Texas Shoot Out Round Robin Results

Congratulations to Chris Leonardi and Hank Stolte, the hybrid team taking first place at the 2010 Texas Shoot Out Round Robin. Thanks to all of the participants for some great debates.

1st place - Chris Leonardi and Hank Stolte - Hybrid
2nd place - Faraz Hemani and Saad Khalid - Dulles High School
3rd place - Vivek Dathla and Nikhil Bontha - The Kinkaid School

2010 Texas Shoot out - Round Robin pairings and judge assignments

Hello everyone,

Below are the pairings for the 2010 Texas Shoot Out. Note - all rounds will be in the CMA. You can park in any of the legal spots close to the CMA on Sunday. On Monday, you will want to park in the parking garage on University and 27th street. Breakfast will be served at 9:30 AM in CMA 3.130 - - call me with any questions at 646-286-3734.

SUNDAY

Round 1 10AM



Westwood v Dulles – Bhatacharjee, Fitz - CMA A3.108

Hendrickson v Churchill – Gonzalez, Rocha - CMA A3.112

Hybrid v Kinkaid – Crowe, Park - CMA A3.130

Mercedes v Little rock - Martin, Sanford - CMA A5.136



Round 2 1PM



Little Rock Central v Westwood –Gonzalez, Fairchild - CMA A3.108

Dulles v Hendrickson – Crowe, Miller - CMA A3.112

Churchill v Hybrid – Makuch, Albiniak - CMA A3.130

Kinkaid v Mercedes – Clark, Koneru - CMA A5.136



Round 3 3:30

Westwood v Kinkaid – Thomas, Evans - CMA A5.136

Hendrickson v little rock cental – Clark, Cauthen - CMA A3.108

Hybrid v dulles – Johnson, Fairchild - CMA A3.112

Mercedes v Churchill – Crowe, Bhattacharjee - CMA A3.130



Round 4 6PM

Churchill v westwood – Johnson, Evans - CMA A5.136

Kinkaid v Hendrickson – Makuch, Cauthen - CMA A3.108

Little rock central v hybrid – McNeil, Koneru - CMA A3.112

Dulles v Mercedes – Liu, Albiniak - CMA A3.130



MONDAY



Round 5 9:00 AM

Westwood v Hendrickson – JD Sanford, Mckinney - CMA A3.108

Hybrid v Mercedes – Gonzalez, Reed - CMA A3.112

Dulles v Churchill – Martin, Park - CMA A3.130

Kinkaid v Little Rock Central – Thomas ,Bhattacharjee, - CMA A5.136



Round 6 11:30

Hybrid v westwood – Bhattacharjee, Albiniak - CMA A3.108

Mercedes v Hendrickson – Murray, Johnson - CMA A3.112

Kinkaid v ‘dulles – McNeil, Evans - CMA A3.130

Little rock v churchhill – Miller, Donovan - CMA A5.136



Round 7 1:30

Westwood v Mercedes – McNeil, Makuch - CMA A3.112

Hendrickson v Hybrid – Martin, Donovan - CMA A3.108

Dulles v little rock – Rocha, Fitz - CMA A5.136

Churchill v kinkaid – Miller, Murray - CMA A3.130

2010 University of Texas Round Robin Participants

The University of Texas and the Texas Forensic Union will host the following Round Robin participants:

Westwood - Zofia Yellin and Jackie Chen - Judge: Chris Crowe, Jeremy Martin

Hendrickson - Hudson Davis and Maggie Solice - Judge: Risha Bhattacharjee

Hybrid - Chris Leonardi and Hank Stolte - Judge: Steven Murray

Mercedes - PJ Martinez and Leo Vela - Judge: Hector Rocha

Dulles - Faraz Hemani and Saad Khalid - Judge: Misael Gonzalez

Churchill - Adam Lipton and Max Birnbaum - Judge: JD Sanford

Kinkaid - Nikhil Bontha and Vivek Dathla - Judge: Claire McKinney

Some UTNIF announcements

For all you UTNIF alums out there, you may be wondering what has happened to the old names of the differing UTNIF program offerings (Marathon, Experienced, etc) in the 2011 program offerings. We decided to change the names for the sake of clarity. Too much ambiguity about skill level, curriculum emphasis, etc in the old naming convention made for confusion on the part of students, parents and coaches. The new naming convention, is just that, a new naming convention.

The curriculum for the two UTNIF mainstays (Marathon and Experienced) remains largely the same. What was formerly referred to as "The Marathon" (a reference, I believe, to the late Scott Deatherage's oft heard reminder that debate tournaments are a marathon, not a sprint, and also to the high number of practice debates guaranteed by the curriculum) now goes by the name "The Skills Intensive." What was formerly called "the Experienced Seminar" is now known as "The Topic Research Intensive."

Students in the Topic Research Intensive are typically more experienced than the majority of those students choosing to participate in the Skills Intensive, but the major difference between the two programs is the emphasis on topic research and argument construction strategy in the Topic Research Intensive. The Skills Intensive is appropriate for students across the board - even the most experienced debater will benefit from the tremendous practice experience. The Topic Research Intensive is appropriate for debaters who understand that to succeed at the highest levels of debate competition you've got to understand the topic better than your opponent. Writing and researching your own arguments is essential. The Topic Research Intensive will teach students how to do it.

We have had in past summers a growing number of students who choose to spend the ENTIRE SUMMER in Texas at the UTNIF. Some will choose to attend the Skills Intensive in one session and the Topic Research Intensive in the other. Other students have attended two sessions of the Topic Research Intensive. Still others have chosen to enroll in the 6 week Summer Survivors program. Whatever the division, contact us if you have questions about curriculum or need guidance in choosing what is right for you.

New UTNIF Program Offering

The Sophomore Select. June 24-July 14.

We are very excited to offer a new program in 2011 for rising sophomores!

Any debater entering their second year in the activity is at a crucial moment in their learning curve. Having conquered the basics, most students are hungry for success at the varsity level. It is essential for students at this stage to receive strong guidance that will help them develop good practice, speaking, and research habits. This program is designed with those needs especially in mind.

The Sophomore Select will be offered during Session 1 of the UTNIF only and will be led by Brian McBride of the University of Southern California and Nick Fiori of Damien. Students will work as a tight knit lab with McBride and Fiori to master foundational skills. Skill and tactical work will be the emphasis, but the lab also aims to ignite student interest in topic research and argument construction. Two of the best coaches from the high school and college debating world, McBride and Fiori will ensure students come away transformed into much, much, better debaters. Both instructors offer a strong background in policy and kritikal approaches to debating. Students will come out of this lab experience ahead of the pack because of the opportunity to work hard amongst their peers in an environment of constructive criticism that will encourage students' intellectual growth, while dispelling the myths that often hold young debaters back from success. Lectures by other UTNIF staff on select topics also will be offered.

The lab will have limited enrollment, acceptance by application only. Applications for this program are DUE by March 15, 2011. Applicants will receive notice of acceptance by April 1. Application to this program is free. More information on the program and the application process will be forthcoming on the UTNIF site - www.utdebatecamp.com

Making 2AR Choices

Making 2AR choices - Claire McKinney

Often in debates, the 2AR snatches defeat from the jaws of victory. What I mean is that sometimes a 2NR fails to do any of the following things:

1 ) Does not do impact calculus, picks the wrong impact to heavily favor, or fails to
even extend a terminal impact (this is common when they go for a counterplan with an internal net benefit, or when the terminal impacts to both the affirmative and the negative positions are very similar like hegemony and deterrence)
2 ) Does not kick out of a turned argument well or at all.
3 ) Fails to hedge their bets by making even-if statements or comparative risk analysis (similar to impact calculus, but may have more to do with comparing warrants on uniqueness, link, or internal link questions)

As a judge, one often expects the 2AR to easily exploit these mistakes and make use of that Aff Side Bias to easily dispense with a poorly executed 2NR. Yet more often than not, the affirmative replicates the mistakes of the 2NR. I think there are three main reasons the affirmative might do this.

1 ) The 2AR is seduced into thinking that where the negative went was the most
important part of the debate.
2 ) The 2AR feels pressure to refute everything the 2NR said.
3 ) The 2AR tries to extend everything the 1AR said.

These are not mutually exclusive and all point to the problem of not thinking about the big picture and making strategic choices. Here are a few tips of how to begin to think systematically about a winning 2AR and how to capitalize on 2NR mistakes.

--The 2AR overview. Write one. Many overview naysayers think they serve little purpose, but I believe that the 2AR overview is where you isolate what you need to win and why winning it means you win the debate forces you to do two thinks that are vital in prep time. The first is that you force yourself to make a strategic decision. Will you win on a dropped turn? On a solvency deficit to the counterplan? The permutation? Because you needs to isolate THE reason you win (not three reasons), you will have to analyze what arguments you have to answer to do so, what arguments are irrelevant, and how to persuade the judge that the negative was inadequate on those positions. Second, you are reminded of the importance of impact calculus. Do this impact calculus in the top of the 2AR and you won’ t forget to do it later on the flow.

-- Less is more. Sure, you need defense on the key negative arguments, but you shouldn’ t extend ALL your defense or EVERY solvency deficit to the counterplan. You should extend the solvency deficit that is most true or is the largest and thus gets you access to the largest impact. In a debate I recently saw, the 2AR extended two solvency deficits to a counterplan, one for each advantage. However, the counterplan obviously solved one advantage and the time it took to extend the second solvency deficit made it such that the 2AR didn’ t extend a terminal impact to either advantage. If the 2AR had focused on just one solvency deficit, then there would have been a complete argument as opposed to two distinct halves of two distinct arguments.

--Evidence comparison is your friend. Even if you are behind on an issue after the 1AR, if you do evidence comparison, you can make new arguments in the comparison of the
warrants of the evidence. For instance, even if the debate had hitherto been as shallow as heg solves war versus heg doesn’ t solve war up until the 2AR, you can use the evidence as a place to argue that the 2NRs evidence just says hegemony cannot stop a conflict from beginning, but your evidence indicates that hegemony can stop the escalation of war because political leaders will avoid entangling other powers through escalation for fear of losing to a preponderance of American power. IF your evidence actually supports your warrants (and that’ s a big IF), most judges will allow this type of evidence comparison because the extension of the evidence in the 1AR made this comparison predictable. It’ s better if the warrants come out earlier, but if they don’ t, you can argue the evidence extension gave the negative ample opportunity to do their own comparison. A corollary, of course, is that if you hide new arguments in warrant comparison and your evidence DOESN’ T make the claims you say, you are very likely to lose.

-- Making new arguments is often a no-lose prospect. While your first instincts should be depth is better than breadth and the 1AR ought to set up your 2AR strategy, sometimes, especially in impact calculus, new arguments will be accepted and even welcomed.

For instance, if the 2AR is the first time you make a timeframe outweighs magnitude argument, if it is the ONLY such comparison, the judge may very well allow it because there is nothing else to guide their decisionmaking. Even if the judge doesn’ t allow the new comparison, all it did was waste 5-10 seconds and the payoff is potentially much greater than the cost. Notice that this advice is conditioned on what else happened in the debate. Impact calculus that the neg starts early and goes unrefuted will make this strategy much less likely to payoff. Exploit the failures of the 2NR to give the judge something to hang onto.

In the end, remember that the greatest strategic asset of the 2AR is that you get to ignore a lot of what the 2NR says because if you make one argument very well, that often is much better than answering all their shallow arguments with an equal number of shallow arguments. Shallow versus shallow makes for unhappy judges and coin flip decisions.Shallow versus depth makes for happy judges and much more certainty in your wins.

Congratulations to UTNIF St. Mark's participants

Congratulations are in order to the College Prep team of Vinay Pai and Tatsuro Yamamura on being top seed and also on their SEMIFINALS appearance at the Heart of Texas invitational. Vinay is an '09 alum of the UTNIF and two of his coaches, Daniel Sharp and John Hines, are members of the UTNIF teaching staff.

Congratulations also to the Kinkaid team of Zach Rosenthal (UTNIF '09) and Vivek Dathla (Doubles), and also the Kinkaid team of Robert Baldwin and Nikheel Bontha (Quarters). Both teams are coached by UTNIF lab leader Claire McKinney, who also was recognized by the tournament for her stand out assistant coaching!

"Barbarians, Savages, and the Civilised" - New Security K article just in time for St. Marx...

Of interest: a new interview/discussion between Michael Hardt and Brad Evans from Theory and Event about security discourse and strategies of liberal governance. Beyond this article, the entire issue should be of interest to debaters.

Two among many interesting things in this essay:
1. An answer to the answer to the K that says "there are good instances of biopolitics"

Even if the Aff is right that there are good instances of human rights discourse or of liberal social programs, many of those examples assume a domestic, internal, liberal politics. This evidence is calling into question the use of human rights justifications in the service of campaigns of warfare against an external enemy. This is not to suggest that liberal domestic human rights discourse ought be considered unproblematic. What it does suggest is that the "good" instances of liberal domestic politics cited by opponents of this argument are also threatened by the continued employment of human rights discourse in justifying externally prosecuted wars. That is, there is a trade off that takes place between the use of liberal human rights discourse in international military discourse and the possibility of good liberal reforms domestically. AT THE SAME TIME, the essay is calling into question the unwavering imperative of liberal governance strategies to govern and is drawing attention to dangers that are inherent to the rationality of liberal governance itself. So, in short: provisionally good liberal governance gets crowded out by the appropriation of liberality into war-making, and even examples of good liberal governance have questionable/dangerous imperatives.

Excerpt 1.
Evans:
"Rather than pursuing that biopolitical question directly, though, I want first to understand better how the shift in the relationship between war and sovereignty that Toni and I propose relates to your notion of liberal and humanitarian war. In a war conventionally conceived, it is sufficient for the two sovereign powers to justify their actions primarily on the basis of national interest as long as they remain within the confines of international law. Whereas those inside , in other words, are at least in principle privilege to the liberal framework of rights and representation, those outside are not. When the relationship of sovereignty shifts, however, and the distinction between inside and outside erodes, then there are no such limits of the liberal ideological and political structures. This might be a way of understanding why contemporary military actions have to be justified in terms of discourses of human rights and liberal values. And this might be related, in turn, to what many political theorists analyze as the decline of liberal values in the US political sphere at the hands of neoliberal and neoconservative logics.1 In other words, perhaps when the division declines between the inside and outside of sovereignty, on the one hand, the liberal logic must be deployed (however inadequately) to justify the use of violence over what was the outside while, on the other, liberal logics are increasingly diluted or suppressed in what was the inside."

2. observations relevant to Afghanistan Affs that transition toward counter-insurgency and away from counter-terrorism

The evidence below frames this move toward counter-insurgency in the schema of "Barbarians, Savages, and the Civilized" outlined by Foucault in _Society Must Be Defended_. Barbarians are beyond the pale; irredeemable. Savages are redeemable, open to civilizing forces. The civilized are, well, civilized. The aff represents an acknowledgment of the failure of an externally oriented eradication strategy that seeks to eliminate "barbarians" in the battle of the civilized and barbarian. The aff also is an explicit move toward A. the process of civilization of the savage/insurgent class, and, B. the employ of the savage/insurgent class in the battle against the barbarians, in which the "proof" of the savages accession to the dictates of civilization is their success in aiding in the eradication of the barbarian. In this view, the affirmative is calling for the adoption of a quasi-liberal governance strategy which has as its aim to act upon both the barbarian/terrorist, and, the savage/insurgent.

Excerpt 2:
Evans: A logical corollary of this is the mixture of the strategic fields you mention. It is no coincidence today to find renewed priority being afforded to the insurgent. The RAND Corporation for instance have for some time now been calling for a more comprehensive and nuanced strategic paradigm that incorporates counter-insurgency into the wider remit of the Global War on Terror. I am reminded at this stage of a wonderful observation Foucault makes in a few incisive pages of the Society Must Be Defended lectures in which he identifies the three key figures which make up the modern condition: Barbarians, Savages and the Civilised. Barbarians he argues are a function of sovereign power. Existing beyond the constitutional pale, although sometimes penetrating with purely destructive intent, they represent those lives which show no respect for the constitutional order, hence they have and should be afforded no moral or political value. Savages on the other hand are a function of bio-political power. Open to remedy and demanding engagement, they represent those lives which are capable of being redeemed. No great conceptual leap of imagination is required here to draw out meaningful connections between barbarians/terrorists and savages/insurgents. Indeed, in the theatres of war today one can write of that all too familiar historical tendency of waging war by getting savages to fight barbarians in order to prove their civilising credentials. Even here however the lines in the sand have been blurred. Terrorists for instance no longer occupy a place of exteriority to the political realm, but are fully included within the bio-political order. What is more, the ability to set out clear parameters between the terrorist and the insurgent has proved rather elusive. This is compounded even further by a realisation that terrorists are no longer simply intent upon wanton destruction, but have showed a willingness to actually cross over to become insurgents posing a much wider social problem. This approach is clearly evidenced in the recent United Kingdom Contest II National Security Strategy (2009). What particularly strikes about this document is the style in which these threats are presented. Terrorists are now presented in a manner which is biopolitically fitting. Like some cancerous cell, not only are they seen to be capable of damaging a vital organ within the body politic, but they now hold the potential to infect the wider bodily terrain. The significance of this sovereign/bio-political merger can be read in two ways. First, through this coming together it is possible to detect a certain reprioritisation of affairs in which the once familiar problem of the sovereign encounter can now be dealt with bio-politically. And second, given that the bio-political is now tainted by the spectre of terror, then the biopolitical becomes truly moralised in that the war to redeem savages is equally a war to expel evil.

Hardt: I find intriguing and very productive your translation of barbarian to terrorist and savage to insurgent, along with the correlate that from the standpoint of the sovereign the latter couple has the potential to be civilized or redeemed whereas the formal couple does not. It strikes me that what is at play here, in part, is two relations to the body. In the first years of the new millennium, at the inception of the “war on terror,” I recognized in much of US military theorizing a fascinating doubling and inversion regarding the body of the terrorist and the body of the US soldier. On the one side stood the horrifying, barbaric figure of the terrorist defined by not only its power to destroy others but also its acceptance of corporeal self-destruction, characterized paradigmatically by the absolute negation of the body in the act of suicide bombing. On the other side stood the body of the US soldier that, it was thought, could be kept at a safe distance from all danger by technological innovations and new military strategies associated with the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). Precise missiles, drone airplanes, and other devices could aid a military strategy aimed at no soldiers lost, at least no US soldiers. So, I was interested in the way that these two figures—the barbaric body guaranteed destruction and the civilized body guaranteed preservation—arose at roughly the same time and seemed to be bound together in dialectical negation.

You are right that the insurgent body occupies an entirely different position. It does not threaten self-destruction or corporeal annihilation. The insurgent must be transformed through the mechanisms of biopower just as the savage must be redeemed and civilized. It is interesting, in fact, that at the same time that in the military and security discourses there has been a shift from the barbaric terrorist to the savage insurgent, as you say, there has been a parallel move away from the dreams of bodiless military actions and the strategic principles of the RMA. Antiinsurgency biopower is aimed at the transformable body. This gives us another level, I suppose, to the relation between war, biopower, and liberalism that you were insisting on earlier.
--
Of course, reading this evidence in conjunction with biopower o/w all will not be sufficient to win a debate. At least, it shouldn't be. The job of the negative is to show why an alternative approach/perspective on the action of the plan is superior to the approach of evaluation that the aff itself has advanced. The aff wants the judge to assess the value of the plan by looking to its prospective advantages as if they are necessary, determinate, consequences of a possible, instrumental action of the government. The negative wants the judge to assess both plan and advantages from a different vantage point. The negative wants the judge to see how it is, rhetorically/discursively, that the plan/advantage combo advanced by the Affirmative is not merely a descriptive prediction about the consequences of an instrumental action by the USFG, but also functions upon the listener/audience/judge as a prescriptive kind of statement.

What i mean is, there is a way in which the logic/rhetoric/discourse of the Affirmative puts the listener/audience/judge into a situation in which they are asked to endorse/accede to a certain "regime of truth." The consequence of acceding to that "regime of truth" is that certain, specific actions then appear as the only possible ethical actions, and therefore become in some sense inevitable. The purpose of the negative's kritik in these debates is to question the methodology by which the regime of truth of the aff was constructed, so that the rhetorical space of the debate is opened up in order to allow for the possibility of the emergence of competing ethical imperatives. The difference between the Aff and the Neg in these debates is that the Aff pretends that ethics follow from truth/evidence/fact in an unproblematic/opaque way (e.g. 'it is try or die', 'you have no other choice'). The negative, on the other hand, aims to show how the Aff's claim to truth is itself an exercise of power that ought be questioned in order to create a situation in which ethics/action can be related to in a more provisional/problematized/transparent way. The result that the negative is aiming for in advancing the argument in this way is not stasis or stale mate or absence of ethics or postponement of decision. The negative is aiming to reinvigorate the debate space's ethical potential through its successful critique of the affirmative's presentation. The choice presented by the affirmative is a false one and attempts to hide the power relations that shape its sense of ethics. At a meta-level, the function of this sort of critique is to ensure that those institutions (governments, think-tanks, corporations) that possess the most effective institutional descriptive power (in the form of studies, fact generation, policy memorandums, etc) do not as a result come to monopolize in totality the range/field of ethical possibilities. The logic of the aff, in which ethics follow from truth claims in an unproblematic way, is what hastens the advance of this monopolization of ethics.

Congratulations UTNIF Alumni on Closing Out New Trier!

Congratulations to the Kinkaid School team of Zach Rosenthal and Vivek Dathla, and, the Georgetown Day School team of Joe Krakoff and Ben Levy on their FINALS appearance at the New Trier tournament! Zach and Joe are both '09 alums of the UTNIF, and the Kinkaid team is coached by UTNIF lab leader, Claire McKinney.

UTNIF lecture 2010: Kirk Evans - K affs and Framework

UTNIF 2010 - Kirk Evans - Framework from UTNIF on Vimeo.

Grapevine Results

Congratulations to distinguished UTNIF alumni...

Speaker Awards:
3.Cooper Shear (Heritage Hall HS) - UTNIF '9
4.Humza Tariq (Dulles TR) - UTNIF '10
11. Tanweer Rajwani (Dulles TR) - UTNIF '10

Seeding:
4. Dulles TR (Humza Tariq & Tanweer Rajwani)- UTNIF '10
5. Heritage Hall HS (Philip Holsted & Cooper Shear) - - UTNIF '9
11. Dulles HK (Faraz Hemani & Saad Khalid)- UTNIF '10
30. Westlake PD (Kevin Presley & Alexander Dzeda)- UTNIF '9/'10
32. Heritage Hall KH (Mac Kennedy & Ryan Haygood)- UTNIF '10


Octafinalists:
4. Dulles TR (Humza Tariq & Tanweer Rajwani)- UTNIF '10
11. Dulles HK (Faraz Hemani & Saad Khalid)- UTNIF '10
30. Westlake PD (Kevin Presley & Alexander Dzeda)- UTNIF '9/'10
32. Heritage Hall KH (Mac Kennedy & Ryan Haygood)- UTNIF '10

I don't know who was in finals... Joy of Tournaments results end w/ the Semi's debates.

Semifinalists/Finalists: ???
32. Heritage Hall KH (Mac Kennedy & Ryan Haygood)- UTNIF '10

Hope for the 2AR - How to win when the 1AR undercovers

I recently judged a debate that went down like this:

The 1NC consists of : 2 T arguments, an Agamben K, PTX, Executive Agency CP, Case. The negative has primarily gone for the DA/CP strategy in earlier prelims, but aren't so pinned down that going for the K would be impossible. Plus, since I am judging the debate, there was probably some sense by the Aff that they at least have to take the K somewhat seriously. The 2AC answers the arguments with appropriate division of time, seriousness of response, etc. The 2NC is PTX and the Executive agency CP. The 1nr is case and the K. Based on the depth of argument in the block, it seems pretty clear that the K is not the intended 2nr choice. Nothing is developed beyond very elementary/tag line extension of the 1nc argument. Even though quite a few cards are read by the 1nr, virtually nothing is said that demonstrates that the negative has tried to think about their argument in relation to this specific Aff. The 1AR, rightly, reads this as good reason to invest a substantial amount of time dealing with PTX and the CP. The 1AR gets a little bogged down though and ends up getting to the Agamben K with 30 seconds. She blazes through her extension of the 2ac arguments including the extension of a couple of 2ac cards that were read, a perm, an extinction outweighs because it is irreversible and is a prereq to value of life arg, and... TIME.

The 2NR recognizing the 1ARs weakness goes for the K, calls for strictness on the part of the judge in 2ar extrapolations of 1ar arguments etc. The 2AR gives their speech. Much/most of it is new. Some of it is not.

I spend much of my decision trying to figure out what I can allow of the 2ar and what should be axed from the get-go. After doing that, I determine that the aff has a single argument that was not new, that could win them the debate. The "extinction outweighs" argument is the aff's only hope. I then proceed to read the Neg's impact cards looking for any kind of ethics argument, pre-req arguments, or any other sort of argument that explains to me why I ought to prioritize the alt or the neg's impact. No such evidence exists. The 1NC impact card had been tagged as such, but, in the rush to diversify the 1NC (and to shorten the amount of time spent in the 1NC on the "B" strat) the negative had never actually read an impact card that let them make the "we o/w extinction" claim. No warrant exists for why the K impact comes first, other than the extension of the tag line and the 1NC evidence that supposedly makes the claim. I voted aff.

A couple of lessons here:

1. the 1nc shell matters. complete (even if short) arguments in the 1nc can make decisions for the 2nr much easier. When you don't know which arguments were constructed as throwaways, it can result in 2nr choices like this one. Probably the right thing to do when assessing the debate tactically, but it was the wrong thing to do when assessing the debate realistically/holistically.

2. Sometimes, even if the 1AR is really really undercovering an argument, you are BETTER OFF sticking with the A strat in the 2NR. Its hard to win when there just ain't nothin' to win with. If there's no "there" there, you will be hard pressed to get any judge to decide in your favor. (That's probably not true, I'm sure there are a lot of judges who are just looking at the debate almost exclusively in terms of their perception of tactical acumen. I am not one of those judges...)

After the debate, the 2ar recognized that this was a close one and that the Aff had barely eked it out. 2AR asks me: "what should a 2ar do when there is very little to go on from the 1ar? How can the 2ar recover and counter the perception that the entirety of the speech is new?"

Here were my suggestions:

The 2ar needs to counter the impression that the 2ar is new (even though inevitably it will be somewhat new.) There is always a disconnect in EVERY debate between what is said by a debater in a given speech and what was comprehensible by a judge during that speech. This is especially true for theory arguments, CP texts, etc. But it is also true, often, for the text of the cards themselves, which were read at a faster rate, w/o pauses, etc. than the Tags were read. Due to this disconnect, there is always some degree of reconstruction of the arguments after a debate. The moments where the judge finally figures out what was said/what was being contested between the debaters vs. what the judge originally heard to be said. (These moments of disconnect, in which the 4 debaters know more clearly what is being contested than the judge, have increased in frequency (I think) with the rise of paperless debate. The debaters have a record in front of their faces of what their opponents said, while the judge still relates to the debate with their ears.) In any case, my point is that in every debate there is an internal dialogue that the judge has with herself about what was said, what is a new nuance, what was appropriately emphasized, what arguments/nuance it is reasonable to expect a burden of rejoinder from the other team on, etc. The 2ar's job -always, but especially when the 1ar was slight- is to color the judges assessment of the arguments in the debate in such a way, that the arguments the Aff needs to win can sneak back into the judge's consideration. This IS NOT the same as making blatantly new arguments in the 2ar. You may not be able to go for "the K is non-unique" in an explicit way in the 2ar if the 1ar dropped this argument. But you may be able to use another argument to get the judge to consider, in some way shape or form, whether or not the aff causes anything bad to happen that isn't already happening. This is kinda sorta a UQ question and kinda sorta a question of specificity/linearity of impact. In this case, kinda sorta is better than nothing for an aff that is searching for any way to make a comparison of impacts that is favorable to the 1ac impact over the Neg's impact. Working in the realm of smuggling in these kinda sorta considerations is the real art of the 2ar.

Specific tips on how to succeed when the 1ar is slight are:

1. begin the 2ar overview w/whatever argument was covered the best by the 1ar. pretend that it is the central question of the debate. the categories of link, impact, uq, alt, etc in someways are made artificially distinct by debaters, when in reality, they all implicate one another. Use the area of contestation that you have covered the best to emphasize the strengths in the 1AR and to begin to beg the questions of the other categories of argument by innuendo.

2. blame the negative for the 1AR's undercoverage. Make it clear that the Negative's evidence, specificity of explanation was so poor that the 1ar lightness was justified.

3. Use any hint of a new-ish explanation in the 2nr to justify new-ish answers on your own part. Listen closely for any phrase, nuance, subtle example or explanation by the 2nr that hasn't been used in the debate before. Answer that argument directly. Use the phrasing of the 2nr exactly in referencing the argument so that there is no doubt in the judges mind that you are answering the new nuance. Make comparisons that are favorable to the aff that you might have been restrained from making if you were trying to tie your speech to 1ar arguments exclusively.

4. After the overview, stick to the 1ar order exactly. Any phrases or words that the 1ar said should be repeated by the 2ar and inserted into the arguments you need to make. Even if it was just a few simple words, the repetition and connection to the words of the 2ar can make the 2ar feel like a more organic out growth of 1ar arguments.

5.Use the language of the 2ac word for word. It reminds the judge of the "substance" of the 1ar extensions. Especially if the neg block was bad about answering the specifics of the 2ac arguments, use that as a reason to justify the 1ar time allocation. Your job here is to revive 2ac answers by repeating the warrants and making it clear that even though the 1ar didn't repeat those warrants textually in the 1ar, the warrants from the 2ac should still be considered because they were present in the 1ar "by extension."

6. Any and all evidence extended by the 1AR should be gone over with a fine tooth comb by the Aff during 2AR prep. Look for words/phrases/sentences that were read in the 2AC but maybe weren't really emphasized. Look for sentences in that evidence that reintroduce into the debate "dropped" arguments. Or, at least introduce into the debate arguments that are in the same category as the dropped arguments (e.g. link answers, arguments that suggest the alt and the plan don't really compete, etc.).

7. In the 2ar read slowly and comprehensibly portions of 2ac evidence (if the ev was extended by the 1ar) that help you reintroduce comparisons that give the aff a leg up. Reading evidence in a debate comprehensibly can really change the way that a judge assesses a piece of evidence when they read it after the round. If a specific argument is in a card and everyone heard it and flowed it and it is then referred to specifically in the last rebuttal, most judges will not say "that argument wasn't the tag of the card, so i'm not going to consider it." However, if you read a piece of evidence incomprehensibly and then "extend" it by saying, "Jones 08 answers this", most judges will not try to figure out which part of Jones answers this. That said, if you've read a piece of evidence in the 2ac, the 1ar extends it, the 2nr says the 1ar didn't warrant the extension, and the 2ar says "the block never answered the warrants in the original 2ac evidence and here's what they were...and then proceeds to read the evidence slowly and clearly" The 2ar may have just succeeded in resurrecting enough argumentation to win themselves a debate that looked lost because of 1ar tactical mishaps.

Greenhill/Wake Forest congratulations

Congratulations to all of those who did well last weekend at Greenhill and Wake Forest.

Special congratulations to these UTNIF alumni:

Greenhill
-Dulles KR (Saad Khalid UTNIF 10 & Tanweer Rajwani UTNIF 10) Doubles
-Kinkaid bb (nikhil bontha & robert Baldwin UTNIF 08) Quarters
-Kinkaid dR (vivek datla & Zach Rosenthal UTNIF 09) Doubles
-Saint Francis High Sc AP (Ish Arora & Sanjana Parikh UTNIF 10) Doubles

Wake Forest
-Georgetown Day KL (Joe Krakoff UTNIF 09 & Ben Levy) Closed out Finals
-Beacon SO (Evan Sweet UTNIF 10 and Henry Osman UTNIF 10) Doubles
-Beacon GG (Eli Gold and Jonah Garnick UTNIF 10) Doubles
-Mountain Brook DS (Russell Day and Philippa Straus UTNIF 10)Doubles


Congratulations also to UTNIF teaching staff John Hines and Daniel Sharp, whose teams College Prep PT and PY advanced to the Doubles and Octafinals respectively.

Also, congratulations to UTNIF lab leader Nick Fiori for coaching Damien GF to the semifinals!

UTNIF Video Flashback : the 1 off K strategy, UTNIF 2010

UTNIF 2010 - Daniel Sharp - The 1 Off K from UTNIF on Vimeo.

Operation Awareness: GI Opposition to U.S. Military Presence

Near the end of UTNIF's second session, UTNIF students had the opportunity to participate in a discussion about the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq with two veterans of those wars, Jacob George and Spencer Hindmarsh. George and Hindmarsh are members of Operation Awareness, a peace movement group comprised of veterans opposed to war.

Operation Awareness is one among several peace movement organizations made up entirely of veterans. Along with Veterans for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, and Vietnam Veterans Against War, Operation Awareness brings the voices and experiences of veterans to the forefront.

What follows is a very interesting discussion. The subjects range from questions about how day to day counterinsurgency operations actually work, military conditioning and its psychological toll on soldiers, the issues of wikileaks and Private Bradley Manning, to the history of GI led anti-war peace movements.

This Q and A makes for a nice companion to the interviews conducted and published in earlier posts here by John Hines of College Prep.

I can imagine a powerful aff or neg argument structured around the need to "privilege the local" in considerations of military policy as a way to decenter the abstract concepts that characterize military grand strategy. Such an approach could make good use of these interviews/transcripts.

I will post some cites and suggestions about this in a later post, but its fair to say that there is a tremendous literature base (much of it coming from feminist international relations scholars) about this very subject.

UTNIF '10 Operation Awareness pt. 1 from UTNIF on Vimeo.

UTNIF '10 Operation Awareness pt. 2 from UTNIF on Vimeo.

UTNIF '10 Operation Awareness pt. 3 from UTNIF on Vimeo.

A VIEW OF US. PART 3: KOREAN STORIES CONTINUED

Today is August 15th here in Japan. For those of you who remember your history, today is the 65th anniversary of Japan’s surrender to the United States marking the end of World War II. I did not realize I planned to arrive in Okinawa on this exact date, but now find it somewhat appropriate. This date also marks 10 days since my arrival in Asia, so I figure it is time to finish my report on Korea. Towards the end of my interview with Mr. Kwon (readers of my last post will remember him as the long-time political prisoner and activist I went to a protest with) on the afternoon of August 5th; he mentioned that there are still activist groups facing prosecution for lending aid to the enemy under the National Security Law. My final interview that evening was with two individuals from the Pan Korean Alliance for Reunification who had just been released from prison but are still cleared of the charges of collaborating with the North Korean Government. Let’s begin where I left off in the previous blog, on the trail of the use of the National Security Law to prevent dissent and activism on behalf of a peaceful reunification with North Korea.

BonMinRyon’s Vision for a “Third Way”
The Pan Korean Alliance for Reunification (BonMinRyon) was founded in 1990 based upon the three principles for national reunification (independence, peaceful reunification and great national unity) that had been declared in a joint statement by both the North and South Korean governments in 1972. Sung-hee and I joined Choi Eun-a (staff member), Lee Kyung-won (secretary) and Kang In-ogg (editor) in the PKAR offices in downtown Seoul at approximately 7pm. We were all hungry so decided to have a short (one hour) interview in their offices before relocating to a restaurant for dinner. Ultimately, I wanted to talk to them about three things that perked my curiosity when I read about their organization. I wanted to hear about their recent arrest and imprisonment under the National Security Law, their opinions on the relationship between the South Korean government and South Korean people, and I wanted them to explain their vision for a reunified Korea.

According to Ms. Choi, the direct cause of their arrest can be traced back to the previous administrations that opened the way for cooperative alliances between North and South Korean activists. During the previous two administrations (Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun) their organization had been allowed regular travel to North Korea to meet with sister organizations in order to facilitate peaceful reunification. In 2008 South Korea elected Lee Myung-bak as president and the country has since taken a decidedly militant tone towards the north. President Lee’s administration began to claim that the PKAR was getting their orders from North Korea. The government essentially argued that since the PKAR agrees with the North Korean government that there should be a peace agreement between the two countries and a subsequent withdrawal of the US military from the peninsula, they must clearly be collaborating and helping the North. Ms. Choi and Mr. Lee are on release at this point based upon a motion by their attorneys arguing that the prosecution violated their constitutional rights; it will be another year before they find out how the court rules on the use of the evidence gathered by the prosecution via tapping the phones and surreptitiously reading emails of PKAR members. After they explain their current legal situation I decide to shift the conversation to some contemporary political issues.

My question: Does the current Cheonan incident make your job more difficult? (Cheonan is the name of the South Korean ship apparently sunk by a North Korean torpedo some months ago)

Mr. Lee: Many South Korean citizens are suspicious of the conclusions offered by the South Korean government’s investigation. If the people were really convinced this were an act of North Korean aggression they would be rushing out to stock up on noodles right now. Instead, they appear to be more afraid of the implications of the current joint military exercises involving the US and South Korean militaries—these actions are much more likely to increase the risk of war on the peninsula. The Cheonan incident also gives the South Korean government more excuses to suppress North Korea.

My question: To what degree does the general population of South Korea believe the accuracy of the government’s conclusions?

Mr. Lee: Not very much and the government even admits so. On July 7th the minister of National Defense testified to the National Assembly that she was afraid too many citizens doubted the government’s version of the incident. This is probably also because of an overarching lack of support among the people for the current version of the US/ROK military relationship. In the 2003 final report issued on the question of modernizing the military alliance in order to support the US military’s goal of strategic flexibility, the government admits the greatest threat to the stability of the alliance was a rising anti-American sentiment among the consciousness of the people of South Korea. The government also noted a weakening of hostility towards North Korea. For these reasons the US must oppose improved relations between North and South Korea since this will jeopardize the future goals of the alliance.

My question: In your statement of principles you state that “it is important that the two different political and socio-economic systems now existing on Korean soil be allowed to continue their way, competing and cooperating with each other, for an ultimate evolution into one.” Could you perhaps give some explanation or greater clarification as to how you see this taking place?

Ms. Choi: It’s called a “creative third way.” We need a new method. For example the German reunification would not be an example of a successful merging of two distinct systems. (Because basically just the West German approach was adopted throughout the country) We want a system where the two different approaches merge and co-exist with each other. Federated unification is really the idea.

Mr. Lee: We first need to acknowledge that both sides are human beings proud of their own national histories; only once we first acknowledge this can we move forwards towards peaceful unification. If we can’t do this, the only alternative is continued war.
Ms. Choi: The basis for ending the conflict has already been established by the Joint Statement of Principles. If you look at the statement, there is a key phrase where both governments acknowledge the importance of accepting our differences and using difference as a starting point. It also states that on this basis of two different Korean communities we must work from a unified federated system for unification.

As I said initially, we decided to keep this meeting short since the day had been long for all involved. We concluded the interview by discussing the role South Korea should play in helping to reduce tensions between the United States and North Korea. Both Ms. Choi and Mr. Lee agreed that a key first step towards peaceful reunification of the Korean people is an improved relationship between North Korea and the United States. They also argued that since the possession of nuclear weapons by North Korea is at the heart of this issue, the United States and North Korea must work in a bilateral way to resolve this conflict.

Ms. Choi explains: The essence of the issue is that this is a conflict between the US and the DPRK. Even though the South Korean government cannot intervene between the two; it can support a better relationship by emphasizing its own policy goal of peaceful reunification. Specifically, the ROK could encourage an honest effort towards inter-Korean dialogue. Such an approach towards dialogue with the North would also encourage a more positive relationship between North Korea and the United States. Kim Dae-jung’s sunshine policy (The “Sunshine Policy” refers to Kim’s systematic approach to “warm” relations between the North and the South) was a good example of how successful this approach could be. For example, after the June 15th statement the Vice Prime-Minister of North Korea was invited to visit the United States and Madeline Albright was invited to North Korea.

We concluded our interview and went down the street to eat some delicious (perhaps a bit too spicy for me) Korean food. Mr. Lee was kind enough to introduce me to the Korean liquor known as “Soju”, a very strong yet somewhat fruity flavored alcohol. Overall the first day of my trip was thoroughly exhausting but as I near the end of my journey that first day in South Korea continues to stand out as the single most educational and eye-opening day of my trip.

Two Little Girls and the White Cranes
The next morning Sung-hee meets me early once again as we have another busy day planned. This day (August 6th) we plan to visit villages that are being (or have already been) displaced by the South Korean government in order to make room for the expansion of US Military facilities in South Korea. Our first stop is the village of Ohyun-ri in the vicinity of Mugeonri in the Kyeonggi Province. The area of Mugeonri has been a key training ground for both the US and South Korean militaries since the 1970s. Over the course of three decades the training field has gradually expanded until in 2007 the South Korean government decided to completely remove all villagers in the area so that the United States can more fully train their forces at the battalion level consistent with the principle of strategic flexibility. Troops based in Guam, Okinawa and the US come here for training.

As we arrive to meet our guides for the day I am startled by the sound of bombs exploding in the distance. Of course I knew I was going to a training field, but I guess it took the actual sound of explosions for the full force of what it means to live next to a military training facility to hit me. Eventually the sound of explosions ends during the course of our tour, but I definitely found the sound unsettling, I could not even imagine how difficult it must be to live under these conditions on a continuing basis. Our guides Joo Byung-joo (village chairman) and Lee Jae-hoo (chairman of the committee against expansion of the training field) meet us at the bus stop and begin to take us on a tour of the area in Mr. Joo’s van. They begin by explaining that the original village is almost completely removed at this point, and the remaining villagers who have been holding out against relocation have recently learned that the will inevitably lose their battle against the expansion of the training field. The legal principle of imminent domain has been used by the National Defense Department to force the remaining 200 villagers and 100 households out of the area.

Mr Lee explains the first firing range we visit is currently for target practice by tanks and soldiers launching rocket-propelled grenades. They practice by shooting their munitions over the mountains to land and explode in the unoccupied jungle in the distance. This field housed a school where both our guides once played and learned, but there is no longer any school in the area for the few remaining children.
The only residents of the field are a dwindling flock of white cranes, an important national symbol to the Koreans. Our guides spend a lot of time talking about the threat posed to the cranes since the cranes’ habitat relies upon cultivation of rice fields. As rice fields are destroyed to make way for bases and training grounds the cranes lose their home.

Our visit concludes by a visit to an important memorial site. As some of you may already be aware, this is also the village where two little girls where killed in a traffic accident eight years ago involving two US Military armored vehicles. The vehicles where approaching each other driving in opposite directions and rather than stopping to let one or the other pass they tried to pass at the same time, taking up not only the entire roadway but also the sidewalk where two 15 year old girls were walking. The girls found themselves trapped with no avenue for escape since the area of road they were passing has a large retaining wall on their side of the street. Local activists claim the soldiers saw the girls and decided not to stop anyway. The soldiers were never tried in South Korean court and since they were on duty the US military court found no fault with the soldiers. The US military has since built a memorial at the site, but the local villagers apparently despise the memorial because they would rather have built their own memorial to honor these two lost souls. If one looks closely at the inscription explaining that the officers and soldiers of the 2nd Infantry division built the memorial, they’ll notice a vandal has attempted to scratch the division’s name off the monument.

A Plea to American High School Students from the Elders of Daechu-I
Imagine waking up one morning to the sound of helicopters filling the sky over your village. You exit your home to see soldiers rappelling down from the helicopters in what appears to you to be full combat gear. Next imagine that these soldiers then proceed to construct a large impenetrable fence around the rice paddies that had been your family’s primary means of support and way of life for generations and generations. Such is the sad story related to me during our meeting in the next village visited.

After leaving Mugeonri we traveled to the city of Pyeongtek, about an hour south of Seoul by train. There are two major US bases in the area, Osan Air Base and Anjeong-ri Base. Under the new ‘strategic flexibility’ principle, Osan is slated to be the primary base of the massive US presence in Korea. The site was originally a Japanese base from prior to World War II, and now the US has promised to build a base there to last 100 years.

We go to visit the newly constructed village of Nowar-I, but the village head is fighting to rename the village to the name of their community’s original village-Daechu-I. The “village” looks more like a recently build American tract development. Villagers that were once farmers have now become suburban “homeowners” with mortgages. Unfortunately, they have lost their primary means of support. Now each household is given one 6 month a year appointment to work in the city sanitation department cleaning roads.

We meet in the newly constructed home of village headman Shin Jong-wok. He is reticent to talk about the struggle that culminated in the entire village being forcibly evicted and relocated to an apartment complex three years ago before finally being relocated to its current location. Mr. Shin has invited three elders whom he says were instrumental in the struggle to speak with me. He says he invited many others, but most chose not to talk to me since the memory of their forcible eviction is still too painful. Sung-hee and I sit down with the elders; Mr. Song Jae-guk does the majority of the talking for the group.

Mr. Song: I just wanted to save our village. I’m not sure if the US military is here to protect us or not, but I am angry because they took our land. We were not properly compensated and the US and Republic of Korea militaries treated us like “small fries.” This is why we are still so angry. Our opinions were never considered in the negotiations. In fact, we were never consulted; instead we were just told we had to move and when we resisted we were forcibly relocated to a temporary space for three years before being brought to this final location. If the US government had taken the time to speak to us and listen to us we would not be so angry at being relocated. Another thing we are upset with the government over is that during the relocation process they easily could have let us stay in our village for the three years it took them to get this village ready. The US military decided they wanted our village and the decision was made without any discussion with us. I think they did not talk to us because they were afraid we would refuse to move. We also feel betrayed by our government because they were more worried about their relationship with the United States than being responsible to their own people. I don’t really have much else to say, but I do have a request for the American teenagers. The US is a powerful country, and we are not sure if the US military is here to protect their own interests or us. But, there should be respect shown to your alliance country. This respect must come from the heart, only then can there be no hostility. Please treat us as your brothers. Please treat the world as your brothers. There should be no difference between you and me. I think both countries should peacefully co-exist and am saddened it is not going so well.

Thus my second day of travel has been completed. Friday was not nearly as hectic and fast paced as the day before, but by the end of the day I’m once again exhausted and looking forward to returning to my hostel. The next morning will be a very early departure since we will be flying to Jeju Island at 7:30AM.



Jeju Island: The Uprising and Planned Naval Base.
The final leg of my journey in Korea took me to Jeju Island. Korean’s consider Jeju to be their own version of Hawaii; an island paradise most newlyweds visit on their honeymoon. From the descriptions of this gorgeous island one reads in travel brochures, they would never know the sad and tragic history hidden here, much less the South Korean and US Governments’ current plan for the island. I’ll begin the final portion of this blog entry with a brief history lesson.

“The Jeju April 3 Incident” refers to a series of events that lasted for 7 years spanning the US military government period, the founding of the Republic of Korea and the end of the Korean War. The casualties involved with this incident are exceeded only by the death toll of the Korean War itself. In 1945, after the liberation of Korea, public sentiment on Jeju Island was restless about the political direction of the US Military Government in Korea. The spark for the incident is often identified as an event on March 1, 1947. Six Jeju residents were shot dead by the National Police while demonstrating against rule by the American Military Government in Korea. The citizens of the island responded with a general strike that even involved local government officials. In response the US Military Government deployed the National Police and the Northwest Youth Organization (a right-wing political organization modeled after the Hitler Youth of Nazi Germany). These two entities attempted to quell the uprising by unleashing torture and political terror upon the local population. Finally, members of the Jeju branch of the South Korean Labor Party initiated an uprising to protest the military repression and the announcement of an election to establish a separate South Korean government. The people of Jeju themselves responded by boycotting the elections en masse which led to the nullification of the May 10th general election results.

Despite the efforts of the Jeju Islanders to oppose the establishment of an independent South Korean Government, the Republic of Korea came into existence on August 15, 1948. Following the establishment of the ROK, the South Korean government intensified its military presence on the island with the support of the US Military. On November 17, 1948, the ROK declared martial law on Jeju Island. This led to intensive military operations designed to further suppress political resistance on Jeju. In a particularly shocking move, the newly created South Korean Military declared all areas further than 50km from the coast a “free fire zone.” They ultimately deployed a scorched earth policy burning down almost the entire island in order to drive out the remaining resistance on the island. If citizens of Jeju were found within the free fire zone, they would be killed and tortured regardless of age, gender or political affiliation. Accounts of how many people were killed are difficult to come by since the South Korean government suppressed all attempts to even talk about the Jeju April 3 incident until 1987. Official estimates of the death toll from this incident range anywhere from the early conservative ROK estimates of 15,000 to upwards of 60, 000 citizen deaths.

I relate this history to give context to the current plans to build a naval base on the island. With this decision, the political history of Jeju Island as a holdout against US Military rule and Korea and the decision to partition Korea has come full circle. The “red-island” (name given to Jeju by US military propaganda in 1947) will now become a key strategic location for the South Korean and American militaries to practice the principle of strategic flexibility.

A simple glance at this map demonstrates the ultimate strategic goal for building a military base on this island. I’ll give the reader a hint; it’s not for protection against North Korea. In Jeju Sung-hee and I join up with members of SPARK who have come to the island in order to see and hear first hand about the current plans for the military base. A group of Korean-Americans on a cultural exploration trip also joins in our expedition.

Local artist and activist Mr. Koh Kwoh-I was our driver and tour guide around the island that afternoon. Mr. Koh took us to three different sites in order to help us grasp the impact the proposed naval base would have on the local population. First we go to the reservoir the villagers rely upon for their drinking water. Jeju Island is singularly bereft of rivers, but they do have a few streams that actually start from underground aquifers. The reservoir we visit is the only site of clean and fresh drinking water for the villagers. Once the base is built, it is expected by the villagers they will lose access to the clean and healthy water provided by this natural resource. Next we visit the site on the coast that represents the northernmost limits of the proposed base. The beautiful volcanic rocks we stood on that day will have to be covered over with concrete in order to build the base. Finally, we visit a protest tent at the southernmost edge of the proposed site.

Mr. Koh explains his objections to the proposed base: The ROK government tells us this base is not intended for use by the US military, but given that they plan to have the base ready by 2014 I am suspicious of this claim. 2014 is also the date the US military has promised to remove troops from Okinawa by. Also, the Status of Forces Agreement (in military speak this is called a “SOFA”; essentially an agreement between the United States and South Korea which outlines the nature of US military presence in the country) says that the United States does not even need to ask South Korea’s permission to use bases owned and operated by the South Korean military. Therefore, it is inevitable that this base will become a US military base. Jeju Island should remain an “Island of Peace” (the Roh Moo-hyun government designated Jeju Isand and “International Island of Peace” in 2002 as part of an apology for the April 3 Incident) and serve as a site for peace and stability in North East Asia, but if a base is built here we will instead be in the eye of the storm. The closest naval port to Jeju is not Pyongyang in North Korea, but instead is Shanghai. The goal of the base is clearly to wage war against China, not to protect us from the North Koreans. Clearly, China would not look favorably upon the building of this naval base. If tensions in North East Asia are heightened the world will become destabilized and potentially cause World War III. The only people who benefit from such a situation is the Military Industrial Complex. I personally feel that is why our struggle here is so important; if we do not fight this base the safety of the world for the next 100 years will be jeopardized.

After Mr. Koh’s speech we leave the protest tent and head to the village cultural center for a shared meal. The agenda for the rest of the evening is a meeting with the Mayor of Geongjeong (the village where the base will be built). Mayor Kang Dong-kyun gives a speech explaining the history of the island’s struggle against the base and the current status of their fight. I’ve run out of space to completely reproduce his speech here, so instead I will end this post with his exhortation to us. If you’d like to read more from Mayor Kang, you can read another speech of his here.

Mayor Kang: In conclusion, I have one request for you. Tens of thousands of people have visited our village over the past few years but they always go home and forget about our struggle here. Please go home and talk to people about our story. Please remember our struggle as a small village trying simply to preserve our way of life.

Thus ends my journey in Korea. I am now writing from my hotel room in Okinawa and hope to have plenty more stories to tell about my time in Asia the next time I get a chance to post to the blog. Thanks for reading, and hopefully these stories have inspired you in the same way my encounters with the people in these stories have inspired me.

A VIEW OF US. PART 2: KOREAN STORIES

While I had the best of intentions to blog on a more regular basis while in Korea, the combination of jetlag, humidity and the sheer pace of meetings and events conspired against me. I have now made it safely to Taipei and am finally getting some time to rest and reflect upon my encounters in Korea. At the start, I should say my encounters were nothing short of mind-blowing and heart-rending. The stories I return with from Korea have a broad range, all of them sad. There’s the former North Korean soldier who’s been a political prisoner trapped in the South since 1962 with no word or contact from his family for nearly four decades. There’s the mother who worries that her children will carry traumatic memories with them for the rest of their lives from the day the South Korean military forcibly evicted them from their homes in order to make way for the expansion of a US military base. There’s the artist and activist on Jeju Island fighting the building of a US naval base in his village who can’t understand how US citizens continue to support militaristic policies that place the lives of his whole community in jeopardy. Due to the immense amount of information I have collected, I will only relate two of the interviews from my first day in Korea in this entry. They were by far the most extensive and exhaustive. Before I begin though, I’d like to take a moment to discuss process and method.

Specifically, it is important to acknowledge and understand the act of translation from the outset. Other than Professor Kang, none of my subjects spoke English just as I do not speak Korean. Each of my interviews were arranged and translated by a Korean activist and blogger named Choi Sung-Hee. Without her tireless dedication to this project, this endeavor would never have been possible. The testimony I present below has been gathered through an arduous translation process. I would ask questions, Sung-Hee would then translate the questions for our interviewee and then translate their responses back to me. Obviously, no act of translation will ever completely and accurately capture the exact meaning and tenor of the message the subject wished to convey. Therefore the words below are the combined effort of Sung-Hee, the interviewees, and me to bring you stories and descriptions we all felt must be heard and understood by American high school students specifically and Americans citizens in general. Every person interviewed was informed of the nature of my fellowship, and that our goal was to get these stories into the hands of high school students debating whether or not to decrease US military presence in Asia. Without further ado, I’ll begin with the first story.

THE TRAGEDY OF THE LOVELY COUPLE.

August 5^th began with Sung-Hee and me meeting and interviewing Professor Kang Jung-Koo of Dong-Guk University. Professor Kang will soon retire from the Department of Sociology where his research interests include Korean reunification and contemporary Korean history. Professor Kang is also the director of the Research Institute for Peace and Reunification of Korea, and is affiliated with an activist organization called SPARK (“Solidarity for Peace and Reunification of Korea”). The interview was conducted at the SPARK offices in Seoul and lasted just under two hours. Professor Kang is a very controversial figure in South Korea whose statements regarding the Korean War and reunification of Korea have landed him in court for violating South Korea’s National Security Law. Our interview begins with him explaining why the South Korean Government has prosecuted him.

Professor Kang: In the year 2005 which marked both the 60^th anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japan and the 60^th anniversary of a foreign military presence by the United States and thus our forced division, I began arguing that we should celebrate this 60^th anniversary with a withdrawal of foreign military forces from South Korea. Also, during this time I wrote an article on the Internet about the General MacArthur statue in Incheon where I argued it was time to get rid of that statue because he was at the forefront of our country’s division. In fact, he advocated dropping as many as 26 Atomic bombs on North Korea; therefore we should not continue to honor his memory with this statue. I have also been very publicly critical of the US military’s actions during the Korean War. For all of these reasons I am now being prosecuted for violating our National Security Law.

My main argument is that if there had been no intervention by the US into the internal affairs of liberated Korea at the end of World War II, Korea would never have been divided and we would not have had to suffer the tragedy of the Korean War. IF the US did not intervene in the Korean War, the war would have ended in a month without the killing of as many as 3 million Koreans and 1 million Chinese. IF there had been no intervention in 1950 during the first period of the Korean War, we would not have suffered such a tragedy. The Korean War was a war of reunification and would have ended quickly and resulted in a unified Korea.

The professor explains to me that his case has gone all the way to the South Korean Supreme Court and he has received a suspended sentence of two years in jail for advancing this argument in his academic writings and public advocacies. He is currently awaiting the decision of the Supreme Court to discover whether or not he will serve prison time for arguing that the US military should never have intervened in the internal affairs of Korea. At this point I ask him to elaborate and explain the historical hypothetical he has advanced.

Professor Kang: The US is 90% responsible for the division of Korea. If there had been no forced division there would never have been a civil war. By 1950 both the US and Russian militaries had left Korea (the US military left in June 1949, and Russia’s military left in December 1948). On July 1^st, 1950 the US military returned to Korea in order to intervene in our civil war. Therefore the civil war is a product of interference by foreign powers.

Even though Korea has been divided for over 65 years, I think most Koreans (both North and South) want a re-unified Nation. We have the same identity. Even though there are many differences between South and North in the way of culture, ways of living and thinking we still have a shared identity and desire to be reunited. Prior to our forced division, we had been a united country since the 7^th century, that’s over 1400 years as a single country and people.

The story of the “lovely couple” can be used here to understand Korea’s current struggle. When a husband and wife are married, they are “ONE,” but in this story the neighborhood gangster intervened and forced them to be divorced (the US is of course this neighborhood gangster). The majority of Koreans want to be reunited as a “lovely couple” again through peaceful means.

My question: “Can you elaborate on your writings about the US military government in Korea collaborating with pro-Japanese Koreans after World War II? Specifically, how do you think the US military occupation of Korea resembles the Japanese occupation of Korea prior to World War II?”

Professor Kang: If there had been no intervention, the liberated Korea would have cleaned up the pro-Japanese national traitors. In 1946 North Korea acted to root out the pro-Japanese influence in their government and society in order to counteract the legacy of Japanese Imperialism. Therefore, the ruling party of North Korea has no legacy of Japanese imperialism and they are able to maintain self-reliance. This rejection of US imperialism for the last 65 years must be understood as a continuation of the struggle against Japanese imperialism.

On the contrary, in the South there is an opposite history. When the US entered Korea, they had no friends on the Peninsula that would help them administer their military occupation. When the US wanted South Korea to take a Capitalist route rather than a Socialist route, most of South Korea wanted to have a Socialist system rather than a Capitalist system. In July 1946 the US Military Government in Korea conducted a survey of South Koreans and discovered that 71% of respondents wanted a Socialist system, 7% wanted a Communist system, and only 14% wanted a Capitalist system. If the survey had been conducted in 1945, before the US Military Government in Korea made it clear they were opposed to any form of Communist of Socialist system, I would say that almost 90% of Korean people (both North and South) wanted a Socialist system rather than a capitalist system. That is why the US could not find friends in either the North or the South.

The US Military Government needed pro-Japanese national traitors to cooperate with them to help institute a pro-Capitalist regime. For the pro-Japanese, to be friends with the US was the only way to keep their power and status in Korean society. Therefore there emerged a very close alliance between the US military occupation and the pro-Japanese national traitors. This is the reason we had so many small on-going wars (referred to as people’s uprisings) starting in October 1946 and leading up to the Korean War in 1950. In 1946 alone more than 10,000 Koreans were killed by the US occupying forces. These small wars lasted from 1946 to 1950, and because of these wars almost 100,000 Koreans lost their lives.

Also important to understand is that the Korean War was not a “war of aggression.” A “war of aggression” is between two separate sovereign countries, but the North and the South are not separate sovereign countries—we are one country, one nation with two different governments. Therefore, this is a civil war. It is true that North Korea mobilized their military and invaded South Korea. They believed the war would end in one or two months without such tragedy. This was an internal conflict; there was no reason for neighbors to intervene in the internal affairs of the “lovely couple.” As I explained we are like a married couple that was forced by the neighborhood gangster to divorce, so it is natural for us to get reunited after the neighborhood gangster has left.

My question: “So Professor Kang, what can American high school students do in order to facilitate the process of allowing this ‘lovely couple’ to be reunited?”

Professor Kang: Most Americans do not know the real story of our country’s division and the ensuing Korean War. For example, in 2002 I met Thomas Friedman of the New York Times and we talked for about 90 minutes. He later wrote some articles about South Korea and the North Korean nuclear crisis and I was very disappointed to notice that he didn’t appear to know anything about the real story of what is actually going on between North Korea and South Korea. Therefore, we must start by getting to the Real Story of our country’s division, the tragedy of the Korean War, and of the inevitability of North Korea’s development of nuclear powers in order to protect itself against attacks from the United States. In the history of crises on the Korean peninsula since the end of the Korean War, out of 11 crises all but 2 were initiated by United States actions and belligerence towards North Korea. In the face of the US military aggression what can North Korea do? They do not have the money to cope with South Korean and United States military spending; therefore the most economic way to defend themselves is to develop nuclear bombs. Only a nuclear bomb can guarantee North Korea’s security in such a situation. When North Korea first announced the test of their nuclear weapons, the official announcement of North Korea stated that when the hostile policies of the United States towards North Korea cease they would be willing to give up their nuclear weapons.

The first step is to get American citizens to know all these true details of US involvement in Korea. If they know they will realize there is no reason for the US military to be here in the Korean peninsula. The Korean peninsula is not safe because of US military presence; instead it is “the most dangerous place in the world” because of the US military presence. So the conclusion is clear, the first step is to get the US military out of Korea. Then, we (North and South) can refuse the offensive military orientation towards each other and transition towards defensive oriented military systems and we can begin to work towards peaceful reunification and cooperation between North and South.

THREE PRISONERS OF CONSCIENCE

At the conclusion of my interview with Professor Kang, Sung-Hee and I quickly rush off in order to make our lunchtime meeting with Mr. Kwon Oh-Hun. Mr. Kwon is a former political prisoner (prisoner of conscience) and has been a reunification activist since 1964. He is the chairperson of the Supporting Committee for Prisoners of Conscience and the Co-Chairperson of MINKAHYUP Human Rights Group. Our goal is to have lunch with Mr. Kwon before joining him at the weekly MINKAHYUP protest in Tapgol (Pagoda) Park. I must admit at this point my mind is spinning in a million different directions after meeting with Professor Kang, but one question above all is burning in my mind when I meet him. Ultimately this interview spans seven hours and three different locations. Below I have reproduced a small fraction of the transcript of our meeting.

My question: “How has the South Korean government utilized the National Security Law to suppress dissent?”

Mr. Kwon: The official National Security Law was enacted in 1948, but it was preceded by the Japanese enactment of the “Security Maintenance Law” in 1929. Both laws had the same basic goal—to suppress dissent. On September 8, 1945 the United States came here to disarm the Japanese military, but ultimately turned out to be an occupying army as well. Koreans were told that resistance to the US military order would be met with death. The National Security Law of 1948 was passed in order to help preserve US military control.

One of the first acts of the South Korean government after its creation on August 15, 1948 was to pass the National Security Law on October 1^st, 1948. At the time the separate South Korean government was established there was substantial public opposition to the creation of separate governments; this partition was only possible with the help of the US military. On April 3, 1948 the first organized and mass resistance to the separate South Korean government occurred with the Cheju Uprising [readers should take note that Cheju Island has been re-named Jeju Island]. The South Korean military was sent to the island to suppress the movement but the military resisted the order (this refusal is known as the Yeo-soon uprising). Only by the US military stepping in was the Cheju uprising suppressed [watch for my upcoming blog regarding the US military’s shocking involvement in suppressing this uprising].

In order to make the creation of the separate South Korean government successful the National Security Law was needed to prevent resistance and ensure the permanent division of Korea. Under the US dominated South Korean government the Japanese imperialists had retained their positions in the new government and suggested the use of the same law they had previously used to control dissent. The Japanese “Security Maintenance Law” of 1929 had three main goals: 1. Control over ideas 2. Suppress the local independence movement 3. Suppress freedom of expression. The first goal was the most important because it was via this law that the Japanese and later the United States and South Korea were able to suppress the growing socialist movement in Korea. One of the main differences between South Korea and North Korea at this point in time is that in North Korea the pro-Japanese collaborators were purged, but in South Korea the US military protected and promoted the pro-Japanese collaborators and their institutions of control.

My question: “Could you give me some specific examples of how the National Security Law has been used since its enactment in 1948?”

Mr. Kwon: The first victims of the law where the legislators in the South Korean government who voted against the law. When the South Korean National Assembly was first created the progressives had refused to participate, yet even without such participation about 37 members who were center-right nationalists still opposed the law even though they supported the partition of Korea. There were four reasons for their refusal to support the law: 1. It could be used to control the freedom of ideas 2. It would make the division of Korea permanent 3. It could be used to oppress political opponents 4. The law could be interpreted arbitrarily and used to violate human rights. Because of their opposition to the law charges were brought against these 37 members of the National Assembly accusing them of being spies. This event in our history is now referred to as the “Incident of the National Assembly Spies.”

The second victims of the National Security Law were the progressive political parties and the socialist organizations. Within the first year of enactment of the National Security Law 118,00 people were arrested and 132 political parties and civil organizations (including media organizations such as newspapers etc…) were dispersed utilizing the law. Due to this repression many of South Korea’s progressives, activists and artists fled to the North during this time. Many were convicted and sentenced to death during this purge, but since we are running out of time I can only relate one specific example. Cho Bong-Am, chairperson of the Progressive Party, called for peaceful reunification with the North. Syngman Rhee preferred absorption of North Korea into his regime and therefore had Cho arrested and executed on July 30, 1959.

At this point in the interview we are forced to pause for a couple hours so Mr. Kwon can participate in a weekly political protest wherein activists from a group known as MINKAHYUP rally in support of the release of all remaining political prisoners and the repeal of the National Security Law.

After the rally, we reconvene our interview about an hour away from downtown Seoul in a quiet neighborhood in Incheon. We continue our discussion in a house used over the years by recently released political prisoners until they are able to make their way back to North Korea. Over the next hour and a half Mr. Kwon meticulously outlines the history of the South Korean government’s active oppression of dissent and opposition by use of the National Security Law. The litany is exhausting and eye opening.

Mr. Kwon: There is the “April 19^th Uprising” in 1960 which started with students protesting a fraudulent election designed to ensure Syngman Rhee the lifetime presidency of South Korea. Syngman Rhee was unable to maintain support due to this uprising but the South Korean military intervened via a coup to reign in the movement. Right before the coup the aspirations of the progressive movement was very high and many thought peaceful reunification would be the likely outcome of the uprising. After the coup, the National Security Law was again invoked resulting in 500 people being arrested, 200 being tried and convicted and 7 or 8 people being executed. One of the executed was Joo Yong-Soo, chairperson of the Korean Social Party Organizing Committee and publisher of the “People’s Daily Newspaper.” It has recently come to light that the outcome of his trial was actually a “not-guilty” verdict but he was executed regardless. Additionally, the chairperson for the Socialist Party and a number of teachers advocating democratic social change were also executed.

For the sake of time and space, I’m not able to relate the full litany of incidents and abuses Mr. Kwon detailed that afternoon. Hopefully, I will be able in the coming weeks to continue transcribing the list of incidents and publish the full interview here. Instead, at this time I’d like to skip ahead to some slightly more recent history.

My question: “Mr. Kwon, up to this point we have talked exclusively about the time of South Korea’s history that is fairly universally regarded as a dictatorship. How does the current government since the end of the dictatorship utilize the National Security Law to prevent dissent?”

Mr. Kwon: I’d like to point out two things in response to your question: 1. The military dictatorship continues to this day. The president elected in 1987 was a former military general and even when we have had civilians elected as President they still collaborated with military leaders. 2. The National Security Law was revised in 1991 but is still used to suppress activists. For example, recent progressive movements that advocate for peaceful reunification have been prosecuted as organizations lending support to the enemy.

During the course of our discussion two men have joined our interview. My host explains both are former political prisoners (a term he uses interchangeably with “prisoners of conscience”) who would like to have a chance to speak to me about their experiences.

First is Mr. Park Hee-Sung. Born in 1935 in Pyongyang province, Mr. Park has not seen his wife or children who still reside in North Korea since 1962 and in fact does not even know if they are still alive. He came to South Korea in 1959 to assist South Korean activists to escape to the North in order to avoid persecution by the Rhee government. After a two hour naval battle in which he suffered numerous injuries he was captured and placed in a South Korean prison. He recounts to me some of his horrifying experiences in prison that range from being able to hear fellow inmates being executed to being told he too could easily be killed if his guards so decided. He was released in 1989 under a general amnesty and has been waiting for the South Korean government to allow him to go home ever since. His only wish at this late stage in his life is to go home to be hugged by his homeland and see his family one last time before he dies.

The other former prisoner is Mr. Kim Young-Sik. At this point we have run out of time for our interview so Mr. Kim takes a brief moment to angrily curse the policies of the United States government towards Korea as a policy wherein the most powerful country on Earth suffocates the weak and helpless. He reasserts an argument I end up hearing over and over while in Korea: If the US had never intervened in the internal affairs of Korea by collaborating with Japanese imperialists there would have been no division, no war and no tragedy. He states that it’s particularly terrible that the US gave power in South Korea to the people most hated by the Korean population.

Sung-Hee and I wish our hosts good-bye as rush hour sets in. We board the subway back to Seoul where one final meeting with Choi Eun-A, Lee Kyung-Won and Kang In-Ogg of the Pan Korean Alliance for Reunification. Ms. Choi and Mr. Lee have both recently been released from prison after being brought up on charges for violating the National Security Law. They have not yet been vindicated though, they were only released because their attorneys where able to prove that their human rights were violated because the prosecution has been taping their phones and reading their emails.

As I promised at the beginning, this entry only covers my first two meetings on August 5^th. The day has ended here in Taipei and I want to get to the night market for a late night snack before I begin to pack for my trip to Beijing tomorrow. Check back in the next day or two for the continuation of my interviews in Korea.