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| Fifth Column |
| Arundhati asks: 'What Can We Do?' |
| 2003-02-01 |
| By Arundhati Roy, Outlook From India I’ve been asked to speak about "How to confront Empire?" It’s a huge question, and I have no easy answers. When we speak of confronting "Empire," we need to identify what "Empire" means. Does it mean the U.S. Government (and its European satellites), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and multinational corporations? Or is it something more than that? Or do you have any idea at all what you're talking about? In many countries, Empire has sprouted other subsidiary heads, some dangerous byproducts — nationalism, religious bigotry, fascism and, of course terrorism. All these march arm in arm with the project of corporate globalization. Horrors! Not globalization! Let me illustrate what I mean. India — the world’s biggest democracy — is currently at the forefront of the corporate globalization project. Its "market" of one billion people is being prized open by the WTO. Corporatization and Privatization are being welcomed by the Government and the Indian elite... And we don't have to worry about the "starving children in India" anymore. Funny, how that works. So what do you think should be done, Arundhati?.. We can hone our memory, we can learn from our history. We can continue to build public opinion until it becomes a deafening roar. A deafening roar of childish nattering... We can turn the war on Iraq into a fishbowl of the U.S. government’s excesses. We can expose George Bush and Tony Blair — and their allies — for the cowardly baby killers, water poisoners, and pusillanimous long-distance bombers that they are. Rather than the close up, personal, slicers of heads who're their opponents. Would you like some of this baby, by the way? It's really tasty... We can re-invent civil disobedience in a million different ways. In other words, we can come up with a million ways of becoming a collective pain in the ass. Ahah! Honesty! She wants to be a hemorrhoid! Strive for excellence, I always say... When George Bush says "you’re either with us, or you are with the terrorists" we can say "No thank you." We can let him know that the people of the world do not need to choose between a Malevolent Mickey Mouse and the Mad Mullahs. The Mad Mullahs want to kill witless wonders like Arundhati because they're infidels. It doesn't matter whether she wants to play or not. They didn't ask her if she wanted to play. Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness — and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. Our strategy, on the other hand, should be not only to confront Evil, to deprive it of its leadership as well as its cannon fodder. To kill it, doorknob dead. But also to mock it, and to mock the naysayers and fellow travellers, the holier-than-thou set, the cryptocommies, the backward, the ignorant, and the stupid — people like Arundhati Roy, in fact. ("Brilliance", my ass!) The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling — their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few.They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing. "If we close our eyes really, really tight, the killers and torturers won't see us. And we should fight really, really hard against the West and its values, because the West won't cut our heads off." |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |
| #2 We see here one face of humanity; Arundhati Roy, a smug, self-satisfied, self-serving pseudo-intellectual coward who would rather kneel in submission to the forces of reaction than bother her fat ass (and she's a porker!) to extend the most minor benefits of 21st Century to her impoverished countrymen. On the other hand, we also see today an Indian woman named Kalpana Chawala, who was bright, beautiful, brave, and willing to sacrifice her life on the Columbia for the betterment of humanity. Ms Chawala is dead and Ms Roy is sitting down to her third helping of dessert. I hope she chokes on it. |
| Posted by: JDB 2003-02-02 01:04:46 |
| #1 How can we even begin to deal with someone like this self-important destructive fool on an adult basis? I don't live on the same planet as her |
| Posted by: Frank G 2003-02-01 14:27:09 |