The aff’s assumption of totalitarianism leads to war AND justifies western involvement via military in foreign countries. --- this debate not only engages in this but also enables it.

A year after Cadigan’s novel was published, disaster porn was thrust into a growing debate around humanitarian and military interventions and the role of aid agencies in developing countries. On December 10, 1992, a Los Angeles Times editorial entitled “Disaster Pornography from Somalia” and a London Independent article entitled “Somalia: White House ‘steamrolled’ into intervention” framed the terms of the debate over disaster pornography in a way that would resonate for most of the rest of the decade. The articles were written by Rakiya Omar and Alex de Waal, former members of the human rights organization Africa Watch, who quit over its support for U.S. intervention in Somalia. The LA Times piece accused Western journalists of exaggerating the Somali famine in order “to compose the ‘right’ image”—one that justified U.S. involvement. The next year, in the September 29, 1993 edition of The Times of London, de Waal again deployed this term to describe the dilemmas faced by reporters hoping to inspire humanitarian action, but leery of creating false impressions or exacerbating stereotypes. “This is the dilemma for sensitive journalists,” he wrote, “disaster pornography and reassuring archetypes are needed to make a disaster into front-page news; then the journalistic pack follows, and coverage degenerates.” In its first decade in print, then, disaster pornography was primarily employed as an epithet directed at depictions of extreme suffering in developing countries. Such depictions were identified as problematic because of their tendency to sensationalize and simplify complex geopolitical realities, and thereby encourage Western military adventurism under the guise of humanitarian action. However, this usage began to shift as the decade wore on and the Western world began to tire of such interventions. For instance, an April 11, 1999 Toronto Star article bemoaned the small number of television viewers tuning in to coverage of the war in Kosovo, and noted that, “We have all seen so much Disaster Porn, whether Somalian or Rwandan, Ethiopian or Biafran, that we’re almost numb to it.” Four months later, in a New York Times piece entitled “The Precarious Triumph of Human Rights,” journalist David Rieff argued that “Human solidarity is a real fact of the world, but so is compassion fatigue. You can no longer build a political consensus for action, assuming you ever could, by showing yet another clip of disaster pornography on television.” While still applied primarily to images of suffering people in famine-stricken or war-torn corners of the globe, the essential problem associated with disaster pornography had taken a 180-degree turn. No longer accused of over-hyping tragic circumstances and leading to public overreaction, disaster porn, by the end of the decade, had come to be seen as a force that muted public reaction to important issues, rather than enflaming them. Though sociologists Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton had identified a general “narcotizing dysfunction” of mass media as early as 1948, in which increased media coverage of a topic tended to paradoxically decrease the likelihood of public action, today these alleged sympathy-deadening effects extend to media coverage of specifically global problems. With the growth of 24-hour cable news coverage and the increasing scope and sophistication of global news broadcasting during the 1990s, critics began to worry that Americans and citizens of other Western nations had seen their emotional reserves drained by an increasing procession of televised war and disaster victims from across the globe. But this view was about to change. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 dramatically recast the problem of disaster pornography, expanding its definition and recalibrating American reactions to it. Fittingly for a world in which the influence of print news organizations had arguably already begun to decline, the website Slate led the way in this redefinition. In his column for Slate, film critic David Edelstein noted just three days after the attacks that Americans were renting movies and looking for escapist cinema, but avoiding any films having to do with disasters. Referencing the 1974 disaster epic The Towering Inferno, he suggested, “It will be a while, after footage of people fleeing clouds of lethal debris, before we surrender to disaster-porn like that again.” Similarly, a Time International article from October 1 of that year noted that “the purveyors of cinematic disaster porn [had begun] soul searching,” ultimately cancelling several big-budget action movies whose plots or visuals were too reminiscent of the 9/11 attacks. While the reasoning behind the culture industry’s sudden post -9/11 sensitivity are obvious, it appears to have been accompanied by a new public distrust or disdain for entertainments previously seen as harmless. Thus, one sees after September 11 the expansion of disaster porn terminology to encompass not just news reports of actual disasters, but the kinds of fictional disaster films that had been uncritically consumed for decades. Criticism of Hollywood blockbusters such as 2012, which was more frequently labeled disaster porn than anything else in a Lexis Nexis and Proquest search of newspaper articles using this term, has indeed become commonplace. But this shift in meaning remains puzzling, given that the term was initially rooted in concerns over real-life disaster news coverage and genuine human suffering, not fantastic computer-generated graphics with actors running around in front of green screens. We run the risk of ignoring the suffering of others and relieving our own anxieties about viewing their misfortunes. While not deploying the term itself, film critic Anthony Lane’s September 24, 2001 essay in The New Yorker exposes one motivation behind this extension of disaster porn’s domain. Making the case that people “literally saw, and are continuing to see, as it airs in unforgiving repeats—that day as a movie,” Lane asserted that “it was the television commentators as well as those on the ground who resorted to a phrase book culled from cinema: ‘It was like a movie.’ ‘It was like Independence Day.’ ‘It was like Die Hard.’ ‘No, Die Hard 2.’ ‘Armageddon.’ And the exclamations from below, from the watchers of the skies caught on video, as they see the aircraft slice into the side of the tower: where have you heard those expressions most recently—the wows, the whoohs, the holy shits—if not in movie theatres, and even on your own blaspheming tongue?” For Lane, such a heavily mediated understanding of suffering and tragedy—one gleaned from fictional, spectacular, and ultimately enjoyable representations of disaster and destruction—violated some emergent norm about the proper limits of spectatorship, or respect for the reality of human suffering. But this dimly understood norm was one we had, of course, all violated in a pre-September 11 world largely untroubled by consumption of the occasional big-budget disaster epic. It is worth remembering that after September 11, many Americans came to see themselves as victims of an attack perpetrated against the entire nation, or at least, as potential victims of future terrorist attacks. A September 25, 2001 Pew poll found that 53 percent of Americans were very or somewhat worried that they or someone in their family “might become a victim of a terrorist attack.” As Americans came to see themselves as victims, they engaged in a kind of retroactive condemnation of Hollywood disaster epics that had, it turned out, quite accurately anticipated the audio-visual qualities of jetliner crashes and skyscraper collapses amid a bustling metropolis. When they suddenly hit much closer to home, it was much more difficult to simply enjoy such spectacles.