[Reader-list] Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy - Arundhati Roy (May 13) + broadcast details

[Harsh Kapoor]

http://www.cesr.org/roy/  has all the details.

Roy's speech at Riverside Church in New York on May 13 will be on
C-Span. As the CESR site says:
The entire event was recorded by C-SPAN and will be broadcast
nationwide beginning this Sunday, May 18 at 12:00AM EST (saturday
night) and then again at 8:00AM EST. C-SPAN will continue these
broadcasts over the next several weekends in different time slots.
The broadcast schedule is available online:
http://www.booktv.org/schedule/

May 18 midnight-2 am (saturday night) (all times eastern US)
May 18 8 am - 10 am

http://www.cesr.org/roy/royspeech.htm
has a transcript of the speech as well as a link to pdf.

-----------------------

                   Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy

                   (Buy One, Get One Free)

                                    by
                   Arundhati Roy

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 at 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,
but
.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.
 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 naïve 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?

Well


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 naïve 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 at igc.org.




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