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WASHINGTON, Jan 25 (Reuters) - An effort by Republican U.S. lawmakers to reallocate $18 billion in climate-friendly agriculture funding under President Joe Biden's signature climate law would shift money away from programs that primarily benefit farmers in Republican-leaning states, a Reuters analysis found.

The Inflation Reduction Act money, earmarked for U.S. Department of Agriculture-designated "climate-smart" farm practices, is intended to support Biden's agriculture climate agenda, which relies heavily on storing carbon in the soil and lowering emissions through sustainable farming techniques.

The House Ag Committee approved the 2024 Farm Bill with bipartisan support. Following the vote, Chairman Glenn “G.T.” Thompson told members, “A majority having voted in favor of the motion, as agreed to, and HR 8467, as amended, will be reported favorably to the House.”

Four Democratic members voted for the measure providing some momentum as it awaits floor time. Eric Sorensen a Democrat from Illinois voted in favor of the bill, Don Davis of North Carolina, Yadira Caraveo of Colorado, and Sanford Bishop of Georgia also voted in favor of the measure.

Mitigating the costs of selective legal memory, the past teaches us, is a project already begun and one involving many voices and many lifetimes. Rather than pretend to solve the problem of law’s color line, I return to the particularity of my own responses to this case study.202 My first response has been this Essay, weaving stories of the past in ways calculated to reach the keepers and transmitters of law’s memories and seeking to use an uncommon angle—patent law—to make the color line visible and, thereby, a problem to be solved rather than the unquestioned status quo. I have recognized, too slowly, that our selective legal memory has allowed me to be repeatedly surprised by Ned’s accomplishment and those of the many other African American inventors, free and enslaved, who have been a part of our history at least since Africans landed in Jamestown in 1619.203 That surprise perpetuates the racism of low expectations that motivated Baker and the NAACP in 1913 to publish his pamphlet, and feeds implicit biases and explicit racism.204 By exclaiming with wonder at the tale of an inventive blacksmith, a black railroad engineer, or an African American beauty entrepreneur, I imply that there is reason to be surprised, as if a designated subset of U.S. citizens is not expected to invent, as if George Washington Carver, perhaps the only famous black inventor, was sui generis.205 It is my obligation to avoid perpetuating that surprise by positioning Ned and the broader history of African American inventivenessas coextensive with the history of American inventiveness in my teaching and writing, rather than as rare examples distinct from assumed whiteness of technology creation in North America.206 While Ned is only one of a myriad of such inventors—some of whose stories are known in much more detail—his story is particularly well suited to separating biological assumptions from the politics of racism in legal settings, since his invention resulted in Jeremiah’s opinion, which had a profound, if fleeting, legal consequence.207 A three-sentence opinion can slip easily into a syllabus. What I have learned from these storytellers about the stakes of remembering Ned is also causing me to rethink the stakes of current conversations about inclusivity and access to the patent system.208 Understanding patents as political facts is a new perspective for those of us trained in patent law. We are accustomed to evaluating the patent system on its ability to “promote the progress of [the] useful arts” by encouraging technological innovation through individual economic reward.209 In a world of corporate research, we consider the collective use of patents in portfolios and pools, but remain unaware of the continuing significance of patents as a collective resource for those advocating for group inclusion.210 Understanding patents as proof of a prized ability with political meaning adds new dimensions to analyzing the use and functioning of the patent system today. For I have realized that the political meaning of patents is also “something that is happening.”211 Patents remain potent symbols of individual ability as well as a collective source of national pride.212 The patent office provides space for and collaborates with the National Inventors Hall of Fame to honor and publicize American inventors, celebrating original thought.213 The United States government, led by the patent office, claims the significance of patents, in both number and quality, in demonstrating a characteristic of the United States people that distinguishes this country from the rest of the world, echoing Baker’s analysis that inventive skill is a valued contribution to the nation.214 Underscoring the continued link between patents and citizenship, patents collectively granted to immigrants are offered as evidence of their worthiness to join the United States community.215 Demonstrating participation in the patent system remains a way of claiming to be an American, fully within the borders of belonging. Recognizing this meaning and its stakes adds new urgency to the severe underinclusion of persons of color, particularly African Americans, in the patent system.216 Once we see patents as political facts, we can appreciate that the rate at which African Americans apply for and receive patents is more than just another data point in discussions of STEM education or the innovation economy, or a question of distributive justice, although it is all those things.217 The patent system both remains a means of reifying racial hierarchies and offers the opportunity to destabilize them.218 As the activists I have highlighted understood, that opportunity expands as the list of African American patentees grows. At a moment when the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is requesting authority to collect data on the sex and race identification of applicants, remembering Ned, Jeremiah, and Oscar underscores the need for such data as a way to create such lists.219 It also provides an additional incentive to encourage participation by marginalized groups in the patent system, reminding us that doing so will renegotiate the borders of belonging in ways that reverberate far beyond patents. I recognize that many of the storytellers whose history I have excavated had no interest in technological innovation or patent office policy. Rather, their efforts were directed to questions of race and rights, of citizenship and belonging, and of the role of law in shaping American identity, providing an important reminder that such questions are answered in many places. They have taught me that law’s selective memory imposes costs on the work of understanding what the law is, how it is working, and particularly, where and how the fault lines of entrenched racism in the United States continue to disrupt our legal promises of equality and inclusion. They encourage me to shift back from “I” to a “we” that I imagine includes many who never think about patents but are interested in these overarching questions of law and society in order to suggest that we need to shift our attention in at least two ways. By looking across law’s color line, we can learn legal stories we need to understand. Further, we need to recognize that the borders of belonging are forged in all parts of law and its bureaucracies, not just in the regulation of physical borders and polling places, or in designated civil rights laws. Fundamentally, understanding over a century of remembering Ned’s story teaches us the political stakes of our participation in law’s memory, a present happening worth remembering.

Even as a small-scale story of slavery in the antebellum United States, Invention of a Slave provides a poignant example of the contradictions between humanity and property that challenged and distorted American law in a slave society.16 It forces us to acknowledge that the ideology of slavery reached into the technical bureaucracy of the patent office, an area of law and of the administrative state frequently considered outside politics.17 The dry lines of the opinion expose the breathtaking claim by an enslaver to the mental labor of another person—an ultimate claim of whiteness as intellectual property—and another frontier in the “myriad and nefarious uses of slave property.”18 These features make Invention of a Slave a story worth remembering. One of history’s projects is the recovery of missing stories. This goal has always been urgently foregrounded in African American history as a corrective to the whitewashed narrative that dominated professionalized history in the United States from its late-nineteenth-century inception.19 Invention of a Slave, however, has never been a “forgotten” or missing story.20 For over 150 years, African American activists have remembered and written about the opinion in many venues excluded from our collective legal memory.21 Their remembering was not casual storytelling but rather deliberate, strategic, and political. Understanding the purpose of their efforts reveals the opinion’s continuing relevance to our collective effort to understand what the law is, how it is working, and how it might be changed in the service of justice.22 I offer Invention of a Slave as a case study of race and selective legal memory, tracing the color line that demarcates legal memory and the costs of that line.23 I begin with my first encounters with Invention of a Slave and its backstory as told in African American “sites of memory.”24 I then foreground the nineteenth- and twentieth-century storytellers to understand by whom and in what places the opinion was remembered. With an appreciation of the opinion as a remembered story, I can then ask, why? What were the stakes that drove African American activists and leaders to tell and retell the story of the enslaved inventor and his exclusion from the patent system? I argue that this memory work was performed in support of fights for the “rights of belonging,” the various civil rights that signal and accompany inclusion.25 Between the formal lines of the opinion, these activists read an unintended message that patents could be political tools used to oppose anti-black racism and racist laws. They mobilized patents as government certifications that their recipients had a prized mental ability, inventiveness, in order to undercut the logic of racism in its shifting guises, including scientific racism, white supremacy, and the pernicious bigotry of low expectations. This labor resulted in publications that remained on the other side of a color line, excluded from the acknowledged repositories of legal memory. This exclusion has carried costs, as we in law have failed to appreciate and participate in what was always in part a legal effort, even though it occurred outside formal legal publications. These storytellers, by telling one of law’s stories, were seeking legal change. Our legal erasure of both the opinion and storytellers has allowed us to encounter a wellremembered story as “forgotten” and remain blind to its relevance. Acquiring a new perspective transforms Invention of a Slave from an oftoverlooked piece in the vast mosaic of law and slavery in the antebellum United States into part of the post-Emancipation history of race and law— a history characterized by never-ending and always-changing campaigns to fulfill the formal promises of the Reconstruction Amendments to bring African Americans into law and society as citizens. This history has not ended, but rather remains “something that is happening,”26 as we continue to debate what Barbara Welke has memorably called the “borders of belonging,” that is, the contours of citizenship and Americanness as shaped in law and society.27

This atomistic model of individual human beings with their unique interior landscapes translates into the fundamental unsayability of pain, and the failure of pain to take an object means that we can only approach the pain of others with doubt. For Scarry (1985: 4), ‘pain comes unsharably into our midst as at once that which cannot be denied and that which cannot be confirmed’. Here, the possibilities for accurately or meaningfully expressing pain are always subject to the ever-present threat of their negation. As physical pain is seen to destroy the possibility of its own expression in language, the options for representing pain are limited to a range of visual practices that can only ever point to some trace – some visible cause that might point to the presence of pain in another (i.e. the emaciated body in starvation, the torn and bleeding body in war, the contorted face of the prisoner at Abu Ghraib). In this sense, the drive to image the pain of others seeks to impart a certainty to experience that, in the Cartesian model, can ever only be marked by a radical doubt. It is from within the frame of doubt associated with pain that the drive to visualize correlative expressions of pain – rather than the pain itself – occurs. For this reason, the visual expression of pain and trauma translates into a politics of representation that flattens the experience of pain by being able to capture only the visible causes or expressions of pain. One of the results of this is the development of an aesthetic imagery of pain-causing phenomena – an iconography of symbols that stand in for pain and thus become the representational alibis for actual pain: images of starvation, of emaciated concentration-camp victims, of hooded prisoners, of broken and bleeding skins, of blood-stained floors in prison cells, and so on. In the imaging of pain-causing phenomena and of bodies in pain, the specificity of the interior experience of pain, and of the subject that experiences it, is elided or even entirely evacuated. People become representations of their plights. As Feldman argues, we encounter ‘generalities of bodies – dead, wounded, starving, diseased, and homeless. . . . In their pervasive depersonalization, [they appear as an] anonymous corporeality’ (cited in Malkki, 1996: 388). The fundamental inexpressibility of pain is the unsaid hypothesis on which a range of claims about torture, war, and death as primarily interior experiences (and thus doubtable experiences) are made possible. For Hannah Arendt, for example, the concentration-camp survivor, had he been able to return to narrate his experience, would not have been believed. The suffering in the camp as a space of profound and potentially limitless pain is understood to defy attempts at narration, because the capacity to express the content of that pain is understood to be severely curtailed. Arendt uses terms such as ‘unimaginable’ to describe experiences that ‘can never be fully embraced by the imagination’, and that, as a consequence, can ‘never be fully reported’. In short, ‘it is as though [the survivor] had a story to tell of another planet’ (Arendt, 2000: 125). Similarly, she writes that ‘anyone speaking or writing about the concentration camps is . . . regarded as suspect; and if the speaker has resolutely returned to the world of the living, he himself is often assailed by doubts with regard to his own truthfulness, as though he had mistaken a nightmare for reality’ (Arendt, 2000: 120). Here, we see that pain and trauma are regarded as so fundamentally inaccessible and unshareable that any attempt at recounting one’s experiences is haunted by the stark fact that one’s suffering will always and necessarily be received by others with radical doubt. The poverty of communicating traumatic experience was also expressed by Walter Benjamin, who suggests that ‘witnessing war . . . takes away the ability to speak about it’ (cited in Sliwinski, 2004: 151). Jenny Edkins (2003: 8) expresses a similar understanding with regard to trauma, writing that ‘what we can say no longer makes sense; what we want to say, we can’t. There are no words for it.’ Similarly, the act of witnessing others’ pain (and deaths) is also fraught with an unsayability, because the witness is limited to only a modicum of access to the trauma of the other body.  To be sure, there is an ethical imperative here to mark the experience of trauma as both unique and exceptional – an imperative that, for all its ethical motivations, also works to further divide the pain-filled from the pain-less. Here, the witnessing of pain, because it is marked by the inability of the witness to experience the pain of the other body, can ever only be a partial witnessing. This is Levi’s (1989) formulation of the differentiation between the drowned and the saved. The drowned cannot come back to bear witness to what happened to them, and the saved are capable of only a partial witnessing. Of course, the possibility of perfect witnessing – of perfect affinity between the one who experiences pain and the one who witnesses it – is not only impossible, but also probably undesirable. The reasons for this undesirability are found not in the impossibility of experiencing the pain of the other, but rather in the immanent risk that the pain of others might be evacuated – through a refocusing on the self – from the realm of politics.

To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell's flames. Still, it seems a good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one's sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others. Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood. No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.  There now exists a vast repository of images that make it harder to maintain this kind of moral defectiveness. Let the atrocious images haunt us. Even if they are only tokens, and cannot possibly encompass most of the reality to which they refer, they still perform a vital function. The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing-may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don't forget. This is not quite the same as asking people to remember a particularly monstrous bout of evil. ("Never forget.") Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. So the belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans, who know we are going to die, and who mourn those who in the normal course of things die before us-grandparents, parents, teachers, and older friends. Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together. But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of a collective history. There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited. If the goal is having some space in which to live one's own life, then it is desirable that the account of specific injustices dissolve into a more general understanding that human beings everywhere do terrible things to one another.

Previous studies suggest significant differences in Whites’ enjoyment of ethnic entertainment with the most pronounced effects among those who identify highly with authoritarian values (Altemeyer, 1988; Middleton, 1959; Oliver, 1996). Hobbes’ (1968) superiority theory argues that enjoyment of humor messages is derived from a falsely constructed sense of superiority to the disparaged. In other words, the perceiver not only fails to identify with the disparaged, but also receives gratification from seeing an inferior group belittled because it makes them feel more positive about themselves. Therefore, enjoyment of Black stereotyping is considered to be influenced by Whites’ sense of superiority and disconnect from Black culture. In addition, entertainment theories posit that responses to media fare are predetermined by audiences’ predispositions to a media character. For instance, Ford, Wentzel, and Lorion (2001) found that men exposed to sexist humor perceived sexism as normative and acceptable. These effects were most pronounced among men who already subscribed to beliefs about gender inequality. Similarly, Vidmar and Rokeach’s (1974) study on All in the Family revealed a relationship between predisposition and humor interpretation such that high-prejudiced individuals viewed comical racial slurs in the show as more acceptable than those low in prejudice. Disposition theory specifically explains that negative attitudes toward a media character most often predict higher enjoyment outcomes (Zillmann & Cantor, 1976). Cantor (1976) argued that mirth reactions are a combination effect of attitudinal predispositions as well as group membership. Therefore, racial attitudes play a significant role in humor interpretation. Moreover, Whites’ racial identity development helps to clarify the formation of Whites’ racial attitudes. Thus, the literature reviewed suggests that there is a gap in the understanding of the mechanisms involved in the way viewers of ethnic humor come to enjoy particular portrayals; the experimental study described below is designed to elucidate the role of two mechanisms in particular: disparagement and identity. Drawing inferences from the assertions of disposition based theories of enjoyment and theories of whiteness, Whites’ racial identity as reflected in their attitudes will moderate the relationship between exposure to stereotyped messages and enjoyment outcomes such that: H1: Those exposed to portrayals entailing Black disparagement will report higher levels of enjoyment than those exposed to portrayals of White disparagement.

Within a sedimented field-imaginary, knowledge is produced through a set of taken for granted epistemological norms and conceptual-ideological assemblages. In other words, the general terms of what it is possible to say, do, and think, are set, yet our awareness of the terms themselves (and their impact on the knowledge that we produce) is dulled as the contextual conditions of its emergence disappear from view. As a result, we do not often think to ask whether the questions that orient our field-imaginary are still the questions that need asking, and whether the terms of our scholarly conversations are adequate to the task of responding to contemporary ethical–political challenges. Scott (2004) thus asks “whether the moment of normalization of a paradigm is not also the moment when it is necessary to reconstruct and reinterrogate the ground of questions themselves through which it was brought into being in the first place” (p. 8).

Currently Debate can be described as a high-speed, oral game of chess. It has become a game of information processing. Debaters now speak up to 400 words per minute and use highly specialized jargon as a way of communicating arguments and ideas. Under this model, persuasiveness is not only determined by one‘s oratory and research skills but also by one‘s ability to master the techniques of debate. Debate, to many, has become ―just a game.‖ However, the role of debating for Blacks has always served dual functions. Blacks have participated in Debate recognizing the competitive, gaming aspects but debating has also served a social agenda for Blacks. Debate has often been used as a platform for disproving myths of intellectual inferiority. For some Black students, it has also been a way to escape the problems associated with living in the inner city. Students receive debating scholarships to college, the opportunity to travel nationally, a food stipend and many other benefits that they may have ordinarily not been able to access. To many Black debaters, Debate has been more than just a game—in a lot of cases, it has been a means for survival.

Niggas been givin’ the world this werq. The werq of this thesis is just one drop in an ocean of countless ‘nigga tries.’ I am not alone in my criticism that I offer that gives this werq to the field of rhetoric for how it positions and assumes it’s the civil for niggas. I take the patterns of movements of rhetorical scholars and civil institutions to task because they liquate niggas in order to recognize Black rhetoric as a thing that informs future moments of antiblackness. I therefore, argue throughout this thesis that the Black death that happens to Black flesh is the result of antiblack patterns of movements and the worlds those patterns create. I have defended that antiblackness is what forecloses the possibility of niggas communicating, which exists in the ways that niggas move, reason, and make the space that makes the difference in just how proximate the touch of antiblackness is. Hence, I discuss the communicative sites of academia, interracial race relations of politics, intra-racial race relations of gender, and Nigga care and love. I lay out some humanist starter kits for my niggas to peep the foot work of liquidation and offer some suggestions on how to move around despite it. For what is at stake in the “communicative force” (Spillers, 1987, p. 69) of all niggas, whether niggas are amongst the civilized or whether they are amongst the most antiblack ass niggas, is that Black flesh can have only voice in certain places and times. ‘Nigga voices’ are without the possibility of speech or communication because just like niggas, the voice is always already captured and returned to antiblackness. ReidBrinkley reminds us that, “[v]oice is not a noun, nor a possession; instead it operates as a verb, as a process, created in and through “relational” negotiations within rhetorical moments” (Reid-Brinkley, Voice Dipped in Black: The Louisville Project and the Birth of Black Radical Argument in College Policy Debate, 2019, p. 218). This is an important rendering of voice, because while voice is often assumed as the same as communication, Black flesh can never be recognized in front of the human ‘as is’ and will instead always appear as made. It is in the communicative site of “Niggatry” that I discussed liquidation in the context of humanist rhetoric and Reason, and then again in the context of cis niggas to non cis niggas in the gender communicative site. This thesis is a journey whose footwork peeps the transforming/terraforming process of making niggas and they things fungible, while exploring Reasoning within and beyond civilizing humans. Within the criticism of liquidation, I launch specific shots at the field of rhetoric for its liquidation of Black scholarship and scholars in the training of the Black voice of Black scholars when I make clear that the terms and conditions afforded to niggas no matter how hard they work is closed legs don’t get fed and Robbing Peter to pay Paul for the publish or perish system niggas produce in. ‘To be recognized by civilized audiences’ range of acceptable possibilities’ for niggas is the ‘right type of black.’ Rhetoric for Black (rather than nigga) scholars is about how best to create Black agents and nigga superheroes for the human. That is to say, rhetoric for Black scholars is a premium training grounds for Black people and perpetratin’ ass niggas to field the D.E.A. job call that reads, “The U.S. Department of Justice is looking for fluent Ebonics speakers to fill nine drug enforcement jobs, and to assist with wiretaps and linguistic profiling.” For Black rhetoric scholars are placed as the lead investigators of Blackness because “there's the perception in many minds that you don't need a translator, people believe they've understood something when they haven't.” (Netter, 2010) If ‘comm that is so white was to learn anything from reading this werq is that I’ll just like other relative niggas will put in that werq for niggas nowhere and everywhere This thesis is also implicated given that my work in many ways functions as a catalog of ‘nigga translations.’ Nonetheless, I write with an orientation of Niggatry (meaning, I move like I know what time it is) in order to forward that peeping foot werq of care that subtends my “aint shittiness” to alter my investigation from ‘business as usual’ to ‘for niggas and niggas only.’ This werq must continue to move amongst niggas until, and thus this werq’s limits are given by the times and places of niggas that I could think of or with. There is limit to my werq here, given that the horizon of niggas is already always moves beyond, but my werk is also limited to niggas somewhere. That is to say, there are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. Here I consider that niggas are amongst each realm and that niggas can use niggatry to move around in those realms by studying the patterns of movements of niggas and power.

Culturally sustaining and antiracist assessment demands that we both affirm and empower the lifeways of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) students. To do so requires that cultural words and expressions be included in our assessments. Moreover, I argue that what is considered “cultural” expressions/words are simply words that are not a part of White Mainstream English (WME). Indeed, WME is considered standard, normal English, so, in this context, those words would be appropriate to include in an assessment. Words, however, that are commonplace in African American Vernacular English (AAVE), for example, would be considered “culture-specific” and removed from the assessment as construct irrelevant. Again, this White supremacist approach devalues and dehumanizes BIPOC students. In focusing on removing construct irrelevant variance, we remove all context. This practice, in large part, is designed to remove “race” from the items. Such an approach to assessment requires students to identify the music of Beethoven and Mozart, interpret the poetry of Emily Dickerson and Sylvia Plath, and analyze the writings of Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams, but ignores Culturally sustaining assessment (as if it does not exist) the language of Hip Hop—the most popular musical genre in the world comprising nearly 24.7% of all U.S. music album consumption in 2018 (Leight, 2019)—in instructional spaces and on assessments. Assessment companies do not commission Hip Hop lyricists to provide texts for reading comprehension or listening comprehension tasks. Yet this language is widely used and understood by American students and employs one of the most sophisticated vocabularies of any musical genre (Kendi, 2019). Nonetheless, despite having won the Pulitzer prize for music in 2018, Kendrick Lamar’s lyrics would be considered culture-specific and inappropriate for inclusion on assessments due to construct irrelevance.

As a strategy of protection, opacity sometimes takes the form of simple concealment: hiding from the oppressive Other. Thus, one image for it is the forest into which the slaves escaped and where the maroon communities lived, and which was "the first obstacle the slave opposed to the transparency of the planter" (CD, 83). But the forest is disappearing, and its loss is symbolically as well as literally destructive. In Malemort Glissant writes of "the vast leprosy of erosion of deforestation eating away at the great mountain wringing your heart with all the present woes and all the woes that are still to come" (179). The forest provided invisibility, in other words, but is no longer an adequate metaphor for opacity; the concept of opacity in general is part of a far more complex structure of seen and unseen, seeing and not seeing, that determines the relations between "discoverer" and "discovered." In the first place, the colonizer's power obviously depends to a large extent on surveillance. He cannot control what he cannot see.26 In Le quatrième siècle, the newly arrived slave "learned right from the first day that the master only really existed when he was looking at you; despite the permanent fear and the leaden hand that seemed to keep you forever down in the mud; that the master lost some of his power when he had turned his back on you, as though he could command only by imposing the flux of his gaze, which dried up as soon as he turned away from you" (79). But, as the immediate, face-to-face nature of this encounter implies, the master's power depends also on the slave seeing that the master sees him; that is, the colonizers exercise their domination not only by seeing but by being seen, and by being seen to be powerful. And, since the masters were heavily outnumbered by the slaves, it was the individual figure of the master that had to inspire fear and obedience. As Fanon puts it, the master had to be an exhibitionist: "The settler pits brute force against the weight of numbers. He is an exhibitionist. His preoccupation with security makes him remind the native [colonisé] out loud that there he alone is master." The extraordinary ostentation and visual extravagance of colonial life (in clothes, architecture, etc.) in the period of slavery was a strategy of intimidation; as Roger Toumson writes, "The system of terror calls for a system of sumptuous extravagance." 27 But the relationship between colonial master and slave is not limited to a purely rational exercise of power. It is widely recognized (since Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, if not before) to include also a dimension of unconscious desire and fear. Similarly, in "Poetics and the Unconscious" Glissant makes it clear that opacity is not simply a practical, rational strategy on the part of the colonized, but a constituent of their collective unconscious (CD, 159). It is thus not surprising that the interchangeability of the two forms of power that is, surveillance and intimidation, seeing and being seen and the ease with which one crosses over into the other are also reminiscent of the reversibility of the psychic drives analyzed by Sigmund Freud. Indeed, one of Freud's main examples is the relation between voyeurism and exhibitionism, the two closely connected variants of the scopic drive. Sight and visibility, in the colonial relationship, relate to a domination that goes beyond conscious, rational concerns of imposing or eluding control and includes a strong element of unconscious fantasy. Power and pleasure merge together, in the way outlined by Bhabha in his analysis of "the peculiar visibility of the nature of colonial power," to result in a form of exhibitionism that exceeds the narrowly practical aim of imposing control. Significantly, it is this exhibitionism, rather than the colonizer's powers of surveillance, as common sense might dictate, that is given in "Poetics and the Unconscious'' as the reason for the colonized subject's desire for opacity. This desire is provoked not by the gaze of the master but by the exaggerated "transparent" visibility of his presence not the master as all-seeing, but the master as seen: "The only source of light ultimately was that of the transcendental presence of the Other, of his Visibility colonizer or ad- ministrator of his transparency fatally proposed as a model, because of which we have acquired a taste for obscurity, and for me the need to seek out [opacity]" (CD, 161). 28 The oppression inherent in the master's gaze is repeated in that of historically later types of "discoverer," such as the ethnologists for whom the colonized peoples are merely visible objects of knowledge. But it is significant that, in his discussion of this relationship in L'intention poétique, Glissant states that the colonial subject's desire is not to escape the master's gaze, but to participate in the scopic exchange on equal terms. He writes, "We hate ethnography. . . . The distrust that we feel toward it is not caused by our displeasure at being looked at, but rather by our obscure resentment at not having our turn at seeing" (128, emphasis added). The problem is, in other words, the inequality and lack of reciprocity of the relation, in which those who are seen cannot themselves "see" those who see them. Pursuing the psychoanalytic dimension of the colonial relationship that is, its imbrication, alongside political and economic motivations, in unconscious fantasy and desire reveals a further sense in which opacity resists the domination of the discoverers. This depends upon Bhabha's analysis already suggested in the work of Fritz Gracchus of the racist stereotype as fetish. Bhabha argues that the stereotype is the result of a complex unconscious dynamic, which derives from the ambivalence at the root of all colonial power: both civilizing mission and violent subjugation. Thus, the stereotype is "the primary point of subjectification in colonial discourse, for both the colonizer and the colonized." He notes the irrational, compulsive, and ever-renewable quality of racial stereotypes and sees them as the product of the same mechanism of disavowal that Freud defined in relation to the sexual fetish. That is, just as the fetish is a defense against the anxiety aroused by the man's knowledge of sexual difference, the racial stereotype represents an attempt to disavow racial difference insofar as this poses a threat to the white person's own sense of identity.

Despite the shrill warnings of some NATO members and hawkish types in the United States, the great "Russia Threat" appears to be highly exaggerated. True, Russia is still a significant regional power militarily and economically, but it is not a global power or even a credible candidate to be a regional hegemon. The Kremlin would have difficulty executing anything more than a very limited expansionist agenda, even if it has one.

Russia lacks the economic and military wherewithal for conducting a vast wave of aggression and territorial conquest. The difference in economic and demographic features between the USSR and Russia is massive. The Soviet Union was the world's number two economic power, second only to the United States. Russia has an economy roughly the size of Canada's, and it is no longer ranked even in the global top 10.2- Even taking into account purchasing power parity, Russia is still a second-tier economic player that is not in the same league as leading economic powers such as Japan, China, and Germany — much less the United States. It also has only three-quarters of the Soviet Union's territory (much of which consists of nearly empty Siberia) and barely half the population of the old USSR.

Republicans across the political spectrum, from moderate Senator Mitt Romney to fire-breathing former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have decreed that China poses an existential threat to the United States. While President Joe Biden hasn’t gone that far yet, his national-security team has maintained the previous administration’s hardline policies toward Beijing. Any other stance would risk a political backlash: The latest Gallup poll shows nearly 80% of Americans hold unfavorable views of China — a number that will only rise if U.S. intelligence agencies conclude that the new coronavirus leaked from a Chinese lab.

Biden should think carefully before he commits himself further. Countries facing an existential threat must mobilize and deploy all their resources to confront, if not remove, that threat and ensure their survival. How the Biden administration assesses the threat China poses will effectively determine war and peace in the 21st century.

As the rhetoric and warlike maneuvers of the U.S. and North Korea accelerate, the media are increasingly considering the prospect of “accidental” war between the U.S. and North Korea. But if war does start, it will not be accidental. It depends on deliberate choices by both sides about whether to escalate violence or pull back and reassess. Those choices are made by politicians, who are often swayed by domestic political pressures. The myth of accidental war is a pernicious consequence of liberal international relations theory, which argues that since the consequences of war are so horrendous, no sane person would willfully choose war. Therefore, war occurs only when “madmen,” like Hitler, are in power, or when otherwise rational leaders miscalculate the consequences of their actions. My blog last week argued that the U.S. may be slipping into war with North Korea, but it is important to understand that if it does happen, it is not accidental. It is a product of choices being made now that people and leaders need to be responsible about. Liberals, in particular, are fond regarding war as a product of accident rather than design. Conversely, realist theory expects that wars start as a matter of deliberate calculation and strategy. My corporatist approach criticizes both. Wars may benefit few while imposing extremely high costs on many, but that is the nature of political economy. Power is not kind, but ruthless. As Prussian war theorist Karl von Clausewitz emphasized, war is an extension of politics. He also wrote that war is like commerce, but with bloodshed; in other words; in my terms, it is a product of polarized political economy. The mistake many realists make, though they often admire Clausewitz, is to ignore domestic politics and political economy when considering war origins. Clausewitz hoped that valid reasons of state security would guide decisions for war. He did not claim that they typically do. The liberal case for inadvertent war emerged only since World War II. It has two principal roots: One, the advent of mutual assured destruction made nuclear war, at least, seem unthinkable. Two, an effort was made to repair Germany’s reputation during the Cold War. The “madman” Hitler could be blamed for World War II, but to counteract strong objections to rearming Germany again after 1945, it was convenient to exonerate the country for pushing World War I. Most influential was Barbara Tuchman’s bestseller, The Guns of August, which argued that World War I was a tragic accident. Unfortunately, Tuchman was quite wrong. Historians have found plenty to contradict her view in the archives of the various warring states. Four great powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and France) and one minor power (Serbia) deliberately chose war, all believing that war was inevitable, and that the summer of 1914 was an opportune time—maybe the last good chance—for victory. Furthermore, in all five countries leaders believed that victorious war would yield significant domestic political gains against rival parties. Of course, none of the belligerents could exactly predict the future course of events or more than four years of horrendous bloodletting. European wars during the previous century had tended to be brief. But the calculations that led to World War I did have some rational basis, as least in terms of the interests of the parties making them, if not the nations as a whole. Russian leaders wanted war specifically by August 1914 because a key part of their plan was a seaborne landing of an army corps near Istanbul to capture the Turkish Straits at the onset of hostilities. The Russian general staff knew that their country would need to export grain through the Straits to import the materials necessary for war. This chance would be lost in August because the Ottomans were scheduled to receive two new British-built battleships, decisively changing the balance of naval power in the Black Sea and dooming Russia’s war plan. When the war did start in early August, Britain seized the two battleships and incorporated them into the Royal Navy. However, unexpectedly for Russia, a powerful German battle cruiser operating in the Mediterranean evaded both the French and British Mediterranean fleets and arrived in Istanbul, where it foiled the Russian invasion plan. As a result, Russia fought World War I chronically short of munitions and other materials it expected to import. Serbia was divided between pro-Russian and pro-Austrian parties with competing business ties. The pro-Russian party was in power in 1914, but needed a big win to forestall its pro-Austrian adversaries. The Russian military attaché in Belgrade, working closely with the Serbian army’s chief of military intelligence, recruited a group to assassinate the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Russian leaders pushed this risky project because of their own agenda for war sooner rather than later. Austria-Hungary, a polyglot multinational empire, needed reform to survive in an age of intense nationalism. The assassinated heir had promised sweeping reforms to give more autonomy to the empire’s 10 major constituent nationalities. This threatened both the pro-Russian Serbs, who feared that such reforms would weaken the appeal of their effort to unite all the South Slavs under Serbian leadership, and the empire’s German and Hungarian conservatives, who did not want to give up their privileges. A war to crush Serbia would certainly nip “Greater Serbia” in the bud. Germany pushed its ally Austria-Hungary into war in 1914 because, according to the German general staff, time was not on its side. Russia was industrializing and building more and more railroads (funded by French capital), which would speed up military mobilization in event of war, making the country a growing threat if not defeated soon. Furthermore, Germany had just widened the Kiel Canal so that its battleships could easily transit between the North and Baltic Seas, enabling the navy to fight a two-front war. The army had just completed a major expansion in 1912. Finally, German conservatives worried that the rapidly growing Social Democratic Party, already the largest party after the 1912 election, would win a majority in the 1916 election and then reform or reshape the German Reich. Victory in a patriotic war against tsarism might restore popularity to the conservative parties. France backed Russia’s advances after French President Raymond Poincaré visited St. Petersburg on the eve of war. French military planners worried that France’s birthrate, much lower than Germany’s, doomed it to eventual demographic inferiority, so war had to be fought and won soon, under Poincaré’s conservative leadership, to discredit the French Left, which had made significant gains in the June 1914 election. In both France and Germany, conservatives expected that a patriotic war would discredit the internationalism of the socialist left. French leadership had an exaggerated confidence in the superiority of their army over the larger German army, which was more dependent on mobilizing civilian reserves to fill out its ranks. France also expected help from Britain, and possibly Italy. World War I was not accidental. In fact, I know of no war that was. There are numerous instances where accidental or incidental provocations were contained short of war because leaders did not deliberately choose war. My blogs have argued why Donald Trump may see major political benefit in provoking war with North Korea, and why it is not difficult to provoke. He is aided by media reports that present war as unthinkable, and argue that whatever Trump or Kim Jong Un say, they do not want war and would not deliberately provoke one. I am not so sure.

In 1983, scientists published a paper on nuclear winter. This boosted the death toll of all-out nuclear war from ‘only’ 200-500 million to the very real possibility of the complete extinction of the human race*. But some argued the report was alarmist, and there did seem to be some issues with the assumptions. So – a military phenomena that might cause megadeaths, possibly true but requiring further study, and a huge research defense budget that could be used to look into this critical phenomena and that was already spending millions on all aspects of nuclear weapons – can you guess what happened next?

Correct – the issue was ignored for decades. For over twenty years, there were but a tiny handful of papers on the most likely way we could end our own existence, and a vague and persistent sense that nuclear winter had been ‘disproved’. But in 2007, we finally had a proper followup - with the help of modern computers, better models and better observations, what can we now say? Well, that nuclear winter is still a major threat; the initial fear was right. Their most likely scenario was:

Third, in the midst of a high-stakes military confrontation – for example, if China began alerting its nuclear forces during a conventional war with the United States – the United States might strike first even if leaders in Washington doubted they could destroy every single long-range Chinese weapon. In the immediate aftermath of a limited U.S. counterforce attack – one that targeted only China’s DF-5A silos, but avoided direct attacks on Chinese leadership and population targets – U.S. leaders would likely hasten to explain that any Chinese nuclear retaliation against U.S. forces, American allies, or the U.S. homeland would trigger a second and far more extensive American strike.

The use-it-or-lose-it pathway confronts the same logical problem as the downward-spiral pathway in terms of the assertions made by NFU supporters. If nuclear weapons are unnecessary for the major power to prevail, as some NFU supporters claim, and if AFU lacks credibility such that the adversary disregards it, then why would that same adversary feel pressure to “use it or lose it” against an NFU state and not an AFU state? 39 The argument that AFU is unnecessary contradicts the argument that AFU is dangerous. The weak state is ultimately choosing between likely annihilation if it does not attack first and certain annihilation if it does. Why would it ever choose the certain suicide of the latter remains unclear.40 We may suppose that if a weaker adversary believes that it is about to be hit first with nuclear weapons and wiped out, then it may take a chance on striking first to try to inflict pain on the major power in order to compel that major power to back down. But why would the major power back down if the adversary has already expended its arsenal, making it more vulnerable to a devastating riposte? There are cases where the weak state tried to impose costs against a stronger opponent to compel the major power to back down, such as Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War, as we discuss later. However, in these cases, the weaker state does not attempt to impose costs until after the major power has initiated the conflict. Once the conflict has started, the adversary indeed has nothing to lose by attacking, but until then the adversary will have much to lose. These points raise an interesting question: might a weak state choose to attack first and sacrifice the possibility of better material outcomes for some emotional or psychological utility gained by imposing costs on the major power. Though plausible, such an assumption raises the additional question of whether the state can enjoy this immaterial benefit if it has successfully self-destructed. Similarly, in the event that the state somehow survives the conflict, would it still receive the same benefits? The use-it-or-lose-it pathway is thus empirically very rare. One study finds that preemptive wars—that is, wars either fought to exploit military advantages before they disappear or caused by fear of surprise attack—“almost never happen.” 41 In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cases that seem prima facie to have been pre-emptive wars were World War I, China’s entry into the Korean War, and the 1967 Arab–Israeli War. Although World War I does not meet the asymmetrical conditions that our analysis emphasizes, it suggests that use-it-or-lose-it pressures embodied by mobilization schedules can exist in a purely conventional world, where nuclear doctrines are absent. Still, the case of the United States and China in 1950 better approximates the asymmetrical conditions explored by our analysis. According to the pre-emptive-war version of events, China intervened in the Korean War out of concern that the US-led forces moving toward the Yalu River were striving to reunify the peninsula under non-Communist control. By taking over all of Korea, these forces would pose an imminent threat to China’s security.42 Yet Chinese decision makers were not necessarily facing a use-it-or-lose-it conundrum even in this case. Other motivations—promoting the world Communist revolution and forestalling an indefinite US presence on the border—were also present.43 To be sure, China did go on to acquire nuclear weapons, but the evidence suggests that it did so in order to be self-reliant following its dissatisfaction with the support it was receiving from the Soviet Union during the 1950s.44 Of course, just because something has not happened before does not mean that it could never happen. Nevertheless, if we believe that the use-it-or-lose-it pathway is possible, then the fundamental inconsistency in the argument that AFU is dangerous remains. We must believe that the adversary’s incentives to strike first under AFU will reverse if the United States declares NFU, as in the instance where the adversary believes that its armaments could survive a conventional first strike but not a nuclear first strike. Though that is possible, it again goes against arguments made by NFU advocates that the first use of nuclear weapons would provide no tactical benefit to the United States.45 Indeed, when other scholars discuss the adversary’s use-it-or-lose-it incentives, the adversary is presumed to fear a result of any likely US first strike or effort toward regime change, regardless of whether nuclear weapons are used.46 Nuclear weapons may even be a moot point if the strong state is unwilling to use them for normative reasons but maintains its conventional military superiority.

This book addresses not only the benefits of a robust nuclear posture but also its costs. Critics of US nuclear strategy have argued that the pursuit of a robust nuclear arsenal is not only pointless but also risky, futile, dangerous, and costly. They have claimed that pursuing a lasting nuclear advantage is risky because imbalances in power can lead to first-strike incentives and an increased chance of nuclear war;21 futile because adversaries will react quickly to close any gaps, resulting in unnecessary arms races;22 dangerous because it will encourage other nations to develop nuclear weapons, undermining international nonproliferation efforts;23 and financially costly, draining the national budget.24 These criticisms, however, point to a contradiction similar to the one posited earlier. Presumably, Washington would not have pursued and maintained these enduring elements of its nuclear strategy for decades if the downsides were truly so severe.

The second part of the book, therefore, explores the alleged disadvantages of nuclear advantages. The book finds that there are, indeed, costs to the maintenance of a robust nuclear force, but that they are less steep than many claim. Turning first to strategic stability, it shows that theoretical logic and available empirical evidence suggest that nuclear superiority, not nuclear parity, contributes to more, not less, strategic stability. Next, to examine nuclear arms races, the book presents a new theoretical argument about the origins of “underkill.” It explains why states are often unable or unwilling to match the nuclear capabilities of competitors and demonstrates that, empirically, nuclear arms races are uncommon and the United States has often achieved lasting nuclear advantages. This is followed by a study on the relationship between US nuclear weapons and nonproliferation. This study shows that there is not an observable link between a large US nuclear arsenal and the proliferation and nonproliferation policies of other states. Finally, an examination of the US nuclear budget explains that a robust nuclear force is indeed costly, but also affordable. If one believes, therefore, as then–US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter argued in 2016, that nuclear weapons are the “bedrock of our security,” and the “most important mission of the Department of Defense,” then it is also a good value.25

Deterrence and Counterforce Robust nuclear deterrence is in large part a function of the survivability of retaliatory forces, meaning the ability of either adversary to withstand a disarming strike and still inflict a devastating response on the attacker. An effective deterrent posture must deter all leaders, including highly aggressive ones, and it must succeed in peacetime, during intense crises, or in the midst of conventional wars. In short, maintaining a survivable nuclear retaliatory force is foundational to deterrence. The new era of counterforce threatens this foundation. Maintaining a survivable retaliatory force is becoming difficult because of the vulnerability of fixed sites against today’s highly accurate delivery systems. Technological advances mean that both nuclear and conventional strike systems pose a plausible disarming threat to even the hardest fixed targets. Concealment is also at risk. Trends in remote sensing – from the growing diversity of sensing platforms to the improvement in sensor resolution, persistence, processing, and transmission – are eroding the security that mobility once provided. Historically, land-based mobile forces wishing to remain concealed merely needed to hide from optical satellites or manned aircraft passing intermittently and quickly overhead. Now, they must worry about a plethora of satellites and other sensors – some of which loiter, gathering streams of data. SSBNs also face new and meaningful advances that threaten their ability to stay concealed at sea. Although none of these technological trends alone are transformative, taken together they are creating a degree of transparency that was unimaginable even two decades ago. While the survivability of deterrent forces may be on shaky ground, the new era of counterforce means that the U.S. can plausibly disarm adversaries if deterrence fails. The threat of using nuclear weapons against the United States is often seen as merely the strategy of delusional leaders or terrorists, but U.S. adversaries may have good reasons to engage in such escalation. Throughout the nuclear age, countries lacking sufficient conventional forces to repel a major attack have relied on nuclear threats to deter or stalemate conventional war. Specifically, relatively weaker countries have planned to use nuclear weapons in order to halt a conventional conflict before they suffer catastrophic defeat. This was NATO’s strategy for much of the Cold War, and it has been adopted by Russia, Pakistan, and North Korea today. Now that the United States possesses the world’s most powerful conventional force, it faces significant escalation risks. For example, if war erupts on the Korean Peninsula, or in the Baltics, or possibly even in maritime East Asia, U.S. adversaries will likely need a quick way to stalemate superior U.S. conventional forces. Nuclear escalation offers adversaries one of the only viable options for forcing a stalemate and avoiding catastrophic defeat during a conventional war.[21] This is the strategic context in which potent counterforce capabilities may benefit the United States. Such capabilities may not appear attractive to U.S. leaders in peacetime. But in the midst of a conventional conflict – especially after an adversary like North Korea has begun to escalate – the ability to conduct a counterforce disarming strike might be enormously valuable. The possession of potent counterforce capabilities might even bolster deterrence – by deterring adversaries from initiating a conventional war in the first place, or by compelling them to accept conventional defeat rather than reaching for nuclear weapons. In addition to those worthy deterrence objectives, the ability to mitigate or eliminate the costs inflicted by an adversary that has begun to escalate is a worthy goal in its own right. U.S. Force Structure U.S. leaders should consider the implications of the new era of counterforce for both deterrence and escalation. The growing vulnerability of retaliatory forces might bolster the case for developing a mobile ICBM instead of replacing the silo-based ICBM. All silo-based ICBM options will face the same type of vulnerability problem faced by existing missiles; and the vulnerability of fixed silos will only grow worse over the coming decades. Similarly, U.S. leaders should beware of overreliance on the sea-leg of the triad: SSBNs have never been as invulnerable as analysts typically assume, and the popular notion that the oceans are a sanctuary for retaliatory forces is outdated. Moreover, a strategy relying entirely on the concealment of submarines is a “fail deadly” one – meaning that if an adversary discovers a way to locate one’s forces, one’s arsenal might shift from being almost completely survivable to almost completely vulnerable in a short period of time – and without warning.[22] To bolster counterforce capabilities, leaders should focus on several desirable delivery system characteristics: promptness (to hit targets before they are fired or moved), accuracy (to improve the odds of destroying key targets), and low yields (in order to preserve the possibility of disarming the adversary without causing large-scale collateral damage). Air-delivered bombs – like the B-61 bomb currently undergoing a life-extension program – and cruise missiles offer a valuable combination of high accuracy and flexible yield options. The long-range stand-off cruise missile (LRSO), which would replace current nuclear cruise missiles, will also serve an important role as a system that can threaten enemy targets protected by sophisticated air defense systems. Finally, as the United States modernizes its ICBMs and SLBMs – and the warheads they carry – U.S. planners should exploit new technologies that will enhance accuracy further, as well as consider low and flexible yield options for those warheads. In short, the new era of counterforce poses long-term challenges and opportunities for U.S. nuclear policy, strategy, and force structure. Some readers may worry that U.S. steps to enhance counterforce will be destabilizing. Increasingly insecure adversaries might pursue countermeasures to make their arsenals survivable once again, which could exacerbate tensions, trigger arms races, and create dangerous incentives to preempt in a crisis. These concerns have validity because U.S. adversaries will seek ways to blunt the threat of a U.S. disarming strike. However, such potential problems will be at least partly offset by the benefits of more robust deterrence; specifically, U.S. adversaries are less likely to undertake a coercive nuclear escalation strategy if they recognize the vast threat to their arsenals posed by robust U.S. counterforce capabilities. Perhaps more importantly, the United States cannot roll back the technological advances behind the new era of counterforce. The breakthroughs in accuracy and remote sensing are here to stay – if for no other reason than they are now the foundation of conventional military operations. The best we can do is harness these technological changes to bolster deterrence and reduce the likelihood and consequences of escalation. The same technologies that render arsenals vulnerable just might make deterrence stronger.