Confronting Empire:
The Race is on for a Better World
by Arundhati Roy
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 Organisation, and multinational
corporations? Or is it more than that?
In many countries, Empire has sprouted subsidiary heads, some dangerous
by-products—nationalism, religious bigotry, fascism and, of course, terrorism.
All these march arm in arm with the project of corporate globalisation.
Let me illustrate what I mean. India—the world’s biggest democracy—is currently
at the forefront of the corporate globalisation project. Its ‘market’ of one
billion people is being prised open by the WTO. Corporatisation and
privatisation are being welcomed by the government and the Indian elite.
It is no coincidence that the Prime Minister, the Home Minister, the
Disinvestment Minister—the men who signed the deal with Enron in India, the men
who are selling the country’s infrastructure to corporate multinationals, the
men who want to privatise water, electricity, oil, coal, steel, health,
education and telecommunication—are all members or admirers of the RSS, a right
wing, ultra-nationalist Hindu guild, which has openly admired Hitler and his
methods.
The Free Market Nation
The dismantling of democracy is proceeding with the speed and efficiency of a
Structural Adjustment Programme. While the project of corporate globalisation
rips through people’s lives in India, massive privatisation, and labour
‘reforms’ are pushing people off their land and out of their jobs. Hundreds of
impoverished farmers are committing suicide by consuming pesticide. Reports of
starvation deaths are coming in from all over the country.
While the elite journeys to its imaginary destination somewhere near the top of
the world, the dispossessed are spiralling downwards into crime and chaos.
This climate of frustration and national disillusionment is the perfect breeding
ground, history tells us, for fascism.
The two arms of the Indian government have evolved the perfect pincer action.
While one arm is busy selling India off in chunks, the other, to divert
attention, is orchestrating a howling, baying chorus of Hindu nationalism and
religious fascism. It is conducting nuclear tests, rewriting history books,
burning churches, and demolishing mosques. Censorship, surveillance, the
suspension of civil liberties and human rights, the definition of who is an
Indian citizen and who is not, particularly with regard to religious minorities,
is becoming common practice now.
Last March, in the state of Gujarat, two thousand Muslims were butchered in a
state-sponsored pogrom. Muslim women were specially targeted. They were
stripped, and gang-raped, before being burned alive. Arsonists burned and looted
shops, homes, textiles mills and mosques. More than a hundred and fifty thousand
Muslims were driven from their homes. The economic base of the Muslim community
has been devastated.
While Gujarat burned, the Indian Prime Minister was on MTV promoting his new
poems. In January this year, the government that orchestrated the killing was
voted back into office with a comfortable majority. Nobody has been punished for
the genocide. Narendra Modi, architect of the pogrom, proud member of the RSS,
has embarked on his second term as the Chief Minister of Gujarat. If he were
Saddam Hussein, of course each atrocity would have been on CNN. But since he’s
not—and since the Indian ‘market’ is open to global investors—the massacre is
not even an embarrassing inconvenience.
There are more than one hundred million Muslims in India. A time bomb is ticking
in our ancient land.
All this to say that it is a myth that the free market breaks down national
barriers. The free market does not threaten national sovereignty, it undermines
democracy.
As the disparity between the rich and the poor grows, the fight to corner
resources is intensifying. To push through their ‘sweetheart deals,’ to
corporatise the crops we grow, the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the
dreams we dream, corporate globalisation needs an international confederation of
loyal, corrupt, authoritarian governments in poorer countries to push through
unpopular reforms and quell the mutinies.
Corporate Globalisation—or shall we call it by its name?—Imperialism—needs a
press that pretends to be free. It needs courts that pretend to dispense
justice.
Meanwhile, the countries of the North harden their borders and stockpile weapons
of mass destruction. After all they have to make sure that it’s only money,
goods, patents and services that are globalised. Not the free movement of
people. Not a respect for human rights. Not international treaties on racial
discrimination or chemical and nuclear weapons or greenhouse gas emissions or
climate change, or—god forbid—justice.
So this – all this – is ‘empire.’ This loyal confederation, this obscene
accumulation of power, this greatly increased distance between those who make
the decisions and those who have to suffer them.
Our fight, our goal, our vision of Another World must be to eliminate that
distance.
The Naked Empire
So how do we resist ‘Empire’?
The good news is that we’re not doing too badly. There have been major
victories. Here in Latin America you have had so many—in Bolivia, you have
Cochabamba; in Peru, there was the uprising in Arequipa; in Venezuela, President
Chavez is holding on, despite the U.S. government’s best efforts.
And the world’s gaze is on the people of Argentina, who are trying to refashion
a country from the ashes of the havoc wrought by the IMF.
In India the movement against corporate globalisation is gaining momentum and is
poised to become the only political force to counter religious fascism.
As for corporate globalisation’s glittering ambassadors—Enron, Bechtel,
WorldCom, Arthur Anderson—where were they last year, and where are they now?
And of course here in Brazil we must ask... who was the president last year, and
who is it now?
Still, many of us have dark moments of hopelessness and despair. We know that
under the spreading canopy of the War Against Terrorism, the men in suits are
hard at work.
While bombs rain down on us, and cruise missiles skid across the skies, we know
that contracts are being signed, patents are being registered, oil pipelines are
being laid, natural resources are being plundered, water is being privatised,
and George Bush goes to war against Iraq. If we look at this conflict as a
straightforward eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation between ‘Empire’ and those of
us who are resisting it, it might seem that we are losing.
But there is another way of looking at it. We, all of us gathered here, have,
each in our own way, laid siege to ‘Empire.’ We may not have stopped it in its
tracks—yet—but we have stripped it down. We have made it drop its mask. We have
forced it into the open. It now stands before us on the world’s stage in all its
brutish, iniquitous nakedness.
Empire may well go to war, but it’s out in the open now—too ugly to behold its
own reflection. Too ugly even to rally its own people. It won’t be long before
the majority of American people become our allies.
Before September 11, 2001 America had a secret history. Secret especially from
its own people. But now America’s secrets are history, and its history is public
knowledge. It’s street talk.
For example, killing people to save them from dictatorship or ideological
corruption is, of course, an old U.S. government sport. Here in Latin America,
you know that better than most.
And while nobody doubts that Saddam Hussein is a ruthless dictator, a murderer,
we should note that his worst excesses were supported by the governments of the
United States and Great Britain. There’s no doubt that Iraqis will be better off
without him.
But, then, the whole world would be better off without a certain Mr. Bush. In
fact, he is far more dangerous than Saddam Hussein. So, should we bomb Bush out
of the White House?
So, what can we do about the next war against the next Iraq?
We can hone our memory, we can learn from our history. We can continue to build
public opinion until it becomes a deafening roar. 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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
—Porto Alegre, Brazil, January 27, 2003
(Editor’s note: This speech was given at the World Social Forum before the
recent war in Iraq, so some of it has been bypassed by current events.)
Used with permission of Zmag <www.zmag.org>
Arundhati Roy is author of The God of Small Things, for
which she won the Booker Prize. Before that she was an architect and
screenwriter. Born in Kerala, India, she is also a well known social activist.
In 2002 she was convicted of contempt of court by the Supreme Court in New Delhi
for accusing the court of attempting to silence protests against the Narmada Dam
project, receiving only a symbolic sentence of one day in prison.
This article was printed in New Renaissance, Vol. 12, No. 1, issue 40,
Summer, 2003
Copyright © 2003 by Renaissance Universal, all rights reserved.
Posted on the web on June 22, 2003.
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