Instant-Mix
Imperial Democracy
(Buy One, Get One Free), May 13, 2003
Info on Arundhati's latest book, Wartalk
LA: Arundhati Roy opens Amnesty International Film Festival, May
27
Arundhati
Roy, a writer in India, is the author of the novel "God
of Small Things" and several books of essays, including "Power
Politics" and the "The Greater Common Good". She is
not afraid of controversy. And she is not afraid to stand with
the oppressed people of the world. For this, she has come under
attack and currently faces charges in the Indian Supreme Court,
which could put her in prison. It is up to us, the people of the
world, to defend this artist.
To
read more about her story, go to: Arundhati Roy vs. Supreme Court
of India: "This
Beautiful Voice Must Not Be Silenced",
Revolutionary Worker, February 10, 2002.
Instant-Mix
Imperial Democracy
(Buy One, Get One Free)
by Arundhati Roy
http://www.cesr.org/Roy/royspeech.htm
Presented in New York City
at The Riverside Church May 13, 2003
Copyright 2003 by Arundhati Roy
Sponsored by the Center for Economic and Social
Rights www.cesr.org
For permission to use or reprint, contact: arnove@igc.org.
In these times, when we have to
race to keep abreast of the speed at which our freedoms are being
snatched from us, and when few can afford the luxury of retreating
from the streets for a while in order to return with an exquisite,
fully formed political thesis replete with footnotes and references,
what profound gift can I offer you tonight?
As we lurch from crisis to crisis,
beamed directly into our brains by satellite TV, we have to think
on our feet. On the move. We enter histories through the rubble
of war. Ruined cities, parched fields, shrinking forests, and
dying rivers are our archives. Craters left by daisy cutters,
our libraries.
So what can I offer you tonight?
Some uncomfortable thoughts about money, war, empire, racism,
and democracy.
Some worries that flit around
my brain like a family of persistent moths that keep me awake
at night. Some of you will think it bad manners for a person like
me, officially entered in the Big Book of Modern Nations as an
"Indian citizen," to come here and criticize the U.S. government.
Speaking for myself, I'm no flag-waver, no patriot, and am fully
aware that venality, brutality, and hypocrisy are imprinted on
the leaden soul of every state. But when a country ceases to be
merely a country and becomes an empire, then the scale of operations
changes dramatically. So may I clarify that tonight I speak as
a subject of the American Empire? I speak as a slave who presumes
to criticize her king.
Since lectures must be called
something, mine tonight is called: Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy
(Buy One, Get One Free).
Way back in 1988, on the 3rd of July,
the U.S.S. Vincennes, a missile cruiser stationed in the Persian
Gulf, accidentally shot down an Iranian airliner and killed 290
civilian passengers. George Bush the First, who was at the time
on his presidential campaign, was asked to comment on the incident.
He said quite subtly, "I will never apologize for the United States.
I don't care what the facts are."
I don't care what the facts are.
What a perfect maxim for the New American Empire. Perhaps a slight
variation on the theme would be more apposite: The facts can
be whatever we want them to be.
When the United States invaded Iraq,
a New York Times/CBS News survey estimated that 42 percent of
the American public believed that Saddam Hussein was directly
responsible for the September 11th attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon. And an ABC News poll said that 55 percent
of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein directly supported Al
Qaida. None of this opinion is based on evidence (because there
isn't any). All of it is based on insinuation, auto-suggestion,
and outright lies circulated by the U.S. corporate media, otherwise
known as the "Free Press," that hollow pillar on which contemporary
American democracy rests.
Public support in the U.S. for the
war against Iraq was founded on a multi-tiered edifice of falsehood
and deceit, coordinated by the U.S. government and faithfully
amplified by the corporate media.
Apart from the invented links between
Iraq and Al Qaida, we had the manufactured frenzy about Iraq's
Weapons of Mass Destruction. George Bush the Lesser went to the
extent of saying it would be "suicidal" for the U.S. not to attack
Iraq. We once again witnessed the paranoia that a starved, bombed,
besieged country was about to annihilate almighty America. (Iraq
was only the latest in a succession of countries - earlier there
was Cuba, Nicaragua, Libya, Grenada, and Panama.) But this time
it wasn't just your ordinary brand of friendly neighborhood frenzy.
It was Frenzy with a Purpose. It ushered in an old doctrine in
a new bottle: the Doctrine of Pre-emptive Strike, a.k.a. The United
States Can Do Whatever The Hell It Wants, And That's Official.
The war against Iraq has been fought
and won and no Weapons of Mass Destruction have been found. Not
even a little one. Perhaps they'll have to be planted before they're
discovered. And then, the more troublesome amongst us will need
an explanation for why Saddam Hussein didn't use them when his
country was being invaded.
Of course, there'll be no answers.
True Believers will make do with those fuzzy TV reports about
the discovery of a few barrels of banned chemicals in an old shed.
There seems to be no consensus yet about whether they're really
chemicals, whether they're actually banned and whether the vessels
they're contained in can technically be called barrels. (There
were unconfirmed rumours that a teaspoonful of potassium permanganate
and an old harmonica were found there too.)
Meanwhile, in passing, an ancient
civilization has been casually decimated by a very recent, casually
brutal nation.
Then there are those who say, so
what if Iraq had no chemical and nuclear weapons? So what if there
is no Al Qaida connection? So what if Osama bin Laden hates Saddam
Hussein as much as he hates the United States? Bush the Lesser
has said Saddam Hussein was a "Homicidal Dictator." And so, the
reasoning goes, Iraq needed a "regime change."
Never mind that forty years ago,
the CIA, under President John F. Kennedy, orchestrated a regime
change in Baghdad. In 1963, after a successful coup, the Ba'ath
party came to power in Iraq. Using lists provided by the CIA,
the new Ba'ath regime systematically eliminated hundreds of doctors,
teachers, lawyers, and political figures known to be leftists.
An entire intellectual community was slaughtered. (The same technique
was used to massacre hundreds of thousands of people in Indonesia
and East Timor.) The young Saddam Hussein was said to have had
a hand in supervising the bloodbath. In 1979, after factional
infighting within the Ba'ath Party, Saddam Hussein became the
President of Iraq. In April 1980, while he was massacring Shias,
the U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinksi declared,
"We see no fundamental incompatibility of interests between the
United States and Iraq." Washington and London overtly and covertly
supported Saddam Hussein. They financed him, equipped him, armed
him, and provided him with dual-use materials to manufacture weapons
of mass destruction. They supported his worst excesses financially,
materially, and morally. They supported the eight-year war against
Iran and the 1988 gassing of Kurdish people in Halabja, crimes
which 14 years later were re-heated and served up as reasons to
justify invading Iraq. After the first Gulf War, the "Allies"
fomented an uprising of Shias in Basra and then looked away while
Saddam Hussein crushed the revolt and slaughtered thousands in
an act of vengeful reprisal.
The point is, if Saddam Hussein
was evil enough to merit the most elaborate, openly declared assassination
attempt in history (the opening move of Operation Shock and Awe),
then surely those who supported him ought at least to be tried
for war crimes? Why aren't the faces of U.S. and U.K. government
officials on the infamous pack of cards of wanted men and women?
Because when it comes to Empire,
facts don't matter.
Yes, but all that's in the past we're
told. Saddam Hussein is a monster who must be stopped now. And
only the U.S. can stop him. It's an effective technique, this
use of the urgent morality of the present to obscure the diabolical
sins of the past and the malevolent plans for the future. Indonesia,
Panama, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan - the list goes on and on.
Right now there are brutal regimes being groomed for the future
- Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, the Central Asian Republics.
U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft
recently declared that U.S. freedoms are "not the grant of any
government or document, butÉ.our endowment from God." (Why bother
with the United Nations when God himself is on hand?)
So here we are, the people of the
world, confronted with an Empire armed with a mandate from heaven
(and, as added insurance, the most formidable arsenal of weapons
of mass destruction in history). Here we are, confronted with
an Empire that has conferred upon itself the right to go to war
at will, and the right to deliver people from corrupting ideologies,
from religious fundamentalists, dictators, sexism, and poverty
by the age-old, tried-and-tested practice of extermination. Empire
is on the move, and Democracy is its sly new war cry. Democracy,
home-delivered to your doorstep by daisy cutters. Death is a small
price for people to pay for the privilege of sampling this new
product: Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy (bring to a boil, add
oil, then bomb).
But then perhaps chinks, negroes,
dinks, gooks, and wogs don't really qualify as real people. Perhaps
our deaths don't qualify as real deaths. Our histories don't qualify
as history. They never have.
Speaking of history, in these past
months, while the world watched, the U.S. invasion and occupation
of Iraq was broadcast on live TV. Like Osama bin Laden and the
Taliban in Afghanistan, the regime of Saddam Hussein simply disappeared.
This was followed by what analysts called a "power vacuum." Cities
that had been under siege, without food, water, and electricity
for days, cities that had been bombed relentlessly, people who
had been starved and systematically impoverished by the UN sanctions
regime for more than a decade, were suddenly left with no semblance
of urban administration. A seven-thousand-year-old civilization
slid into anarchy. On live TV.
Vandals plundered shops, offices,
hotels, and hospitals. American and British soldiers stood by
and watched. They said they had no orders to act. In effect, they
had orders to kill people, but not to protect them. Their priorities
were clear. The safety and security of Iraqi people was not their
business. The security of whatever little remained of Iraq's infrastructure
was not their business. But the security and safety of Iraq's
oil fields were. Of course they were. The oil fields were "secured"
almost before the invasion began.
On CNN and BBC the scenes of the
rampage were played and replayed. TV commentators, army and government
spokespersons portrayed it as a "liberated people" venting their
rage at a despotic regime. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
said: "It's untidy. Freedom's untidy and free people are free
to commit crimes and make mistakes and do bad things." Did anybody
know that Donald Rumsfeld was an anarchist? I wonder - did he
hold the same view during the riots in Los Angeles following the
beating of Rodney King? Would he care to share his thesis about
the Untidiness of Freedom with the two million people being held
in U.S. prisons right now? (The world's "freest" country has the
highest number of prisoners in the world.) Would he discuss its
merits with young African American men, 28 percent of whom will
spend some part of their adult lives in jail? Could he explain
why he serves under a president who oversaw 152 executions when
he was governor of Texas?
Before the war on Iraq began, the
Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) sent
the Pentagon a list of 16 crucial sites to protect. The National
Museum was second on that list. Yet the Museum was not just looted,
it was desecrated. It was a repository of an ancient cultural
heritage. Iraq as we know it today was part of the river valley
of Mesopotamia. The civilization that grew along the banks of
the Tigris and the Euphrates produced the world's first writing,
first calendar, first library, first city, and, yes, the world's
first democracy. King Hammurabi of Babylon was the first to codify
laws governing the social life of citizens. It was a code in which
abandoned women, prostitutes, slaves, and even animals had rights.
The Hammurabi code is acknowledged not just as the birth of legality,
but the beginning of an understanding of the concept of social
justice. The U.S. government could not have chosen a more inappropriate
land in which to stage its illegal war and display its grotesque
disregard for justice.
At a Pentagon briefing during the
days of looting, Secretary Rumsfeld, Prince of Darkness, turned
on his media cohorts who had served him so loyally through the
war. "The images you are seeing on television, you are seeing
over and over and over, and it's the same picture, of some person
walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it twenty
times and you say, 'My god, were there that many vases? Is it
possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?'"
Laughter rippled through the press
room. Would it be alright for the poor of Harlem to loot the Metropolitan
Museum? Would it be greeted with similar mirth?
The last building on the ORHA list
of 16 sites to be protected was the Ministry of Oil. It was the
only one that was given protection. Perhaps the occupying army
thought that in Muslim countries lists are read upside down?
Television tells us that Iraq has
been "liberated" and that Afghanistan is well on its way to becoming
a paradise for women-thanks to Bush and Blair, the 21st century's
leading feminists. In reality, Iraq's infrastructure has been
destroyed. Its people brought to the brink of starvation. Its
food stocks depleted. And its cities devastated by a complete
administrative breakdown. Iraq is being ushered in the direction
of a civil war between Shias and Sunnis. Meanwhile, Afghanistan
has lapsed back into the pre-Taliban era of anarchy, and its territory
has been carved up into fiefdoms by hostile warlords.
Undaunted by all this, on the 2nd
of May Bush the Lesser launched his 2004 campaign hoping to be
finally elected U.S. President. In what probably constitutes the
shortest flight in history, a military jet landed on an aircraft
carrier, the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, which was so close
to shore that, according to the Associated Press, administration
officials acknowledged "positioning the massive ship to provide
the best TV angle for Bush's speech, with the sea as his background
instead of the San Diego coastline." President Bush, who never
served his term in the military, emerged from the cockpit in fancy
dress - a U.S. military bomber jacket, combat boots, flying goggles,
helmet. Waving to his cheering troops, he officially proclaimed
victory over Iraq. He was careful to say that it was "just one
victory in a war on terror...[which] still goes on."
It was important to avoid making
a straightforward victory announcement, because under the Geneva
Convention a victorious army is bound by the legal obligations
of an occupying force, a responsibility that the Bush administration
does not want to burden itself with. Also, closer to the 2004
elections, in order to woo wavering voters, another victory in
the "War on Terror" might become necessary. Syria is being fattened
for the kill.
It was Herman Goering, that old
Nazi, who said, "People can always be brought to the bidding of
the leaders.É All you have to do is tell them they're being attacked
and denounce the pacifists for a lack of patriotism and exposing
the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
He's right. It's dead easy. That's
what the Bush regime banks on. The distinction between election
campaigns and war, between democracy and oligarchy, seems to be
closing fast.
The only caveat in these campaign
wars is that U.S. lives must not be lost. It shakes voter confidence.
But the problem of U.S. soldiers being killed in combat has been
licked. More or less.
At a media briefing before Operation
Shock and Awe was unleashed, General Tommy Franks announced, "This
campaign will be like no other in history." Maybe he's right.
I'm no military historian, but when
was the last time a war was fought like this?
After using the "good offices" of
UN diplomacy (economic sanctions and weapons inspections) to ensure
that Iraq was brought to its knees, its people starved, half a
million children dead, its infrastructure severely damaged, after
making sure that most of its weapons had been destroyed, in
an act of cowardice that must surely be unrivalled in history,
the "Coalition of the Willing" (better known as the Coalition
of the Bullied and Bought) - sent in an invading army!
Operation Iraqi Freedom? I don't
think so. It was more like Operation Let's Run a Race, but First
Let Me Break Your Knees.
As soon as the war began, the governments
of France, Germany, and Russia, which refused to allow a final
resolution legitimizing the war to be passed in the UN Security
Council, fell over each other to say how much they wanted the
United States to win. President Jacques Chirac offered French
airspace to the Anglo-American air force. U.S. military bases
in Germany were open for business. German Foreign Minister Joschka
Fischer publicly hoped for the "rapid collapse" of the Saddam
Hussein regime. Vladimir Putin publicly hoped for the same. These
are governments that colluded in the enforced disarming of Iraq
before their dastardly rush to take the side of those who attacked
it. Apart from hoping to share the spoils, they hoped Empire would
honor their pre-war oil contracts with Iraq. Only the very na•ve
could expect old Imperialists to behave otherwise.
Leaving aside the cheap thrills and
the lofty moral speeches made in the UN during the run up to the
war, eventually, at the moment of crisis, the unity of Western
governments - despite the opposition from the majority of their
people - was overwhelming.
When the Turkish government temporarily
bowed to the views of 90 percent of its population, and turned
down the U.S. government's offer of billions of dollars of blood
money for the use of Turkish soil, it was accused of lacking "democratic
principles." According to a Gallup International poll, in no European
country was support for a war carried out "unilaterally by America
and its allies" higher than 11 percent. But the governments of
England, Italy, Spain, Hungary, and other countries of Eastern
Europe were praised for disregarding the views of the majority
of their people and supporting the illegal invasion. That, presumably,
was fully in keeping with democratic principles. What's it called?
New Democracy? (Like Britain's New Labour?)
In stark contrast to the venality
displayed by their governments, on the 15th of February, weeks
before the invasion, in the most spectacular display of public
morality the world has ever seen, more than 10 million people
marched against the war on 5 continents. Many of you, I'm sure,
were among them. They - we - were disregarded with utter disdain.
When asked to react to the anti-war demonstrations, President
Bush said, "It's like deciding, well, I'm going to decide policy
based upon a focus group. The role of a leader is to decide policy
based upon the security, in this case the security of the people."
Democracy, the modern world's holy
cow, is in crisis. And the crisis is a profound one. Every kind
of outrage is being committed in the name of democracy. It has
become little more than a hollow word, a pretty shell, emptied
of all content or meaning. It can be whatever you want it to be.
Democracy is the Free World's whore, willing to dress up, dress
down, willing to satisfy a whole range of taste, available to
be used and abused at will.
Until quite recently, right up to
the 1980's, democracy did seem as though it might actually succeed
in delivering a degree of real social justice.
But modern democracies have been
around for long enough for neo-liberal capitalists to learn how
to subvert them. They have mastered the technique of infiltrating
the instruments of democracy - the "independent" judiciary, the
"free" press, the parliament - and molding them to their purpose.
The project of corporate globalization has cracked the code. Free
elections, a free press, and an independent judiciary mean little
when the free market has reduced them to commodities on sale to
the highest bidder.
To fully comprehend the extent to
which Democracy is under siege, it might be an idea to look at
what goes on in some of our contemporary democracies. The World's
Largest: India, (which I have written about at some length and
therefore will not speak about tonight). The World's Most Interesting:
South Africa. The world's most powerful: the U.S.A. And, most
instructive of all, the plans that are being made to usher in
the world's newest: Iraq.
In South Africa, after 300 years
of brutal domination of the black majority by a white minority
through colonialism and apartheid, a non-racial, multi-party democracy
came to power in 1994. It was a phenomenal achievement. Within
two years of coming to power, the African National Congress had
genuflected with no caveats to the Market God. Its massive program
of structural adjustment, privatization, and liberalization has
only increased the hideous disparities between the rich and the
poor. More than a million people have lost their jobs. The corporatization
of basic services - electricity, water, and housing-has meant
that 10 million South Africans, almost a quarter of the population,
have been disconnected from water and electricity. 2 million have
been evicted from their homes.
Meanwhile, a small white minority
that has been historically privileged by centuries of brutal exploitation
is more secure than ever before. They continue to control the
land, the farms, the factories, and the abundant natural resources
of that country. For them the transition from apartheid to neo-liberalism
barely disturbed the grass. It's apartheid with a clean conscience.
And it goes by the name of Democracy.
Democracy has become Empire's euphemism
for neo-liberal capitalism.
In countries of the first world,
too, the machinery of democracy has been effectively subverted.
Politicians, media barons, judges, powerful corporate lobbies,
and government officials are imbricated in an elaborate underhand
configuration that completely undermines the lateral arrangement
of checks and balances between the constitution, courts of law,
parliament, the administration and, perhaps most important of
all, the independent media that form the structural basis of a
parliamentary democracy. Increasingly, the imbrication is neither
subtle nor elaborate.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi,
for instance, has a controlling interest in major Italian newspapers,
magazines, television channels, and publishing houses. The Financial
Times reported that he controls about 90 percent of Italy's TV
viewership. Recently, during a trial on bribery charges, while
insisting he was the only person who could save Italy from the
left, he said, "How much longer do I have to keep living this
life of sacrifices?" That bodes ill for the remaining 10 percent
of Italy's TV viewership. What price Free Speech? Free Speech
for whom?
In the United States, the arrangement
is more complex. Clear Channel Worldwide Incorporated is the largest
radio station owner in the country. It runs more than 1,200 channels,
which together account for 9 percent of the market. Its CEO contributed
hundreds of thousands of dollars to Bush's election campaign.
When hundreds of thousands of American citizens took to the streets
to protest against the war on Iraq, Clear Channel organized pro-war
patriotic "Rallies for America" across the country. It used its
radio stations to advertise the events and then sent correspondents
to cover them as though they were breaking news. The era of manufacturing
consent has given way to the era of manufacturing news. Soon media
newsrooms will drop the pretense, and start hiring theatre directors
instead of journalists.
As America's show business gets more
and more violent and war-like, and America's wars get more and
more like show business, some interesting cross-overs are taking
place. The designer who built the 250,000 dollar set in Qatar
from which General Tommy Franks stage-managed news coverage of
Operation Shock and Awe also built sets for Disney, MGM, and "Good
Morning America."
It is a cruel irony that the U.S.,
which has the most ardent, vociferous defenders of the idea of
Free Speech, and (until recently) the most elaborate legislation
to protect it, has so circumscribed the space in which that freedom
can be expressed. In a strange, convoluted way, the sound and
fury that accompanies the legal and conceptual defense of Free
Speech in America serves to mask the process of the rapid erosion
of the possibilities of actually exercising that freedom.
The news and entertainment industry
in the U.S. is for the most part controlled by a few major corporations
- AOL-Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, News Corporation. Each of these
corporations owns and controls TV stations, film studios, record
companies, and publishing ventures. Effectively, the exits are
sealed.
America's media empire is controlled
by a tiny coterie of people. Chairman of the Federal Communications
Commission Michael Powell, the son of Secretary of State Colin
Powell, has proposed even further deregulation of the communication
industry, which will lead to even greater consolidation.
So here it is - the World's Greatest
Democracy, led by a man who was not legally elected. America's
Supreme Court gifted him his job. What price have American people
paid for this spurious presidency?
In the three years of George Bush
the Lesser's term, the American economy has lost more than two
million jobs. Outlandish military expenses, corporate welfare,
and tax giveaways to the rich have created a financial crisis
for the U.S. educational system. According to a survey by the
National Council of State Legislatures, U.S. states cut 49 billion
dollars in public services, health, welfare benefits, and education
in 2002. They plan to cut another 25.7 billion dollars this year.
That makes a total of 75 billion dollars. Bush's initial budget
request to Congress to finance the war in Iraq was 80 billion
dollars.
So who's paying for the war? America's
poor. Its students, its unemployed, its single mothers, its hospital
and home-care patients, its teachers, and health workers.
And who's actually fighting the war?
Once again, America's poor. The soldiers
who are baking in Iraq's desert sun are not the children of the
rich. Only one of all the representatives in the House of Representatives
and the Senate has a child fighting in Iraq. America's "volunteer"
army in fact depends on a poverty draft of poor whites, Blacks,
Latinos, and Asians looking for a way to earn a living and get
an education. Federal statistics show that African Americans make
up 21 percent of the total armed forces and 29 percent of the
U.S. army. They count for only 12 percent of the general population.
It's ironic, isn't it - the disproportionately high representation
of African Americans in the army and prison? Perhaps we should
take a positive view, and look at this as affirmative action at
its most effective. Nearly 4 million Americans (2 percent of the
population) have lost the right to vote because of felony convictions.
Of that number, 1.4 million are African Americans, which means
that 13 percent of all voting-age Black people have been disenfranchised.
For African Americans there's also
affirmative action in death. A study by the economist Amartya
Sen shows that African Americans as a group have a lower life
expectancy than people born in China, in the Indian State of Kerala
(where I come from), Sri Lanka, or Costa Rica. Bangladeshi men
have a better chance of making it to the age of forty than African
American men from here in Harlem.
This year, on what would have been
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 74th birthday, President Bush denounced
the University of Michigan's affirmative action program favouring
Blacks and Latinos. He called it "divisive," "unfair," and "unconstitutional."
The successful effort to keep Blacks off the voting rolls in the
State of Florida in order that George Bush be elected was of course
neither unfair nor unconstitutional. I don't suppose affirmative
action for White Boys From Yale ever is.
So we know who's paying for the war.
We know who's fighting it. But who will benefit from it? Who is
homing in on the reconstruction contracts estimated to be worth
up to one hundred billon dollars? Could it be America's poor and
unemployed and sick? Could it be America's single mothers? Or
America's Black and Latino minorities?
Operation Iraqi Freedom, George Bush
assures us, is about returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people.
That is, returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people via Corporate
Multinationals. Like Bechtel, like Chevron, like Halliburton.
Once again, it is a small, tight circle that connects corporate,
military, and government leadership to one another. The promiscuousness,
the cross-pollination is outrageous.
Consider this: the Defense Policy
Board is a government-appointed group that advises the Pentagon.
Its members are appointed by the under secretary of defense and
approved by Donald Rumsfeld. Its meetings are classified. No information
is available for public scrutiny.
The Washington-based Center for Public
Integrity found that 9 out of the 30 members of the Defense Policy
Board are connected to companies that were awarded defense contracts
worth 76 billion dollars between the years 2001 and 2002. One
of them, Jack Sheehan, a retired Marine Corps general, is a senior
vice president at Bechtel, the giant international engineering
outfit. Riley Bechtel, the company chairman, is on the President's
Export Council. Former Secretary of State George Shultz, who is
also on the Board of Directors of the Bechtel Group, is the chairman
of the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.
When asked by the New York Times whether he was concerned about
the appearance of a conflict of interest, he said, "I don't know
that Bechtel would particularly benefit from it. But if there's
work to be done, Bechtel is the type of company that could do
it."
Bechtel has been awarded a 680 million
dollar reconstruction contract in Iraq. According to the Center
for Responsive Politics, Bechtel contributed hundreds of thousands
of dollars to Republican campaign efforts.
Arcing across this subterfuge, dwarfing
it by the sheer magnitude of its malevolence, is America's anti-terrorism
legislation. The U.S.A. Patriot Act, passed in October 2001, has
become the blueprint for similar anti-terrorism bills in countries
across the world. It was passed in the House of Representatives
by a majority vote of 337 to 79. According to the New York Times,
"Many lawmakers said it had been impossible to truly debate or
even read the legislation."
The Patriot Act ushers in an era
of systemic automated surveillance. It gives the government the
authority to monitor phones and computers and spy on people in
ways that would have seemed completely unacceptable a few years
ago. It gives the FBI the power to seize all of the circulation,
purchasing, and other records of library users and bookstore customers
on the suspicion that they are part of a terrorist network. It
blurs the boundaries between speech and criminal activity creating
the space to construe acts of civil disobedience as violating
the law.
Already hundreds of people are being
held indefinitely as "unlawful combatants." (In India, the number
is in the thousands. In Israel, 5,000 Palestinians are now being
detained.) Non-citizens, of course, have no rights at all. They
can simply be "disappeared" like the people of Chile under Washington's
old ally, General Pinochet. More than 1,000 people, many of them
Muslim or of Middle Eastern origin, have been detained, some without
access to legal representatives.
Apart from paying the actual economic
costs of war, American people are paying for these wars of "liberation"
with their own freedoms. For the ordinary American, the price
of "New Democracy" in other countries is the death of real democracy
at home.
Meanwhile, Iraq is being groomed
for "liberation." (Or did they mean "liberalization" all along?)
The Wall Street Journal reports that "the Bush administration
has drafted sweeping plans to remake Iraq's economy in the U.S.
image."
Iraq's constitution is being redrafted.
Its trade laws, tax laws, and intellectual property laws rewritten
in order to turn it into an American-style capitalist economy.
The United States Agency for International
Development has invited U.S. companies to bid for contracts that
range between road building, water systems, text book distribution,
and cell phone networks.
Soon after Bush the Second announced
that he wanted American farmers to feed the world, Dan Amstutz,
a former senior executive of Cargill, the biggest grain exporter
in the world, was put in charge of agricultural reconstruction
in Iraq. Kevin Watkins, Oxfam's policy director, said, "Putting
Dan Amstutz in charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq is
like putting Saddam Hussein in the chair of a human rights commission."
The two men who have been short-listed
to run operations for managing Iraqi oil have worked with Shell,
BP, and Fluor. Fluor is embroiled in a lawsuit by black South
African workers who have accused the company of exploiting and
brutalizing them during the apartheid era. Shell, of course, is
well known for its devastation of the Ogoni tribal lands in Nigeria.
Tom Brokaw (one of America's best-known
TV anchors) was inadvertently succinct about the process. "One
of the things we don't want to do," he said, "is to destroy the
infrastructure of Iraq because in a few days we're going to own
that country."
Now that the ownership deeds are
being settled, Iraq is ready for New Democracy.
So, as Lenin used to ask: What Is
To Be Done?
WellÉ We might as well accept the
fact that there is no conventional military force that can successfully
challenge the American war machine. Terrorist strikes only give
the U.S. Government an opportunity that it is eagerly awaiting
to further tighten its stranglehold. Within days of an attack
you can bet that Patriot II would be passed. To argue against
U.S. military aggression by saying that it will increase the possibilities
of terrorist strikes is futile. It's like threatening Brer Rabbit
that you'll throw him into the bramble bush. Any one who has read
the documents written by The Project for the New American Century
can attest to that. The government's suppression of the Congressional
committee report on September 11th, which found that there was
intelligence warning of the strikes that was ignored, also attests
to the fact that, for all their posturing, the terrorists and
the Bush regime might as well be working as a team. They both
hold people responsible for the actions of their governments.
They both believe in the doctrine of collective guilt and collective
punishment. Their actions benefit each other greatly.
The U.S. government has already displayed
in no uncertain terms the range and extent of its capability for
paranoid aggression. In human psychology, paranoid aggression
is usually an indicator of nervous insecurity. It could be argued
that it's no different in the case of the psychology of nations.
Empire is paranoid because it has a soft underbelly.
Its "homeland" may be defended by
border patrols and nuclear weapons, but its economy is strung
out across the globe. Its economic outposts are exposed and vulnerable.
Already the Internet is buzzing with elaborate lists of American
and British government products and companies that should be boycotted.
Apart from the usual targets - Coke, Pepsi, McDonalds - government
agencies like USAID, the British DFID, British and American banks,
Arthur Andersen, Merrill Lynch, and American Express could find
themselves under siege. These lists are being honed and refined
by activists across the world. They could become a practical guide
that directs the amorphous but growing fury in the world. Suddenly,
the "inevitability" of the project of Corporate Globalization
is beginning to seem more than a little evitable.
It would be na•ve to imagine that
we can directly confront Empire. Our strategy must be to isolate
Empire's working parts and disable them one by one. No target
is too small. No victory too insignificant. We could reverse the
idea of the economic sanctions imposed on poor countries by Empire
and its Allies. We could impose a regime of Peoples' Sanctions
on every corporate house that has been awarded with a contract
in postwar Iraq, just as activists in this country and around
the world targeted institutions of apartheid. Each one of them
should be named, exposed, and boycotted. Forced out of business.
That could be our response to the Shock and Awe campaign. It would
be a great beginning.
Another urgent challenge is to expose
the corporate media for the boardroom bulletin that it really
is. We need to create a universe of alternative information. We
need to support independent media like Democracy Now!, Alternative
Radio, and South End Press.
The battle to reclaim democracy is
going to be a difficult one. Our freedoms were not granted to
us by any governments. They were wrested from them by us. And
once we surrender them, the battle to retrieve them is called
a revolution. It is a battle that must range across continents
and countries. It must not acknowledge national boundaries but,
if it is to succeed, it has to begin here. In America. The only
institution more powerful than the U.S. government is American
civil society. The rest of us are subjects of slave nations. We
are by no means powerless, but you have the power of proximity.
You have access to the Imperial Palace and the Emperor's chambers.
Empire's conquests are being carried out in your name, and you
have the right to refuse. You could refuse to fight. Refuse to
move those missiles from the warehouse to the dock. Refuse to
wave that flag. Refuse the victory parade.
You have a rich tradition of resistance.
You need only read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United
States to remind yourself of this.
Hundreds of thousands of you have
survived the relentless propaganda you have been subjected to,
and are actively fighting your own government. In the ultra-patriotic
climate that prevails in the United States, that's as brave as
any Iraqi or Afghan or Palestinian fighting for his or her homeland.
If you join the battle, not in your
hundreds of thousands, but in your millions, you will be greeted
joyously by the rest of the world. And you will see how beautiful
it is to be gentle instead of brutal, safe instead of scared.
Befriended instead of isolated. Loved instead of hated.
I hate to disagree with your president.
Yours is by no means a great nation. But you could be a great
people.
History is giving you the chance.
Seize the time.
ARUNDHATI ROY
Presented in New York City at The Riverside Church May 13, 2003
Copyright 2003 Sponsored by the Center for Economic and Social
Rights www.cesr.org For permission
to reprint, contact: arnove@igc.org.
