An empire once wanted to know where their territory lay, so they hired a cartographer to create a map detailing every holding the empire had and every nook and cranny of the land. The cartographer

Baudrillard 83, leading social critic and philosopher, Simulations, p.2

Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept....

In fact,

since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is a hyperreal, the product of an irradiating synthesis of cominatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.

We are often obsessed with making sure that our values are held by everyone, that they should be universal. But when an idea reaches this critical stage, it is in reality at its weakest for it is now just expressing a view that everyone can agree with. As a result of this dilution, it becomes just an abstract product to trade through the systems established by globalization, it is no longer a radically powerful concept. And without that power to keep it distinct from the global, it becomes consumed by globalization until they are indistinguishable.

Baudrillard, 2002, professor and leading philosopher, The Violence of the Global

          We believe that the ideal purpose of any value is to become universal. But we do not really assess the deadly danger that such a quest presents....

The universal has become globalized, and human rights circulate exactly like any other global product (oil or capital for example).

The universal functioned on the idea that all difference can be resolved in equality, and in bringing that difference into the uniform modes of thought. But when difference does not want to be equated, the only response the system can make is to eliminate it through force (both physical and mental). Those that do consent to the universal become the same; divorced from their old culture (or singularity), they can only proceed to destroy the difference in other cultures, the difference they once had.

Baudrillard, 2002, professor and leading philosopher, The Violence of the Global

          We are really not talking about a "clash of civilizations" here, but instead about an almost anthropological confrontation between an undifferentiated universal culture and everything else that, in whatever domain, retains a quality of irreducible alterity....

The goal is to get rid of any reactive zone, and to colonize and domesticate any wild and resisting territory both geographically and mentally.

This quest for uniformity leads us to expunge anything negative, anything that contradicts our established global order. This includes expunging death as a value or valuable in and of itself. Even sex and the body must be left out of the system if it is to survive. As a result of this desire for agreement, we have to push out everything that is related to the real and the natural, leading us into the hyperreal.

Baudrillard, 2002, professor and leading philosopher, The Violence of the Global

          The universal was an Idea. But when it became realized in the global, it disappeared as an Idea, it committed suicide, and it vanished as an end in itself...It moves by contagion, proceeds by chain reaction, and little by little it destroys our immune systems and our capacities to resist.

The hyperreal is characterized two ways: a real that is more than real, and the breakdown between the real and the imaginary. Imagine a pretty girl in a cosmetics advertisement. She probably has a lot of makeup on, and looks prettier thanks to camera angles. And then her face is digitally altered to be even more attractive. And this face is presented to us as the ideal of ‘beauty’, what beauty looks like, despite not actually existing anywhere in our world. As a consequence, we cannot tell the difference between what is real (the face of the woman before the photoshoot), and what is imaginary (the end result, a ‘copy without an original’).

Baudrillard, 1981, Philosopher and professor, Simulacra and Simulation

            In fact, even inverted, Borges’s fable is unusable...

A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences.

So restore the radical meaning of illusion

Baudrillard, 08, Professor of philosophy and leading social theorist, The Perfect Crime, pg.17

We have to restore the potency and the radical meaning of illusion, which is most often reduced to the level of a chimaera diverting us from what is true: what things deck themselves out in to hide what they are...

The happy non-distinction between true and false, between real and unreal, gives way to the simulacrum, which consecrates the unhappy non-distinction between true and false, between the real and its signs, the unhappy, necessarily unhappy, destiny of meaning in our culture.

And only the illusion allows for vibrant life

Nietzsche, 95, The Gay science, preface to the second edition

And as for our future, one will hardly find us back on the path of those Egyptian youths who make temples unsafe at night, wrapping their arms around statues, and in general uncovering and tearing the veil away from everything that, with good reasons, is kept covered- they want to put it into bright light...And precisely therefore-artists?

US foreign policy bears striking resemblance to the thought process of Adolph Eichmann. US foreign policy thought and language is instrumentally superficial and perpetuates a blind indifference to the suffering it enables and justifies.

Spanos, 2008 (William, Symploke, Global American: The Devastation of Language Under the Dictatorship of the Public Realm, Volume 16, Numbers 1-2, p.178-181)

It is not my purpose in this essay to argue that,

in invoking Eichmannlong after he was executed for his crimes against the Israeli people, Hannah

Arendt was specifically identifying the thinking he demonstrated at his trial—the “thought-defying” thought that coordinated the logistic machinery feeding millions of innocent human beings into the mass death-producing “gas factories”—with the official and public thinking that has characterized America in the wake of World War II....They will, I hope, at a least suggest the viability of my argument.

Accepting the resolution at face value is dangerous. Historically, democracy assistance is spin control for US imperialism.

Gerald Sussman, teaches urban studies and communications at Portland State University and has published widely on the international political economy of information technology, mass media, and development, 2006 (The Monthly Review, “The Myths of ‘Democracy Assistance’: U.S. Political Intervention in Post-Soviet Eastern Europe”, Dec., http://monthlyreview.org/2006/12/01/the-myths-of-democracy-assistance-u-s-political-intervention-in-post-soviet-eastern-europe)

One of the notable shifts in post-Soviet world politics is the almost unimpeded involvement of Western agents, consultants, and public and private institutions in the management of national election processes around the world—including those in the former Soviet allied states...In the IRI worldview, freedom equates to “free enterprise” those who resist open-door economic policies are ipso facto undemocratic. Considerably more so than NDI, IRI uses an ideological litmus test in its funding programs. Both organizations rely primarily on people with experience not in development work, “but [rather] in the war rooms of presidential campaigns, in congressional and lobbying efforts, and through family relationships to top party officials.”

The language of democracy assistance matters. Words are a means of deception. The phrase democracy assistance is used to provide seductive comfort for a violent ideology to make people into a willing agent of Pax Americana.

Spanos, William V. 2010 (“In The Neighborhood of Zero A World War II Memoir” p.112-113)

It was then—during those few mind-shattering days in the abyssal heart of the darkness of what was once a city of light—“the Florence of the Elbe”—that I realized with utter finality, however intuitively, something that became forever afterward a constant of my waking life: that language was not a transparent instrument, as I had been led to believe by the culture I grew up in, particularly the media and the schools...The familiar terrain into which our world’s language had mapped the phenomena of being had irrevocably changed.

Democracy assistance is part of a larger American foreign policy, exemplified by Vietnam, which is an arrogant, thoughtless, managerial instrumentalism that perceives the other as an obstacle to US pre-conceived goals. This is the same ontological trajectory of the Nazi’s

Spanos, 2008 (William, Symploke, Global American: The Devastation of Language Under the Dictatorship of the Public Realm, Volume 16, Numbers 1-2, p. 204-205)

Let me now, after this long detour, return to Hannah Arendt’s report on the banality of evil....

To reconstellate Eichmann’s language and that of the Pentagon or Rand Corporation experts into the context prepared by Arendt is not only to point to the horrific self-destruction of the former’s logic as a warning; it is also to suggest the urgency at this perilous global occasion of the need to rethink thinking itself, indeed of this rethinking taking its cue from the very “other”—the world below, as it were—that this privileged American will—ferociously—

have nothing to do with at the very same time that it always already and necessarily speaks it “name.”