FYI, we forward this interview with Arundhati Roy on elections, global
power, empire, lies and resistance ...

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From an interview for the International Socialist Review Issue 38,
November-December 2004 with David Barsamian.
http://www.isreview.org/issues/38/Arundhati_roy.shtml

DB: I'D LIKE to start with a quote from a recent interview I did with you,
published in the July-August issue of the International Socialist Review.
You said, "It's that we're up against an economic system that is suffocating
the majority of the people in this world. What are we going to do about it?
How are we going to address it?" So I thought that would be a really easy
way to begin. What are we going to do about it, and how are we going to
address it?

AR: I'VE ONLY been in the United States for three days now, and I obviously
have felt the electricity in the air about the coming election. Just in May,
we had a very important election in India. I think one of the dangers that
we face is that politics becomes a discussion only about personalities, and
we forget that the system is in place, and it doesn’t matter all that much
who is piloting the machine. So as I said in my talk at the American
Sociological Association in San Francisco, this whole fierce debate about
the Democrats and the Republicans and whether Bush or Kerry is better is
like being asked to choose a detergent. Whether you choose Tide or Ivory
Snow, they're both owned by Procter & Gamble.

[Clip]

But here, in the United States, they don't even do you the dignity of that.
The Democrats are not even pretending that they're against the war or
against the occupation of Iraq. And that, I think, is very important,
because the antiwar movement in America has been so phenomenal a service not
just to people here, but also to all of us in the world. And you can't allow
them to hijack your beliefs and put your weight behind somebody who is
openly saying that he believes in the occupation, that he would have
attacked Iraq even if he had known there were no weapons of mass
destruction, that he will actually get UN cover for the occupation, that he
will try and get Indian and Pakistani soldiers to go and die in Iraq
instead, and that the Germans and the French and the Russians might be able
to share in the spoils of the occupation. Is that better or worse for
somebody who lives in the subject nations of empire?

[Clip]

DB: I THINK a lot of people here have on their minds the November 2 election
and what to do, who to vote for. Tariq Ali, who is very critical of Kerry,
recently said, "If the American population were to vote Bush out of office,
it would have a tremendous impact on world opinion. Our option at the moment
is limited. Do we defeat a warmonger government or not?" What do you think
of Ali's perspective?

AR: LOOK, IT'S a very complicated and difficult debate, in which I think
there are two things you can do: you can act expediently, if you like, but
you must speak on principle. I cannot sit here with any kind of honesty and
say to you that I support Kerry. I cannot do that.

I'll tell you a small example. In India, you may or may not be aware of the
levels of violence and jingoism and fascism that we've faced over the last
five years. In Gujarat, rampaging mobs murdered, raped, gang-raped, burnt
alive 2,000 Muslims on the streets, drove 150,000 out of their homes. And
you have this kind of plague of Hindu fascism spreading. And you had a
central government that was supported by the BJP. A lot of the people who I
work with and know work in the state of Madhya Pradesh, in central India,
where there was a Congress state government for ten years. This government
had overseen the building of many dams in the Narmada valley. It had
overseen the privatization of electricity, of water, the driving out from
their homes and lands of hundreds of thousands of people, the disconnection
of single-point electricity connections because they signed these huge
contracts for privatization with the Asian Development Bank.

The activists in these areas knew that a lot of the reason that Congress was
also so boldly doing these things was they were saying, "What option do you
have? Do you want to get the BJP? Are you going to campaign for the BJP? Are
you going to open yourself up not just to being physically beaten but maybe
even killed?" But I want to tell you that they didn't campaign for the
Congress. They didn't. They just said, "We do not believe in this, and we
are going to continue to do our work outside." It was just a horrendous
situation, because the BJP was pretending to be anti-"reform," saying,
"We'll stop this, we'll change that." They did come to power, the BJP, and
within ten days they were on the dam site saying, "We are going to build the
dam." So people are waiting for their houses to get submerged. This was the
dilemma.

The point is, then, you have to say, "Look, can you actually campaign for a
man [John Kerry] who is saying that I'm going to send more troops to Iraq?"
How? So I think it's very important for us to remain principled.

Let me tell you that during the Indian elections, people used to keep asking
me, "Aren't you campaigning for the Congress?" Because, of course, I had
spent the last five years denouncing the BJP. I said, "How can I campaign
for the
Congress that also oversaw the carnage of Sikhs in Delhi in 1984, that
opened the markets to neoliberalism in the early 1990s?" And every time,
you're put under this pressure. I said, "I feel sometimes when I'm asked
this question like I imagine that a gay person must feel when they're
watching straight sex: I'm sort of interested but not involved."

I think it's very important for us to understand that we are people of
principle and we are soldiers who are fighting a different battle, and we
cannot be co-opted into this.

So you've got to refuse the terms of this debate; otherwise you're co-opted.
I'm not going to say who you should vote for. I'm not going to sit here and
tell you to vote for this one or vote for that one, because all of us here
are people of influence and power, and we can't allow our power to be
co-opted by those people. We cannot.

[Clip]

I've grown up in India, and I've lived all my life there. I've never spent
any large amounts of time in the West. So you come here and you listen to
people like Ignatieff, and you think, even our fascists are not saying that.

I've often been asked to come and debate imperialism, and I think it's like
asking me about the pros and cons of child abuse. Is it a subject that I
should debate?

Every little bylane that we walk down in India, are people saying, "Bring
the British back. We miss colonialism so badly"? So it's a kind of new
racism. And it isn't even all that new. We can't even give them points for
originality on this. These debates have taken place in the colonial time in
almost exactly the same words: "civilizing the savages," and so on.

So that isn't even something I think is worth the dignity of a debate. It is
just an aspect of power. It is what power always will say. And we can't even
allow it to deflect our attention for six seconds.

[Clip]

Like Old Imperialism, New Imperialism relies for its success on a network of
agents - corrupt local elites who service Empire.

We all know the sordid story of Enron in India. The then-Maharashtra
government signed a power purchase agreement that gave Enron profits that
amounted to 60 percent of India's entire rural development budget. A single
American company was guaranteed a profit equivalent to funds for
infrastructural development for about 500 million people!

Unlike in the old days, the New Imperialist doesn't need to trudge around
the tropics risking malaria or diarrhea or early death. New Imperialism can
be conducted on e-mail. The vulgar, hands-on racism of Old Imperialism is
outdated. The cornerstone of New Imperialism is New Racism.

The best allegory for New Racism is the tradition of "turkey pardoning" in
the United States. Every year since 1947, the National Turkey Federation has
presented the US President with a turkey for Thanksgiving. Every year, in a
show of ceremonial magnanimity, the President spares that particular bird
(and eats another one). After receiving the presidential pardon, the Chosen
One is sent to Frying Pan Park in Virginia to live out its natural life. The
rest of the 50 million turkeys raised for Thanksgiving are slaughtered and
eaten on Thanksgiving Day. ConAgra Foods, the company that has won the
Presidential Turkey contract, says it trains the lucky birds to be sociable,
to interact with dignitaries, school children and the press. (Soon they'll
even speak English!)

That's how New Racism in the corporate era works. A few carefully bred
turkeys - the local elites of various countries, a community of wealthy
immigrants, investment bankers, the occasional Colin Powell or Condoleezza
Rice, some singers, some writers (like myself) - are given absolution and a
pass to Frying Pan Park. The remaining millions lose their jobs, are evicted
from their homes, have their water and electricity connections cut, and die
of AIDS. Basically they're for the pot. But the Fortunate Fowls in Frying
Pan Park are doing fine. Some of them even work for the IMF and the WTO - so
who can accuse those organizations of being antiturkey? Some serve as board
members on the Turkey Choosing Committee - so who can say that turkeys are
against Thanksgiving? They participate in it! Who can say the poor are
anti-corporate globalization? There's a stampede to get into Frying Pan
Park. So what if most perish on the way?

As part of the project of New Racism we also have New Genocide. New Genocide
in this new era of economic interdependence can be facilitated by economic
sanctions. New Genocide means creating conditions that lead to mass death
without actually going out and killing people. Denis Halliday, who was the
UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq between 1997 and 1998 (after which he
resigned in disgust), used the term genocide to describe the sanctions in
Iraq. In Iraq the sanctions outdid Saddam Hussein's best efforts by claiming
more than half a million children's lives.

In the new era, apartheid as formal policy is antiquated and unnecessary.
International instruments of trade and finance oversee a complex system of
multilateral trade laws and financial agreements that keep the poor in their
bantustans anyway. Its whole purpose is to institutionalize inequity.

Why else would it be that the US taxes a garment made by a Bangladeshi
manufacturer twenty times more than a garment made in Britain?

Why else would it be that countries that grow cocoa beans, like the Ivory
Coast and Ghana, are taxed out of the market if they try to turn it into
chocolate?

Why else would it be that countries that grow 90 percent of the world's
cocoa beans produce only 5 percent of the world's chocolate?

Why else would it be that rich countries that spend over a billion dollars a
day on subsidies to farmers demand that poor countries like India withdraw
all agricultural subsidies, including subsidized electricity?

Why else would it be that after having been plundered by colonizing regimes
for more than half a century, former colonies are steeped in debt to those
same regimes and repay them some $382 billion a year?

[Clip]

There is so much going on, so many places to look for information. But also
I think there is a kind of ad busting to be done, which is you read the
mainstream media, but what you gather from it is not what they want to tell
you. You have to learn to decode it, to understand it for the boardroom
bulletin that it is. And therefore, you use its power against itself. And I
think that's very important to do, because many of us make the mistake of
thinking that the corporate media supports the neoliberal project. It
doesn't. It is the neoliberal project.

[Clip]

DB: THE GLOBAL demonstrations against the Iraq war on February 15, 2003,
turned out at least ten million people and by some accounts up to fifteen
million people. You've called that one of the greatest affirmations of the
human spirit and morality. But then the war started and many people went
home.

AR: THIS IS something we have to ask ourselves about, because the first part
of this question is that you did have this incredible display of public
morality. In no European country was the support for a unilateral war more
than 11 percent. Hundreds of thousands marched on the streets here.

And still these supposedly democratic countries went to war. So the
questions are, A: Is democracy still democratic? B: Are governments
accountable to the people who elected them? And, C: Are people responsible
in democratic countries for the actions of their governments? It's a very
serious crisis that is facing democracies today. And if you get caught in
this Ivory Snow vs. Tide debate, if you get caught in having to choose
between a detergent with oxy-boosters or gentle cleansers, we're finished.

The point is, how do you keep power on a short leash? How do you make it
accountable?

And the fact is that we can't also only feel good about what we do. What we
have done has been fantastic, but we must realize that it's not enough. And
one of the problems is that symbolic resistance has unmoored itself from
real civil disobedience. And that is very dangerous, because governments
have learned how to wait these things out. And they think we're like
children with rattles in a crib. Just let them get on with their weekend
demonstration, and we'll just carry on with what we have to do. Public
opinion is so fickle, and so on. The symbolic aspect of resistance is very
important. The theater is very important. But not at the cost of real civil
disobedience. So we have to find ways of
implementing what we're saying seriously.

And you look at what's happening today. I feel that the Iraqi resistance is
fighting on the front lines of empire. We know that it's a motley group of
former Baathists and fed-up collaborationists and all kinds of people.

But no resistance movement is pristine. And if we are going to only invest
our purity in pristine movements, we may as well forget it. The point is,
this is our resistance, and we have to support it.

[Clip]

DB: POTA, the Prevention of Terrorism Act - or, as you and others have
called it, the Production of Terrorism Act - has its counterpart in the
United States in the PATRIOT Act, which has greatly enhanced the ability of
the state to surveil and imprison its citizens.

AR: Fundamentally the thing about these acts that we have to understand is
that they are not meant for the terrorists, because the terrorists are just
shot or taken, in the case of America, to Guantanamo Bay, or suspected
terrorists. Those acts are meant to terrorize you. So basically all of us
stand accused. It prepares the ground for the government to make all of us
culprits and then pick off whichever one of us it wants to. And once we
give up these freedoms, will we we ever get them back?

In India, at least when the Congress Party was campaigning, it said it was
going to withdraw POTA. It probably will, but not before it puts into
legislation other kinds of legislation that approximate it. So it won't be
POTA, it will be MOTA or whatever. But here, are they even saying that they
will repeal the PATRIOT Act? It's an insult to you that they don't even
think they have to say it. Is it populist to say that we are going to deal
in sterner ways with terror and we are going to make America stronger and
safer and have more oxy-boosters?

It's a crazy situation that they don't even lie. I know a lot of people say
that, "Oh, you know, Kerry is saying this, but when he comes to power, he
will be different." But nobody moves to the left after they come to power;
they move only to the right.

[Clip]

DB: IN ONE of your essays in your book War Talk, you conclude with a
paraphrase of Shelley's poem "Mask of Anarchy": "You be many, they be few."
Talk about that.

AR: THAT IS what is happening. It is in the nature of capitalism, isn't it?
The more profit you make, the more you plow back into the machine, the more
profit you make. And so now you have a situation in which, like I said, 500
billionaires have more money than the GDP of 135 countries. And that rift is
widening. I think today's paper said that the rift between the rich and the
poor of the United States is widening even more.

Everywhere that's happening. And the fact is that I believe that wars must
be waged from positions of strength. So the poor must fight from their
position of strength, which is on the streets and the mountains and the
valleys of the world, not in boardrooms and parliaments and courts. I think
we are on the side of the millions, and that is our strength. And we must
recognize it and work with it.

DB: THERE IS an alternative to terrorism. What is it?

AR: JUSTICE.

DB: HOW DO we get there?

AR: THE POINT is that terrorism has been isolated and made to look like some
kind of thing that has no past and has no future and is just some aberration
of maniacs. It isn't. Of course, sometimes it is. But if you look at it, the
logic that underlies terrorism and the logic that underlies the war on
terror is the same: Both hold ordinary people responsible for the actions of
governments.

And the fact is that Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda, in their attacks on
September 11, took the lives of many ordinary people. And in the attacks in
Afghanistan and on Iraq, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans paid
for the actions of the Taliban or for the actions of Saddam Hussein. The
difference is that the Afghans didn't elect the Taliban, the Iraqis didn't
elect Saddam Hussein.

So how do we justify these kinds of wars?

I really think that terrorism is the privatization of war. Terrorists are
the free marketeers of war. They are the ones who say that they don't
believe that legitimate violence is only the monopoly of the state. So we
can't condemn terrorism unless we condemn the war on terror.

And no government that does not show itself to be open to change by
nonviolent dissent can actually condemn terrorism. Because if every avenue
of nonviolent dissent is closed or mocked or bought off or broken, then by
default you privilege violence.

When all your respect and admiration and research and media coverage and the
whole economy is based on war and violence, when violence is deified, on
what grounds are you going to condemn terrorism?

Whatever people lack in wealth and power they make up with stealth and
strategy. So we can't just every time we're asked to say something, say,
"Oh, terrorism is a terrible thing," without talking about repression,
without talking about justice, without talking about occupation, without
talking about privatization, without talking about the fact that this
country has its army strung across the globe.

And then, of course, even language has been co-opted. If you say
"democracy," actually it means neoliberalism. If you say "reforms," it
actually means repression. Everything has been turned into something else.

So we also have to reclaim language now.