The aff gets coopted by authoritarians like putin

Occupy aside, the most successful effort so far to translate academic postmodernism into a usable language of praxis ironically seems to have been initiated not by the political Left at all, but by the Right. In 2006, Eyal Weizman reported that elite military research institutions on urban warfare around the world had been assigning their students "Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Guy Debord . . . as well as more contem- porary writings on urbanism, psychology, cybernetics, post-colonial and post-Structuralist theory."88 The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), in particu- lar, had been bullish on Deleuze and Guattari. As the director of the IDF Operational Theory Research Institute explained, "We employ crit- ical theory" because it helps the IDF rethink its conceptual foundations: "Several of the concepts in A Thousand Plateaux became instrumental for us allowing us to explain contemporary situations in a way that we could not have otherwise." Brigadier-General Aviv Kokhavi, sounding rather like Foucault or Georges Bataille—another IDF favorite—in fact describes a 2002 military campaign he waged against Palestinian militants in Nablus as "the reorganization of the urban syntax by means of a series of micro-tactical actions." Though one doesn't "need Deleuze to attack Nablus," Weizman comments, "theory helped the military reorganize by providing a new language in which to speak to itself and others." "In no uncertain terms," he writes, "education in the humanities—often believed to be the most powerful weapon against imperialism—is being appropri- ated as a powerful vehicle for imperialism."89 While it would be unfair to draw too many conclusions from this bizarre effort to enlist post-structuralist theory for state repression, the episode does raise the question of whether postmodernism is really a friend to the Left after all. The trouble with Nietzscheanism ultimately is that it is an unreliable basis for a progressive politics. Post-structuralism's Nietzschean-inflected skepticism toward "metanarratives" like freedom and justice; its Foucauldian metaphysics of the spatial indeterminacy of power; its rejection of a diachronic historical vision in favor of a col- lapsed temporality ("the now"); its refusal of longer-term visions of col- lective action and institution-building; and its refusal too of an older, more worthy language of solidarity, mutual aid, unity, and collective consciousness, tell heavily against it. Worse still, a strain of authoritari- anism has long haunted the project, from Nietzsche' hatred of social- ism and feminism to Martin Heidegger's Nazism and Louis Althusser's mechanistic Stalinism. Even the otherwise libertarian Foucault flirted with authoritarianism at times. During the Iranian Revolution in 1978, Foucault's first response to the paroxysm was not to side with the left- ists and feminists who participated in the upheaval, but to side with the radical Islamist followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Nor was this some oversight on Foucault's part, but a stance that flowed organically from his deep skepticism toward modern institutions and norms—including those of representative democracy. As Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson remind us: Scholars often assume that Foucault's suspicion of utopianism ... hostility to grand narratives and universals . . . and his stress on difference and singularity rather than totality would make him less likely than his prede- cessors on the Left to romanticize an authoritarian politics that promised radically to refashion from above the lives and thought of a people . However, his Iran's writings showed that Foucault was not immune to the (same) type of illusions that so many Western leftists had held with regard to (the USSR and China) .90 This is not to say that post-structuralism is necessarily undemocratic; only that its attitude toward democracy and to human rights has at best been ambivalent.