitution which has become the equivalent of oil deposits and gold mines. The extortion of the
spectacle of poverty and, at the same time, of our charitable condescension: a worldwide appreciated surplus
of fine sentiments and bad conscience. We should, in fact, see this not as the extraction of raw materials, but
as a waste-reprocessing enterprise. Their destitution and our bad conscience are, in effect, all part of the
waste-products of history- the main thing is to recycle them to produce a new energy source. We have here
an escalation in the psychological balance of terror. World capitalist oppression is now merely the vehicle
and alibi for this other, much more ferocious, form of moral predation. One might almost say, contrary to the
Marxist analysis, that material exploitation is only there to extract that spiritual raw material that is the
misery of peoples, which serves as psychological nourishment for the rich countries and media
nourishment for our daily lives. The 'Fourth World' (we are no longer dealing with a 'developing' Third
World) is once again beleaguered, this time as a catastrophe-bearing stratum. The West is whitewashed
in the reprocessing of the rest of the world as waste and residue. And the white world repents and
seeks absolution - it, too, the waste-product of its own history. The South is a natural producer of raw
materials, the latest of which is catastrophe. The North, for its part, specializes in the reprocessing of raw
materials and hence also in the reprocessing of catastrophe. Bloodsucking protection, humanitarian
interference, Medecins sans frontieres, international solidarity, etc. The last phase of colonialism: the New
Sentimental Order is merely the latest form of the New World Order. Other people's destitution becomes
our adventure playground. Thus, the humanitarian offensive aimed at the Kurds - a show of repentance on
the part of the Western powers after allowing Saddam Hussein to crush them - is in reality merely the second
phase of the war, a phase in which charitable intervention finishes off the work of extermination. We are the
consumers of the ever delightful spectacle of poverty and catastrophe, and of the moving spectacle of our
own efforts to alleviate it (which, in fact, merely function to secure the conditions of reproduction of the
catastrophe market); there, at least, in the order of moral profits, the Marxist analysis is wholly applicable:
we see to it that extreme poverty is reproduced as a symbolic deposit, as a fuel essential to the moral and
sentimental equilibrium of the West. In our defence, it might be said that this extreme poverty was largely of
our own making and it is therefore normal that we should profit by it.

We need to critically examine the justifications for policies or we risk reproducing the very
harms that well-meaning political decisions are meant to alleviate. Reject the aff’s
discursive constructions
Doty 96(Assistant Professor Of Political Science at ASU, 1996 [Roxanne Lynn, Imperial Encounters: The Politics
of Representation in North-South Relations, p. 170-171]
North-South relations have been constituted as a structure of deferral. The center of the structure
(alternatively white man, modern man, the United States, the West, real states) has never been absolutely
present outside a system of differences. It has itself been constituted as trace—the simulacrum of a
presence that dislocates itself, displaces itself, refers itself (ibid.). Because the center is not a fixed locus
but a function in which an infinite number of sign substitutions come into play the domain and play of
signification is extended indefinitely (Derrida 1978: 280). This both opens up and limits possibilities,
generates alternative sites of meanings and political resistances that give rise to practices of
reinscription that seek to reaffirm identities and relationships. The inherently incomplete and open
nature of discourse makes this reaffirmation an ongoing and never finally completed project. In this
study I have sought, through an engagement with various discourses in which claims to truth have been
staked, to challenge the validity of the structures of meaning and to make visible their complicity with
practices of power and domination. By examining the ways in which structures of meaning have been
associated with imperial practices, I have suggested that the construction of meaning and the
construction of social, political, and economic power are inextricably linked. This suggests an ethical
dimension to making meaning and an ethical imperative that is incumbent upon those who toil in the
construction of structures of meaning. This is especially urgent in North-South relations today: one does
not have to search very far to find a continuing complicity with colonial representations that ranges
from a politics of silence and neglect to constructions of terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, and
international drug trafficking, and Southern immigration to the North as new threats to global stability and
peace. The political stakes raised by this analysis revolve around the question of being able to "get beyond"
the representations or speak outside of the discourses that historically have constructed the North and the
South.

Finally- Rhetorical analysis is a necessary precursor to policy making- representations
always come first
Dauber 01( Cori Elizabeth, Associate professor of communications at the university of North Caroline Chapel
Hill, “the shot seen round the world: the impact of the images of Mogadishu on american military operations”;
http://muse.uq.edu.au.ts.isil.westga.edu/journals/rhetoric_and_public_affairs/v004/4.4dauber.html)
The impact the Mogadishu images have had on American foreign policy is clear. But their impact is not
inescapable or inevitable. It is based on the incorrect assumption that people can only read images
unidirectionally. No matter how similar, no matter how powerfully one text evokes another, every image is
unique. Each comes from a different historical situation, is placed within a different story, and offers an
ambiguous text that can be exploited by astute commentators. Images matter profoundly, but so do their
contexts and the words that accompany them. The implications of this shift in interpretation are
potentially profound. Mogadishu, or the mention of a potential parallel with Mogadishu, need not be a
straightjacket or a deterrent to the use of American power. Rhetoric, whether discursive or visual, has real
power in the way events play out. What this article makes clear is that rhetoric (and therefore rhetorical
analysis) also has power in the way policy is shaped and defined. In a recent book on the conflict in
Kosovo, the authors note that when the president spoke to the nation on the night the air war began, he
immediately ruled out the use of ground forces. This was done, they argue, due to fears that leaving
open the possibility of ground force participation would sacrifice domestic public and congressional (and
allied) support for the air war. But "publicly ruling out their use only helped to reduce Milosevic's
uncertainty regarding the likely scope of NATO's military actions," 109 and possibly to lengthen the air war
as a result. Yet, they report, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, "who authored the critical passage in
the president's speech, maintains that 'we would not have won the war without this sentence.'" 110 It
would be difficult to find more direct evidence for the profound impact and influence public rhetoric
and debate have--and are understood to have--on policy, policymaking, and policymakers at the highest
level. That means that rhetorical analysis can have a role to play and a voice at the table before policies
are determined. Academic rhetoricians, through their choice of projects and the formats in which they
publish, can stake a claim to having an important voice at the table--and they should do so.
Link: Atrocity Exploitation (1/5)

Compassion Fatigue is the reason why the media will do anything to get higher ratings, just
like the affirmative will exploit anything to win a ballot
Moeller 99 (Susan, assistant professor in the philip merrill college of journalism at the university of Maryland,
“Compassion Fatigue : How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death” 1999; page 2)
Compassion fatigue is the unacknowledged cause of much of the failure of international reporting
today. It is at the base of many of the complaints about the public’s short attention span, the media’s
peripatetic journalism, the public’s boredom with international news, the media’s preoccupation with crisis
coverage. What does compassion fatigue do? It acts as a prior restraint on the media. Editors and
producers don’t assign stories and correspondents don’t cover events that they believe will not appeal to their
readers and viewers. Compassion fatigue abets Americans’ self-interest. If conventional wisdom says
that Americans are only interested in their own backyard, the media will prioritize stories where
American political, cultural or commercial connections are evident. Compassion fatigue reinforces
simplistic, formulaic coverage. If images of starving babies worked in the past to capture attention for
a complex crisis of war, refugees and famine, then starving babies will headline the next difficult crisis.
Compassion fatigue ratchets up the criteria for stories that get coverage. To forestall the I’ve-seen-it-before
syndrome, journalists reject events that aren’t more dramatic or more lethal than their predecessors.
Or, through a choice of language and images, the newest event is represented as being more extreme or
deadly or risky than a similar past situation. Compassion fatigue tempts journalists to find ever more
sensational tidbits in stories to retain the attention of their audience. Compassion fatigue encourages the
media to move on to other stories once the range of possibilities of coverage have been exhausted so
that boredom doesn’t set in. Events have a certain amount of time in the limelight, then, even if the
situation has not been resolved, the media marches on. Further news is pre-empted. No new news is bad
news. Compassion fatigue is not an unavoidable consequence of covering the news. It is, however, an
unavoidable consequence of the way the news is now covered. The chapters that follow identify the ruts
into which the media have fallen in their coverage of international crises. Through these studies, the media’s
repetitive chronologies, sensationalized language and imagery and Americanized metaphors and references
are compared and exposed. Through these studies the inevitability of compassion fatigue is made apparent.
The aff gives power to disaster journalism- which exploits the suffering of others, while
causing more of that suffering itself
Putting an indelible question mark on disaster journalism, they say, “Reduced to nameless extras in the
shadows behind Western aid workers or disaster tourists, the grieving, hurting and humiliated human
beings are not asked if they want to be portrayed in this degrading way.” Has anyone ever considered
this? They also reveal that “Somali doctors and nurses have expressed shock at the conduct of film crews in
hospitals. They rush through crowded corridors, leaping over stretchers, dashing to film the agony
before it passes. They hold bedside vigils to record the moment of death. When the Italian actress
Sophia Loren visited Somalia, the paparazzi trampled on children as they scrambled to film her
feeding a little girl—three times. This is disaster pornography.”

The aff, like the media, will exploit any atrocity as long as they are benefited in the end-
Africa is uniquely hurt by this flawed methodology
Kromah 02 (Alhaji G.V, former Assistant Professor of International Communication & Media Law at the
University of Liberia, “Africa In the Western Media: Cycle of Contra-Positives and Selective Perceptions”; The
Perspective; http://www.theperspective.org/africa_westernmedia.html; April 30, 2002)
The technological revolution in international broadcasting - radio and television - has made an
overwhelmingly diversified imprint on global society. Wars and disasters are telecast to the world as they
happen. Competition among American television stations over their desire to report from the scene of
events has pushed almost every American network and cable group to go international. The latest is the
MSNBC, which has made the regional Middle East conflict and the Afghanistan operation as a regular
feature of their nightly news. MSNBC's Ashley Banfield has become the company's version of CNN's
Christianne Amanpour, who acquired fame by reporting from the battle zones of Bosnia and Korsovo, as
well as penetrating the secluded domains of power in Iran and similar places. Besides CNN, which has built
some credibility for reporting to the world about the world, the American broadcast stations reporting on
international affairs target the American audience. Catering exclusively to a particular national
audience has always been fraught with parochial tendencies. In this technological explosion and
unprecedented excitement in journalism, Africa has not benefited. In fact, the advancement has been
used to reinforce in vivid pictures, the stereotype imagery that has lived with the American and other
Western audiences. If events in African countries ever make it to the news, they are presented to the
audience as an exception to normal things.
Media representations of Africa use disaster images instead of using useful knowledge and
African perspectives to capture attention. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where all
we can know are the images.
Makunike 93[Ezekiel Makunike, Former Zimbabwe Director of Information, Out of Africa: Media Stereotypes
Shape Images, Center for Media Literacy]
I requested permission from the news departments of those two daily newspapers to glean through their
wastepaper baskets for telex sheets from wire services containing stories transmitted from Africa. I
conducted this search for most of an entire week. While indeed not much was offered by the news
services, I was nevertheless surprised to find that much of the little that came in was either "killed" or
simply spiked for a more suitable publication date that never came.
When I asked an editor to explain these decisions, he told me that stories on Africa are routinely ignored
because of a presumed lack of reader interest. "You see," he said, "America does not know Africa well.
It never had a colony on that continent. Thus, unless the story has a strong human interest potential,
there is no point using it, since no one will read it."
Of course, the editor was both creating a self-fulfilling prophecy and ignoring an obvious fact. The
prophecy was simple: White Americans would never become aware of Africa unless they could learn
enough about it to be interested, a process the media has a lot to do with.

The media caters to the populations demand- their only interest is what will sell most
“Compassion Fatigue : How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death” 1999; page 9-10)
It’s the media that are at fault. How they typically cover crises helps us to feel overstimulated and
bored all at once. Conventional wisdom says Americans have a short attention span. A parent would not
accept that pronouncement on a child; she would step in to try to teach patience and the rewards of stick-
toitiveness. But the media are not parents. In this case they are more like the neighborhood kid who is the bad
influence on the block. Is your attention span short? Well then, let the media give you even more staccato
bursts of news, hyped and wired to feed your addiction. It is not that there’s not good, comprehensive,
responsible reporting out there. There is. “Sometimes,” said the late Jim Yuenger, former foreign editor
with the Chicago Tribune, “you put the news in and people just aren’t going to read it and you have to say the
hell with it.” But that type of coverage is expensive as well as space- and time-consuming. It rarely shows
enough bang for the buck. So only a few elite media outlets emphasize such coverage, and even they
frequently lapse into quick once-over reporting. “We give you the world,” yes, but in 15-second news briefs.
The print and broadcast media are part of the entertainment industry—an industry that knows how to
capture and hold the attention of its audience. “The more bizarre the story,” admitted UPI foreign editor Bob
Martin, “the more it’s going to get played.” With but a few exceptions, the media pay their way through selling
advertising, not selling the news. So the operating principle behind much of the news business is to appeal to an
audience—especially a large audience—with attractive demographics for advertisers. Those relatively few news outlets
that consider international news to be of even remote interest to their target audiences try to make the world accessible.
The point in covering international affairs is to make the world fascinating—or at least acceptably convenient: “News
you can use.” “When we do the readership surveys, foreign news always scores high,” said Robert Kaiser, former
managing editor of The Washington Post. “People say they’re interested and appreciate it, and I know they’re lying but I
don’t mind. It’s fine. But I think it’s an opportunity for people to claim to be somewhat better citizens than they are.” But
in reality, they’re bored. When problems in the news can’t be easily or quickly solved—famine in Somalia,
war in Bosnia, mass murder of the Kurds—attention wanders off to the next news fashion. “What’s
hardest,” said Yuenger, “is to sustain interest in a story like Bosnia, which a lot of people just don’t want to
hear about.” The media are alert to the first signs in their audience of the compassion fatigue “signal,”
that sign that the short attention span of the public is up. “If we’ve just been in Africa for three months,”
said CBS News foreign editor Allen Alter, “and somebody says, ‘You think that’s bad? You should see
what’s down in Niger,’ well, it’s going to be hard for me to go back. Everybody’s Africa’d out for the
moment.” As Milan Kundera wrote in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, “The bloody massacre in
Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination
of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende,
the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai and so on and so forth, until ultimately everyone lets
everything be forgotten.”
The affirmative uses their disaster pornography to entertain themselves- to them its
entertaining. This is what desensitizes the world to all suffering
What does it mean when we become blasé about the pictures we see? Images of suffering and disaster—
from pictures of the grieving Princes William and Harry to photos of the flattened Mercedes in the Paris
tunnel—are appropriated to appeal emotionally to readers and viewers. As The New York Times
columnist Max Frankel says, “Conflict is our favorite kind of news.” Crises are turned into a social
experience that we can grasp; pain is commercialized, wedged between the advertisements for
hemorrhoid remedies and headache medicines. In that cultural context, suffering becomes
infotainment—just another commodity, another moment of pain to get its minute or column in the
news. Our experience and our understanding of a crisis is weakened, diluted and distorted. If the news
shows prompt us to equate chronic famine with chronic fatigue syndrome we are somewhat relieved. It helps
absolve us of responsibility for what we see and can do little about. So with relief, we forget and go on with
our everyday lives—until some other crisis image seizes our attention for a second.

Their stimulus of emotions create a control of the advertiser over the desires of the public,
which places aid second to winning the ballot.
Rozario 03 [Kevin Rozario, assistant professor in the American studies program at Smith College, Delicious
Horrors, American Quarterly 55.3, 417-455]
At the beginning of the century, American psychologists had "discovered" the awesome power of irrational
instinctive impulses and had abandoned the Kantian moral philosophy that sought the springs to ethical
action in reason and judgment. This was initially alarming to social engineers who worried that an
unreasonable citizenry might prove resistant to education and uplift. But by the time of the Great War, John
B. Watson was only the most notable member of a profession that had come to suspect that a proper science
of human nature (behavioral psychology) could actually bestow extraordinary powers to manipulate
"irrational" emotions. It was beginning to appear that human behavior itself could be "conditioned."
This was an exciting prospect for advertisers who marveled at the returns to be had if they could only
master the "the power of suggestion." But it was also a tantalizing prospect for humanitarian
fundraisers who were increasingly interested in the "psychology of the appeal": The advertiser has
coined a word of his own which has the same meaning as . . . stimulus as here used; namely, appeal. The
term is often used by him as a synonym for 'selling argument' . . . It is the function of the appeal to
awaken or arouse the desire in the mind of the individual and to put in action the behavior
mechanisms which will lead to the satisfaction of the desire. Now, if the desire aroused can be satisfied
only by the purchase of advertiser's goods his aim has been accomplished. In an age of mass media
and marketing, relief officials and welfare workers also needed to know, in Brandt's words, "what sort
of paid advertising pays and how to get newspaper publicity for nothing by furnishing 'human interest
stories,' when to send out appeal letters so as to catch contributors in the most responsive mental
attitude," and so forth. 4Humanitarian organizations, then, were also increasingly in the business of
creating wants. What were they selling? In addition to a sense of virtue, these organizations were
trading in thrills.
Representations of suffering shift the focus from a call to altruistic action to a desire to
consume suffering. This is the affirmative’s façade to win the round.
This is a startling phrase—"delicious horror." The horror seems straightforward enough (though it is
worth reminding ourselves that while revulsion is undoubtedly the dominant modern response to suffering, it
is not as natural as one might suppose). But it is the purported deliciousness of suffering that poses the
most disquieting questions. What is so appetizing about depictions of pain and discomfort? What
makes images of suffering thrilling? And why, for that matter, was an exciting show about destruction and
suffering expected to part audiences from their charity dollars? A connection is implied in the very word we
use to describe an entreaty for charitable donations: "appeal." According to the Oxford English Dictionary,
the word "appeal" is adapted from the Latin "appelare" which means "to call upon." Thus it is that charity
organizations call upon donors for contributions. Since the late nineteenth century, however, the word has
also carried another meaning (one that was, significantly, articulated and disseminated most thoroughly by
an emerging advertising industry): the quality of being attractive, enticing—"appealing." The
producers of the Minneapolis show certainly intuited that to raise money they needed both to please and
appall audiences with shocking images of destruction and misfortune, gambling correctly that audiences
so captivated would contribute generously to the relief of San Francisco. It seems that a closer connection
exists between the appalling and the appealing than most accounts of humanitarianism have recognized.

Western Media isn’t even interested in correctly depicting Africans- the images create a
false perception of Africa as a crude underdeveloped wasteland
For the purposes of this discussion, I shall highlight British and American media environments to explore the
problem. And in this framework, it would be helpful to capture some of the complications that derive
from the lack of energy many Western news reporters demonstrate in ascertaining the real identities of
their African subjects. In many instances, Western media practitioners present fatalistic and
selectively crude images of Africa to prove to their already misinformed audiences that they have
visited the continent or are knowledgeable about its activities.
Link: Representations
Representations of Africa create it as worthless and sub human.
Chavis 98 [Rod, U Penn, http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Workshop/chavis98.html]
With the stroke of a journalist's pen, the African, her continent, and her descendants are pejoratively
reduced to nothing: a bastion of disease, savagery, animism, pestilence, war, famine, despotism,
primitivism, poverty, and ubiquitous images of children, flies in their food and faces, their stomachs
distended. These "universal" but powerfully subliminal message units, beamed at global television
audiences, connote something not good, perennially problematic unworthiness, deplorability, black,
foreboding, loathing, sub humanity, etc. On the other hand, little is said about Africa's strategic importance
to so called industrialized nations; her indispensability and relevance to world development, global
technology, and the wealth of nations, derived from involuntary African largesse, are not acclaimed in the
media. The amorphous news spin is America has to protect her strategic interests and national security.
Without access to certain raw materials from Africa, Western industrial capacity would wither much like a
"raisin in the sun". Even less is communicated via the media or anywhere else about the incalculable volume
of African art and crafts that end up in private collections and museums: books, calendars, and artistic
publications, produce minimal income and royalties, if any, for Africans creating such works of art. Mega
profits are gained by expatriate marketers in royalties, commissions, exhibitions, documentaries, movies,
shows, and other niches in the U.S and world art and craft consumer market. African unique textile designs
are now bootlegged or blatantly copied by other international economic and globally marketing groups.
Sadly, until the ban on ivory importation, elephant and rhinoceros populations were facing certain extinction
because foreign consumers, mainly in Asia, demanded their tusks for medicinal purposes and aphrodisiacs.
Link: AIDS
All narratives of AIDS inscribe it as internal to Africa – This serves to frame Africa as the
sick continent.
Early inquiry into and pontification about the origin of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS)
contraindicated any origin for the disease other than out of Africa. Subsequent research has rebuffed
such unsubstantiated theory. However, just recently, an article appeared in a local newspaper citing DNA
studies of a man in Zaire who had AIDS in 1959. Is it prudent for the scientific and medical research
community to find someone or thing to blame AIDS on or would resources better be used to develop public
education campaigns as well as prevention and intervention strategies that together will eliminate the threat
of AIDS to future populations anyplace on the planet? Does the scourge of AIDS restrict itself to national
or international borders or territories? Does it selectively kill? What do the media gain by spreading
dubious information, information that has not been thoroughly documented or researched prior to
reporters and journalists rushing to meet press deadlines? Investigative reports by the broadcast and print
media have devoted talent and monetary resources to influencing and shaping world opinion: AIDS came
out of Africa. Did such hype save one life?
Link: Food Crisis

Exploitation of food crisis is afro-pessimistic disaster porn at its worst- reducing over 900
million people to one impoverished sub-human group
Gidley 05 (Ruth; Staff writer for AlertNet; “Aid workers lament rise of 'development pornography'”;
http://www.alertnet.org/thefacts/reliefresources/112669283410.htm;14 Sep 2005)
"It's got worse in the last 10 years," said Nikki van der Gaag, a freelance writer and editor. "There's a whole
new generation of people working in NGOs who've never had this debate before." Critics say Western
newspapers have been full of undignified images of women and children alongside articles and appeals
related to Niger's 2005 food crisis. They say such pictures are not quite as bad as images from Ethiopia in
1984 that showed matchstick-thin wrists of black babies dwarfed by white hands, but still perpetuate a
colonial idea of incapable Africans waiting passively for help from their white saviours. "The media
coverage of the Ethiopian famine was a watershed for how aid agencies thought about images of
disasters," wrote the organisers of a recent conference in London to commemorate the 1984 famine in
Ethiopia. "Part of the Live Aid legacy has been the equation of famine with Africa and Africa with
famine, reducing a continent of 57 countries, nearly 900 million people and numerous disparate
cultures to a single, impoverished place." The "Imaging Famine" conference brought together aid
workers, media representatives, photographers and academics to reignite the debate. "You have to think:
'Would I like my picture, or my child's picture, taken like this?'" said van der Gaag, who was involved in the
1980s debate about famine pictures. Pete Davis of Oxfam's education department said the repetition of
certain types of images helped shape public assumptions. "The idea that pervades is that Africa is a
broken, dusty place without food or hope," he said. "Many children in the UK simply don't believe
there are cars, cities or mobile phones in Africa."
The Aff’s representations of Africans degraded humans create interveners as foreign

angels. These images do not represent reality and justifies unwarranted intervention.
Omaar and De Waal 93[Disaster Pornography from Somalia, Center for Media Literacy, Winter, Issue 61,
Rakiya Omaar and Alex de Waal, co-directors of African Rights]
In the vanguard of the Marines, the press corps had already stormed Somailia. Now we will see more of the
famailiar pictures of grotesque human degradation, with foreign angels of mercy ministering to
starving children, juxtaposed with images of trigger-happy teen-age looters. Such pictures prompted
President Bush's military adventure-now they will justify it.
The camera can't lie, we are told. But anyone who has watched a Western film crew in an African
famine will know just how much effort it takes to compose the "right" image. Photogenic starving
children are hard to find, even in Somalia. Somali doctors and nurses have expressed shock at the
conduct of film crews in hospitals. They rush through crowded corridors, leaping over stretchers,
dashing to film the agony before it passes. They hold bedside vigils to record the moment of death. When
the Italian actress Sophia Loren visited Somalia, the paparazzi trampled on children as they scrambled to film
her feeding a little girl-three times. This is disaster pornography.
Of the the most sever famines in the 20th century, Africa isn’t even in the top 20- a
perception of vulnerability is what the aff exploits
Jooma 06 (Mariam; Researcher with the African Security Analysis Program at the Institute for Security
Studies, “Africa in 2006: The Humanitarian Hangover?”, Africa Watch;
http://www.iss.co.za/index.php?link_id=4059&slink_id=3464&link_type=12&slink_type=12&tmpl_id=3)
A striking piece of information relating to the vulnerability of marginalised communities in Africa is that of
the 20 most severe famines of the 20th century, none occurred in Africa. How then did Africa become
the poster-child for media depictions of hunger? A focus on the underlying causes of vulnerability,
such as the reduction of ‘networks of affection’ that are linked to macro-economic adjustments, the
impact of an urban bias for access to services, increasing desertification of land, and the effect of
HIV/AIDS on the agricultural labour force are all part of the dynamic mix of factors affecting local
communities.
Link: Sudan
The motivation of the Affirmative analogous to the media in that they only desire to exploit
the suffering of the Sudanese crisis in order to win a debate round
Toolis 99 (Kevin, a features writer for The Guardian, “Hungry for the Truth”;
http://www.developments.org.uk/articles/hungry-for-the-truth/ 9 April 1999)
Omaar’s criticism could also apply to the media – which is instrumental in uncritically promoting the
NGO charities’ message that all aid is good. What Omaar is pointing to is a largely untold contradiction
that underpins the Famine Business and the news reporting of it. It is the contradiction between the
simplistic, emotive messages of starving children – “disaster pornography” – and the messy, confused
political reality of disasters induced by war. No one can explain the complexities of Sudanese politics in
three minutes of prime time television. But everyone can relate to powerful images of starving babies.
And it is in the institutional interests of journalists and NGOs to repeat this simple message. Journalists
obviously benefit from bylines, prime time slots, even awards. The charities benefit not only from the
stream of donations from the public, but also from the flow of Government funds that are released in
the wake of public concern.
Link: Children
Representations of helpless children define African culture as desperately in need of help
and fulfill the stereotype of Africa from the occident.
Nakanjako 06[Prossy Nakanjako, Childrens Rights Activist, Who gains from pictures of suffering children?,
New Vision (Ugandan Journal), October 26]
For months, I did not see any pictures of smiling children from Africa, a memory I had from home. I did
not see pictures of children happily running around, playing 'hide-and-seek' or football, unaware of their
tattered clothes. But instead, I saw only pictures of starving children from war-torn northern Uganda,
AIDS orphans from South Africa begging to be helped, or someone begging on their behalf.
Universally, children are seen as innocent, immaculate of the injustices of the world. And when it
comes to disasters, such as war, epidemics, drought and earthquakes, children and women are
considered to be a vulnerable category in society. "Like canaries down a coal mine, children often give the
first indication that something is going wrong. Child malnutrition offers the most common index to famine; a
child being disruptive at school may be the first sign of a family at war; child prostitutes and soldiers indicate
a society in crisis; child-to-child murders are interpreted as a sign of moral breakdown," wrote one author,
when commenting about the challenges of implementing children's rights in developing countries. Yes,
suffering African children on television have delivered the atrocities, wars, famines, and droughts in
many African countries right to the living rooms of even those Western citizens who do not know where
the continent is exactly located. If childhood is viewed as a 'golden age' full of innocence but vulnerable
and therefore in need of adult protection, then negative pictures of African children portray a society
that does not give proper care to their children. If no beautiful pictures of Africa are shown, what kind of
conclusion does one expect from someone who has never been to any country in Africa, but only feasts on
negative pictures of African children on TV? Patricia Holland, author of Picturing Childhood says that,
"Pictures of children contribute to a set of narratives about childhood which are threaded through
different cultural forms, drawing on every possible source to construct stories that become part of
cultural competence." What kind of narratives then, do pathetic images of hungry, lonely and helpless
children deliver to those who feast on them in the West? Or, to throw back Mr. Oloya's question, "If we
watch these documentaries about Africa's numerous ills, so what?" Social critics say that that negative
pictures of African children aid fulfil the stereotype of Africa in the West; as a poverty, disease, war,
famine etc infested continent where development has eluded the lives of many people.
The use of children to epitomize plight creates a relationship of victim to spectator.

Experience is captured in one frame which erases culture and identity.
Fair and Parks 01 [Jo Ellen Fair and Lisa Parks, Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of
California-Santa Barbara, Africa on Camera: Television News Coverage and Aerial Imaging of Rwandan Refugees,
Africa Today 48.2, pg. 35-37]
Many of the reports close with a single lasting image that asks the television viewer to look into the eyes of
an individual refugee, often a child. In attempting to establish a connection between American viewers
and the anonymous and voiceless refugee, news stories often use the eyes of children as points of entry
into, and sympathy for, Rwandans. What these images frequently accomplish is not to create rapport
but to reduce refugees to a part of their bodies--their eyes wide open--in an attempt to symbolize their
plight. In doing so, television viewers are encouraged to view crisis through children's eyes, and to see
Africa itself as incarcerated space on the far side of the television news camera. In this space, the
history, culture, and identity of Rwandan refugees is erased. The effect of such images is to establish a
relationship between the refugee "victim" and the American citizen as spectator. In one particularly
striking image, two Hutu children are displayed through a metal-framed window, peering out of the darkness
toward the cameras. They are incarcerated by the metal frame of the object that protects them from
violence, and they are trapped in the incarcerated space of the television camera's caricature of their
experience. In the end, by framing their faces, the story attempts to transform them into portraits that
convey a condensed tell-all version of the conflict.
Link: Relief Workers

Images of relief workers strip individuals of agency and reinforces western paternalism
Perhaps the most common images featured in news stories of campsites are of white, western relief
workers organizing camp life, tending to the medical needs of refugees, and providing food aid to
refugees. Relief workers by far are the most frequently used sources for stories. In short, news accounts
repeatedly show the good deeds done by relief workers. These images, of course, are nothing new. They are
the stock from which western paternalism has fed itself (Malkki 1995; Fair 1996; Girardet 1996). What
these images accomplish is to deny refugee camp dwellers the possibility of political agency, of working
for their own improvement. In stories that use images of Rwandans confined to camps, refugees are acted
upon by outsiders--international relief workers, government officials of various states, soldiers
protecting one interest or another, and journalists--who have the power to determine the conditions in
which refugees live, the amount of food they receive, and their ability to reside in camps. Yet, as Malkki
suggests, such portrayals fail to recognize that camps are often sites where displaced groups
dynamically stake out new allegiances, create new histories, and reconstitute cultural identities and
consciousness (1995: 232-58; see also Thayer 1998).
Link: “Tribe”
Representations of African ethnic groups as “tribes” ground them as systemically negative.
Why is it "ethnicity" in Bosnia or Kosovo and "tribe" in Africa? Why are certain African cultural
groups, residing in "jungles" designated pygmies while northern, caribou herding Europeans of similar
physical stature are referred to as Laplanders? Why were the Sans People (South Africa) renamed
Hottentot? Can one conclude that negative reportage of events in Africa, compared to other reporting
and spin tactics, by major news organizations, like racism in America, is systemic? Can the news
chroniclers, wire services, media organizations, and other gatherers of news, find nothing of value to report
when Africa is the subject-and a sound byte at that? The media industry practice of consistently practicing
the opposite is deeply troubling.
Link: US Key
Even as they aid Africa, the affirmative caters to America- feeding the citizens reasons why
the world must subscribe to America and adhere to our culutre
The Americanization of crises also plays into this proclivity. Americans are terribly preoccupied with
themselves. The Americanization of events makes the public feel that the world subscribes, and must
subscribe, to American cultural icons—and if it doesn’t or can’t it is not worth the bother, because
clearly the natives are unworthy or the issue or event is. Media consumers are tied to a tether of cultural
images. This is a fact well-known yet rarely acknowledged. Peoples in other countries know that when
they use Western icons to help define their struggles the West pays greater attention. So the student
democracy movement in Tiananmen Square made sure to carry their Statue of Liberty in front of the cameras
and protesters outside an Indonesian courtroom sang the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” while
facing the microphones. Would our interest in those events have been as great without those signifiers? We
draw historical parallels and make cultural connections between our world and that of the “other.” The lone
man defying the Chinese authorities by standing in front of the line of tanks was for us another Patrick Henry
shouting, “Give me liberty or give me death.” We take for granted the placards quoting Thomas Jefferson
and Martin Luther King, Jr., which are written in English—but are carried by citizens of China or Croatia or
Chechnya.
Focusing on pain and suffering in far off places allows us to maintain a distance and
superiority. The west becomes separate and benevolent and refuses to actively engage the
circumstances. Tossing aid justifies our inaction to structural changes. The aff has no long
term solvency, they just want to feel good.
U.S. news organizations' earlier experiences, particularly in Ethiopia and Somalia, demonstrated that at
least for a few weeks U.S. news viewers would be content to watch the pain and suffering of others as
long as the story remained an uncomplicated one of U.S. benevolence. Simplifying humanitarian
stories for domestic audiences in terms of what the West is doing for Africans allows journalists and news
consumers alike to assume a certain superiority. As a result, the West is made separate and distant
from Africa, which permits journalists to ignore questions about how historical and contemporary
western involvement contributes to current problems (Hawk 1992; Fair 1996; Girardet 1996; Myers,
Klak, and Koehl 1996). Speaking of how the U.S. media simplified its Rwandan coverage, ABC's Ted
Koppel explained: Maybe it's a natural outgrowth of the age of television, but we do prefer to keep our
crises simple, stories with a definable beginning and a predictable end. We like our villains to be
foreign and our heroes home-grown. What we do not like are long, open-ended, complicated
involvements far from home, in which America's good intentions are misunderstood. By those
standards, we will not much like even our limited involvement in Rwanda. It is one thing to respond with
American skill and generosity to a human disaster, fly in the food and the medicine, build the roads,
set up the water purification plans. But at that point, our national attention span starts to lag. If people
are no longer dying at the rate of 2000 a day
Link: Genocide
Media framing of genocide frame violence through stereotypes of primordial tribalism for
the sake of audiences.
For media organizations, coverage of Rwanda's 1994 genocide was challenging. Logistically, U.S. news
media had to scramble to gain entry into a country where conditions were deteriorating rapidly.
Organizationally, because few U.S. newsgroups support regular reporting from Africa and still fewer operate
bureaus on the continent, scarce resources for international reporting had to be redirected from regions
thought to be of greater geopolitical and/or cultural interest to American consumers. Journalistically, U.S.
reporters were dropped into a region where they knew little, and where their own government
advocated disinterested noninvolvement. Hence, reporting on the Rwandan genocide was typical of
U.S. coverage of Africa generally. Journalists relied on stereotypes--thoroughly tested by news
organizations in stories set in other African countries, such as Uganda, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Sudan--
that characterized the genocide in Rwanda as the result of some inexplicable, uncontrollable
primordial tribalism that drove Hutus and Tutsis to murder. The framing of news coverage of the
Rwandan genocide as localized Hutu-Tutsi warfare made news reports simpler to produce and easier
for U.S. television audiences to digest. Still, the Rwandan genocide was not a "good" news story for many
U.S. news organizations. Media attempts to peg events neatly as one tribe pitted against another
demanded that reporters be able to identify which tribal side U.S. audiences should support. The
problem with the Rwandan genocide story was that reporters at the outset were unable to make clear
distinctions as to which side was good or bad. This ambiguity caused the genocide story to receive far less
coverage than subsequent movements of thousands of refugees into settlement camps in 1995 and 1996
(Minear et al. 1996; Murison 1996; De Waal 1997). ).
Link: Prioritize Crisis Over Africa

The Western media exploits Africa to perpetuate the false ideal that all Africans are
subject to atrocities
What is disaster pornography? Africans define it as the Western media’s habit of blacking out Africa’s
stock markets, cellphones, heart surgeries, soaring literacy and increasing democratization, while
gleefully parading its genocides, armed conflicts, child soldiers, foreign debts, hunger, disease and
backwardness. I recently found myself making small talk with an airport official in the United States. “I
hear in Africa, people are very poor and hungry, that they don’t have anything to eat,” he said. “I saw a
documentary on Africa a few days ago on CNN, and there were all these hungry people, dying
children, with flies all over their faces....” Yeah, I replied hesitantly, not knowing exactly what a correct
response should be. My situation was not helped by 22 hours of travel, which had considerably dulled my
reflexes. “But you look well fed,” he said, scanning my generous proportions.
Link: Disaster
The Aff constantly perpetuates ignorant depictions of African people via atrocity
exploitation. All they show is disaster.
My short lecture had no effect whatsoever on my “student.” His next question was, “But, what is the problem
with Africa?” Clearly, nothing I had said could erase the “huge expanse of waste” picture of Africa
from his mind. I don’t blame him. Neither do I blame another official at a different airport who asked me if
Africans keep their cowries in banks. [Editor’s note: Cowries are shells that were used as mediums of
exchange in parts of Africa.] He was quite taken aback when I showed him a few naira notes [Nigerian
currency]. I also don’t blame some of my American friends when they ask me how I “picked up such good
English.” Far from picking up good English, I tell them, I have a background of solid British education. My
country, Nigeria, was a British colony until 1960. No one should blame these people or anyone else who
displays such profound ignorance about Africa. Rather than educate and enlighten by disseminating
fair, balanced and accurate information, all that the Western media seem to be keen on showing the
West about Africa is backwardness, disease, hunger, want, deprivation, banditry, brigandage,
slaughter fields, child soldiers, gang-raped girls, harassed mothers, wasted children, flies feasting on
the living and vultures waiting to devour the near-dead. Goodness!
Link: Afro-Pessimism
The affirmative perpetuation of the media’s negative perception of Africa as a whole limits
progressive politics and spreads a false image of what Africa is
Hugh Hamilton in “Ownership, Diversity & Race: Confronting (Mis) Representations of Africa in the US
Media” also highlights the same thread. “The dominant images of Africa in American mainstream media
are of a dark and desolate continent, riven by tribal conflict, beleaguered by pestilence, poverty and
disease, a place of fear and futility ...of despair and depression, of a lost people languishing in a lost
land somewhere beyond the edge of modern civilization.” Their Excellencies examined the record of
coverage of some of America’s most distinguished publications—The New York Times, The Washington
Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and U.S. News & World Report. They reviewed these
publications over a 10-year period—from 1994 to 2004—and “found their coverage of the continent to be
anything but fair and balanced.” Such an incredible labor of love, considering the fact that many of them had
more than enough to do with Africa’s present sorry state. They therefore concluded that “the findings of this
(and other) surveys indicate that coverage of Africa, by the leading sources of American media is, at best,
dismissive of the continent’s progress and potential, and thus leading to continued ‘exotification’ and
marginalization of the African continent. At worst, coverage disregards recent trends toward
democratization, thus betraying an almost contemptuous lack of interest in the potential and progress
being achieved on the continent.”
The structural lens of western representations of Africa is a negative one. All reports have
to conform to the traditional stereotypes of grotesque images.
Influenced first by colonialism and then by Cold War politics, this contemptuous tone has long shaped
and fashioned Western media perceptions of Africa. As I learned very quickly in the U.S, for American
readers or viewers to be interested, news out of Africa must be negative. It must conform to the
traditional stereotypes in its spotlight on grotesque and sensational events. It must show misery,
corruption, mismanagement, starvation, primitive surroundings and, as in the case of Somalia, chaos
and outright anarchy.
In Somalia and elsewhere, news reports show white people feeding black people. You never see Africans
helping themselves.
Foreign correspondents in African capitals and their superiors in the media gate-keeping chain seem to
have these perceptions ingrained in them. From newsgathering in Africa to publication and broadcast
thousands of miles away, stories about Africa are looked at with these negative lenses. Even more
unfortunately, reporters and editors with a broader vision run the risk of having their stories
disbelieved and unused. Little wonder they learn to toe the expected line.
Western media perpetuates afro-pessimism via disaster porn

The persistent phenomenon of how the Western Media have continued to treat Africa negatively is as
topical today as it was nearly two decades ago when many Africans and other aggrieved proponents
campaigned for the adoption of a new world information order as the best corrective approach. I
suggest, not in any new way or fresh revelations, that the problem about Western media reporting on
Africa goes beyond professional inadequacies and structural bias. Socio-cultural factors have
continued to account significantly for the stereotyping archetype, which has remained a hallmark of
Western collection and dissemination of information about Africa.
Link: Newsbites
The Aff’s exploitation of suffering and conflict through newsbites instead of actual analysis
is the main contributor to Afro-pessimism in America
Ezekiel Makunike addresses the same concerns in “Out of Africa: Western Media Stereotypes Shape
Images.” “We hear about famines and coups, but not the rejuvenation of its cities and the cultural vitality of
its village life ... about oppression and massacres, but not education, economic self-help and political
development ... about poaching and habitat destruction, but not ongoing active efforts at conservation,
reforestation and environmental awareness.” The TransAfrica Forum, a body which aims to influence U.S.
policy on Africa and the diaspora, surveyed two of the most esteemed newspapers in the United States—The
New York Times and The Washington Post—between March and August 2000. Its study showed that the
vast majority of news stories fell within only three categories—AIDS, development and conflict. The
study found no reports on regional economic or political cooperation in Africa, nor one article on the
private sector. The study concluded that “one would have expected the New York Times and the
Washington Post to make an effort to inform American citizens and policymakers in a much more
balanced, detailed, and fair manner. Failure to address this issue will contribute to an increase in Afro-
pessimism in America.”
Link: Empathy
The desire to empathize with the oppressed and give aid is how we compensate with images
of misery. But trying to become one with the oppressed doesn’t help them. All it does is
wish away our feelings of guilt.
Jackson 04 (Michael, The Prose of Suffering and the Practice of Silence, Spiritus: A Journal of Christian
Spirituality, http://muse.uq.edu.au.ts.isil.westga.edu/journals/spiritus/v004/4.1jackson.html, prof. of Anthropology at
Univ of Copenhagen)
But men like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Tom Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Owen, and John Adams,
though exposed to the spectacle of mass suffering, did not themselves suffer the hardships, pain, and
deprivations that moved them so deeply. What was it, then, that drove these men to want to alleviate
the suffering of "the people," en masse, and to create a world in which equal rights included the right to
wellbeing and happiness, as well as the right to decide how one was governed? For the Americans, "the
abject and degrading misery" of slavery and African-American labor "was present everywhere."7 For
European intellectuals, urban poverty and misery was equally ubiquitous and unavoidable, and it is possible
that their revolutionary thinking was driven as much by the sheer awfulness of coexisting with such large
numbers of distressed human beings as by enlightenment and compassion. This situation reflected the
changes that had taken place in Europe as a result of industrialization. By the 18th century, the dense
concentrations of people in cities, and the intensification of urban misery, meant that the effects of poverty,
disease, overcrowding, and pollution could not be ignored. [End Page 48] In 1818, the English poet John
Keats visited the city of Belfast in northern Ireland. The scenes that met his eye are pretty much the same that
a traveller encounters in many Third World cities today, crowded with youngsters from rural areas seeking
their fortune or people displaced by war. Since the turn of the century, rural poverty and the effects of the
Industrial Revolution had "sucked so many people into Belfast that its population had expanded by 50 per
cent."8 Keats, travelling with a close friend, Charles Brown, was deeply troubled by the suffering he saw.
"What a tremendous difficulty," he wrote his brother Tom, "is the improvement of the condition of such
people—I cannot conceive how a mind 'with child' of Philosophy could gra[s]p at possibility—with me it is
absolute despair."9 But Keats' despair at how this suffering might be alleviated gives way to an
acceptance of life's unavoidable hardships, and a fascination with how one might "convert the brutal
facts of life into perceptions which might 'do the world some good.'"10 Subtly, the desire to reform a
barbarous social system is tempered by a more fervent desire to transmute the suffering around him
into a form that improves his own soul. "Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an
Intelligence and make it a soul?" he wrote to his brother George in 1819, observing that this "system of salvation" was very different
from Christianity, and did not "affront our reason and humanity."11 This turn to inwardness is, of course, characteristic of
romanticism. But it is a turn that is born of a frustration to change the world politically. Faced with entrenched
inequality, and the impossibility of social change, the romantic falls back on his own emotions, his own
thoughts, his own suffering—what Coleridge called "inner goings-on" and Luc Boltanski calls a
"metaphysics of interiority,"12 and Sartre calls "magical action."13 That is to say, when action on the world
around us proves impossible, we have recourse to action on our own emotions and thoughts, thereby
transforming the way we experience the world. Unable to flee an assailant, a person may faint. Unable to win an
argument, a person may resort to verbally abusing his opponent. Unable to do anything about an impending crisis, a person may worry
himself sick about it, as if this increase in anxiety will make some real difference. Unable to stop thinking about a traumatic event, a
person may refuse to speak of it, as if silence will make the event go away—a view contained in the English saying "Least said, soonest
mended." Time does not allow me to review all these magical strategies, but a brief summary of two may be helpful. One such
strategy is to magic the problem away by merging oneself with it—identifying so completely with the
misery around you that the boundary between oneself and the object of one's concern is effectively
dissolved. Van Gogh provides a poignant example of this empathic identification. Writing to his brother
Theo in the winter of 1880, Vincent confesses that his "only [End Page 49] anxiety is: how can I be of use
in the world?" At this time he is preparing himself to be an evangelist among the coal miners of the
Borinage region, west of Mons. In order to commit himself body and soul to the poor, he feels he must
cut himself off from his family, to "cease to exist" for them. He neglects his appearance, goes hungry
and cold, and gives the little he has to peasants and workers. But who is helped by this self-abasing
sympathy? What good can come of this identification with the oppressed? Vincent feels imprisoned and
melancholic. Frustrated in his efforts to alleviate the misery of humankind, he ends up seeking to annihilate
his anguish by steeping himself in the suffering around him. But nothing is really changed. In his act of
martyrdom, the martyr has simply made his own troubled conscience disappear by a sleight of hand,
donning the sackcloth of those he had set out to save.
Impact: Consumption (1/2)

Representations of suffering condemn aid to be at the will of market commodification.
Scott's experience raises two questions: What exactly made suffering so interesting to audiences in this
period? And, why did charity officials suspect that a sensational interest in suffering might be an asset in
their quest to cultivate compassion? Against the dominant critical view of sensationalism and
humanitarianism as distinct and competing cultural developments, I will contend in this essay that modern
"humanitarianism" is in fact a creation of a sensationalistic mass culture. My main concern here will be
with the second decade of the twentieth century, the moment when humanitarianism became a mass
phenomenon and when charity organizations developed the fundraising techniques (professional
publicity departments and manipulative emotional appeals) that are still most familiar to us today. A
careful look at charitable publications over this formative period discloses surprising similarities in the
presentation and consumption of charity texts and the pulp magazines, advertisements, and
commercial movies of an increasingly entertainment-oriented mass culture. As it turns out, it was only
when philanthropy became a marketing venture and when donors began to be treated and courted as
consumers who had to be entertained that philanthropy could become a mass phenomenon. By paying
especially close attention to the content of the American Red Cross Magazine and its contribution to the
emergence of the American Red Cross as the most important charity organization of the twentieth century, I
hope to enhance our understanding of the social and emotional scaffolding of modern philanthropy.
The culture of imagery creates philanthropy into a commercial activity and individuals as
participants in a dream world of mass consumption
Charity organizations took full advantage of the opportunities presented by the new mass culture of
movies and mass-circulation newspapers to beguile the public into "acts of benevolence." Even as
publicists at the YMCA and the Red Cross continued to speak warmly about the compassion and intelligence
of their supporters, they began to imagine donors in much the same way that advertisers were imagining
consumers: emotional, suggestible, (and significantly) female. Indeed, I would argue that they were fully
implicated in the dominant cultural project of the age: producing a society of consumers. In so doing
they were moving humanitarianism further out of the moral realm and into the "dream world of mass
consumption"—turning philanthropy itself into a consumerist activity. It was thus quite appropriate for
charity workers to borrow marketing strategies from movies, pulp magazines, and popular dailies. Now,
more than ever, philanthropic institutions found themselves competing with commercial ventures in a
(sensationalistic) mass culture for the attention of the public. From this point on, fundraisers would have
to devote as much attention to advertising as to ethics, and to "entertainment" as to education.
Impact: Consumption (2/2)

Depictions of suffering create our subjectivity to be based on stimulation. This creates
simplistic moral perspectives that shroud explication or context.
One notable and significant effect of the war was to erode Victorian prohibitions against showing brutality on
screen. In September 1917, the very month that Robert H. Scott was dropping in on movie theaters
throughout Alaska on his recruitment drive for the Red Cross, the CPI established a Division of Film to
develop and distribute thrilling war films that were expected to encourage citizens to enlist or to buy liberty
bonds. Despite concerns that overly vivid dramatizations of the brutality of war might deter some men from
enlisting, these movies proved very successful. Commercial motion picture companies took advantage of this
new opening and were so successful at enticing millions of Americans into theaters to watch exciting
(propagandistic) war films that the War Industries Board took the extraordinary step of recognizing hitherto
"disreputable" Hollywood as an "essential industry." And audiences became so used to the "patriotic"
screening of violence and suffering that the censorious mayor of New York who cut violent scenes from
Griffith's propaganda film Hearts of the World was accused of being pro-German. The war years disarmed
opposition to public representations of violence thus changing the rules for portraying suffering in
charitable publications. The movies, meanwhile, were transforming the way victims were imagined.
Although Hollywood movies, and even government newsreels, did not depict the sufferings of war with any
particular exactness, they did—through such cues as music, framing, and quivering close-ups—shape the
ways viewers responded emotionally to the sufferings of war. Given that movies were "especially good
at conveying impressions of speed, action and violence," cinematic representations of suffering
unsurprisingly tended to emphasize spectacle and sentimentality over explication or context, feeding
simplistic moral perspectives. By the time of the Armistice, the war movie was the most successful type of
film in the country; not coincidentally, the horror movie was also emerging as a major genre. Mass culture,
in short, was educating Americans how to see and feel suffering. Recent critics have plausibly argued that
mass culture engendered a distinctively "modern form of subjectivity," one shaped by, and
characterized by, an appetite for sensory stimulation, for agitation, thrills, and shocks. If this is so, then
it should hardly be a surprise to discover that philanthropic groups seeking to move public sentiment
should have adapted to these new conditions. The American Red Cross, which was initially granted
exclusive control over the distribution of government war films, certainly hoped to promote humanitarian
ideals (which, in practice, were often conflated with war aims) by making full use of the sensational mass
media. This accommodation with mass culture decisively transformed the humanitarian enterprise,
shifting it into the orbit of the entertainment world.
Impact: Spread Cap (Foreign)

Exploiting atrocity is an empirical example of the Western attempt to intervene in ‘conflict’
to expand cultural capitalism
Slavoj Zizek, researcher at the institute of sociology at the university of Ljubljana, The Plague of Fantasies,
1997. pg. 16-17
Apropos of a phantasmic scene, the question to be asked is thus always: for which gaze is it staged?
Which narrative is it destined to support? According to some recently published documents, the British
General Michael Rose, head of the UNPROFOR forces in Bosnia, and his special team of SAS operatives,
definitely had a ‘hidden agenda’ in Bosnia: under the pretence of maintaining a truce between the so-called
‘warring factions’, their secret task was also to place the blame on the Croats, and especially the Muslims
(soon after the fall of Srebrenica, for example, Rose’s operatives suddenly ‘discovered’, in northern Bosnia,
some Serb bodies allegedly slaughtered by the Muslims; their attempts to ‘mediate’ between Muslims and
Croats actually inflamed the conflict between them, etc.); these diversions were intended to create the
perception of the Bosnian conflict as a kind of ‘tribal warfare’, a civil war of everybody against
everybody else in which ‘all sides are equally to blame’. Instead of a clear condemnation of the Serb
aggression, this perception was destined to prepare the terrain for an international effort of ‘pacification’
which would ‘reconcile the warring factions’. From a sovereign state, the victim of aggression, Bosnia
was suddenly transformed into a chaotic place in which ‘power-mad warlords’ acted out their
historical traumas at the expense of innocent women and children .... Lurking in the background, of
course, is the pro-Serbian ‘insight’ according to which peace in Bosnia is possible only if we do not
‘demonize’ one side in the conflict: responsibility is to be equally distributed, with the West assuming
the role of the neutral judge elevated above local tribal conflicts.
Impact: Consumption = Cap (Domestic)

Victim imagery exploits those suffering in order to promote mass consumption of these
images- in other words- the ideology of capitalism
Slavoj Zizek, researcher at the institute of sociology at the university of Ljubljana, The Plague of Fantasies,
1997. pg. 18
The same operation is easily discernible in the abundant media reports on the ‘saintly’ activities of Mother
Teresa in Calcutta, which clearly rely on the phantasmic screen of the Third World. Calcutta is regularly
presented as a Hell on Earth, the exemplary case of the decaying Third World megalopolis, full of
social decay, poverty, violence and corruption, with its residents caught in terminal apathy (the facts
are, of course, rather different: Calcutta is a city bursting with activity, culturally much more thriving
than Bombay, with a successful local Communist government maintaining a whole network of social
services). Into this picture of utter gloom, Mother Teresa brings a ray of hope to the dejected with the
message that poverty is to be accepted as a way to redemption, since the poor, in enduring their sad fate with
silent dignity and faith, repeat Christ’s Way of the Cross .... The ideological benefit of this operation is
double: in so far as she suggests to the poor and terminally ill that they should seek salvation in their
very suffering, Mother Teresa deters them from probing into the causes of their predicament — from
politicizing their situation; at the same time, she offers the rich from the West the chance of a kind of
substitute-redemption by making financial contributions to her charitable activity. Again, all this
works against the background of the phantasmic image of the Third World as Hell on Earth, as a place
so utterly desolate that no political activity, only charity and compassion, can alleviate the suffering.2’
Impact: Cap - Terminal

Capital’s destructive cycle will lead to the end of humanity
Slavoj Zizek, professor of philosophy at the university of Ljubljana, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre
of Political Ontology, 1999, pg. 4
While this book is philosophical in its basic tenor, it is first and foremost an engaged political
intervention, addressing the burning question of how we are to reformulate a leftist, anti-capitalist
political project in our era of global capitalism and its ideological supplement, liberal-democratic
multiculturalism. One of the photos of 1997 was undoubtedly that of members of some indigenous tribe
from Borneo carrying water in plastic bags to put out gigantic fires which were destroying their habitat, the
ridiculous inadequacy of their modest effort matched by the horror of seeing their entire life-world disappear.
According to newspaper reports, the gigantic cloud of smoke covering the entire area of northern
Indonesia, Malaysia and the southern Philippines derailed nature itself, its normal cycle (because of the
continuous darkness, bees were unable to accomplish their part in the biological reproduction of plants). Here
we have an example of the unconditional Real of global Capital perturbing the very reality of nature —
the reference to global Capital is necessary here, since the fires were not simply the result of the
‘greed’ of local wood merchants and farmers (and of corrupt Indonesian state officials allowing it), but also
of the fact that because of the El Niflo effect, the extraordinary drought did not end in the rains which
regularily quench such fires, and the El Niflo effect is global. This catastrophe thus gives body to the Real
of our time: the thrust of Capital which ruthlessly disregards and destroys particular life-worlds,
threatening the very survival of humanity. What, however, are the implications of this catastrophe? Are
we dealing merely with the logic of Capital, or is this logic just the predominant thrust of the modern
productivist attitude of technological domination over and exploitation of nature? Or furthermore, is this very
technological exploitation the ultimate expression, the realization of the deepest potential of modern
Cartesian subjectivity itself? The author’s answer to this dilemma is the emphatic plea of ‘Not guilty!’ for the
Cartesian subject.
Capitalism risks extinction

Melbourne Indymedia, May 13, 2003, p. http://www.melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2003/05/47400.php.
(DRGOC/E244)
We cannot be certain whether such an innate instinct for freedom exists but as Chomsky has stated, "by
denying the instinct for freedom, we will only prove that humans are a lethal mutation, an
evolutionary dead end: by nurturing it, if it is real, we may find ways to deal with dreadful human
tragedies and problems that are awesome in scale." These problems are so grave that we are left,
contrary to the option offered by Washington of "hegemony or survival", with two fundamental choices;
self-induced extinction or emancipation from the forces of social domination. Capitalism and indefinite
human survival are incompatible, not only for the reasons stated here.
Impact: Capitalist Exploitation

Representations of Afropessimism create the continent as subservient to Western profit.
Africans, themselves, see no value in decimating these animal populations for profit. Yet, those Western
Media moguls, who can find only the negative when Africa is the subject, create Africa's world image
almost entirely to serve their capitalististic greed while simultaneously denigrating the continent's
global image. It is an image again that is put on Africa by outsiders, primarily Europeans, whose abiding
motivation is profit. That image is as dark as the pervasive fear conjured up in the their minds. On the
other hand, Africa herself projects warmth and welcome. Even this aspect of the African personality is
cinematographic in that it appeals to the Western tourist's palette through its media: adventure, safari, natural
wonders, big game hunting, and the Sun City like attractions.
This "other" designation works always to the advantage of its creator. Usually, the "other" is not
sufficiently powerful to respond to media opprobrium because of political, social, economic, and resource
deprivation or disadvantageous alliances with external imperialist, political, and economic dynamics.
An early historian noted, " we flatter ourselves imagining African peoples as primitive or barbarous
prior to European interference in her affairs, and that it is we who have civilized them. But it is theory that
lacks historical foundation...The Empire of Ghana flourished during Europe's dark ages; Mali and Nigeria
had highly complex civilizations prior to European military intervention and colonial adventurism in Africa."
Africa's contribution to European and world technological and later capitalistic development, exacted through
infamous treaties and the concordat, especially, in the final analysis, was of no direct or collateral benefit to
the indigenous owners. Africa's resources, lands, people, and cultures were expropriated. Miscreant
behavior, resulting in not just massive disruption of African people's cultural norms and values, as well,
artificial territorial boundaries across communal lands, forced European acculturation, etc., were
sanctioned by every institution in the societies (of Europe)
Impact: History Erasure / Capitalist Exploitation

The affirmative’s biased representations rob Africa of its culture and identity for Western
profit gain at the expense of African nations.
Chavis 98 (Rod, U Penn, http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Workshop/chavis98.html)
The press of those early Darwinian years and its successor today, continues a tradition: stereotype and
bombast, bias and disdain often are warp and woof of media coverage when Africa is the subject.
Western Media treat the African continent as a malignant appendage rather than as an integral, systemic part
of the earth and all its natural functions in accordance with universal laws. Its indigenous populations are
depicted as without value. One needs surgical removal while the other should quietly accept his biblical
destiny: the curse of Ham.
Inarguably, much of what is known today, indeed, has its origins and basis in Africa: Kemet (Egypt), as the
precursor in all fields of human activity and the world's foundation upon which subsequent epistemology is
based, magnanimously passed on its knowledge to the world: a world that would have developed much
slower without the benefit of ancient Kemet's highly developed and organized dynastic civilizations. Her
gifts to the world, intellectually and in all known spheres of human development, is unequivocal:
mathematics, science, astrology, architecture, medicine, building, the arts, language, metaphysics, religion,
and spirituality.
What do negative media images, conveyed by the Western Media about Africa communicate? What
darkness prevails in the mind of the producer(s)? What gains for whom derive from journalistic bombast
and unmitigated stereotype of a whole continent? Nouns and adjectives like hut, dark, tribe, King Kong,
tribalism, primitive, nomad, animism, jungle, cannibal, savage, underdeveloped, third world, developing,
etc., are yet pervasive when Africa is the story. Historically, since at least the issuance of the Papal Bull of
1455, when the Pope of Rome authorized Spain and Portugal to go out into the world, the one east and the
other west, to bring salvation to the heathens, -and, coincidentally, set up new territories for the crown-, word
of mouth initially and now sophisticated, globally reaching electronic news organizations, maintain a
negative reportage policy when the subject is Africa. Balance is rarely evidenced; why? Must a news
organization demonstrate objectivity, responsibility, ethical standards, and fairness? Images of Africa in the
Western Media, many times, are deeply troubling psychologically and emotionally, especially to those
claiming her as primordial heritage, lineage, and descendancy. They portray a no there there: no culture,
no history, no tradition, and no people, an abyss and negative void. Dark or black connotes fear,
foreboding, and evil. Africa, as a continent, African nations, African peoples and lands, in the Western
Media, and its constituencies, conjure up Richard Wright's classic Native Son or Ralph Ellison's Invisible
Man; she is the bastardized other, an ectoplasm, subjected to relentless vitriol and eternal
marginalization while her vast resources are ruthlessly extracted by neocolonialist forces, new world
order syndicates, and interlocking global corporate entities. For example, a recent U.S. ex-president, is
a principal in a mining operation in Zaire, a country the size of the U.S., West of the Mississippi. Why is
Zaire so poor, with all that wealth underground: copper, diamonds, gold, manganese, cobalt, inter alia.
Modern media, more than religious organizations and the academy, have the ability to broadcast to every
nook and cranny on the planet, instantaneously, any "news" or image concerning anything and do. Africa is
bludgeoned repeatedly by the press: famine, warlords, coup d'e tat, epidemics, drought, tribalism, and
on and on it goes.
Impact: Racism
The Aff’s depiction of African peoples mirrors Conrad’s “heart of darkness”, a dark war-
like continent waiting for a western savior – These depictions feed racism
Kperogi 07 (Daily Trust, Abuja (Nigeria), Staff, Farooq, http://allafrica.com/stories/200703110012.html)
The phrase "heart of darkness" has a lot of associative significance. It is a historically racist phrase that
has been central in the discourses of Western negrophobia. As any student of African literature knows,
the Heart of Darkness is a 1902 fictional representation of the Congo, and by extension Africa, by Joseph
Conrad, an English novelist whom our own venerable Chinua Achebe famously described as a "bloody
racist." Achebe's inimitable Things Fall Apart was, by his own confession, a response to Conrad's racist
denigration of Africans in the Heart of Darkness and Joyce Carey's equally condescending characterization of
Africans in Mr. Johnson, another racist fictional work set in northern Nigeria. I do not want to bore readers
with the storyline of Conrad's novel. It suffices to say, however, that Conrad deployed the motif of
"darkness" to encapsulate his sense of the barbarism, backwardness and spiritual death of Africans
whom he portrays as inhabiting a dreary, lifeless and colorless jungle in contradistinction to the
"civilization" and spiritual light of Europe. Since Achebe called global intellectual attention to the racist
underpinnings of the phrase "heart of darkness," most careful academics, journalists and public
commentators don't use it to refer to Africa lest they should be accused of racism. But CNN's Anderson
Cooper, in 2007, called Nigeria the "heart of darkness" using Jeff Koinange's tendentious report on the
Niger Delta as a convenient cover. And no eyebrows were raised from the plethora of anti-racist and anti-
defamation groups in America! When I called the attention of a CNN editor to this, his only response was
that he didn't watch the domestic version of the report and could therefore offer no comment. The truth is
that the report fits perfectly well with the mental pictures Americans are made, even forced, to have of
Africa. A report that was supposed to highlight the plight of Niger Deltans under the tyranny of oil
companies and the Nigerian state became, in reality, an informational staple to feed the ever ravenous
racist fantasies of Americans about Africa. In the video, we see menacing, hooded "militants" dancing
themselves to a state of "trance," aiming their guns at poor kidnapped Pilipino oil workers, and insisting that
they would only grant CNN an interview in the middle of the river for "spiritual" reasons-and such other
racist banalities that are irrelevant to the core of the story. And then you have naked children walking in fetid
refuse dumps, and half-naked men in filthy, begrimed makeshift huts fishing on the bank of the river. We all
know these are atypical scenes. But the object of the report is not to highlight the desperate state of the
Niger Delta, but to provide a journalistic endorsement (by an "African" journalist) that Africa is indeed
(still) the "heart of darkness" where people are notoriously superstitious and backward; where people live
in a state of nature, wear no clothes, live on trees or at best in mud houses, are untouched by the
faintest sprinkle of "modernity"-and maybe in need of a white "savior." This caricature of Africa
achieves two purposes: it reminds white Americans how truly racially superior they are, and makes the
Black American population feel so grateful that their ancestors were enslaved by white brutes and
brought to America that demands for reparations for slavery not only seem unreasonable but also
preposterous. And these calculations have worked perfectly over the years.
African disaster exploitation is selected with completely different standards- the media
doesn’t even think twice before exploiting Africans anymore
Oxfam's Davis said pictures from Africa were often selected using totally different standards to those
that would normally apply elsewhere. For example, he said, picture editors would usually think at least
three times before publishing photographs of naked children, unless they were African famine victims.
"But naked famine's okay, it seems," Davis said. "Using pictures of bare-breasted women in a society
where the only other place we see that is salacious tabloids is not acceptable."
Impact: Racism (Terminal)

Racism comes first – outweighs nuclear war.
Brij Mohan, Professor at LSU, ECLIPSE OF FREEDOM, p. 3-4. (DRGCL/B1049) No Date
Metaphors of existence symbolize variegated aspects of the human reality. However, words can be
apocalyptic. "There are words," de Beauvoir writes, "as murderous as gas chambers. " Expressions can
be unifying and explosive; they portray explicit messages and implicit agendas in human affairs and
social configurations. Manifestly the Cold War is over. But them world is not without nuclear terror. Ethnic
strife and political instabilities in the New World Order -- following the dissolution of the Soviet Union --
have generated fears of nuclear terrorism and blackmail in view of the widening circle of nuclear powers.
Despite encouraging trends in nuclear disarmament, unsettling questions, power, and fear of terrorism
continue to characterize the crisis of the new age which is stumbling at the threshold of the twenty-first
century. The ordeal of existence transcends the thermonuclear fever because the latter does not directly
impact the day-to-day operations if the common people. The fear of crime, accidents, loss of job, and
health care on one hand; and the sources of racism, sexism, and ageism on the other hand have created a
counterculture of denial and disbelief that has shattered the façade of civility. Civilization loses its
significance when its social institutions become counterproductive. It is this aspect of the mega-crisis
that we are concerned about.
Impact: African Self-Hate

Biased media causes Africans to be ashamed of their history and devalues African
humanity.
Africa's image in the Western Media is not a self-portrait. It is not a what you see is what you get.
Because media conditioning shapes, molds, and monopolizes those images, references to Africa are
received sometimes with disdain and contempt. Even African descendants, who have virtually no cultural
competence, actually contribute to how Africa is projected globally. Ashamed of their "heritage and
historical past" they side with media characterizations projected through stories, datelines, specials, and
nightline episodes. This attitude, while supremely disturbing, also abets the media-as if they need assistance-
in denigrating Africa. Of course, the Cherokee, Apache, Lenape, etc., indigenous peoples here in America,
encountered the same thing when their lands were targeted for annexation and foreign domination and
control. Continual portrayals of Africa in a bad light only perpetuates ignorance in a world much closer in
proximity than ever before a media industry that thrives on the negative.
Africa's negative and contrived image, promoted in the Western Media, pervades the psyche, pre-empts
behaviors, infers worthlessness, disregards African humanity, and devalues the mind, while it
attenuates human spirituality and connectivity: key ingredients in equitable planetary wealth sharing. Do
media organizations, in the words of Shelly, "have responsibility for their creations"? What level of
journalistic professionalism must be achieved in order to obtain balanced, objective, and fair reportage on
events as they occur anyplace in Africa? Because the modus operandi is so entrenched, so readily applicable
to news treatment and for putting a local or provincial spin on news, newsgathering organizations feel no
compunction to do anything different or right. For example, two German doctors working in Kenya
conducted a significant study on Kemron, as a possible cure for AIDS. As mentioned earlier, the research
community was busy campaigning to lay the blame for AIDS on Africa. AIDS is alive and well. How many
advertising dollars were wasted in that effort: dollars that may have been better put into research activity.
Impact: Indifference / No Solvency

Overabundance of tragedy desensitizes people into indifference. Representations have to
become more and more horrific until it means nothing to people – this guts long term
solvency.
The last years of the Great War saw the emergence of a coherent, if hesitant, critique of compassion fatigue.
Receptive to revolutionary developments in the field of psychology that emphasized the preeminence of
irrational drives over reflective reason, impressed by the manifest ability of the new advertising profession to
manipulate popular desires, attentive to the power of the movies to move public tastes and values, and
taking advantage of a novel wartime toleration for images of violence, charity officials eagerly
experimented with ways to dramatize the suffering of the victims they most wanted to help. The lesson
seemed obvious. Prominent welfare writer Lilian Brandt announced the new orthodoxy in her prizewinning
1921 book How Much Shall I Give?: "[T]he more vividly the individuals are pictured, the greater the
returns." This was why, she explained, relief agencies had lately, and properly, begun to depend so heavily
on "'human interest stories,' photographs, and motion pictures." But there was a danger here. As long
ago as 1759, Adam Smith, one of the foremost architects of the humanitarian ideal, had warned that
overexposure to representations of suffering was likely to end in "indifference." By 1921, the law of
diminishing returns seemed to be taking hold. "Tragic photographs of starved children and skeleton
babies fail now to bring the response which could have been counted on a few years ago." An
overabundance of images, according to Brandt, was to blame. People, she thought, were losing their
capacity to respond appropriately to images and stories of suffering "because the horrors have become
so commonplace that they cease to arouse the sympathy. The emotions become fatigued, like the frog's
muscle in an experiment; increasing doses of stimulation must be applied to produce equal reactions,
and finally the point is reached at which it is impossible to excite any response."
Impact: Dependency
These images create false illusions, strip agency and ensures longterm dependency
Omaar and De Waal 93[Disaster Pornography from Somalia, Center for Media Literacy, Winter, Issue 61,
Rakiya Omaar and Alex de Waal, co-directors of African Rights (NGO)]
Reduced to nameless extras in the shadows behind Western aid workers or disaster tourists, the
grieving, hurting and humiliated human beings are not asked if they want to be portrayed in this
degrading way.
Do pictures of Somalia show herdsmen tending large flocks of well-fed camels, or farmers cultivating
ripening crops of sorghum and maize? Do they show vegetable markets flourishing in Mogadishu? Are we
allowed to see clan elders negotiating a local cease fire, or the women who have turned their homes over
to orphanages, filled with the laughter of healthy children? All these are just as much facets of life in
Somalia today as looting and starvation, but they are not what we are shown.
The truth is that, even in the areas of the country stricken by famine, outright starvation is the exception.
Most deaths are the result of disease. The great majority of people will survive-largely due to their own
efforts. International food aid is much less important than food grown by local farmers, the maintenance of
animal herds, having roots and berries to eat and charity of relatives and friends.
The most respectable excuse for selectively presenting images of starvation is that this is necessary to
elicit our charity. But famine relief experts concur that the total impact of our charitable giving is less
than what can be achieved if the stricken people are enabled to help themselves.
If "Operation Restore Hope" is to live up to its name, first it must restore humanity, self-respect and
dignity to the Somali people. This cannot be done while the press corps makes disaster pornography
pass for a true portrait of the Somali nation. No more, please.
Impact: Humanitarian Intervention

Western intervention is a rhetorical device used to justify self-serving goals which create
more humanitarian crisis and replicate the system of imperialism which sustains atrocities.
Podur 04 [Justin Podur, ZNet, Getting Beyond Hypocrisy of Humanitarian Intervention, September 29,
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=6325]
Gberie sensibly argues that the Sudanese government’s consent ought to be irrelevant (as irrelevant, for
example, as Israel’s consent ought to be if an international intervention to protect Palestinians from massacre,
assassination, and starvation were ever mounted). The example he provides, however, is equally unsavory to
anti-imperialists: “However, the issue of consent should be irrelevant. There was no consent in 1999, to the
aerial bombardment and insertion of some 50,000 NATO troops into Kosovo in response to the deaths of
some 2,000 people.” When one considers the problems the NATO intervention caused compared to
those it solved, this ‘success’ of ‘humanitarian intervention’ seems less ‘humanitarian’ and less
‘successful’ (7). The same is true of the world’s response to the mass murder in the Congo, which took
place largely in Rwandan and Ugandan-controlled parts of the Congo between 1998-2001 (8), while the
liberal interventionists were still trying to find ways of using the Rwandan genocide of 1994/5 as a
rhetorical device to justify future Western interventions. Clearly Ramesh Thakur, Vice Rector of the UN
University, who Gberie also cites, is correct when he argues that “Western Medicine is no cure for
Darfur’s ills”, and that “a Western intervention, far from offering a solution, may add to the
problems.” Thakur has good reasons for thinking so. The US’s actions in Afghanistan, where funds were
available for bombing but not for rebuilding, show that the US is more interested in building bases,
controlling regions, and controlling energy sources than solving local humanitarian crises. The oil
connection in Darfur also casts doubt on US humanitarian intentions. Sudan is a country with a Muslim
population and, even though the Islamist regime is oppressive and unpopular, an invasion would do little for
pro-US sentiment in a region where such sentiment is sorely lacking. US military doctrine, which
compensates for its reluctance to risk its soldiers by using firepower and ruthlessness against non-US
civilians, tends to have very un-humanitarian effects. A year after the Iraq invasion, there should be
little doubt about any of these points. Given that, one would have to disagree with the conclusion of the
Black Commentator’s well-reasoned editorial of September 23, 2004, that: “No matter how cynical U.S.
motives, Colin Powell’s invocation of the Genocide Convention in Darfur invigorates forces seeking a more
just world. When criminals are compelled to cite the law, we know that justice is within our reach.” (9) In
fact, we know no such thing. The Colin Powell brand of criminal always cites the law, whether he’s ignoring
it, upholding it, or tearing it up. Proposals for an African Union intervention as cited by Gberie, however
flawed, could have the best chance of success (it was African intervention that brought the Congo civil war to
a halt). The real world demands not allowing genuine concern for victims of atrocities to be transmuted
by interventionist hypocrites into apologetics for an imperialism that will ultimately produce more
victims of more atrocities. But those same victims deserve better than mere denunciations of
intervention and its apologists as hypocrites and warmongers. Perhaps Khalid Fishawy and Ahmed Zaki of
Egyptian alternative media site kefaya.org posed the challenge for movements best:
Impact: Afro-pessimism ÆPoverty / Root of War

These representations perpetuate policies and structures which prevent African progress.
Turns case.
Olujobi 06 [Gbemisola, African journalist,
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20061128_the_africa_you_need_to_know/]
Wilson Rutayisire, post-genocide director of Rwanda Information Services, says “the way Africa is covered
in the international media is not only charged with a partisan view but also responsible, to no small
measure, for the perpetuation of prejudices that exacerbate Africa’s problems.
“Although the media coverage Africa receives is not the principal cause of the problems Africa faces, it
provides the superstructure within which Africa is perceived and foreign policies on Africa are
prescribed.” According to Carol Pineau, it “comes at a high cost, even ... the cost of lives. Stories about
hardship and tragedy aim to tug at our heartstrings, getting us to dig into our pockets or urge Congress to
send more aid. But no country or region ever developed thanks to aid alone. Investment, and the job and
wealth creation it generates is the only road to lasting development. That is how China, India and the
Asian tigers did it. “Yet while Africa, according to the U.S. Government’s Overseas Private Investment
Corporation, offers the highest return in the world on direct foreign investment, it attracts the least.
Unless investors see the Africa that is worthy of investment, they won’t put their money into it. And that
lack of investment translates into job stagnation, continued poverty and limited access to education
and health care.” Rwandan President Paul Kagame says: “The constant negative reporting kills the
growth of foreign direct investment. There has even been a suggestion that it is meant to keep Africa in
the backyard of the global economy.” According to Charles Stith, former U.S. ambassador to Tanzania,
“One thing blocking a fuller perception of Africa’s progress may be implicit racism. There is a historic
framework that by definition sees Africa ... and Africans as inferior and negative and makes most
stories about the continent negative. By contrast, China has problems, but we see and hear other things about
China. Russia has problems, yet we see and read other things about Russia. That same standard should apply
to Africa.”
Poverty is the root of war

O’Donnell 04 [Katherine, Hartwick College, http://casnov1.cas.muohio.edu/cawc/documents/building%20north-south%20chapter.pdf.]
The U.S houses the School of the Americas so when will people understand organizing for the poor in the
belly of the beast or the danger of the poor in the U.S. getting organized against empire? The poor in the U.S.
should be seen as strategically important to all people who struggle against the daily terror of the empire.
When will religious, labor and legal communities hear our cries and see the invisible faces of our kids? When
a military base is built or a bomb is dropped, more kids will go hungry, more kids will die and become
forever more invisible. Poverty is the root cause of war and if we are serious about ending war and
poverty in the U.S. and the whole world, help organize the poor to speak for themselves ‘cause we’ve
learned important lessons from history. When those most affected by an issue are involved in the fight,
we can end those conditions around the world and in the U.S. Speaking for ourselves, linking
movements, no longer hiding the human rights violations of the U.S.; we will take down this empire.
Impact: Turns Case + Systemic Harms / Alt Key

Their representations turn the case and cause systemic harms that outweigh the case –
Only the alt solves
Igwe 04 [Leo, IHEU Growth and Development representative, http://www.iheu.org/node/1047]
Unfortunately, these mistaken beliefs about Africa have served the interests of the continent’s invaders,
missionaries, jihadists and colonizers. They have been used to justify a multitude of atrocities: slavery,
racism, colonialism, apartheid, oppression, exploitation, dispossession, deprivation, denudation and the
dehumanization of Africans and people of African descent. Humanism is thus needed to help address the
lingering legacy of interracial, intercontinental and intergenerational injustice and inequity that have marked
Africa’s relationship with the rest of the world. Secondly, Humanism will provide a veritable framework
for Africans to tackle, resolve and overcome their problems and difficulties. Today, human beings possess the
means through science and technology to ameliorate the human condition, and to advance human happiness and well being. But most
people in Africa are living and languishing in palpable poverty, hunger, misery, ignorance, and disease. With over 800 million people,
Africa contributes only 1% of global Gross Domestic Product and less than 3% of international trade. In spite of its abundant human and
natural resources, Africa has remained the poorest region with 49 of its countries classified as least developed. About half of Africa’s
population live on less than $1 per day while the mortality rate of children under five years of age is 140 per 1,000 and life expectancy at
birth only 54 years. Only 58% of the African population have access to safe water, and the literacy rate for people over 15 is 41%.
Armed conflicts often with tribal and religious dimensions have claimed millions of lives, disrupting and
shattering the livelihoods of tens of millions in Algeria, Angola, Burundi, Congo DRC, Eritrea, Ethiopia,
Ivory Coast, Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Uganda. Drought, famine and flood have disrupted
food production, causing more hunger, starvation and malnutrition. Diseases like malaria, cholera,
tuberculosis, polio, and HIV-AIDS are ravaging the continent. Overwhelmed by crippling debts, most
African economies are worse off today than they were during the colonial years. Harmful traditional
practices and taboos such as female genital mutilation, ritual killing, ‘witch’ killing, and the Osu caste
system, informed by superstition, occultism, and mysticism, have taken an enormous toll on progress
towards emancipation of the African spirit. In the face of problems, Africans invoke the supernatural. They
flee from applying their ‘unaided’ reason and intelligence. They depend on God and rely on the ‘powers’ of
spirits, deities, juju, charms and witchcraft. Throughout history, religious mercenaries – evangelical
Christians and Islamic jihadists who seek to convert Africans to alien faiths – have invaded the “black
continent”. They preach submission to the wills of their gods and salvation in the afterlife as answers to
Africa’s problems. Yet Africa’s problems still remain and in fact have grown and multiplied. Christianity and
Islam have remained impotent in the face of Africa’s troubles. Instead the two religions have contributed to
Africa’s woes, to its stagnation, alienation, and general underdevelopment. Indeed Christianity and Islam
have thrived and flourished while Africans suffer, starve, and die. Christianity and Islam did not prevent the
evils of slavery, colonialism and apartheid in Africa. Christianity did not prevent the genocide in Rwanda, the
war in Liberia, Sierra Leone or Congo DRC. A rebel group in Northern Uganda is fighting to overthrow the
government of Yoweri Museveni and enthrone a government based on the Ten Commandments.Millions of
Africans have lost their lives to holy wars like the Jihad of Uthman Dan Fodio, and to sectarian clashes and
religious bloodletting in Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria, and Sudan. All in all, religions have failed Africa. Religions
have corrupted Africa. The supernatural faiths have greatly undermined Africa’s quest for freedom,
emancipation, and progress. Africa’s foremost Humanist, Tai Solarin, echoed the view when he said “The
worst bane of African development is chronic dependence on the deity to solve all earthly problems”.
The tendency has been for most people to despair for Africa and its future. In pessimism, some have
dismissed the continent as a ‘basket case’ and ‘forgetful of the world and by the world forgot’. But it is
wrong to despair for Africa. In fact it is wrong to despair for any race, continent, or people. Because where
there are human beings, there is hope, there is a future. There is a lot of hope for Africa. Africa’s future is
replete with limitless opportunities, possibilities, and promises. But to realize these promises, Africans
must cultivate and embrace the Humanist virtues of self-help, self-reliance, courage, and critical
thinking. African people must be weaned from their congenital fear and reliance on the unknown – fate, god,
spirits, juju, and charms. Instead, they must learn to believe in themselves, given that, quoting Humanist
Manifesto II, ‘No Deity will save us, we must save ourselves’. Humanists believe that the only way for
Africa to ameliorate the human condition and achieve sustainable growth and development is to tackle
poverty, ignorance, diseases, and other problems through the use and application of reason, science, critical
intelligence and cooperative efforts. Humanism can help Africans achieve the good life, affluence, happiness,
and prosperity in the here and now, and not in the hereafter. The Humanist outlook will facilitate the
realization of African Enlightenment, intellectual awakening, and renaissance.
Impact: Structural Violence Outweighs

Structural violence is outweighs all war and nuclear weapons.
Gilman 97 [Robert, Context Institute, http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC04/Gilman1.htm]
Some comparisons will help to put these figures in perspective. The total number of deaths from all causes
in 1965 was 62 million, so these estimates indicate that 23% of all deaths were due to structural violence. By
1979 the fraction had dropped to 15%. While it is heartening to see this improvement, the number of deaths
is staggeringly large, dwarfing any other form of violence other than nuclear war. For example, the level of
structural violence is 60 times greater than the average number of battle related deaths per year since
1965 (Sivard 1982). It is 1.5 times as great as the yearly average number of civilian and battle field
deaths during the 6 years of World War II. Every 4 days, it is the equivalent of another Hiroshima.
Turns Case (1/4)

Compassion fatigue forces unconscious dismissal of the impacts
Susan D. Moeller in 1999 (Quals: Director of the Journalism Program and Assistant Professor of American
Studies at Brandeis University. , Source: Compassion Fatigue, Page: 237, KL)
To an astonishing extent, the media don’t tailor their coverage to anticipate or accommodate the public’s
indifference. Of course, compassion fatigue or compassion avoidance ultimately prevails—the story is
yanked from sight long before it is truly over, and even before that happens it receives less play than it
deserves. Hut the coverage of genocide — at least the coverage of those few cases of genocide that make it
into the news in the first place—may be one of the few instances where the media really do put their foot
down, when they really do insist on covering a story because the public should know. Public apathy about
Bosnia or Rwanda, for example, argues that few are watching or reading such stories—and that perhaps the
media needs to change their manner of telling this kind of news. But even if every reader and every
viewer turns the page or hits the button on the channel suffer when the horrific images pop up, at least the
media can say that they bore witness. “While much of the world was ignorant in 1940 of the efficiency of
the Nazi killing machine,” said The Cleveland Plain Dealer, “today on the doorsteps of the global village
a media-driven culture delivers fresh images daily of atrocities in Bosnia and Rwanda. . ."
The K turns case- abundance of suffering depictions deters people from advocating aid
New York University communication scholar Neil Postman was not surprised by the comments of those
interviewed in The Times. “The sheer abundance of images of suffering will tend to make people turn
away. People respond when a little girl falls down a well. But if 70,000 people in Bangladesh are killed,
of course people will say, ‘Isn’t that terrible’ but I think the capacity for feeling is if not deadened, at
least drugged.” “People seem to be paralyzed or just giving up,” observed Tom Getman, director of
government relations for the Christian relief organization World Vision, in 1991. “They seem to be saying
to themselves, ‘With so much going on, there’s little one person can do.’” The public can imagine the
rescue effort needed to rescue one trapped little girl, one starving child threatened by a vulture, but the
mind boggles at the logistics necessary to save millions. Some people don’t want to be reminded of
their helplessness. “I get upset watching the babies dying,” said Caroline Trinidad, a housewife and
mother of four interviewed in The Times article. “Who the hell wants to see that? I switch the channel.”
Others feel drained by all the tragedy and by the seemingly repetitive crises. “Americans just get tired
of seeing starving people on television,” said Al Panico of the Red Cross. “They end up just turning the
television off.”
Turns Case (2/4)

Representations of atrocity and suffering humanity promote commercial interests and hurt
actual aid efforts. The audience continually pursues the images.
ROBERT H. SCOTT WAS EXASPERATED. IT WAS SEPTEMBER 1917, AND HE WAS FAR from
home trying to establish a new chapter of the American Red Cross in Seward, Alaska. The task was urgent.
The United States had been at war for five months, and soldiers and civilians were dying by the millions in
the charnel house of Europe. Many more were wounded, hungry, or homeless. And it was up to Scott, as a
field representative for the Red Cross, to raise funds and supplies for this mass of suffering humanity.
But he was having a hard time of it. Here he was, in a motion picture theater (Red Cross guidelines
directed agents to go where the crowds were), trying to arrest the attention of an audience that had just
watched a film "of melodramatic atrocity." As a respectable citizen he took offense at the content of the
movie that preceded his presentation, full as it was of "elopements and scandal," but what clearly rankled
most was that the film had stolen his thunder. He had learned that the most effective way to awaken an
audience's sympathy for suffering strangers was to paint word pictures of cruel misfortune and broken
bodies. But how was he to compete with a thrilling movie—a rival attraction, as he lamented in American
Red Cross Magazine, with "two murders and so much bloodshed that my humble attempt to depict the
horrors of the European war did not meet with the response it had in other places, and it was
considered tame in comparison with the cinema horrors preceding"? As this observation reveals, for all
of Scott's public aversion to racy movies, which he maintained "should be forbidden by legislative
enactment," he was clearly disturbed less by the display of brutal images than by their misuse for the
shameless titillation of audiences and for the enrichment of private commercial interests. His concern,
by contrast, was to inspire the noblest sentiments of the men and women assembled before him, describing
incidents of violence and suffering to appall and shock them into acts of responsible compassion. This
undertaking was already leading his colleagues at the national headquarters of the American Red Cross to
produce their own "thrilling" films of the slaughter in Europe in order to win popular support for their
humanitarian ventures. And it was threatening to introduce a host of moral ambiguities that Scott, for
one, refused to acknowledge. Belonging to an organization, and a middle class, that formally esteemed
charity and humanitarianism as the highest achievements of civilization, Scott was careful to
distinguish his mission from that of theatrical entrepreneurs who, in his view, were always pandering to
the base desires of the masses. But should we accept this distinction so easily? Did audiences actually
compartmentalize their emotional responses so neatly? Assembled in a movie house, a built environment in
which they were accustomed to being stimulated and amused, is it not possible that the people of Seward
should have thrilled to Scott's dramatic fundraising pitch in much the way that they had thrilled to the
sensational "atrocity" movie before it? And wasn't this precisely what Scott was banking on?
Turns Case (3/4)

The Aff will inevitably lead to the reproduction of the harms they want to solve- we turn
case
Just as the economic crisis of the West will not be complete so long as it can still exploit the resources of the
rest of the world, so the symbolic crisis will be complete only when it is no longer able to feed on the other
half's human and natural catastrophes (Eastern Europe, the Gulf, the Kurds, Bangladesh, etc.). We need this
drug, which serves us as an aphrodisiac and hallucinogen. And the poor countries are the best suppliers - as,
indeed, they are of other drugs. We provide them, through our media, with the means to exploit this
paradoxical resource, just as we give them the means to exhaust their natural resources with our technologies.
Our whole culture lives off this catastrophic cannibalism, relayed in cynical mode by the news media, and
carried forward in moral mode by our humanitarian aid, which is a way of encouraging it and ensuring its
continuity, just as economic aid is a strategy for perpetuating under-development. Up to now, the financial
sacrifice has been compensated a hundredfold by the moral gain. But when the catastrophe market itself
reaches crisis point, in accordance with the implacable logic of the market, when distress becomes scarce or
the marginal returns on it fall from overexploitation, when we run out of disasters from elsewhere or
when they can no longer be traded like coffee or other commodities, the West will be forced to produce
its own catastrophe for itself, in order to meet its need for spectacle and that voracious appetite for
symbols which characterizes it even more than its voracious appetite for food. It will reach the point
where it devours itself. When we have finished sucking out the destiny of others, we shall have to invent one
for ourselves
Turns Case (4/4)

Due to the affs reliance on catastrophe exploitation they not only justify the existence of the
catastrophes in the first place, but also inevitably lead to future creation of catastrophes to
exploit
No solution has been found to the dramatic situation of the under-developed, and none will be found since
their drama has now been overtaken by that of the overdeveloped, of the rich nations. The psychodrama of
congestion, saturation, super abundance, neurosis and the breaking of blood vessels which haunts us - the
drama of the excess of means over ends – calls more urgently for attention than that of penury, lack and
poverty. That is where the most imminent danger of catastrophe resides, in the societies which have run out
of emptiness. Artificial catastrophes, like the beneficial aspects of civilization, progress much more
quickly than natural ones. The underdeveloped are still at the primary stage of the natural, unforeseeable
catastrophe. We are already at the second stage, that of the manufactured catastrophe - imminent and
foreseeable - and we shall soon be at that of the pre-programmed catastrophe, the catastrophe of the third
kind, deliberate and experimental. And, paradoxically, it is our pursuit of the means for averting
natural catastrophe - the unpredictable form of destiny - which will take us there. Because it is unable to
escape it, humanity will pretend to be the author of its destiny. Because it cannot accept being confronted
with an end which is uncertain or governed by fate, it will prefer to stage its own death as a species.
Cap 2NC (1/2)

Their depictions of victims and the process of victimization has multiple implications:
primarily, the 1ACs focus on a moral obligation to solve harm done to the victims they
represent de-politicizes their cause, forcing victims to become passive onlookers, waiting
for a paternalistic western intervention instead of politicizing and participating in their
own struggles. In the ideology of the Aff, victims are deserving of our help only if they stay
that way– as soon as they assert political subjectivity, they become a threatening “Other.”
This ideology is the mechanism by which the real of today’s capital operates.
Slavoj Zizek, Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana University, 2000, The Fragile
Absolute, p. 54-60
Postmodern deconstructionists would probably reject such a direct reference to the Real of the ‘logic of Capital’ as too ‘essentialist’, as
not taking into account the radical openness and contingency of the struggle for hegemony. So what do we mean by it? Take the
example of South Africa: of course, the end of apartheid was not directly conditioned by the objective ‘logic of Capital’, by Capital’s
universalism which tends to subvert and transgress all natural boundaries — it resulted from the heroic struggle of thousands of
nameless freedom fighters. Nevertheless, as the current difficulties of the ANC government demonstrate, the end of apartheid confronted
the black majority with their true dilemma: should they risk actually disturbing the free functioning of Capital in order to undo the
effects of apartheid? Or should they make a pact with the Devil, and — like Clinton in the USA or New Labour in the UK — accept the
basic depoliticization of the economy, and limit themselves to the struggle for cultural, ethnic, sexual, etc., rights? The struggle for
hegemony within today’s postmodern politics does have a limit: it encounters the Real when it touches
the point of actually disturbing the free functioning of Capital. The top censored story of 1998 was that of a secret
international agreement called MAI (the Multilateral Agreement on Investment). The primary goal of MAI will be to protect the foreign
interests of multinational companies. The agreement will basically undermine national sovereignty by assigning to these corporations
powers almost equal to those of the countries in which they are located. Governments will no longer be able to treat their domestic Firms
more favourably than foreign Firms. Furthermore, countries that do not relax their environmental, land-use, and health and labour
regulations to meet the demands of foreign Firms may be accused of acting illegally. Corporations will be able to sue sovereign states if
they impose overstringent ecological or other standards — under NAFTA (the main model for MAI), Ethyl Corporation is already suing
Canada for banning the use of its gasoline additive MMT. The greatest threat, of course, is to the developing nations, which will be
pressured into depleting their natural resources for commercial exploitation. Renato Ruggerio, director of the World Trade Organization,
the sponsor of MAI, is already hailing this project — elaborated and discussed in a clandestine manner, with almost no public consul-
tation and media attention — as the ‘constitution for a new global economy. Just as for Marx, market relations provided
the true foundation for the notion of individual freedoms and rights, this is the obverse of the much-
praised new global morality celebrated even by some neoliberal philosophers as signalling the
beginning of an era in which the international community will be able to enforce a minimal code
preventing sovereign states from engaging in crimes against humanity even within their own territory.
in a recent essay, significantly entitled ‘Kosovo and the End of the Nation-State’, Vaclav Havel tries to
bring home the message that the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia: places human rights above the rights
of the state. The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was attacked by the alliance without a direct mandate from the UN. This did not
happen irresponsibly, as an act of aggression or out of disrespect for international law. It happened, on the contrary, out of respect for the
law, for a law that ranks higher than the law which protects the sovereignty of states. The alliance has acted out of respect
for human rights, as both conscience and international legal documents dictate Havel further specifies
this ‘higher law’ when he claims that ‘human rights, human freedoms, and human dignity have their
deepest roots somewhere outside the perceptible world . . . while the state is a human creation, human
beings are the creation of God’.36 If we read Havel’s two statements as the two premisses of a
judgement, the logical conclusion is none other than that NATO forces were allowed to violate existing
international law, since they acted as a direct instrument of the ‘higher law’ of God Himself— if this is not
a clear-cut case of ‘religious fundamentalism’, then this term is devoid of any minimally consistent meaning. Havel’s statement is
thus the strongest assertion of what Ulrich Beck, in an article in Die Suddeutsche Zeitung in April 1999, called ‘militaristic
humanism’ or even ‘militaristic pacifism’. The problem with this term is not that it is an Orwellian oxymoron
—reminding us of ‘Peace is war’ and similar slogans from Nineteen Eighty-Four — which, as such, directly belies the truth of its
position (against this obvious pacifist-liberal criticism, I rather think that it is the pacifist position — ‘more bombs and killing never
bring peace’ — which is a fake, and that one should heroically endorse the paradox of militaristic pacifism). Neither is it that, obviously,
the targets of a bombardment are not chosen out of pure moral consideration, but selectively, in
accordance with unacknowledged geopolitical and economic strategic interests (the Marxist-style criticism).
The problem is, rather, that this purely humanitarian-ethical legitimization (again) thoroughly
Zizek Continues…
Cap 2NC (2/2)

Zizek Continues…
depoliticizes the military intervention, changing it into an intervention in humanitarian catastrophe,
grounded in purely moral reasons, not an intervention in a well-defined political struggle. In other
words, the problem with ‘militaristic humanism/pacifism’ lies not in ‘militaristic’ but in
‘humanism/pacifism’: in the way the ‘militaristic’ intervention (in the social struggle) is presented as
help to the victims of (ethnic, etc.) hatred and violence, justified directly in depoliticized universal
human rights. Consequently, what we need is not a ‘true’ (demilitarized) humanism/pacifism, but a
‘militaristic’ social intervention divested of its depoliticized humanist/pacifist veneer. A report by
Steven Erlanger on the suffering of the Kosovo Albanians in The New York Times perfectly
encapsulates this logic of victimization. Its title is revealing: ‘In One Kosovo Woman, an Emblem of
Suffering’; the subject to be protected (by NATO intervention) is identified from the outset as a
powerless victim of circumstances, deprived of all political identity, reduced to stark suffering. Her basic
stance is that of excessive suffering, of traumatic experience that blurs all differences: ‘She’s seen too much, Meli said. She wants a rest.
She wants it to be over.’ As such, she is beyond any political recrimination — an independent Kosovo is not on
her agenda; she just wants the horror over: ‘Does she favor an independent Kosovo? “You know, I don’t care if it’s this
or that,” Meli said. “I just want all this to end, and to feel good again, to feel good in my place and my house with my friends and
family.”’ Her support of the foreign (NATO) intervention is grounded in her wish for all this horror to be over: ‘She wants a settlement
that brings foreigners here ‘‘with some force behind them.” She is indifferent about who the foreigners are.’ Consequently, she
sympathizes with all sides in an all-embracing humanist stance: ‘There is tragedy enough for everyone,
she says. “I feel sorry for the Serbs who’ve been bombed and died, and I feel sorry for my own people.
But maybe now there will be a conclusion, a settlement for good. That would be great.”’ Here we have
the ideological construction of the ideal subject—victim in aid of whom NATO intervenes: not a
political subject with a clear agenda, but a subject of helpless suffering, sympathizing with all suffering
sides in the conflict, caught up in the madness of a local clash that can be pacified only by the
intervention of a benevolent foreign power, a subject whose innermost desire is reduced to the almost
animal craving to ‘feel good again’. . . The ultimate paradox of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia was
thus not the one about which Western pacifists complained (by bombing Yugoslavia in order to prevent
ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, NATO in effect triggered large-scale cleansing, and thus created the very
humanitarian catastrophe it wanted to prevent), but a deeper paradox involved in the ideology of
victimization: the key aspect to note was NATO’s privileging of the now-discredited ‘moderate’
Kosovar faction of Ibrahim Rugova against the ‘radical’ Kosovo Liberation Army. This means that
NATO was actively blocking the full-scale armed resistance of the Albanians themselves. (The moment this
option was mentioned, fears started to circulate: the KLA is not really an army, just a bunch of untrained Lighters; we should not trust
the KLA, since it is involved in drug-trafficking and/or is a Maoist group whose victory would lead to a Khmer Rouge or Taleban
regime in Kosovo... .) After the agreement on the Serb Army’s withdrawal from Kosovo, this distrust of the
KLA resurfaced with a vengeance: the topic of the day was again the ‘danger’ that, after the Serb
Army’s withdrawal, the KLA would — as the NATO sources and the media liked to put it — ‘fill the
vacuum’ and take over. The message of this distrust could not have been clearer: it’s OK to help the
helpless Albanians against the Serbian monsters, but in no way are they to be allowed actually to cast
off this helplessness by asserting themselves as a sovereign and self-reliant political subject, a subject
with no need for the benevolent umbrella of the NATO ‘protectorate.. In short, while NATO was
intervening in order to protect the Kosovar victims, it was at the same time taking very good care that
they would remain victims; inhabitants of a devastated country with a passive population, not an
active politico-military force capable of defending itself. The NATO strategy was thus perverse in the
precise Freudian sense of the term: it was itself (co-)responsible for the calamity against which it offered
itself as a remedy (like the mad governess in Patricia Highsmith’s Heroine, who sets the family house on
fire in order to be able to prove her devotion to the family by bravely saving the children from the raging
flames.. .). What we encounter here is again the paradox of victimization: the Other to be protected is
good in so far as it remains a victim (which is why we were bombarded with pictures of helpless Kosovar
mothers, children and old people, telling moving stories of their suffering); the moment it no longer
behaves like a victim, but wants to strike back on its own, it magically turns all of a sudden into a
terrorist/fundamentalist/drug trafficking Other.... The crucial point is thus to recognize clearly in this ideology of
global victimization, in this identification of the (human) subject itself as ‘something that can be hurt’,
the mode of ideology that fits today’s global capitalism. This ideology of victimization is the very mode
in which — most of the time invisible to the public eye, and for that reason all the more ineluctable — the Real of Capital
exerts its rule.
Aff Impacts Are Suspect

Their impacts are suspect and founded upon Western Imperialism.
Olujobi 06 [Gbemisola, African journalist, http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20061128_the_africa_you_need_to_know/]
Eleven former African heads of state from all over the continent rose from the African Presidential
Roundtable, 2005, sponsored by Boston University’s African Presidential Archives and Research Center,
with a common conclusion. While agreeing, though with nice words, that most African governments have
been despotic, corrupt, capricious, inept and thoroughly useless, they lamented what they described as
“Africa’s image in the American media.”
Their Excellencies examined the record of coverage of some of America’s most distinguished
publications—The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and U.S.
News & World Report. They reviewed these publications over a 10-year period—from 1994 to 2004—and
“found their coverage of the continent to be anything but fair and balanced.” Such an incredible labor of
love, considering the fact that many of them had more than enough to do with Africa’s present sorry state.
They therefore concluded that “the findings of this (and other) surveys indicate that coverage of Africa,
by the leading sources of American media is, at best, dismissive of the continent’s progress and
potential, and thus leading to continued ‘exotification’ and marginalization of the African continent. At
worst, coverage disregards recent trends toward democratization, thus betraying an almost
contemptuous lack of interest in the potential and progress being achieved on the continent.”
African Progress Uniqueness

We control uniqueness. The truth about African development magnifies our argument.
Olujobi 6 (Gbemisola, African journalist, http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20061128_the_africa_you_need_to_know/)
The 2005 study by Boston University of Africa news coverage also revealed nothing about fewer civil wars,
economic growth or increased access to education on the continent. Disasters in Somalia, Rwanda and West
Africa dominated, while transitions to democracy in Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Namibia, Mozambique and
elsewhere were ignored.
Also grievously ignored by the Western media is the fact that a good number of African countries have made
real progress over the last few years. In 2005 alone, Africa posted an unprecedented growth of 4.5 percent, which
prompted Haiko Alfeld, Africa director at the World Economic Forum, to declare that the African continent has
“emphatically and irreversibly turned the corner.”
In its review of 2005, a year widely acclaimed as “The Year of Africa,” the World Economic Forum reports “a new
resolve [by Africans] to promote the African business and investment climate. Many African countries
extended economic reforms and put in place structures to fight corruption.” Really? Will someone please tell
the whole world that Africans are capable of helping themselves, and that they are not helpless, hapless and
hopeless?
The report goes on to say: “A key development on the business front was the rapid increase in Chinese and to some
extent Indian investment in African countries. In just a few years, trade and investment between China and Africa
has tripled, with the pace of such engagement becoming particularly vigorous during 2005.
“The trend has continued into 2006, as has the phenomenon of South African business expansion into the
continent.” And what is more, the report says, “These positive trends seem set to continue beyond 2006, given
their long-term nature.” Is anyone listening?
Africa indeed has turned the corner. In the last five years, Mozambique has reduced its poverty level from 70
percent to 55 percent and has doubled the number of its children in school. Kenya has introduced free
primary education, which has brought 1.2 million children back into school there. In Tanzania, 1,000 new
schools have been built and 18,000 teachers recruited to enable the nation to achieve the goal of primary
education for all in 2006—nine years before the target date of 2015.
Uganda has reduced HIV from 20 percent in 1991 to about 6.5 percent in 2001, showing that with political will,
the tide of an epidemic can be turned. In 1973, only three African heads of state were elected. Today, 40 countries
have had multiparty elections. Two years ago major conflicts affected 19 countries in Africa. Today they affect
only three countries.
The World Bank reports that countries like Senegal, Mozambique, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Uganda and
Ghana are on course to meet the target of halving poverty by 2010—five years ahead of schedule. Botswana, with
soaring literacy rates, has doubled, some say tripled, its school enrollment figures. South Africa boasts of
sustained economic growth. Rwanda has the highest number of women in parliament in the whole world.
Even war-torn Liberia achieved the distinction of putting the first elected African female head of state into the
global club of female heads of government.
Alternative: Silence Good

Remaining silent and refusing to speak about violence is the best way to honor the suffering
of others and bring about healing.
Univ of Copenhagen)
Violence is a form of excess, writes E. Valentine Daniel.37 But loquacity is a form of excess too, one that risks
doing violence to the very experiences it struggles to make sense of. This is why our language must be
measured and tempered, rather than used to fill silences, or speak that which the sufferer cannot speak. And
this is why we should learn the value of silence, seeing it not as a sign of indifference or resignation, but of
respect. This is not shocked silence—as when one is struck dumb by events that beggar belief, or cannot be
narrated—but silence as a deliberate choice. For there are certain events and experiences of which we choose
not to speak. Not because they hold us in thrall, freezing the tongue. Nor because we fear they might reveal our
flaws or frailty. Still less because we feel our words can never do them justice. Silence is sometimes the only way
we can honour the ineffability and privacy of certain experiences.
Such silence may be, as in Africa, a way of healing and reconciliation, and not a way of evading or repressing
an issue. Indeed, it may be a consummate form of coexistence. To sit with a neighbour or friend, saying nothing,
may seem like a negation of intersubjectivity, but among the Kuranko it is a form of exchange, an expression of
solidarity. And if one's friend has experienced loss, it is to acknowledge that loss, and what cannot be changed,
at the same time as it is to affirm and demonstrate that the sufferer is not alone. Little is said, apart from the
phrase in toro—you suffer—but in silence the social world is restored. Speech disperses the world, say the
Bambara; silence restores wholeness. Speech burns the mouth; silence heals it. Speech builds the village; silence
regenerates the world.
Alternative: Counter - Discourse solves

In round discourse and education about the truth about Africa counters the media’s
exploitation of the African people- the alt is the only way to solve disaster pornography
It appears that this vicious cycle of controlling and tailoring impressions about Africa and Africans in
the Western media can be interrupted from a sociological point of view. In the United States, a new
program of education about Africa and the outside world has to be designed and aggressively
implemented. Well thought out and easily understood forms of public tutoring on the realities of
Africa can help discard the stone age perception still lingering in America about Africa and Africans.
It is true that prejudice and bigotry are hard to eliminate. But a sizeable portion of Americans, including
African Americans, is just simply ignorant about Africa. Americans and their institutions interested in
global understanding cannot rely on the media to change their attitude. The reciprocal entrapment
between the media and their Western audiences on perceptions of Africa can be dissolved if journalists
and their institutional owners wake up and hear members of the same audiences expressing knowledge
of Africa beyond the Tarzans, tigers, and chimpanzees. Ordinary people, including elders and children,
must know that along with the huts, crocodiles and famine, African countries also have skyscrapers, multiple
lane road networks, and other manifestations of modern life. Let people take the initiative, particularly in
America, to teach the young children that Africa is not a single country and a single language. Let the
children know that all forms of human beings come from Africa, and their geographical habitats were
all once attached to the African continent. African Americans can play a crucial role in this
educational drive.
Negative western media reporting is something that needs to be stopped- the alt solves the
aff harms by telling the true stories about Africa
Njeru 05 (Mugo, “Africa at large: Media challenged to correct negative image of
Africa”; http://www.wworld.org/crisis/crisis.asp?ID=480, May 31, 2005)
In a session on reporting Africa, Rwanda's President Paul Kagame said African news from both local and
Western media must be based on facts and the various contexts which have shaped the history of the
continent. President Kagame, whose country is still recovering from the 1994 genocide in which about
800,000 people died, said Africa was not seeking sympathy from the West, "but rather, a deeper
understanding." "There is a fundamental need for change in the way we have been covered. The
constant negative reporting kills the growth of foreign direct investment. There has even been a
suggestion that it is meant to keep Africa in the backyard of the global economy. You can help change
this," he said. He added that Africans must, however, take responsibility for the failures that occur in their
societies. "We in Africa must ask ourselves why we lag behind in spite of the resources at our disposal. Why
is it that the Western journalists see only poverty, disease, corruption, civil war and conflict? Can we give
hope to our future generations?" he asked.
Alternative: Media Change

Reject the affirmatives exploitation of Africa for their own benefit. Instead take steps
toward a genuinely fair and unbiased media through which depictions are made for the
right reasons
Susan D. Moeller in 1999 (Director of the Journalism Program and Assistant Professor of American Studies at
Brandeis University. , Source: Compassion Fatigue, Page: 321-22, KL)
To confirm this, just reflect on the phenomenon of compassion fatigue. In effect, compassion fatigue signals
the public’s weariness with the menu. The public is saying: “Enough. We don’t want what you are
giving us.” The solution to compassion fatigue—as has been proven repeatedly—is not for the media to
respond with entertainment journalism, sensationalist journalism, formulaic journalism. The solution
is to invest in the coverage of international affairs and to give talented reporters, camera people, editors
and producers the freedom to define their own stories—bad and good, evil and inspiring, horrific and
joyous. The solution is for those talented number to cover that panoply of stories day in and day out,
year in and year out, and to be concerned less about the “bottom line” than for the “morning line.” The
solution is for the media business to get back to the business of reporting all the news, all the time.
Discourse Determines Policymaking (1/2)

These representations perpetuate policies and structures which prevent African progress.
Turns case.
Olujobi 06 [Gbemisola, African journalist,
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20061128_the_africa_you_need_to_know/]
Wilson Rutayisire, post-genocide director of Rwanda Information Services, says “the way Africa is covered
in the international media is not only charged with a partisan view but also responsible, to no small
measure, for the perpetuation of prejudices that exacerbate Africa’s problems.
“Although the media coverage Africa receives is not the principal cause of the problems Africa faces, it
provides the superstructure within which Africa is perceived and foreign policies on Africa are
prescribed.”
According to Carol Pineau, it “comes at a high cost, even ... the cost of lives. Stories about hardship and
tragedy aim to tug at our heartstrings, getting us to dig into our pockets or urge Congress to send more aid.
But no country or region ever developed thanks to aid alone. Investment, and the job and wealth
creation it generates is the only road to lasting development. That is how China, India and the Asian
tigers did it.
“Yet while Africa, according to the U.S. Government’s Overseas Private Investment Corporation, offers the
highest return in the world on direct foreign investment, it attracts the least. Unless investors see the
Africa that is worthy of investment, they won’t put their money into it. And that lack of investment
translates into job stagnation, continued poverty and limited access to education and health care.”
Rwandan President Paul Kagame says: “The constant negative reporting kills the growth of foreign
direct investment. There has even been a suggestion that it is meant to keep Africa in the backyard of the
global economy.”
According to Charles Stith, former U.S. ambassador to Tanzania, “One thing blocking a fuller perception
of Africa’s progress may be implicit racism. There is a historic framework that by definition sees
Africa ... and Africans as inferior and negative and makes most stories about the continent negative. By
contrast, China has problems, but we see and hear other things about China. Russia has problems, yet we see
and read other things about Russia. That same standard should apply to Africa.”
Representations of Africa lead to policy failure turning the aff

Africast 2000 (African aid NGO, http://www.africast.com/africast/foundation.html)
The United States has longer suffered from widespread ignorance and misconceptions about Africa,
and the contributions of African Americans to U.S. history. These gaps in knowledge and the negative
portrayals of Africa not only impact populations of African descent in the U.S. but also adversely
affect U.S. attitudes and policies towards Africa. By providing both information about African culture
and links with the African community, the Africast Foundation seeks to educate a global community
about the realities of Africa today - and throughout history.
Discourse Determines Policymaking (2/2)

Western portrayals of Africa psychologically justify underdevelopment.
Is there a historical precedence for denigrating Africa, the continent that most anthropologists agree, Lucy,
humankind's grandmother, came from some two million years ago? Does life thrive in light or in darkness?
Dark Continent is an oxymoron of the highest order. As Ralph Ellison questions in his seminal work,
Invisible Man, would Lucy, our African progenitor, and exponentially great grandmother lament, "when
they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination-indeed
anything and everything except me". Others gained their knowledge and information about Africa from
Greek stalwarts of history whose histories "often were regarded as being equal in truth almost to the Bible".
Scholars like Ptolemy, Herodotus, and Pliny the Elder were prodigious in documenting events, peoples,
cultures, and histories of Africans along the northern or Mediterranean rim of the African continent from the
Western Sudan to Egypt: Herodotus, visiting the region in the 5th century BC, describes his entourage of
young men as being "suddenly surprised and captured by a company of little black, swarthy (author's sic)
dwarfs who took them to their city by a river filled with crocodiles". Ptolemy the geographer, living in Egypt
during Roman times, meaning Egypt was under foreign domination and not in control of her own national
affairs, suggested southern Africa was connected to Asia by a land bridge. Through The Travels of John
Mandelville, one learns, "the whole of Africa is Mauritania, and folk of that country be called Moors, still
others have a foot so large it shadoweth the body against the sun; in the southern parts one finds people with
no heads, their eyes be in their shoulders". To some degree, European knowledge about Africa was only
correctly compiled and presented by a 16th century Moor from Spain (Leo Africanus: History and
Description of Africa). Contextually, in order to justify subsequent motives as to their business in
African lands, critical to his mission, seeking riches, gold, etc., the European denigrated the African for
psychological purposes as strategy to fulfill Machiavellianism, later Darwinism, Imperialism, still later the
so called white man's burden, colonialism, and neocolonialism, the final stage of imperialism eruditely
presented by the late Ghanaian President Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. Europeans, seeking to expand their
national borders by reaching beyond the political, economic, social, and civil chaos of Europe,
insidiously, focused their entire attention on controlling and raping Africa. In doing so, they effectively
knelled Africa's demise and collateral underdevelopment, which persists today. Media organizations
were present in yesteryears lauding Europe's takeover of a continent through the infamous Berlin Conference
1884-5; Africa was Balkanized without any regard for her people, ancestral and communal lands, culture,
lifeways, etc. The media of today is even more powerful and influential. Its sophisticated approach to
creating the African image, shaping and reshaping, goes largely unchallenged by those directly
affected. Often, they do not know how their image is disseminated to the world. Driven by greed, the spirit
of conquest in distant lands, far from fourteenth and fifteenth century Europe, early explorers, Portuguese,
Dutch, British, and French navigators, set out to find solutions to domestic economic and political turmoil
through exploitation, systematic usurpation of lands and territories of indigenous Africans they encountered
along the coastal areas of Africa, West and East. Extension of alien European monarchial rule, papal
authority, bogus treaties, and agreements, as modalities to "legitimize" nation stealing and their wealth of
material resources but a systematic insidious theft of the posterity of infinite millions of Africans,
followed. From that point in history the fate of Africa and her peoples' fate, then and now, was determined
not in favor of the land, its wealth or the people whose lifeways, cultures, and futures depended on the
richness of those lands.
Text = Imagery
Text generates rhetoric which makes suffering a spectacle just like imagery.
In recent years, some charitable institutions have begun to react against the saturation coverage of violence and
misery in movies, news broadcasts, television shows, and magazines, declaring an intention to resist making
spectacular appeals. Oxfam, for example, has moved to head off compassion fatigue by announcing a principled
refusal to subject potential donors to "heart-rending photos calculated to play on your emotions." What the
organization promises instead is "a straightforward case for one of the most effective humanitarian aid
agencies anywhere in the world." 106 But even this mailing surely depends in part on the phantom spectacles of
suffering that are conjured up imaginatively even as they are renounced rhetorically: we won't show you
gruesome pictures. Humanitarian texts have always been sites for encountering horror, and so they remain. In
a sensationalistic mass culture it seems inevitable that some of their appeal comes from the opportunities they
grant the "virtuous" for dwelling upon representations of death and suffering. It may be dismaying to
acknowledge that our virtues are commingled with our vices, that the pain many feel on behalf of suffering
strangers is often inseparable from a sense of relief that it is them not us, and perhaps even from a strange
voyeuristic fascination that borders on titillation. It may be discomforting to discover that feeling good (in the
moral sense) often depends upon feeling good (in the pleasure sense). But the fact remains that the histories of mass
humanitarianism and modern sensationalism have always been inseparable. It is on the basis of this understanding
that cultural critiques of sensationalism and humanitarianism should proceed.
Refugees 1NC (1/4)

Refugees place the viewer in a suspended state of spectatorship.
Television news coverage not only referred to refugees as pure flow, but also exhibited preferences in its
selection of video footage to construct refugees as a slowly moving fluid that overruns the borders of
nation-states, refugee camps, and relief agency resources. Stories use five distinct visual strategies to
track refugees' movement. First, static panoramic perspectives show refugees continuously passing
through the frame one after the other. Second, handheld tracking shots follow refugees in transit, often
showing them from behind as they return home. Third, close ups of refugees' walking feet graphically
reveal the traumatic physical effect of constant movement. Often the feet shown are bare, swollen, and
injured, with particular emphasis on children's feet. Fourth, close ups of refugees' faces show them walking
toward the camera, only to exit the frame quickly. Such images put a face on the moving refugee, but the
line of faces stretches beyond the frame, as if to imply the refugees' infinite replacement. Finally, the
editing of such images together has the effect of multiplying the sense of refugees' movement, placing
the American spectator in vertigo of displacement, as refugees are shown moving in different
directions. Neither the refugees' movement, nor the screen direction of the editing, is unidirectional. Rather
refugees and the shots scatter unpredictably in all directions.
Refugees 1NC (2/4)

Representations of refugees force simultaneous poles of movement and incarceration which
leave the public to conclude that human change is impossible. This is the strategy of
neocolonialism which robs people of agency and autonomy.
U.S. television news coverage of refugees' return to Rwanda began in late October 1996 when hundreds of
thousands of Hutus encamped in eastern Zaire/Congo fled the area to evade military incursions by rebel
forces comprised of Rwandan and Zairian/Congolese Tutsis, and outside forces. Television news coverage of
these events was the primary means by which American spectators came to know about refugees and
the conditions of their displacement. Television coverage of Hutu refugees in late 1996 was
characterized by two contradictory tendencies: movement and incarceration. Refugees were portrayed
as either constantly on the move or as trapped in makeshift encampments. The extreme polarity of
these representations is significant because it positions the refugee as deterritorialized, alternately
moving and forced into highly regulated and surveilled spaces. Such representations reflect the
displacement of refugees, but when combined with the inadequacy of the media coverage of the roots
of the conflict, the public is left to conclude that placelessness is a natural condition. The inadequacy of
context and the focus on displacement work together to reinforce the common western assumption that
little can be done (Barnett 1997). In the process, refugees are stripped of history and agency. Much of
the news coverage on U.S. television from October through December 1996 focused upon Rwandan
refugees' movement from camps in eastern Zaire/Congo to Rwanda, their "homeland." On numerous
occasions and on different networks, reporters referred to Rwandan refugees as a fluid body, as a "wave
of humanity," a "human river," that "flooded across national borders." Such language not only
positions Hutu refugees as a constantly moving mass, but also constructs the refugee crisis as a
"natural disaster" beyond human control. By naturalizing refugees' movement as a flooding river, the
problem can be understood not as a product of political history, but rather as an inevitable natural
catastrophe. This conflation of indigenous peoples with the landscape itself has long been a strategy of
western colonial and neocolonial discourse, and it has the effect of reducing the political agency and
autonomy of colonized people to the unpredictable whims of the natural world (McCarthy 1983; Hickey and
Wylie 1993; Lutz and Collins 1993).
Refugees 1NC (3/4)

Images of pain produces knowledge as a public form and redefine the relationship between
individuals. These images force space between simulated and lived to allow consumers to
enjoy the privilege of distance. The spectacle creates knowledge from the outside and
silences accounts of experience.
U.S. news organizations' construction of Rwandan refugees as a "problem" is predicated on their command
of an array of visual technologies. Without video footage and aerial imagery, many relief organization
officials have argued that events in Rwanda would have gone unnoticed. One assistance official insisted,
"The spread of TV and reporting by satellite have made it possible to provide audiences in industrial
countries with graphic images of large-scale human misery" (Minear, Scott, and Weiss 1996: 7; see also
Benthall 1983; De Waal 1997). The official noted that such images were useful because they fueled western-
led refugee assistance efforts. Yet, as his statement attests, these images of refugees are very much for
Western consumption. Although relief workers no doubt have noble intentions, they often promulgate
assumptions that order the world into beneficent television viewing publics of western industrialized
nations and "problem-ridden" masses of underdeveloped countries (Girardet 1996). By controlling
imaging technologies, U.S. news organizations have the power to produce carefully regulated knowledge
about refugees, as well as the ability to perpetuate distinctions between Africa and the West. In this
production of knowledge, refugees' experiences, made distant from those of ordinary Americans,
compel television viewers and Internet users in the privacy of their homes to see the pain of others but
not to feel it (Fair 1996; De Waal 1997). Refugees' pain is revealed not only in its physical manifestations of
disease, malnutrition, and wounds, but also in more abstract, psychological forms suggested by crying,
rocking the body, huddling in groups, or hugging oneself. The graphic images of others' dislocation,
confusion, and loss force a redefinition of space between simulated and lived (Virilo 1996). Personal
pain is no longer privately experienced; rather, it is publicly exhibited via cameras and satellites to
thousands, if not millions, of consumers who will observe and comment (perhaps in the privacy of their
own homes) on someone else's distant pain. Witnessing someone else's pain allows both the maker and
consumer of images to enjoy the privilege of distance. The spectacle of the refugee is not just a simple
series of images designed to help the viewer understand the situation or feel the need to donate money.
Rather, to engage the viewer, the spectacle emphasizes the pain of others, thereby revealing difference
between those who are witnessing and those are living as refugees (Scarry 1985; Chow 1992). As Guy
DeBord would remind us, "The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among
people, mediated by images" (DeBord 1983: no. 4). In our particular case of Rwanda, television cameras
and aerial images placed refugees within a field of vision where the consumer of these images could pass
judgments about refugees, their plights, their needs, and in doing so, be an active participant in the
production of knowledge about refugees. As objects of the spectacle, refugees' voices are most often
silenced and accounts of their lived experiences ignored in favor of knowledge produced from the
outside by observers (Escobar 1995: 154-211; Malkki 1995: 105-52; Thayer 1998).
Refugees 1NC (4/4)

We must witness the images instead of merely looking at them. This is an attempt to
change the discursive construction of the refugee in the context of history and our own
imagery. This fosters responsibility and recognizes struggles for identity. Only by stepping
outside spectatorship can we foster political change.
Witnessing should be more than looking at images. It should be an effort to intervene in the discursive
construction of the refugee by challenging how visual technologies themselves are used, what they make
visible, and to whom. In this sense, witnessing involves seeing the refugee not simply as another of
Africa's problems, but as a product of state-sanctioned violence, a very specific colonial and
postcolonial history, and western imagery of Africa. The witness is no longer an authoritative
bystander whose gaze verifies or validates an event from a distance. Rather, witnessing is a more
situated and embodied practice--one that involves being accountable for what one sees. In the case of the
Rwandan genocide, witnessing, either for the news reporter or the news consumer, would involve examining
U.S. media images of Rwandan refugees in relation to the one million people that now lay buried in Rwanda.
U.S. television coverage of refugees in eastern Zaire/Congo and Rwanda in late 1996 positioned Rwandan
refugees as either constantly moving or as inhabiting incarcerated spaces. The effect of these images
was to strip refugees of place, identity, history, and culture, thereby creating a humanitarian story that
reinforced notions of western benevolence and African need. But aerial vantages revealed the massive
scale of refugee conditions in a way that ground-based news cameras simply could not. While aerial images
provided a graphic and compelling display of refugees, they further elaborated western detachment from
refugees' conditions by presenting them as electronic dots on a high tech map. As conflict in eastern
Zaire/Congo grew and conditions worsened, news crews and relief workers evacuated refugee camps in the
region, and aerial images became the only means by which western relief workers and political officials
could see events that they otherwise were not there to witness. If witnessing involves accepting
responsibility for and developing affinity with what one sees, then witnessing television news images of
Rwandan refugees involves understanding these events as more than an isolated "natural disaster."
Witnessing demands the direct connection of large-scale movement of refugees from eastern
Zaire/Congo, Tanzania, and Burundi in late 1996 to the complex political events that allowed state-
sanctioned genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and permitted the U.S. government until only recently to refuse
public acknowledgment of "genocide." Witnessing Rwandan refugees' images means seeing them not
purely as victims to be inspected but as individuals who are part of a larger social and political body
engaged in struggles for autonomy, place, and identity. It means recognizing publicly the pain and
trauma of enforced displacement and demanding that the guilty be called to account. Witnessing, then,
calls for reporters and viewers to engage with the story rather to record and watch with cynical
detachment. Only engaged reporters and active spectators can force televised video footage and aerial
images to bear witness to events that our political leaders refuse to "see."
Link: Refugee Movement

Images and reports of refugees as personalized tragedy and as distant and anonymous
eliminate the site of politics and uses the public to produce knowledge about who should
live or die.
ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC--and aerial images of Rwandan refugee movements made available on the
Federation of American Scientists (FAS) web site. We examine both on-the-ground perspectives of television
news cameras, as well as aerial images, because together they provided the dual vantage points that
increasingly are used to manage global crises and media events: the human tragedy at close range, and
the impression from afar. Both video footage and aerial images were used by news organizations and a host
of international organizations to report on and monitor refugees' movements in 1996, when Hutu refugees
were forced to flee encampments in eastern Zaire/Congo. News organizations used on-the-ground video
footage to give viewers close-up, seemingly personalized, accounts of the lives of refugees. By contrast,
international organizations offered networks and governmental agencies alike aerial photos of
refugees, whose movements and containment in camps were tracked from the sky, rendering them
distant and anonymous. As important as both kinds of images can be, their use made it easy for news
organizations to ignore the middle scale, the site of politics, social organization, and history. Relying
heavily on close-up and remote images, while neglecting the infinitely more complex, historical, and
politicized middle scale, U.S. news organization, especially television, had no coherent explanation of
events happening in and around Rwanda. We suggest that televised video footage and aerial images of
Rwandan refugees must be examined together in the context of U.S. news organizations' inability to
represent the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Our analysis explores how these two kinds of images represented
refugees as a deterritorialized mass unanchored from the historical realities that unfolded in Rwanda in 1994.
We argue that these refugees became the living traces of genocide and the shadow focus of media
attention. Forced into exile because of the conflict, refugees became the only signs by which television
viewers might come to know about the genocide that went largely unacknowledged by U.S. news
organizations and political leaders. By observing refugees both from the vantage of on-the-ground
video footage and from overhead aerial photos, the U.S. public was kept distant and safe from any
actual conflict, and from the complications of explanation. Yet, the public inevitably became an
unwitting participant in the production of knowledge about who should live or die in lands far off from
the United States.
Link: Refugee Assistance

Images of refugees as deterritorialized and in need of western assistance change the way we
see refugees to the media norm.
In the first section of the paper, we consider how video footage used on U.S. television represented the
constant movement and incarceration of refugees, positioning them as fully deterritorialized. We then
explore international relief agencies' use of aerial images to track and monitor refugees' movement, a
tracking that made its way to television news in reports of mass movements of refugees. These aerial images
portrayed refugees as electronic dots on a high tech map, further distancing American television
viewers from conditions in the region. From there, we discuss the implications of seeing and constructing
refugees as targets of western assistance, and how media images circumscribe the way we see and know
displaced peoples. In this regard, we suggest that witnessing the Rwandan genocide involves recognizing
the continuity between mass killings and the mass movement of refugees as depicted in news and aerial
images. Both U.S. political officials and the U.S. news media preferred to focus on the refugees and to
divert attention from the genocide that preceded refugee movements.
Link: Refugee Camps

Representations of refugee camps isolate refugees as rooted in the locations they are
contained. These images position refugees as objects of Afro-pessimistic knowledge.
In contrast to the images discussed so far, where refugees are constructed as constantly moving, other
sequences in news stories represent refugees as confined to particular spaces, such as camps, tents,
medical wards, and even stretchers. Enticed by aid agencies that were counting on publicity to further their
assistance efforts and to gain attention and funding, broadcast journalists arrived ready to report on a
story already seemingly written from previous encounters with the "refugee" situated in the "campsite,"
where s/he now is thought to belong (Girardet 1996; Pottier 1996; Rosenblatt 1996a). Journalists often begin
their stories with images of refugees contained by fences, many of them barbed, or by ropes and guarded
posts. In doing so, they reinforce the physical and cultural distance between American television
viewers and Rwandan refugees (e.g., CNN, 22 May 1996; CNN, 29 October 1996; ABC, 3 November
1996; CNN, 28 November 1996; ABC, 30 November 1996). These camp barriers literally and
symbolically link refugees to the place in which they are confined. Physically, the cordons contain any
threat of movement. Symbolically, the fences isolate refugees as a marginalized people to be monitored,
taken care of, and pitied. That people labeled as "refugees" are confined to "refugee camps" is fully
consonant with a long-naturalized association of nonwestern people with place. Appadurai calls this
association the "spatial incarceration of the 'native,'" where nonwestern people are confined to a place in
which they are thought to belong (Appadurai 1988: 36-49). In Appadurai's sense of spatial incarceration,
Rwandan refugees are doubly incarcerated. First, they are incarcerated within a western imaginary
that conflates them with the "dark continent," a place of ongoing "tribal warfare." Second, Rwandan
refugees are physically incarcerated by the conditions of their displacement and statelessness. While
their placement in "refugee camps" assures some access to humanitarian aid, it also positions them as
objects of knowledge. Certainly, the broadcast segments reinforce this spatial incarceration by
monitoring and carefully packaging the indignities of refugee life.
Link: Satellite Imagery

Satellite Imagery becomes spectacles which create a cycle of chasing grander and grander
images. People won’t believe unless the image is spectacular.
On 30 October 1996, Refugees International, in a plea for international intervention, issued a press release
that warned, "A worst-case scenario is unfolding for refugees in Rwanda and Burundi and local residents in
eastern Zaire . . . the exact whereabouts of many of those fleeing the chaos remains unknown." Delayed
action on the part of the international community, particularly the U.S. efforts to stall the UN Security
Council's call for military intervention, compelled Refugees International to release yet another public
statement on 7 November. With the support of other relief agencies such as the UN High Commissioner for
Refugees, Refugees International called upon President Clinton to "give top priority to providing the
best photos from satellite and other sources to enable the best emergency response from UN and other
relief agencies and to focus the international community on the need for urgent action" (Refugees
International 1996d). Indeed, only a satellite image, with its regional aerial perspective, could reveal what
Refugees International called "one of the gravest humanitarian emergencies in recent years . . . a million
refugees spreading across the Zaire countryside, having lost their UN lifeline to clean water and food"
(ibid., 1996d). On 18 November, Refugees International once again called for the release of aerial
imagery, claiming "More than ever, good information, including aerial and satellite photos, [is] needed
to better determine where the unaccounted for refugees are" (Refugees International 1996e). In an
attempt to urge President Clinton to "mobilize an all-out international rescue effort" the organization's
President Lionel Rosenblatt declared: The Zaire humanitarian disaster is unfolding off-camera. As it did on
occasion in Bosnia, the U.S. should make public the satellite photos of the fleeing refugees. . . . In World
War II and since there have been too many occasions where government photos of atrocities and
humanitarian disasters remained in secret archives. Those days should be over and photos of eastern Zaire
should be released. (Rosenblatt 1996b) Rosenblatt recognized that the aerial images would serve as useful
mapping tools for refugee monitoring and tracking, but he also saw them as spectacular news images. In a
presentation to the House International Relations Committee, Subcommittee on International Operations and
Human Rights, Rosenblatt (1996c) insisted that in Zaire/Congo a "reverse form of the 'CNN factor'" was at
work. He claimed that "because the current humanitarian catastrophe in eastern Zaire/Congo is not on
television, many don't believe it's happening (or feel that, politically, they can afford to ignore it)."
Rosenblatt also insisted that only satellite images could help relief workers locate hundreds of thousands of
lost refugees in desperate need of assistance.
Impact: Aerial Image

Aerial images distance the West from political and social turmoil and eliminate individuals
as social and historical. This eliminates potential to change into merely empty view.
While these images might reveal the scale of the crisis, they also reinforce and further elaborate Western
distance from the political and social turmoil and trauma in Africa. The aerial image visually
constructs refugees as an enigmatic nationless body, a moving target, a wandering collective rather
than as a group of socially situated individuals with distinct histories and interests. Although specific
uses of the aerial image were guided by the good intentions of relief agencies like Refugees International,
they tended to privilege science over humanitarianism. Historically, such images have been used by
military officials to generate strategic data about conditions on the ground rather than to prod citizens
to action. The aerial image's data tell little about the embodied circumstances of exile and
displacement. Where the television images expose and even fetishize refugees' pain, the aerial image
completely submerges it in the barren expanse of the panoramic view.
Impact: Tied to Place

The representations force the public to view individuals as culturally monolithic and create
false illusions about the ties between people and place.
U.S. television news coverage of the refugee crisis reinforced existing popular notions about refugees'
displacement by conflating people with place. As Malkki (1992) notes, when people are conceived of as
culturally monolithic, associations of people with state, territory, and land appear natural. The
consequence of this association of people and place is that it appears commonsensical and normal,
when, in fact, people's ties to place may be uncertain and provisional. Hence, televised stories depicted
refugee camps and the long marches back to Rwanda as a natural part of the instability and periodic
dislocations American viewers expect out of Africa.
Impact: Afro-Pessimism
Representations of diseased bodies allows the western imagination to view crisis as Africa’s
natural condition. Understanding of history, politics, and culture are ignored.
As Malkki's statements suggest, defining refugees as "problems" to be cared for by states and international
agencies permits the symbolic and material reentry of refugees into a national and global order in which the
distinction among "nationals" and "foreigners" is clear. To make this distinction, the West constructs
refugees as "problems" in at least three ways. First, because refugees are on the move they often violate
national boundaries and so signify the failure of the nation-state to contain them. Second, refugees are made
visible in U.S. media only as crowded masses of "dirty," "unhealthy," "fatigued," "diseased" bodies
and therefore are understood as the vulgar antithesis of western norms. Finally, the western
imagination locates refugees on a revolting, tumultuous, war-torn continent that has historically resisted
and resented white colonial domination. Thus, when Africa flickers across America's "radar screens," it
is automatically coded as a crisis or catastrophe, allowing any political and social turmoil and upheaval
to be imagined as Africa's natural environmental condition. Refugee images of the sort described in this
paper reinforce the mindset of Africa as a place of crisis. Whether taken on the ground or from the sky,
these images ignore the middle scale, the regional scene where history, politics, and culture play out.
Here is where news organizations, if they looked, would find cause and explanation. And here is where the
American public, if it had the necessary information and patience, might begin to achieve a level of
understanding.
Impact: Eliminates Agency

Representations of the suffering as helpless cause an expectation of them to be resigned
towards change. This is justification for making systems of need subservient to Western
Humanitarianism and Military Intervention.
Acknowledging agency among hundreds of thousands of refugees spatially incarcerated in camps is a
risky proposition for journalists. Audiences and news managers at home expect refugees to be passive,
nobly resigned to their lot in life, not actively engaged in reformulating their political, cultural, and
historical identities. Journalists' perception that refugees were unable or unwilling to act on their own
behalf also is found in a group of stories focusing on the closure of camps in Zaire/Congo and Tanzania
in October and November 1996. When Zaire/Congo and Tanzania began to close refugee camps and
demand repatriation of refugees to Rwanda, 6 journalists began to describe refugees as groups
"trapped" in camps (e.g., CNN, 22 October 1996; ABC, 3 November 1996; NBC, 16 November 1996;
NBC, 23 November 1996; ABC, 30 November 1996). The stories suggested, of course, that those who were
"trapped" would require [End Page 41] the assistance of western humanitarian and possibly military
intervention efforts to locate and retrieve them for repatriation. For example, one NBC story--showing
close up visuals of a young child--concluded that "the job of locating and keeping alive those refugees
trapped in Zaire is the world's focus" (16 November 1996).
Impact: Refugee Dehumanization

The process of representing refugees as objects of the media strip them of their
individuality and influence outsiders to generate knowledge about them. This
spectatorship removes our sense of involvement and responsibility.
As "problems" of displacement, refugees come to represent a pure and universalized humanity,
victimized by political, economic, and historical forces over which they have no control, but for which
they ultimately are to blame. They are objects, rather than subjects, of interventions used by states, aid
organizations, and the media to watch, count, categorize, and track them (Escobar 1995; Malkki 1995: 1-
17). The process, by which refugees are stripped of individuality, as well as history, culture, and place,
serves to make them the focal points of observation and inspection. Television news cameras and aerial
imaging allow various constituencies--media audiences, Internet users, state security organizations,
diplomats, policymakers, and aid groups--to produce and circulate knowledge about refugees'
experiences. Indeed, the public visibility of refugees raises questions about the ways in which they are
"seen" both by American news producers and spectators. Donna Haraway (1988, 1997) has suggested that
scientists' control over technologies of visualization such as photography, sonography, satellite images, and
video has positioned westerners as distant observers of others' problems. For her, such technologies can
reinforce power differentials between westerners and others to the extent that they transform vision into
"unregulated gluttony" (Haraway 1988: 581). 12 As mediated spectacles relayed from Africa, images of
refugees call for detached and disembodied looking that relieves viewers from any sense of
involvement, responsibility, and accountability
Aff Can’t Solve

The overload of chaotic atrocities that are shown by the media cause extreme
desensitization and effectually deterring aid. This desensitization means aff doesn’t solve.
Simple pictures, emotional pictures, pictures that can be distilled into a plain and unmistakable message
can drill into the minds and hearts of their audiences. John Fox, an Eastern European specialist at the
State Department, told of the photographs that came out of Bosnia after a busload of refugee children was
shelled. “The images just kept mounting,” he said. “The images came, they never stopped, and that’s
what got to people…you had to steel yourself just to get through the day.” The public screams, “Stop
those images!”—meaning: “Do something!” but also, sometimes, meaning: “I don’t want to know any
more.” Didactic images can overload the senses. A single child at risk commands our attention and prompts
our action. But one child, and then another, and another, and another and on and on and on is too much. A
crowd of people in danger is faceless. Numbers alone can numb. All those starving brown babies over the
years blur together. “Maybe we’ve seen too many anguished faces in too many faraway places pleading
for help through our television set,” wrote St. Petersburg Times columnist Jack Payton in response to the
deluge of crises in the spring of 1991. “Maybe the Kurds, the Bangladeshis, the Ethiopians and the
Mozambicans have finally pushed us into the MEGO, or My Eyes Glaze Over, syndrome. Maybe Joseph
Stalin was right after all when he said, ‘One death is a tragedy, 1 million deaths is a statistic.’” The New
York Times tested that principle in one of its stories that same spring, interviewing 50 Americans across the
nation. Many said they were “moved by the suffering, but overloaded, confused, even numbed by so
much sorrow from so many places at once…. Kay Hamner, an Atlanta executive, and Roux Harding, a
Seattle window cleaner, find the images on the evening news strangely unaffecting. ‘You can see real true-
to-life pictures, but your mind reacts to it almost as if it’s just a movie,’ Ms. Hamner said. Mr. Harding
remarked, ‘It’s too surreal when you’re watching television.’” 96
AT: Case Outweighs

Not only do we become indifferent to these images – we become hostages to them and
information becomes catastrophe – this is worse than violence itself – although we can still
see the suffering we can’t and won’t do anything about it because the object of the images
is abolished completely
Baudrillard 94 [Jean, Professor of Sociology and Philosophy, The Illusion of the End, pgs 55-56, 1994]
It was not the dead that were the scandal, but the corpses being pressed into appearing before the
television cameras, as in the past dead souls were pressed into appearance in the register of deaths. It was
their being taken hostage, as it were, and our being held hostage too, as mystified TV views. Being
blackmailed by violence and death, especially in a noble and revolutionary cause, was felt to be worse
than the violence itself, was felt to be a parody of history. All the media live off the presumption of
catastrophe and of the succulent imminence of death. A phot in Liberation, for example, shows us a
convoy of refugees ‘which, some time after this shot was taken, was to be attacked by the Iraqi army’.
Anticipation of effects, morbid simulation, emotional blackmail. It was the same on CNN with the arrival
of the Scuds. Nothing is news if it does not pass through that horizon of the virtual, that hysteria of the
virtual – not in the psychological sense, but in the sense of a compulsion for what is presented, in all bad
faith, as real to be consumed as unreal. In the past, to show something up as a fake, we said: ‘It’s just
play-acting’, ‘It’s all romance!’, ‘It’s put on for the cameras!’. This time, with Romania and the Gulf War,
we were able to say, ‘It’s just TV!’ Photographic or cinema images still pass through the negative stage (and
that of projection), whereas the TV image, the video image, digital and synthetic, are images without a
negative, and hence without negativity and without reference. They are virtual and the virtual is what
puts an end to all negativity and thus to all reference to the real or to events. At a stroke, the contagion
of images, engendering themselves without reference to a real or an imaginary, itself becomes virtually
without limits, and this limitless engendering produces information as catastrophe. Is an image which
refers only to itself still an image? However this may be, that image raises the problem of its indifference to
the world, and thus of our indifference to it – which is a political problem. When television becomes the
strategic space of the event, it sets itself up as a deadly self-reference, it becomes a bachelor machine.*
The real object is wiped out by news – not merely alienated, but abolished. All that remains of it are
traces on a monitoring screen.
AT: Case Solves

Representations of desperation allow aid agencies to exploit identity for capital and
political interests instead of actually helping. This supercharges our link.
Rieff 97[David Rieff, Senior Fellow of the World Policy Institute at the New School for Social Research, Charity
on the Rampage: The Business of Foreign Aid, Foreign Affairs, Jan/Feb]
A telling example was the recent decision by the British branch of Save the Children to launch an
appeal for Rwandan refugees in Zaire at a time when their fate, and, by extension, what role the aid
agencies would play, was unclear. Nonetheless, Save the Children ran an advertisement with a
photograph of a pathetic-looking African child that read in part: "Zaire: Desperate children need your
help." That was doubtlessly true. But the ad continued, "Save the Children is able to help these
children. We are providing high protein biscuits, medical supplies, and blankets to help save lives."
That may have been the agency's intention, but when the ad ran in the British press the children in
question had been cut off from aid for weeks, and it was by no means clear when or if that would
change. It is this sort of pious hyperbole, what Maren calls "exploitation of children for fundraising,"
that provokes his indignation. Right or wrong, the agencies usually get away with it, although recently
the Rwandan government expelled a European agency for using a pathetic photograph of a Rwandan child in
one of its campaigns without first consulting the Kigali authorities. The agency's officials were flabbergasted.
No "beneficiary" country had ever dared demand that kind of respect. But then, the experience of Rwanda
has been chastening for many agencies, not only because the government has kept the NGOs on a short leash,
but because it became apparent that humanitarian intervention in the absence of a political solution solves
nothing. In eastern Zaire, the aid agencies found themselves in the position of feeding not only innocent
refugee women and children, but their sons, fathers, brothers, and husbands, many of whom had participated
in the 1994 genocide. The aid allowed those loyal to the old regime to survive, regroup, and launch guerrilla
attacks from the refugee camps into Rwanda. This realization caused a number of agencies, notably the
French branch of Doctors Without Borders and the International Rescue Committee, to withdraw in early
1995. But while courageous, this withdrawal was little more than a symbolic gesture; other agencies,
including other national branches of Doctors Without Borders, were more than willing to fill the "vacancy"
left by the departing NGOs. No better proof exists of how delivering humanitarian aid has become a
business.
Western representations report one-sided stories that don’t offer the complete picture and
positive things occurring in Africa. It ignores the possibility of Africans helping
themselves.
This dynamic explains why the life of Africa's varied and diverse countries is missing. We hear about
famines and coups, but not the rejuvenation of its cities and the cultural vitality of its village life...about
oppression and massacres, but not education, economic self-help and political development... about
poaching and habitat destruction, but not ongoing active efforts at conservation, reforestation and
environmental awareness.
Most telling of all, in Somalia and elsewhere, news reports show outside white people helping the black
people. They never show black people helping themselves.
AT: Moral Obligation

Bereft of values, our society demands images of suffering from others to replenish our
moral sentiment. We exchange our pity for their pain, in a process that guarantees the
suffering must continue
Baudrillard 94 [Jean, September 28, "No Reprieve For Sarejevo"]
The problem lies indeed in the nature of our reality. We have got only one, and it must be preserved.
Even if it is by the use of the most heinous of all paroles: "One must do something. One cannot remain
idle." Yet, to do something for the sole reason that one cannot do nothing never has been a valid
principle for action, nor for liberty. At the most it is an excuse for one's own powerlessness and a token of
self-pity. The people of Sarajevo are not bothered by such questions. Being where they are, they are in the
absolute need to do what they do, to do the right thing. They harbour no illusion about the outcome and do
not indulge in self-pity. This is what it means to be really existing, to exist within reality. And this reality has
nothing to do with the so-called objective reality of their plight, which should not exist, and which we do so
much deplore. This reality exits as such - it is the stark reality of action and destiny. This is why they are
alive, while we are dead. This is why we feel the need to salvage the reality of war in our own eyes and to
impose this reality (to be pitiable) upon those who suffer from it, but do not really believe in it, despite the
fact they are in the midst of war and utter distress. Susan Sontag herself confesses in her diaries that the
Bosnians do not really believe in the suffering which surrounds them. They end up finding the whole
situation unreal, senseless, and unexplainable. It is hell, but hell of what may be termed a hyperreal kind,
made even more hyperreal by the harassment of the media and the humanitarian agencies, because it renders
the attitude of the world towards them even less unfathomable. Thus, they live in a kind of ghost-like war -
which is fortunate, because otherwise, they would never have been able to stand up to it. These are not my
words, by the way: they say it so. To reconstitute reality, one needs to head to where blood flows. All
these "corridors", opened by us to funnel our foodstuffs and our "culture" are in fact our lifelines along
which we suck their moral strength and the energy of their distress. Yet another unequal exchange. And
to those who have found in a radical delusion of reality (and this includes the belief in political rationality,
which supposedly rules us, and which very much constitutes the principle of European reality) a kind of
alternative courage, that is to survive a senseless situation, to these people Susan Sontag comes to convince
them of the "reality" of their suffering, by making something cultural and something theatrical out of it, so
that it can be useful as a referent within the theatre of western values, including "solidarity". But Susan
Sontag herself is not the issue. She is merely a societal instance of what has become the general situation
whereby toothless intellectuals swap their distress with the misery of the poor, both of them sustaining
each other, both of them locked in a perverse agreement. This parallels the way the political class and
civil society are swapping their respective misery: one throwing up corruption and scandals, the other its
purposeless convulsions and its inertia. Thus, not so long ago, one could witness Bourdieu and Abbe Pierre
offering themselves as televisual slaughtering lambs trading with each other pathetic language and
sociological garble about poverty. Our whole society is thus on its way towards "commiseration" in the most
literal sense of the word (under the cloak of ecumenical bathos). It looks like as if we are in the midst of an
immense feeling of guilt, shared by intellectuals and politicians alike, and which is linked to the end of
history and the downfall of values. Then, it has become necessary to replenish the pond of values, the
pond of references, and to do so by using that smallest common denominator which is the suffering of
the world, and in doing so, replenishing our game reserves with artificial fowls. "At the moment, it has
become impossible to show anything else than suffering in the news broadcasts on television", reports David
Schneidermann. Ours is a victim-society. I gather that society is merely expressing its own disappointment
and longing for an impossible violence against itself. Everywhere, a New Intellectual Order is following
on the heels of the New World Order. Everywhere, we see distress, misery and suffering becoming the basic
stuff of the primitive scene. The status of victimhood, paired with human rights is the sole funeral ideology.
Those who do not directly exploit it do it by proxy - there is no dearth of mediators who take some surplus
value of financial or symbolic nature along the way. Loss and suffering, just like the global debt, are
negotiable and for sale on the speculative market, that is, the intellectual-political market - which is in no
way undermining the military-industrial complex of old & sinister days.
AT: Altruism
The belief that help is altruistic and pure is naïve at best. Aid is always accompanied by an
ideological and political agenda. The Aff claims that they just want to “save Africa” don’t
accurately represent the reasoning behind such intervention.
Narman 97 [Anders, Development Thinking: Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Practice, Geografiska
Annaler: Series B, Human Geography v79 n4 Current Development Thinking, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0435-
3684%281997%2979%3A4%3C217%3ADTBTGB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-C, Ass. Prof. at the Dept of Human and
Economic Development Goteberg University]
Regarding the question of what development stands for, students just entering the course normally take a
rather neutral stand. To most of them development means a process of change, which hopefully moves in a
positive direction. Often it is also claimed that embedded in the concept of development we find
environmental concern, individual well-being, self-articulation and peace. If asked to identify common
barriers to development we find, at that stage, a list of basic needs, e.g. education, health and
infrastructure. This is coupled to normatively positive words, such as peace and democracy. In some
cases the dependency structures and power relations are also mentioned as essential. In the majority of
cases, students of Development Studies consider that a general interest, coupled with the need to overcome a
general lack of knowledge on international issues, motivated them to apply for this particular course. A
major role in sensitizing the students to development issues before their enrollment in the university is
often played by various television programmes. Commonly, this is through pictures of starving
children or other disaster pornography. In most cases students have found that the analysis of why a
certain problem has come about is seriously lacking. Even if the times of intensive solidarity manifestations
of 1968, with the Vietnam War and apartheid in South Africa, are not prevalent today, students are
influenced by major debates--on the European Union, nuclear power etc. Discussions on the concept of
development, on the basis of the issues mentioned, tend to turn into a virtual shopping list on what we in the
north can do to assist the poor people of the world. Somehow the notion acquired during such a debate
seems to be that we still live largely in a harmonic environment, in which we in the north are willing to
give up part of our material well-being in favour of the less advantaged. For those continuing the course
up to the field visit, many are taken aback from this idealistic naiveti. When returning to the same issue,
i.e. the meaning of development, during the end of the field course another picture emerges. Most of the
students, at that stage, mention that their visions of development have become increasingly complex.
Contributing to this has been the academic reading, as well as the confrontation with African reality.
Suddenly the gap between theory and practice has widened enormously. Attempts to establish a
universal ground to explain development are constantly challenged during the time in the field. Development
tends to acquire more of relativity, in the dialogue with the other.
AT: Complicity
The affirmative tells you to vote aff or else horrible things will occur and we’d be complicit-
this mindset desensitizes us to suffering.
“Compassion Fatigue : How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death” 1999; page 9)
Most media consumers eventually get to the point where they turn the page. Because most of us do pass
the advertisement by, its curse is on our heads. “Either you help or you turn away,” stated one ad. “Whether
she lives or dies, depends on what you do next.” Turning away kills this child. We are responsible.
“Because without your help, death will be this child’s only relief.” In turning away we become culpable.
But we can’t respond to every appeal. And so we’ve come to believe that we don’t care. If we turn the
page originally because we don’t want to respond to what is in actuality a fund-raising appeal,
although in the guise of a direct humanitarian plea, it becomes routine to thumb past the pages of news
images showing wide-eyed children in distress. We’ve got compassion fatigue, we say, as if we have
involuntarily contracted some kind of disease that we’re stuck with no matter what we might do.
AT: Knowledge / Mobilization

Knowledge of atrocities is not a priori valuable – we must consider the release of social
knowledge of atrocities and the consequences that cannot be wished away – it is the
imagery which creates atrocities.
Treanor 04 (Paul, University of Amsterdam Urban planner; http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/forget.html
“Why forget the holocaust”)
The knowledge of the atrocities substitutes one outcome for another. The Serbian student is admitted, or not. Kosovo-
Albanians are killed, or not. Suppress the knowledge, and you get one outcome: release it, and you get another. It is
not the atrocities themselves which led to military intervention: it was the image of those atrocities for
western public opinion. Although there is no tap to close off all knowledge of large-scale events, public
knowledge is often a result of deliberate decisions - to release or spread certain information. That applies also
to historical knowledge, to the social memory of the past. These decisions are therefore subject to moral
assessment: the effects of the knowledge of atrocities should be taken into account.
AT: Bear Witness / Mobilize Relief

We have no responsibility to bear witness to atrocity – the 1ac is simply an example of
substituting one atrocity for another – in response to the horrors of humanity, even greater
harms can be done in the name of a just system of ethics – ultimately – the 1AC amounts to
playing god with the lives it judges – in fact, focusing upon and bearing witness to atrocity
only guarantees the perpetuation of disaster. Any mobilization of relief only participates in
this cycle of atrocity.
Treanor 2004 (Paul - University of Amsterdam Urban planner
http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/forget.html “Why forget the holocaust”)
Now consider the issue from the point of view of those affected by (western) public knowledge of atrocities.
Consider this fictional example: An investigator for Amnesty International visits a poor country in
Africa. He discovers that terrible atrocities are being committed in a military camp. Before leaving the
country, he visits a village next to the camp. He tells the villagers that he will publicize the human rights
abuses, in the global media. He reminds them, that a new US President has promised a "year-long rain of
bombs" on all human rights abusers. He expects the villagers to thank him, for protecting their human rights.
Instead, realizing that they will die in a major attack on the base, they kill him and destroy the evidence
he has collected. Is this legitimate self-defense? I think it is. There is no right, to substitute the suffering
of one for the suffering of another. The Amnesty investigator is playing God with the lives of the villagers.
There is no absolute right to disseminate knowledge of atrocities, to the disadvantage of others. As in
the example of Kosovo, one outcome is substituted for another: the death of the villagers for the continuation
of human rights abuses. But in the fictional example of the Amnesty investigator, there is a tap to 'close off
the knowledge': the action of the villagers changes the outcome. And in the fictional example, it was the
Amnesty investigator who was wrong. In the presence of a hegemonic superpower, which answers atrocities
with undirected massive military force, there is a moral duty to silence on atrocities. There is no clear
distinction here, between knowledge of present atrocities and past atrocities. Appeals to atrocities as
justification often refer to both recent and historical examples. Three historical atrocities are repeatedly
quoted: the Gulag, the Cambodian mass murders, and the Holocaust. Above all, Auschwitz - considered an
evil too great to be called simply 'an atrocity'. In how far is knowledge of atrocities a deliberate decision,
in the the real political culture of western nations? There is no doubt that atrocity stories such as those
from Kosovo are deliberately spread. The very fact, that governments publicly appeal to them to justify
their actions, increases the publicity. But they are systematically publicized anyway: governments and
military organizations hold press briefings and publish reports. During the Kosovo war, the daily NATO
press conferences were also daily atrocity reports. The media also report independently on atrocities, and in
turn this material is used by governments. The distinction between war reporting, propaganda and espionage
- always unclear - almost disappeared during the Kosovo war. The best evidence that the public knowledge
of atrocities is the result of deliberate action, is its selectivity. If it were simply a case of western media
reporting human suffering, the public would know as much about the war in southern Sudan, as they
knew about Kosovo. Knowledge of past atrocities is equally selective. The western public does know about
the Killing Fields of Cambodia: the use of the film title indicates why they know. Without the film,
Cambodia would have retained the status it had in another title: a book on the US war on Cambodia is titled
"Sideshow".
AT: “They need us/It’s a real problem”

Africa has made significant economic progress in recent years- the media- as well as the
aff- refuse to acknowledge that Africans have the ability to sustain their own happiness
Also grievously ignored by the Western media is the fact that a good number of African countries have
made real progress over the last few years. In 2005 alone, Africa posted an unprecedented growth of
4.5 percent, which prompted Haiko Alfeld, Africa director at the World Economic Forum, to declare
that the African continent has “emphatically and irreversibly turned the corner.” In its review of 2005,
a year widely acclaimed as “The Year of Africa,” the World Economic Forum reports “a new resolve [by
Africans] to promote the African business and investment climate. Many African countries extended
economic reforms and put in place structures to fight corruption.” Really? Will someone please tell the
whole world that Africans are capable of helping themselves, and that they are not helpless, hapless
and hopeless? The report goes on to say: “A key development on the business front was the rapid increase in
Chinese and to some extent Indian investment in African countries. In just a few years, trade and investment
between China and Africa has tripled, with the pace of such engagement becoming particularly vigorous
during 2005. “The trend has continued into 2006, as has the phenomenon of South African business
expansion into the continent.” And what is more, the report says, “These positive trends seem set to continue
beyond 2006, given their long-term nature.” Is anyone listening? Africa indeed has turned the corner.
AT: “They need us/It’s a real problem” (2/2)

The media intentionally mislead to make the stories more interesting- not only do they link
to disaster porn, but their evidence is also untrue
By power of suggestion, the media so fix a conception in our minds that we cannot imagine the one thing
without the other. “We do mislead,” said Browne. “We have to use symbolism. Symbolism is a useful
psychological tool, but it can be terribly misused. It can be misleading. It can lead to great cruelty and
injustice, but all of those things are components of entertainment.” Once a story commands the
attention of the media—or once the media deems a story worthy of attention—reporting styles, use of
sources, choice of language and metaphor, selection of images and even the chronology of coverage all
follow a similar agenda. Other distortions occur. Sensationalized treatment of crises makes us feel that
only the most extreme situations merit attention (although the media still self-censors the worst of the
stories and images from crises—such as the most graphic pictures of those Kurds killed by Iraqi chemical
weapons in Halabja or the photos of trophy bits of flesh and body parts flaunted by Somalis allied with
Mohammed Farah Aidid). Dire portraits are painted through relentless images and emotional language.
A crisis is represented as posing a grave risk, not only to humanity at large, but to Americans
specifically. Unless a disease appears to be out of a Stephen King horror movie—unless it devours your
body like the flesh-eating strep bacteria, consumes your brain like mad cow disease, or turns your insides
to bloody slush like Ebola—it’s hardly worth mentioning in print or on air.
AT: “Our stories are true”

Real stories are elevated to be thrilling as justification for more subscribers to consumerist
advertisement.
Do you like stories—real stories—true stories—stories of heroism, stories of self-sacrifice, stories of
humane effort? And do you like pictures, plenty of them, and good ones? . . . There are many intensely
interesting, even thrilling and entertaining articles scheduled to appear in the Red Cross Magazine during the
year,—articles that will be educational as to your country's official humanitarian agency, informative as to
little-known, enterprising achievements of your Government, and generally enjoyable to patriotic and
humane people, young and old.Why was a humanitarian journal so eager to emphasize its "thrilling,"
"entertaining," and "enjoyable" qualities? The respectable purveyors of American Red Cross Magazine,
of course, would have been shocked and scandalized by the suggestion that there were any similarities
between their journal and the pulps. Targeting working-class boys and men, pulp publishers were little
concerned with genteel standards of good taste, promising readers action and violence unencumbered by
meaning or what they scathingly dismissed as "philosophy." The editors of American Red Cross Magazine
were by contrast very much concerned with "philosophy" and with their civilizing mission. But they also
had to entice readers and to satisfy advertisers who wished to reach the broadest audience possible.
The cultural logic is worth spelling out here. The editors were always eager to emphasize the high
purpose of their journal: "The men who are making this Magazine, are continually keeping in view the
great end that has inspired them from the beginning,—to make the Red Cross a real power in spreading the
doctrine of the Good Samaritan and that they are building the magazine for the benefit of the greatest
humanitarian society in the world and its members." To achieve this goal they had to win subscribers, and,
in a competitive market, they believed that this involved transforming the magazine "into one of the
most attractive and interest-commanding publications in America." The new and improved magazine
suddenly became attractive to advertisers with deep pockets who could be tapped to provide further revenue
for the Red Cross. In the early days of the periodical only a few businesses had purchased promotional space,
the retailers of care-giving products like nurses' uniforms, bandages, and baking powders. But as readership
surpassed the one million mark, businesses and publishers alike espied an "advertising bonanza." 77 To
court advertisers, the editors promised a slick package with advertising pages that were "interesting"
enough to grab the attention of readers. At the same time they directly implored readers to patronize
sponsors. ("When writing to advertisers please mention the Red Cross Magazine" was emblazoned across the
bottom of the advertising pages.)
AT: “NGO Reforms Solve”

The root cause of disaster pornography is competition between NGOs- the Aff solves
Starving black babies pleading silently for help. Twenty years ago, such images thrust Ethiopia's deadly
famine into the global spotlight, helping to raise billions of dollars in aid. But the pictures also sparked
soul-searching among aid agencies who felt they reinforced debasing stereotypes of Africa and robbed
the subjects of their dignity. That soul-searching led to the development of voluntary standards on the
use of images in charity fundraising and appeals, but now some experts say fierce competition for
donations in a ballooning NGO sector has led to an alarming resurgence in shock tactics that critics
call "development pornography".
AT: “Media Doesn’t Control Perceptions”

The western media controls the globe’s perceptions- they provide disaster pornography to
over one billion people a day
For more than three decades now, news agency wire service has continued to be a critical means of
news transmission globally. The key world news agencies are owned by shareholders in Western
countries. The Associated Press (AP) and the United Press (UP), founded in the United States, are two of
the four leading wire services with monopolistic effects. According to its own information bulletin, AP,
which was founded in 1848, is the largest news organization in the world providing news, photos and
video for more than one billion people a day. The AP says it serves 5000 radio and television stations in
the United States, and has nearly 9000 subscribers to its services from 121 countries. Equally powerful are
the Reuters news agency, operating out of Britain, and the Agence France Press (AFP) commonly called the
French News Agency based in Paris. The AFP is the world's oldest news agency, founded in 1835, and like
Reuters, it has stringers and correspondents around the globe. These four Western-based wire services for
many years virtually determined what the audiences in their home countries heard about the rest of
the world and vice versa. They set the tone and duration of international topical issues. Given the
nature of psycho-socio homeostasis history has produced, the news agencies tailored the news coming
from Africa, whenever events were reported from the continent. From the subscription figures of the
AP, one may exponentially determine the collective influence of the Western wire services.
AT: “Disaster Porn is Necessary/We Outweigh” (1/2)

Don’t privilege the lives saved in the 1AC over those who will be destroyed by
“Humanitarian Intervention” – there is no basis for the epistemic privileging of any one
individual or collective subject position – aka there is no reason to privilege one act of
atrocity over the next
Yúdice 01 (George, American Studies @ NYU “From Hybridity to Policy: For a Purposeful Cultural Studies.”
Translator’s Introduction: in Nestor Garcia Canclini, Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural
Conflicts, pp. ix-xxxviii p. xv – xvi)
Although Garcia Canclini understands that such hybridity undermines such dualisms as North/South,
European/indigenous, folk/mass – “cultures are no longer grouped in fixed and stable wholes, and therefore
the possibility disappears of being cultured by knowing the repertory of the “great works”, or of being
popular because one manages the meaning of objects and messages produced by a more or less closed
community (an ethnic group, a neighborhood, a class)”—he also eschews, for the very same reason, the
voluntarism that proclaims the “epistemic privilege” of the oppressed. Between representation and its
undoing by hybridity, Garcia Canclini, unlike Bhabha or Haraway, concentrates on the mediation of
institutions that never permit one or the other to prevail completely. “The artistic market and the
reorganization of urban visuality generated by the culture industry and the fatigue of political
voluntarism are combined to make unrealistic any attempt at making of high art or folklore the
proclamation of the inaugural power of the artist or of prominent social actors.” I would go a little
further and elaborate this insight: neither the representations disseminated by government agencies,
the media, labor and consumer markets, or academic discipline such as anthropology nor the
scrambling of these representations through the intersection of these institutions or other contingencies
provide a foundation for the epistemic privilege of any one individual or collective subject.
The image focused media grab public attention only until the next image and halt
structural change.
As a journalist I understand that "news" is still defined as a usually negative departure from the norm. I
also recognize that in the eternal media race for larger circulations and higher ratings, profits and the
bottom line dominate concerns about values and ethics. As in Somalia, the "hit-and-run" mentality of
Western media makes it easy to briefly light up trouble spots, while the years of exploitation and
deterioration that produced them are left in the dark. The "here today, gone tomorrow" nature of
much international reporting, with star newspersons briefly crowding each other at media feeding troughs,
then jetting on to the next venue, doesn't help. By definition such journalists know little of the language
and less of the cultures they cover. They certainly never appreciate the subtleties and nuances of local
history and interactions that take years to learn. They are neither accustomed or equipped to observe,
understand or explain developmental situations that may change slowly over time. As a Zambian, my
observations are necessarily "out of Africa." But these observations of Western media shortcomings could be
applied to many parts of the developing world. Admittedly, the negative patterns of coverage I've described
were often conditioned by colonialism and Cold War politics. Unfortunately, they reinforced a pattern
of ignorance and distortion that has not changed with the changing political systems. In the case of this
news blackout at least, it is still very much a dark continent.
AT: “Disaster Porn is Necessary/We Outweigh” (2/2)

Disaster porn doesn’t take into account those who are being photographed- persons who
are exploited by the media are then ostracized by their communities- we are NOT helping
by using these methods of conveyance
But many aid workers are reluctant to write hard and fast rules, instead preferring to promote good examples
to ensure best practice. Noone said a Concern appeal for Niger showing a naked, emaciated child in her
mother's arms was not really a good image to use because it was a stereotype and an Irish child would
not be portrayed naked in the same way. On the other hand, she said Irish agency Trocaire had avoided
stereotypes by using an appeal showing a family against a backdrop of land that had turned to desert. "It's
very illustrative of what's going on, and farmers in Ireland could relate," she said. Pictures of famine victims
are often presented without context and without the subjects' names, critics say. Another big problem
is when one person's striking image becomes an icon for a tragedy, bringing long-term and
problematic consequences to the individual. Paul Lowe, a photojournalist who has worked in famines
around the world, said a man photographed in India crying over his dead daughter was then ostracised
by his community for showing weakness, and was forced to move to a different place.
AT: “Negative Portrayals Key”

Negative images and portrayals are not necessary- studies show that positive portrayals are
more successful
As various academic studies have observed, photographs which accompany stories on international affairs—
especially from Africa, Asia and the Middle East—commonly feature mayhem and pathos. “As for
international news,” said Malcolm Browne, the journalist who took the iconic Vietnam War image of the
burning monk, “I think we do care more now about the really poignant image from wherever it happens
to be. As a page-one leader, not necessarily attached to the story, but with a reefer saying, ‘Here’s your BB
[Bloated Belly—shorthand for “starving child”]. Details within.’” Americans expect the worst, and the
photographs in the media—whether ad campaigns or humanitarian appeals—reinforce their
audience’s predispositions. The media rarely act on the basis of the “pleasure principle;” they are
more likely to run striking but essentially negative news images than feel-good pictures. Yet various
studies conducted on direct-mail fund raising in the donor community have suggested that most people
have a distinct preference for positive photographs. Identical appeals were married to either upbeat (clean
child smiling) or depressing (dirty child sad) images. The direct mail with the positive photographs
garnered slightly more donations and greater sums of money per household than those with the
negative images. Threatening and painful images cause people to turn away, and since the media prioritize
bad-news images, this tendency may partially account for Americans’ compassion fatigue.
AT: “Floating PIKs Bad”

The alternative is not framed in a way that makes our kritik the type of “Floating PIK”
that they allege that we are. We are simply claiming that our methodology does not prevent
your harms from being solved. It’s the same thing as turning the internal link to all of your
advantages with a disad. Stop whining and defend your representations.
Group the theory, first our offense:
1. Increases education – choose depth over breadth; PIKs force in depth research into the
assumptions behind the aff
2. Most real world- minor amendments are added in congress, lawyers lose on they way
they present their arguments.
3. Opens up new space for discussion- if we win our framework, we can discuss not only
what is bad, but what can be done to fix the problems with the presentation of the 1AC.
Now our defense:
1. Potential abuse is not a voter – we didn’t do it and it’s impossible to quantify. Since the
ballot doesn’t set a precedent, in-round abuse is the fairest way to judge theory.
2. Reject the argument, not the team – the punishment paradigm rewards theory over
substance, decreasing education. Plus, they can’t prove a reason why we jacked their
ability to beat the rest of our positions.
3. Err neg on theory-
a. Structural side bias – the aff has first and last speech, picks the framework for the
debate, and has infinite prep.
b. Topic specific side bias – infinite things that could be detained and lack of kritik
links off of a decrease in authority guts neg ground.
AT: Politics of Compassion - Inauthenticity

Barrages of spectacles to generate an emotional response create an inauthentic compassion
based on pleasure and distraction. This halts true unmediated compassion.
By the second half of the twentieth century, these and similar anxieties would culminate in a full blown
critique of the spectacular society, with critics like Susan Sontag lamenting that repeated exposure to
representations of suffering was as likely "to deaden conscience as to arouse it." In the society of the
spectacle, according to this now familiar diagnosis, a barrage of impressions of misery had supposedly
alienated people from authentic feelings and from their natural sympathies; spectators were becoming
little more than consumers of the violent images and stories offered up for their pleasure and
distraction. Sontag and many other critics of mass culture portrayed sensational tales and spectacular
images of suffering as hazards to unmediated compassion. But sentiments are never unmediated. Indeed,
an over-investment in supposedly "authentic" human feelings has led scholars to miss the essential
contribution of mass culture to humanitarianism. Robert Scott's experience in Alaska certainly suggests a
complex and significant relationship between sensationalism and humanitarianism. As we shall see, Red
Cross volunteers and staff members gave a great deal of thought to the task of making suffering (and
relief work) "interesting," "exciting," and "entertaining." Suffering had to be graphic; it had to be
stirring. Modern compassion, it seems, has been enabled not only by revulsion against cruelty, and by
desires to help those less fortunate, but also, in disconcerting ways, by the (covert) pleasures afforded by
representations of suffering. Certainly, the editors of the American Red Cross Magazine, which played a
pivotal role in the rapid expansion of the Red Cross in the second decade of the twentieth century, identified
and exploited a causal relationship between sensationalism and compassion, resolving to make their
own accounts of suffering more "vivid" and "thrilling" in the hope of attracting readers and members to
the organization. A growing number of contributions to the magazine during these years present
sensationalized descriptions of misery, violence, and bloodshed. To some extent this was an obvious
reporting technique, readily available and acceptable to muckrakers and yellow journalists alike at this time,
but we should surely ask what cultural assumptions and desires were in place to make this appropriate
fare for the readership of a humanitarian journal.
AT: Politics of Compassion - Ethics of Pity

Calls for compassion institute a civilizing process based on the Ethics of Pity.
The deliciousness of horror has rarely been acknowledged in histories of the origins of humanitarianism.
Much of this scholarly literature remains faithful to the spirit of eighteenth-century Anglo-American moral
philosophy, particularly to the insights of Shaftsbury, Hume, and Smith. In his seminal and still influential
Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith articulated one of the central tenets of this "school" when
he described "sympathy" as one of the "original passions of human nature." One of the most important tasks
of moral philosophy in this tradition has been to identify the conditions that enable natural compassion to
emerge and to flourish. Significantly, early thinkers generally agreed that the secret to activating compassion
was to appeal to the senses rather than to reason, placing vivid accounts of suffering before the spectator in
order to provoke an imaginative identification with the misery of victims. Once a sympathetic bond had been
established, it was assumed, charity would follow. Of course, philosophers like Smith and Hume were
hardly oblivious to the more unsavory aspects of human nature. They were fully aware that people were
motivated also by malice and other less altruistic drives (Smith, after all, is much better known today for
placing the pursuit of self-interest at the center of modern economic theory), and they understood that reason
had to be engaged if compassion was to produce moral action. Still, the idea that compassion was a natural
emotional response to the sufferings of strangers quickly became conventional in philosophical circles,
and it continues to be taken for granted in many scholarly investigations into humanitarianism. 1The
problem with this approach is that it tends to take emotions and desires for granted. What we require is
a social history of sentiments and senses. Thus the true starting point for my own study of
humanitarianism is The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche's path-breaking 1887 study of the "ethics of
pity." He challenged the notion that compassion was a timeless "natural" faculty, arguing that it was
actually a "symptom" of civilization. Nietzsche pointed out that in Ancient and Medieval Europe it had
been conventional to delight in inflicting pain or in witnessing the sufferings of strangers, and he
insisted that any history of humanitarian sentiment had to take the deliciousness of horror into
consideration when it traced the birth of conscience and compassion. This was the very history that
Norbert Elias set out to assay in his own magisterial study of the "civilizing process," which charted rising
thresholds of shame, embarrassment, and repugnance about ungoverned emotions and bodily
functions. In the Middle Ages, he explained, the "pleasure in killing and torturing others was great, and it
was a socially permitted pleasure." But with the advent of modernity and the demand for "stricter control of
impulses and emotions," it became socially unacceptable to express, or even admit to, "joy in the
destruction and torment of others." Brutality, once socially acceptable, was transformed into an offense
against nature, and henceforth it was in bad taste even to expose oneself to scenes of violence and atrocity.
The enduring power of Elias's work comes from his insistent and careful attention to the relationship between
structures of feeling and social conditions and to his awareness that moral pronouncements have always been
tied to class formation. Upon this foundation it was possible to erect a critique of natural sympathy and
a more satisfactory account of the origins of humanitarianism.
AT: Politics of Compassion – Justifies Oppression

The compassion produced by spectacles of suffering justifies other forms of oppression by
separating those who are virtuous through compassion and those who are inhuman. This is
because of the addictive nature of suffering spectacle; it becomes the locus of our desire.
The structural aspects that allow for suffering remain.
The compassion produced by spectacles of suffering can, and all too often has, become an alibi for other
forms of oppression. The wealthy businessmen who ran the Red Cross during the First World War, for
example, could feel virtuous without having to trouble over such matters as low wages, unsafe
workplaces, or even their own contributions to a war machine that was producing the slaughter in the
first place. Indeed, it can be argued that the Red Cross consolidated ideological assent for an often-
exploitative industrial social order at a moment of profound corporate vulnerability—by casting
strikers and radical dissenters as unpatriotic, un-American, and inhuman. Even as George Creel and the CPI
campaigned to overturn the popular belief that the U.S. was fighting a "capitalist's war," financiers and
industrialists were exploiting the prestige of the American Red Cross to undermine the enemies of [End Page
441] business. Of course, the Red Cross was supposed to be a source of national unity and social harmony.
AT: Politics of Compassion – Imagery Becomes Enough

The spectacle of suffering makes us feel delight and guilt which we ride off as enough
compassion. When the aff images are read, it stops any real compassionate progress.
Inquiring into "the role of emotion in moral motivation," the philosopher P.S. Greenspan submits that the
principal spur to charity in our own time is the guilt men and women experience when they respond
inappropriately to the misfortunes of others. If people believe they should feel sadness or horror but
instead feel a strange titillation (which seems to be the modern fate), they begin to experience an
"emotional discomfort" severe enough to become a "compulsive motivation" that drives them to
perform the acts of virtue that they hope will cleanse or expiate their bad feelings. Greenspan's rhetoric
of compulsion is unsettling. After all, a good deal of humanitarian activity has very little to do with
emotion, depending instead on habit or peer pressure or even scrupulous moral deliberation. Moreover, it is
surely not the case that all modern people do experience guilt or discomfort when amusing themselves
with spectacles of suffering. Nevertheless, the logic laid out here provides suggestive insights into the
emotional world of early-twentieth century humanitarians. The spectacle, romance, and thrill of American
Red Cross Magazine stories begins to appear as a means of riveting the attention of ordinary Americans
on the suffering of strangers, of producing that mingled delight and guilt that produces compassion
and, ultimately, acts of charity. The form and content of the magazine, then, enabled readers to take an
ambivalent pleasure in spectacles of death and destruction while simultaneously feeling virtuous and
compassionate. The very act of reading a humanitarian journal surely satisfied most readers of their
compassion and decency; after all, this magazine was only distributed to Red Cross members. Maybe
Augustine was right; perhaps compassion cannot exist without a taste for spectacles of suffering.
AT: Perm
Permutation debate- group it:
1. It’s not competitive: There is no alternative to permute- our argument is that your use of
remembering atrocities to justify political action is bad and causes the harms of the 1ac to
continue
2. Its severance, which is bad and a voting issue: in order for the permutation to solve it
would have to overcome all of the solvency deficit arguments implicit in our link and impact
claims; this can only occur through the discursive severance of getting rid of evidence that
supports our link claims from the 1ac- that’s bad b/c it means the negative would always lose
to aff conditionality, making all our arguments not competitive b/c the affirmative spike
would always loom- it makes them a moving target, they could get out of all our links to
disads and k’s- voter for fairness and competitive equity
3. The perm will always link: as long as they attempt to achieve political action in the interest
of preventing another said atrocity, they will still link.
AT: Perm – Desire For More

The perm is just an excuse for the replicating cycle of escalating imagery. Any instance of
disaster imagery creates a desire that we consume fresh ones while the impact of the
previous fades away completely – this ideology has prevented the west from stepping
through its indifference and being able to engage meaningfully to allievate suffering or
dispel of violence.
Taylor 06 [Paul, Professor of Communication Studies, “The Pornographic barbarism of the Self-
reflecting sign”, IJBS, Volume 4 Number 1, published 2006]
A key element of Pornography is the short-lived nature of the viewer’s attention span. Its nature is such that
once consumed there is an almost immediate demand for fresh images. The same tendency is evident in
social pornography in which political discourse requires fresh images and the impact of the old ones
fades rapidly. This perhaps at least partially explains the insensitivity of David Letterman, the most
successful late-night talk show host on US television, and his above “joke”. It was made less than a month
after the Abu Ghraib pictures first appeared in the US press and when delivered produced a large amount of
laughter in the New York theatre audience to whom Letterman presents his show each weeknight. Žižek
delineates two major post September 11 options open to America: it can either further fortify its
sphere from which it watches world tragedies via a TV screen or it can ‘finally risk stepping through
the fantasmatic screen that separates it from the Outside World, accepting its arrival in the Real
World.51 The Letterman incident suggests that Žižek’s second option is unlikely to be taken up by
America in the near future and the complex reasons for this is a major theme of Baudrillard’s work, and
something we have only been able to touch upon here. What I have tried to show, however, is the deep-
rooted nature of the West’s unhealthy relationship to the image and the way in which this has
repeatedly prevented the West from stepping through that fantasmatic screen and engaging
meaningfully with the Muslim Other. This is a failure that has typified the post September 11 political
response, from its immediate aftermath right up to recent events in Iraq. The apparently benign concept of
branding the US like any other commodity image is in fact a stark indication of how "The Land of the
Free" is in fact imprisoned whether it is thought of in terms of Narcissus’s pond surface or Žižek’s screen.
In keeping with Jung’s above insight, social pornography reveals the darker, slavish element of the term
brand. In order to provide the video’s publicity shot, Rufus Hannah and Donnie Brennan, two of the
homeless protagonists from Bumfights, were paid $200, whilst drunk, to have the show’s logo tattooed in ink
on the former’s knuckles and the latter’s forehead.52 Sometimes a brand connotes more than we would wish.
AT: Perm – Liberalism Bad
Liberal claims to solvency are only tactics to soothe our conscience, not ways to alleviate
and decrease suffering in the world.
Univ of Copenhagen)
But can the intellectual succeed in accomplishing what the sufferer cannot? Or are our attempts to
communicate or publicize the pain of others little more [End Page 54] than stratagems for helping us
deal with the effects this pain has had upon us? In a world in which human misery is increasing as the
divide between haves and have-nots widens, and wars are waged for control over scarce resources, liberal-
minded anthropologists may have no other options than those that have been invoked and deployed by
European liberals for the past 200 years. We all fall back on time-worn liberal assumptions that
improved knowledge—in this case, ethnographic knowledge of people's lives in marginal environments—
will somehow facilitate real, practical interventions, or that exposing the self-serving interests that lie
behind the discourses of dominant States and corporations will somehow embarrass the rich and powerful
into making life less burdensome and miserable for the powerless, or that describing the intolerable
conditions under which the poor live and die will "speak truth to power" and somehow alter the way
power is wielded, or we show that suffering is somehow redeemed by the creativity with which people
rebuild and reimagine their lives, 31 the patience and stoicism with which they go on. But these
arguments are often forms of wishful thinking—ways of salving our consciences rather than saving the
world—and make anthropology, in Boltanski's terms, a "politics of pity" rather than a "politics of justice."32
AT: Perm – Silences Alternatives

Their claim that their representations are “true” recreates hierarchies and silences
alternative discourses.
Huysmans 02 (Lecturer in politics at Dept. of Government; Alternatives vol. 27, “Defining Social
Constructivism in Security Studies: Normative Dilemma of Writing Security”
http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst?docId=5002461851)
The critical quality rests on the assumption that representations of the world make a difference
(performative force of language) and that there is no natural or neutral arbiter of a true representation.
Consequently, any representation, to become true, has to establish itself as hegemonic (often by claiming
it is a true representation, while the others are false) at the cost of silencing alternative representations.
This is shown by indicating how alternative options "circulated"--and still are around--in the political
struggle for founding a hegemonic discourse and how they were silenced by the now dominant
discourse.
AT: Perm – Reps Matter

Images of suffering create desire for the repressed world of death and destruction. Since
this desire has already affected us, the representations cannot be separated from the plan.
When we are dealing with spectacular bodies and the "modern gaze," we enter decisively and
unavoidably into the realm of desire. 26 It was Susan Sontag who first explored this matter at length,
arguing that the conspicuous modern fascination with images of pain and suffering was essentially
pornographic, a reaction-formation to the increasing insulation of everyday lives from violence, death,
and destruction over the last two centuries. The more taboo death and suffering became, according to
this Freudian reading, the more tantalizing they were and the more eagerly (if surreptitiously) readers and
viewers responded to their sensational representations. 27 This surely helps to explain why pornography
might suddenly (and for the first time) be overrun with eroticized depictions of pain in the age of
humanitarianism, and it lends great force to historian Karen Halttunen's conclusion that a pornography of
pain was "not merely a seamy sideline to humanitarian reform literature but rather an integral aspect
of the humanitarian sensibility." 28 In her brilliant reading, the humanitarian movement was itself
complicit in creating the sensational appetites that sustained the growth of the new mass culture. But it
is not finally enough to explain modern prurience about suffering bodies simply as the return of the desires
repressed by civilization. Influence runs both ways. Humanitarianism became a mass phenomenon in the
United States at the very moment that a sensationalistic mass media began to dominate American
culture. The mass media itself played a crucial role in reshaping American ways of seeing, feeling, and
responding to suffering by treating violence and pain as pleasure-producing commodities.
AT: “Its our evidence, not us”
1. Your evidence frames the way in which you represent the harms presented in the
1AC- if we garner a link off of it, you must defend it. The aff has infinite prep time
and if they can sever out of complete ideas in their evidence, they could just get up after
any 1NC and say “we’re sorry, that’s not what we meant”.
2. Shifts in advocacy are bad because:

a. The negative loses 8 minutes of their speech time. We create our 1NC based on
your advocacy out of the 1AC, to say that it’s not your fault is the equivalent of
reading an new speech. If they concede this vote them down on fairness
3. You have infinite prep time. If you cannot endorse your own authors, then they
shouldn’t be in your 1ac.
***AFF ANSWERS***
Aff: Disaster porn key to solve: Public Interest

Images and analogies humanize events so that people can relate to them, increasing public
interest while making solutions more successful.
Susan Moeller, journalist and writer, director of Journalism at Brandeis University, 1999, Compassion Fatigue,
pg. 38
With a distant event there is a need to make an audience "feel" the situation. Northern whites had long
acknowledged the legal apartheid of the American South, but they didn't "feel" its effects until
photography and television in the late 1950s and 1960s brought the emotional blow of racism to the
front pages and airwaves. Images help to legitimate the use of the word "crisis" for an event. A "crisis"
occurs when the abstractions of injustice or racism or prejudice or pain, violence or destruction become
concrete on a scale large enough to attract attention. It is the role of imagery to make the incorporeal,
corporeal. That is how images tap so easily into our emotions, which respond more readily to flesh-and-
blood people than to ephemeral concepts, however transcendent. News needs to be related to an
individual's experience in order for that individual to take it in. Images effect that more easily, partly
because common ground can more readily be discovered in a photograph than in paragraphs of text: That is a
picture of a child; I, too, have a child.
Disaster pornography plays a key role in raising funding for people in need- it’s the only
way to solve
Jenny Matthews, who has made a career photographing women in conflicts and is frequently hired by aid
agencies, said that sometimes a striking picture of a suffering infant needed to be used. "It's a truth,"
she said, pointing to a picture of a baby in her mother's arms being fed by tube. "I'd stand by that."
And fundraisers say the starving baby pictures tug heartstrings and bring in cash - especially at a time
when NGOs are sprouting up all over Africa and competing for limited funds from a Western public
that some say is experiencing "compassion fatigue". According to Tafari Wossen, a former public
relations official with the Ethiopian government, there were only seven NGOs involved in the aid response
during a famine in his country in 1974. "The number of NGOs is now uncountable," he said. Lizzy
Noone, who works for Irish agency Concern, is part of a team writing new guidelines for European agencies
to help staff choose pictures that can raise money without taking away the subjects' dignity. "The fundraising
department argue that softer images don't bring in the money," she said, but added: "If all the agencies
did it at once, and people were willing to take that little drop of income for the transition period, the
public would get used to it very quickly."
Aff: Disaster porn key to solve: Gov’t Pressure

Images of suffering and conflict can be used to pressure the government to act ethically.
Gearoid Tuathail, Associate professor of Geography at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 2000, “De-Territorialized
Threats and Global Dangers: Geopolitics and Risk Society,”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers
September 98.
The ability of new media organizations to deploy satellite systems that can beam back "live" images from
geopolitical hotspots has speeded the pace of diplomacy and statecraft in the late twentieth century. These
images provide a unique source of intelligence for foreign policy decisionmakers and viewing publics,
enabling them to better visualize how a particular crisis is playing itself out in a remote location (though they
hardly capture the complexity of crises). But these image and information flows give crises an immediacy
and proximity that can undermine the restricted strategic and moral geographies of foreign policy
decisionmakers. Certain persistent television images can create imperatives of obligation and
responsibility, particularly cases of egregious human rights violations, in regions that are strategically
marginal and geographically distant (Rotberg and Weiss 1996). This can create awkward dilemmas for
foreign policymakers as they become caught between the universal geographies of moral responsibility
associated with "humanitarianism" and the much more circumscribed geographies of "vital national
interests" based on strategic calculations and obligations (Nye 1999).
Aff: Disaster porn key to solve: Media demystification

Obvious manipulation of the images demystifies news and catastrophe reporting, fostering
detachment that is crucial to life in the modern age.
Baudrillard, 1994 [Jean, “The Illusion of the End” p. 60-61]
Here, then, is the international consciousness foiled by its own ideal, hoist with its own petard. The Gulf War
merely accentuated the disastrous impression of our having been drawn so far into simulation that the
question of truth and reality cannot even be posed, of our having been drawn so far into the 'liberation' of the
medium and the image that the question of freedom cannot even be posed. But can news and the media really
be put on trial now? Absolutely not, for the simple reason that the media themselves hold the key to the
judicial enquiry. There can be no contesting their innocence since 'disinformation' is always imputed
to an accident of news-gathering [information]; the guiding principle itself is never questioned. And yet
there will, nonetheless, have been a kind of verdict in this Romanian affair, and the artificial heaps of corpses
will have been of some use, all the same. One might ask whether the Romanians, by the very excessiveness
of this staged event and the simulacrum of their revolution, have not served as demystifiers of news and its
guiding principle. For, if the media image has put an end to the credibility of the event, the event will, in
its turn, have put an end to the credibility of the image. Never again shall we be able to look at a
television picture in good faith, and this is the finest collective demystification we have ever known. The
finest revenge over this new arrogant power, this power to blackmail by events. Who can say what
responsibility attaches to the televisual production of a false massacre (Timisoara), as compared with the
perpetrating of a true massacre? This is another kind of crime against humanity, a hijacking of fantasies,
affects and the credulity of hundreds of millions of people by means of television- a crime of blackmail and
simulation. What penalty is laid down for such a hijacking? There is no way to rectify this situation and we
must have no illusions: there is no perverse effect, nor even anything scandalous in the 'Timisoara syndrome'.
It is simply the (immoral) truth of news, the secret purpose [destination] of which is to deceive us about
the real, but also to undeceive us about the real. There is no worse mistake than taking the real for the real
and, in that sense, the very excess of media illusion plays a vital disillusioning role. In this way, news could
be said to undo its own spell by its effects and the violence of information to be avenged by the
repudiation and indifference it engenders. Just as we should be unreservedly thankful for the existence of
politicians, who take on themselves the responsibility for that wearisome function, so we should be grateful
to the media for existing and taking on themselves the triumphant illusionism of the world of
communications, the whole ambiguity of mass culture, the confusion of ideologies, the stereotypes, the
spectacle, the banality - soaking up all these things in their operation. While, at the same time, constituting a
permanent test of intelligence, for where better than on television can one learn to question every picture,
every word, every commentary? Television inculcates indifference, distance, scepticism and unconditional
apathy. Through the world's becoming-image, it anaesthetizes the imagination, provokes a sickened
abstraction, together with a surge of adrenalin which induces total disillusionment. Television and the
media would render reality [Ie reel] dissuasive, were it not already so. And this represents an absolute
advance in the consciousness - or the cynical unconscious - of our age.
Aff: Representations good: Global moral conscience

International representations are producing a global moral conscience, linking us to the
struggles of others.
September 98.
The emergence of television as a dominant mode of mass communication between leaders and
populations first impacted the practice of geopolitics in significant ways during the Vietnam war (the broad
relationship between popular media and geopolitics goes back to the nineteenth century). In the 1990s the
development of transnational television networks and the capacity for "real time" coverage of breaking
international crises has extended this impact. Television has unleashed what Ignatieff (1997, 10) terms
an "electronic internationalism" linking the consciences of the world's "tame zones" to the sufferings
of the world's "wild zones," where war, anarchy and starvation are the rule. It has "contributed to the
break-down of the barriers of citizenship, religion, race, and geography that once divided our moral
space into those we were responsible for and those who were beyond our ken," creating in the process
an emergent "global conscience" (Ignatieff 1997, 11).
Aff: Representations good: Force us to address issues

The violence in the representation of the affirmative forces us to confront issues we would
otherwise ignore.
September 98.
Such lurid descriptions of violence and suffering can be accused of sensationalizing and
spectacularizing war, a textualizing of Bosnia into the "war-is-hell" cannon. Yet, inevitably troped and
even anticipated as they may be (not to mention subvertible), such descriptions nevertheless force us
into eye contact with actualities we would prefer to avoid. O'Kane's matter-of-fact style forces us to
contemplate the postmodern horror of modern weapons and pre-modern medicine. In Srebrenica: a man who
had fled from the village of Vlasnica waited outside an operating room while Dr Nikanovich tried to
amputate his daughter's leg with a metal saw. "She's only five. I can't go in," her father told Nezira Bektic
who went into the room to collect his shirt. She died on the table from shock while Dr Nikanovich was
sawing. There was no anaesthetic for the pain (17 March 1993).
Aff: Representations are justified if true (1/2)

Truthful evidence should be accepted regardlesss of representations
This research project focusing on the institutionalization of threat environments does not escape the
normative dilemma of social-constructivist security studies. As with any security analysis, by uttering
security language it risks confirming the securitization of an area that it would prefer not to be securitized.
But because it cuts into the dilemma from the question of the rarefaction of security utterances, it
differentiates the normative dilemma somewhat. As stated up to now, the dilemma rests on the general
assumption that utterances have a performative force and that agents uttering security do not fully
control the way they utter and the effects of the utterance. Sociological inquiries into the conditions of
the mobilization of security dispositions can show that not all utterances have an equal capacity to
"securitize." It depends on the position from which the utterance is spoken and on how it is
constructed. In other words, some security utterances have a higher capacity to mobilize security disp
ositions than others. This also counts for the way security studies reproduces security language. For example,
Bigo's research implies that his own statements have not the same capacity to securitize internal affairs as a
more technical research that tries to correctly define threats and so forth. Why? In his interpretation of the
process, to increase its capacity for securitization the professional knowledge produced by security
Professionals--which can include academics--should be formulated in a technical, rational language. It could
be argued that Bigo's own research does not formulate that technical knowledge and therefore it undermines
its own capacity to securitize, which is probably exactly what it intends to do. I do not want to argue that, as a
result, Bigo has overcome the dilemma. When his utterances enter the political, contested area of
migration, for example, they will become subjected to an intersubjective game that interprets and
reinterprets texts and manipulates its effects. But the research project of Bigo and my overinterpreted
Waever have the advantage of differentiating how one is caught by the normative dilemma by means of
differentiating between the transformative capacity of utterances. This is made possible by means of a
political sociology of the crucial "element" upon which the dilemma depends: the power-knowledge
nexus.
Aff: Representations are justified if true (2/2)

Correct representations depict the true nature of that which they represent
Although one should not rule out the critical value of this kind of research, there is something problematic or
schizophrenic about it. The analytical moment of the research dwells within a performative
understanding of language, while the critical moment resides in a representational interpretation of
language. The main force of its criticism relies on the distortion in the representation that it
"discovers" in the discourses it researches. In other words, this strategy assumes at some point that the
unwanted effects of the criminological or security discourses can be remedied by a correct representation of
the world of migration. It thus seems to call for an undistorted representation of the problematics of
migration. A new label for old phenomena may assist policymakers in finding approval for new proposals.
The question should therefore be whether international crime, if objectively assessed, establishes a greater
threat to the internal security of EC member-states than it did a decade ago, or whether ma ss attention paid
to phenomena related to international crime acts as an instrument in the justification of new investment. (22)
Such an oscillating strategy is problematic from the social-constructivist perspective outlined above. It
assumes that a true, undistorted history of the object of research (for example, the relationship between
migration and crime) is possible. In the social-constructivist understanding of language, this is not the
case. The object only appears within a discursive formation; in other words, a discursive formation is
constitutive for the social emergence of an object. Therefore, an object of research cannot be separated
from discursive formations within which it becomes visible. Consequently, an undistorted history of the
relationship between migration and crime is no longer possible. It will always articulate a criminological
discourse of itself because that discourse makes it possible for the question to appear. Therefore, the social-
constructivist perspective has to go the performative way a bit further than the oscillating strategy. It has to
engage more directly and exclusively with the discursive forma tion in its performative and generic
dimensions. Jumping back in a representational argument at the crucial point is not a viable move. Rather
than being a history or semiology of the referent object, a social-constructivist analysis stresses the
interpretation of the governing work of discursive formations.
Aff Perm – Politics of Compassion

Permutation - Our Affirmative is the Politics of Compassion. Infusing political action with
a moral requirement of compassion allows us to act even when we do not see or know the
specific individual. Where history and relationships are blurred or non-existent, the
Politics of Compassion isolates a shared humanity that calls our emotion, not just those
representations that are spectacular.
Porter 06 [Elisabeth Porter, professor and head of the School of International Studies at the University of South
Australia, Can Politics Practice Compassion, Hypatia 21.4, pg. 97-123]
Admittedly, there is a fine line between care ethics generally and the distinctiveness of a politics of
compassion as I am developing it. There often is a conceptual convergence of themes, and thus in elaborating
on compassion, I draw explicitly on care theorists. In various instances, I draw more broadly on other
international relations and moral theorists to argue that a focus on compassion fosters a more thorough
ethical response to politics than many current versions of care ethics because it enables responses to
those political issues that are outside of our immediate everyday relationships. I endeavor to clarify
where there are clear overlaps between care ethics and a politics of compassion and where the differences are
important. The main similarity between care ethics and a politics of compassion lies in the commitment to
the particular, contextualized characteristics of care, including the moral requirement of compassion.
The main difference lies in the focus of attention. Whereas care ethics is usually directed toward a specific
known person, a politics of compassion extends the political domain in which compassion might operate
to include examples where we do not personally know the people requiring care, such as with refugees,
women raped in war, or civilians killed by the "smart bombs" of the "war on terrorism." The "ethics of care"
broadened into a "politics of care" and a "politics of compassion" extends these debates so that in
situations where there is a lack of previous history and everyday relationship between the parties
involved, the role of compassion enlarges and adopts an important feature in the relationship.3 A
politics of compassion links the universal and the particular in that it assumes a shared humanity of
interconnected, vulnerable people and requires emotions and practical, particular responses to
different expressions of vulnerability.
Perm is Unconditional Responsibility

In a politics of compassion, compassion is merged with an unconditional responsibility to
ground our actions.
Some feminists see the particularity of responsibility as an obstacle to realizing political compassion. For
example, Susan Mendus argues that "identity and morality are constituted by actual relationships of care
between particular people," thus the concept of care does not translate readily to the wider political problems
of hunger, poverty, refugee status, and war that require solutions for people we do not know (2000, 106). As I am
arguing, it is not care alone or a particular relationship of care that enables compassionate responsibility, but
a merging of a compassionate drive with a search for justice, equality, and rights. Caring for someone
necessarily encompasses a concern for his or her equality and rights. I am supporting a strong notion of
compassionate justice that accepts responsibilities toward "particular others" who can include "actual
starving children in Africa with whom one feels empathy" (Held 1987, 118). If we take seriously the idea of
global interdependence, then regardless of our specific nationalities and races, we have "duties" to people who are
distant from us and belong to other communities (Midgley 1999, 161). Amartya Sen also believes we have a
"multiplicity of loyalties" (1996, 113) to humanity, our nation, city, community, family, and friends. Simone
Weil's notion of "justice as compassion" also is one in which mutual respect for all humans grounds our
obligations to prevent suffering and harm. She believes that we have an unconditional obligation not to let a
single human suffer "when one has the chance of coming to his assistance" (quoted in R. Bell 1998, 114).15 This
qualifier is important. We cannot assume responsibility for all suffering, to do so is naïve. We can assume, however,
some responsibility to try to alleviate suffering whenever we can.
Compassion ID w/ Other
The compassion of the aff is premised on identifying with the condition of the Other. This
is an attempt to understand it through the lens of another history and identity.
Most theorists understand compassion as some combination of three factors—feelings, empathy, and co-
suffering. First, compassion involves a "feeling with" another person. In an early influential article,
Lawrence Blum discussed "compassion as a kind of emotion or emotional attitude [with] an irreducible
affective dimension" (1980, 507). Blum categorized compassion as an altruistic virtue given its regard
for the well-being of others. What marks the subject of compassion is the graveness of a situation in
which persons or groups experience serious pain, anguish, torture, misery, grief, distress, despair,
hardship, destitution, adversity, agony, affliction, hardship, and suffering. Blum explained that compassion
is not a simple feeling, "but a complex emotional attitude toward another, characteristically involving
imaginative dwelling on the condition of the other person" (509). This imaginative dimension visualized
what the other person, given his or her "character, beliefs, and values is undergoing, rather than what
we ourselves would feel" in a similar situation (510). Often, we come to some understanding of someone's
plight by imagining what our reactions might be, for example, to having our city bombed, or our daughter
raped in war, or our friend called a terrorist simply for looking Middle Eastern. "The limits of a person's
capacities for imaginative reconstruction set limits on her capacity for compassion" (510). Later, I give
instances of politicians' conspicuous lack of imaginative identification with many groups who clearly are
suffering and desperately in need of compassion.
Compassion opens space for alts

Opening ourselves to the Other allows us to begin a dialogue based on a shared humanity
and the narrative of the Other.
Most theorists understand compassion as some combination of three factors—feelings, empathy, and co-
suffering. Second, if we understand compassion as "the capacity to feel for others and, to some extent, share
their emotions and enter into their predicament" (Porter 1999, 184), feminists are divided as to the extent to
which one can empathize with others. For example, Seyla Benhabib has supported an egalitarian reciprocity
that recognizes "the dignity of the generalized other through an acknowledgement of the moral identity of the
concrete other" (1992, 164). To this end, the more we seek to identify with another, the greater likelihood
we have of being able to understand some of this person's deep needs. In response, Iris Young maintained
"that identifying moral respect and reciprocity with symmetry and reversibility of perspectives tends to close
off the differentiation among subjects that Benhabib wants to keep open" (1997, 41). I argue elsewhere that
we must put ourselves in the position of others to grasp the nature of our differences, otherwise, "we
fail to risk the vulnerability of being truly open to others" (2000, 175). Admittedly, in doing this, we may
be repulsed by our differences. Yet the process of opening ourselves to others' situations is, as I argue
more fully later, part of beginning a dialogue. Clearly, there are limits to how fully we can identify with
others. Those who lost loved ones in the 2001 attacks on the United States, the 2002 Bali bombings, the
2003 Madrid bomb, the 2005 London bomb, or who continue to lose loved ones in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel,
Palestine, or elsewhere, feel the pain differently from those who watch television accounts. Those
involved in refugee advocacy or who befriend asylum seekers listen to firsthand narratives and can
empathize with firsthand knowledge of peoples' pain. As I expand upon later, compassion is grounded in
the universality of human vulnerability, and it requires meaningful responses to particularity that
avoid presumptuous paternalism.
Compassion is Interconnected Ontology

Politics of Compassion relies on ontology of interconnectedness which can address global
concerns.
First, critics counter that care ethics, which includes compassion, is too personal and provides an unsustainable
basis for ethical politics. However, I agree with Fiona Robinson, that a "critical ethics of care" that is
characterized by a relational ontology accepts that "relationships are both a source of moral motivation and
moral responsiveness" to global concerns (1999, 2). Robinson argues that the political priority placed on
autonomy, independence, noninterference, self-determination, reciprocity, fairness, and rights mean that liberal
ethics characterizes the "acceptable voice of morality" in international relations. She argues further that this
"has resulted in the creation of a global 'culture of neglect' through a systematic devaluing of notions of
interdependence, relatedness, and positive involvement in the lives of distant others" (7). Her emphasis on "a
critical politicized ethics of care" (47) is crucial. Compassion, imagination, and responsiveness are needed for
deliberation about meeting peoples' needs, but, as Alison Jaggar reiterated, critical reflection also is needed on
"the structures that create these needs or keep them unfulfilled" (1995, 197). Take for example women's
illiteracy. A critical compassionate stance is needed to break through the cultural and religious barriers that make
women's education a low national priority in many parts of the world. The central component to Robinson's "critical
feminist ethics" is the analytical scrutiny of the contextual relations within global politics. Her point is that ethics in
global politics is concerned not just with specific crises such as the moment when ethnic relations break down and
erupt into violence, or barbaric genocide occurs, or the "coalition of the willing" invades a country. It is also
concerned with the nature and quality of "normal" social relations that contribute to processes of
marginalization, exclusion, and powerlessness that so often prompt violent conflict (1999, 144).
Compassionate Identifying Solves Needs

The Compassion of the Perm values the place of the Other and the shared humanity
between us all. This allows us to evaluate what their needs are, not what we view as their
needs.
Compassionate co-suffering presupposes a sense of shared humanity. "The other person's suffering is
seen as the kind of thing that could happen to anyone, including oneself" (Blum 1980, 511). While there
is inequality of suffering, compassion promotes the equality of possibility, in that cancer, death of one's
child, retrenchment, or a terrorist attack could happen to anyone. As humans, we are all vulnerable to
suffering. Thus respect for the equal worth of every person's humanity is crucial to compassionate co-
suffering, "for without it, compassion runs the danger of being a form of charity and condescension
toward those less fortunate" (Bunch 2002, 16). Co-suffering occurs only when there is a "care respect"
for others in which we try to discover how someone views herself and her world, "trying to understand
what it is like to be her living her life from her point of view" (Dillon 1992, 75). The respect is
demonstrated by promoting another's good, which can only transpire after careful attention to the
other's needs. Such attention requires a sympathetic engagement that expresses a valuing of the person. This
underlying respect for the feelings of others removes the arrogance of deciding for others whether
their needs are "real" (Gilligan and Wiggins 1988, 132). Therefore, "in compassion, I am moved by what
you are going through, not what I am going through, concerned about your condition, not about mine"
(Spelman 1997a, 120). Further, I am moved by your experiences, and not because your pain has
reminded me of my own past or present pain. Often, in listening to others tell of their pain, we quickly
respond by recalling an incident in our own lives when we experienced a similar type of pain. Our story
might help us connect with another, but we need to concentrate our attention on the other's plight in
order to demonstrate compassion.
Compassion solves Marginalization

Politics of Compassion solve the structural social relations in the international arena that
allow for marginalization.
First, critics counter that care ethics, which includes compassion, is too personal and provides an
unsustainable basis for ethical politics. However, I agree with Fiona Robinson, that a "critical ethics of
care" that is characterized by a relational ontology accepts that "relationships are both a source of
moral motivation and moral responsiveness" to global concerns (1999, 2). Robinson argues that the
political priority placed on autonomy, independence, noninterference, self-determination, reciprocity,
fairness, and rights mean that liberal ethics characterizes the "acceptable voice of morality" in
international relations. She argues further that this "has resulted in the creation of a global 'culture of
neglect' through a systematic devaluing of notions of interdependence, relatedness, and positive
involvement in the lives of distant others" (7). Her emphasis on "a critical politicized ethics of care" (47) is
crucial. Compassion, imagination, and responsiveness are needed for deliberation about meeting
peoples' needs, but, as Alison Jaggar reiterated, critical reflection also is needed on "the structures that
create these needs or keep them unfulfilled" (1995, 197). Take for example women's illiteracy. A critical
compassionate stance is needed to break through the cultural and religious barriers that make women's
education a low national priority in many parts of the world. The central component to Robinson's "critical
feminist ethics" is the analytical scrutiny of the contextual relations within global politics. Her point is that
ethics in global politics is concerned not just with specific crises such as the moment when ethnic relations
break down and erupt into violence, or barbaric genocide occurs, or the "coalition of the willing" invades a
country. It is also concerned with the nature and quality of "normal" social relations that contribute to
processes of marginalization, exclusion, and powerlessness that so often prompt violent conflict (1999,
144).
Compassion Solves Absolute Dichotomy / Inclusion-Exclusion

A politics of compassion breaks absolute dichotomies and challenges security concepts and
exclusions that shape the way the Other is framed.
Particularly in the current global climate of heightened vulnerability to terrorist attacks, the need for
protection is powerful. Within liberal democracies, we are more accustomed to emphases on autonomy and
self-sufficiency than the need for protection. While care ethics recognizes that we all are vulnerable in the
sense that fortune and fate are "morally arbitrary" (Porter 1995, 181) and this is why it is important that we
care about each other, most care ethics literature refers to the vulnerable either as children or as those
requiring welfare, disability rights, or health care. In the present international context, we often lose sight
of personal powerlessness and politically equate vulnerability with minimizing the possibility of terrorist
threats. Considerations of national security thus dominate over human security. Certainly, terrorist
threats must be dealt with appropriately, but the means of national protection should not be at the expense of
the emotional safety of such vulnerable groups as asylum seekers. States need to maximize security, but
"there are broader understandings of human security that encompass social well-being and the
security of political, civil, social, cultural, and economic rights" (Porter 2003b, 9). The defense of human
security can adopt an attitude toward the vulnerable of protective "holding," which minimizes
harmful risk and reconciles differences (Ruddick 1990, 78–79). How democratic nations deal with the
vilification or reconciliation of cultural and religious differences is central to the practice of political
compassion. For example, asylum seekers rightfully seek refuge, safety, and security, under United
Nations conventions. These rights include the right to seek asylum and the right to request assistance to
secure safety in their own countries. Those seeking such rights increasingly are facing governments with
tightened borders. In multicultural states, tolerance, trust, and openness are essential for positive civic
relationships. Since 9/11, there has been a movement away from open tolerance to closed dichotomies
based on an "othering," a stereotyping of groups considered different from "us." These dichotomies
are not harmless opposites; they "mask the power of one side of the binary to control the other" (D.
Bell 2002, 433), like us/them, citizen/foreigner, friends/enemies, and good/evil. Absolutist dichotomies
are blind to nuances, middle-ground positions, particular contexts, and connections, all the
considerations of judgment needed for wise, compassionate decisions. Importantly, absolutist
dichotomies are oblivious to the pain of those who are excluded, those most in need of protection. They
make people feel "at risk" simply for looking different or having a different faith. Those with absolutist views
see "illegal immigrants" and "queue jumpers" rather than desperate, fearful people seeking legitimate asylum.
A classic example of this binary control is President George W. Bush's ultimatum, "If you're not with us,
you're against us." A simplistic with us/against us, free world/axis of evil analysis cements an
inclusion/exclusion that fails to comprehend the pain of those who are excluded.
Reps place Other before us

Depictions of suffering allows us to experience co-suffering and compassion. This places the Other before us.
Compassionate co-suffering presupposes a sense of shared humanity. "The other person's suffering is
seen as the kind of thing that could happen to anyone, including oneself" (Blum 1980, 511). While there
is inequality of suffering, compassion promotes the equality of possibility, in that cancer, death of one's
child, retrenchment, or a terrorist attack could happen to anyone. As humans, we are all vulnerable to
suffering. Thus respect for the equal worth of every person's humanity is crucial to compassionate co-
suffering, "for without it, compassion runs the danger of being a form of charity and condescension
toward those less fortunate" (Bunch 2002, 16). Co-suffering occurs only when there is a "care respect"
for others in which we try to discover how someone views herself and her world, "trying to understand
what it is like to be her living her life from her point of view" (Dillon 1992, 75). The respect is
demonstrated by promoting another's good, which can only transpire after careful attention to the
other's needs. Such attention requires a sympathetic engagement that expresses a valuing of the person. This
underlying respect for the feelings of others removes the arrogance of deciding for others whether
their needs are "real" (Gilligan and Wiggins 1988, 132). Therefore, "in compassion, I am moved by what
you are going through, not what I am going through, concerned about your condition, not about mine"
(Spelman 1997a, 120). Further, I am moved by your experiences, and not because your pain has
reminded me of my own past or present pain. Often, in listening to others tell of their pain, we quickly
respond by recalling an incident in our own lives when we experienced a similar type of pain. Our story
might help us connect with another, but we need to concentrate our attention on the other's plight in
order to demonstrate compassion.
***REFUGEES ANSWERS***
Reps Give Advocacy

Protections are refugees are collapsing now – giving voice and political representation to
the struggles of refugees is key to combating the most malicious forms of biopolitics
Benjamin Muller, Simon Fraser University, 2004, Refuge, Vol. 22, No. 1, p. 55, online:
https://www.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/refuge/article/viewFile/875/449, accessed July 6, 2007
As a reflection on contemporary refugee politics, this paper has attempted to draw out a number of core
issues that have altered and challenged the struggle for refugee rights and a political voice. The
increasing links, real and otherwise, with the politics of asylum and the politics of the war on terrorism
have added complexity and impediments in the way of refugee advocates. In the struggle to resolve
paradoxical commitments to the aims of neoliberal globalization and the (alleged) necessities of domestic
security, contemporary anti-terrorist legislation in most western states seems to have chosen economic
interests at the cost of civil liberties. In an attempt to cope with this complex and paradoxical terrain, states
have further entrenched a biopolitics of asylum and refugee politics, where the role of private actors
increases, and the biological body of the refugee becomes the political object/subject. In order to even
begin to consider how movements and interests can struggle towards the protection, rights, and voice of
refugees, the shifted terrain characterized by paradox, diffuse power, biopolitics, and the breakdown of
many of the differentiations integral to international relations’ account of world politics, and subsequently
the conditions of (im)possibility for refugee politics, must be acknowledged. A sensitivity towards the
globalization-domestic security paradox, and an account of politics aware of the role of bio-power and the
(instrumental) politicization of the biological body of refugees, is a crucial step towards coming to terms
with how to (re)think contemporary refugee politics, thus illuminating the shifted terrain upon which
the struggle for refugees’ protection, rights, and voice is fought.
Reps Spur Organizational

Despite all the negative’s arguments on how imagery affects individuals, imagery is
necessary to spur business and humanitarian investment. Our 1AC proves why
organizational aid comes first.
Ogata 00 [Sadako Ogata, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, An Agenda for Buisness-
Humanitarian Partnerships, Washington Quarterly 23.2, 167-170]
Resolving refugee problems, for example, contributes to stability, which in turn opens up possibilities
for economic development and ultimately prosperity. Businesses have much to gain from seeing the
negative spiral of conflict, forced population movement, and poverty replaced by conflict resolution and
a sustainable peace ensured through reconstruction and development. Both have a joint long-term goal
to make the world a more stable place. Largely as a result of a new global compassion sparked by
instantaneous communications and the information revolution, signs of a strategic alliance between
businesses and humanitarians are already emerging (see pp. 164-165, "Preserving Cultural Heritage").
Images of the misery of refugees and other suffering people are beamed daily into homes around the
world, stirring a desire to help. With more than 21 million refugees and others in need worldwide,
humanitarians need all the help they can get.
Business support should not, however, simply be an act of charity or a convenient way to improve a
company's image. Partnership with humanitarian agencies requires that companies accept responsibility and
certain basic norms of ethical behavior. The purpose of business is profit, but it should not come at the
expense of a broader vision of the social, political, and human context in which business operates.
Metaphors Give Refugees History / Culture – Ivory Tower Turn

For all the distancing the negative claims we do, we will win a better internal link turn.
Their evidence is based on academia who claim to study the victims of disaster but who
themselves are locked in an ivory tower. Our proof is that our use of metaphors comes
from first-hand accounts of refugees using metaphors, even disease and bodily ones, to
explain their trauma in terms of a history and culture.
Coker 04 [Elizabeth Marie Coker, Department of Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology and Egyptology, The
American University in Cairo, “Traveling Pains”: Embodied Metaphors of Suffering Among Southern Sudanese
Refugees in Cairo, Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, March[
This paper presents the results of a larger study conducted among Southern Sudanese refugees in Cairo,
Egypt. Illness talk and body metaphors are the focus of the present work, which is based mainly on an
analysis of the illness narratives of people attending a church-run medical clinic. The findings suggest that
refugees use certain narrative styles in discussing their illnesses that highlight the interconnection of
bodily ills and refugee-related trauma. The refugees narrated the histories of their illnesses in terms
consistent and coterminous with their refugee histories, and articulated illness causes in terms of
threatening assaults on their sense of self as human beings and as part of a distinct community and
culture. The use of embodied metaphors to understand and cope with their current and past traumatic
experiences was echoed in narratives that were nonillness related. Metaphors such as the heart, blood, and
body constriction were consistently used to discuss social and cultural losses. Understanding the role
that the body plays in experience and communication within a given cultural context is crucial for
physicians and others assisting refugees.
Imagery Sparks Politics

The negative assumes compassion is the only response to imagery. Our use of
representations show the status of survival and struggle people have to endure, this is to
spark actual politics.
Wall 03 [Tom Wall, Socialist Review, Picture the Suffering and Struggle, May]
However it's not just the worthy subject matter that makes this exhibition so moving. It is also the
exceptional elegance and drama of the photography. For example Salgado's shot of a small Croatian boy
rubbing his eye, standing at the end of a straight path that leads back to a stationary train--where he lives
with 120 other refugees--is a stunning composition. Its impact is strengthened immeasurably by the
beauty of the image. But whatever your view, as the British photojournalist Don McCullin recently
observed, 'Salgado has managed to keep making people sit up and take notice.'
Neither is this exhibition especially depressing or gloomy. Of course the images are about suffering, but
they are also about survival and struggle. Salgado believes he has failed if his work only provokes
compassion. He wants his audience to understand that there is a solution. Consequently a considerable
amount of space is devoted to the political campaigns of both the Brazilian landless workers' movement
and the Zapatistas.
Nowhere is this struggle for survival more apparent than the section of the show dedicated to the children
involved in migrations and upheavals. During Salgado's travels he was often surrounded by crowds of
excited children. In exchange for peace and quiet he offered to take their pictures.
The resulting photographs are powerful and striking--a Palestinian child born in a refugee camp in southern
Lebanon, a Bosnian boy standing in front of a wall pitted by bullets, an Angolan girl in an old woman's dress,
all defiant and strong, but children all the same.

Disaster Porn Africa

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Disaster Porn Africa

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Gonzaga Debate Institute 2007 1

Scholars Lab Disaster Porn

DISASTER PORNOGRAPHY .....................................................................................................................................1

Disaster Pornography 1NC (1/5)

Disaster Pornography 1NC (2/5)

Disaster Pornography 1NC (3/5)

Disaster Pornography 1NC (4/5)

Disaster Pornography 1NC (5/5)

Link: Atrocity Exploitation (1/5)

Link: Atrocity Exploitation (2/5)

Link: Atrocity Exploitation (3/5)

Link: Atrocity Exploitation (4/5)

Link: Atrocity Exploitation (5/5)

Link: Food Crisis

The Aff’s representations of Africans degraded humans create interveners as foreign

The use of children to epitomize plight creates a relationship of victim to spectator.

Link: Relief Workers

Link: Prioritize Crisis Over Africa

Western media perpetuates afro-pessimism via disaster porn

Impact: Consumption (1/2)

Impact: Consumption (2/2)

Impact: Spread Cap (Foreign)

Impact: Consumption = Cap (Domestic)

Impact: Cap - Terminal

Capitalism risks extinction

Impact: Capitalist Exploitation

Impact: History Erasure / Capitalist Exploitation

Impact: Racism (Terminal)

Impact: African Self-Hate

Impact: Indifference / No Solvency

Impact: Humanitarian Intervention

Impact: Afro-pessimism ÆPoverty / Root of War

Poverty is the root of war

Impact: Turns Case + Systemic Harms / Alt Key

Impact: Structural Violence Outweighs

Turns Case (1/4)

Turns Case (2/4)

Turns Case (3/4)

Turns Case (4/4)

Cap 2NC (1/2)

Cap 2NC (2/2)

Aff Impacts Are Suspect

African Progress Uniqueness

Alternative: Silence Good

Alternative: Counter - Discourse solves

Alternative: Media Change

Discourse Determines Policymaking (1/2)

Representations of Africa lead to policy failure turning the aff

Discourse Determines Policymaking (2/2)

Refugees 1NC (1/4)

Refugees 1NC (2/4)

Refugees 1NC (3/4)

Refugees 1NC (4/4)

Link: Refugee Movement

Link: Refugee Assistance

Link: Refugee Camps

Link: Satellite Imagery

Impact: Aerial Image

Impact: Tied to Place

Impact: Eliminates Agency

Impact: Refugee Dehumanization

Aff Can’t Solve

AT: Case Outweighs

AT: Case Solves