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The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile | Excerpt
David Barsamian: Let's talk a little bit about the mass media in the United States. You write that "thanks to America's 'free press,' sadly, most Americans know very little" about the U.S. government's foreign policy.
Arundhati Roy: Yes, it's a strangely insular place, America. When you live outside it, and you come here, it's almost shocking how insular it is. And how puzzled people are-and how curious, now I realize, about what other people think, because it's just been blocked out. Before I came here, I remember thinking that when I write about dams or nuclear bombs in India, I'm quite aware that the elite in India don't want to know about dams. They don't want to know about how many people have been displaced, what cruelties have been perpetrated for their own air conditioners and electricity. Because then the ultimate privilege of the elite is not just their deluxe lifestyles, but deluxe lifestyles with a clear conscience. And I felt that that was the case here too, that maybe people here don't want to know about Iraq, or Latin America, or Palestine, or East Timor, or Vietnam, or anything, so that they can live this happy little suburban life. But then I thought about it. Supposing you're a plumber in Milwaukee or an electrician in Denver. You just go to work, come home, you work really hard, and then you read your paper or watch CNN or Fox News and you go to bed. You don't know what the American government is up to. And ordinary people are maybe too tired to make the effort, to go out and really find out. So they live in this little bubble of lots of advertisements and no information.
DB: Third World Resurgence, an excellent magazine out of Penang, Malaysia, had a recent article on the Bhopal disaster of 1984. More than half a million people were seriously injured and some three thousand people died on December 3, 1984, when a cloud of lethal gas was released into the air from Union Carbide's Bhopal facility in central India. More than twenty thousand deaths have since been linked to the gas. The article features a leader among Bhopal survirors named Rasheeda Bee—you can tell from the name she's Muslim—who lost five members of her immediate family to cancer after the disaster, and she herself continues to suffer from diminished vision, headaches, and panic. At the Earth Summit in Johannesburg a few weeks ago, Rasheeda tried to personally hand over a broom to the president of Dow Chemical, which has now taken over Union Carbide, and here's what she said:
"The Indian Government has received clear instructions from its masters in Washington, D.C. The [Indian] government has made it clear to us [that is, the victims] that if it comes to choosing between holding Dow [Chemical]/[Union] Carbide liable (or punishing Warren Anderson [who was the CEO of Union Carbide]) and deserting the Bhopal survivors, it will opt for the latter without batting an eyelid."
AR: Even the absurd compensation that the Indian courts agreed upon for the victims of Bhopal has not been disbursed over the last eighteen years. And now the governments are trying to use that money to pay into constituencies where there were no victims of the Bhopal disaster. The victims were primarily Muslim, but now they're trying to pay that money to Hindu-dominant constituencies, to look after their vote banks.
DB: You were speaking to some students in New Mexico recently and you advised them to travel outside the United States, to put their ears against the wall and listen to the whispering. What did you have in mind in giving them that kind of advice?
AR: That when you live in the United States, with the roar of the free market, the roar of this huge military power, the roar of being at the heart of empire, it's hard to hear the whispering of the rest of the world. And I think many U.S. citizens want to. I don't think that all of them necessarily are co-conspirators in this concept of empire. And those who are not, need to listen to other stories in the world-other voices, other people.
DB: Yes, you do say that it's very difficult to be a citizen of an empire. You also write about September 11. You think that the terrorists should be "brought to book." But then you ask the questions, "Is war the best way to track them down? Will burning the haystack find you the needle?"
AR: Under the shelter of the U.S. government's rhetoric about the war
against terror, politicians the world over have decided that this technique
is their best way of settling old scores. So whether it's the Russian government
hunting down the Chechens, or Ariel Sharon in Palestine, or the Indian government
carrying out its fascist agenda against Muslims, particularly in Kashmir, everybody's
borrowing the rhetoric. They are all fitting their mouths around George Bush's
bloody words. After the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament on December
13, 2001, the Indian government blamed Pakistan (with no evidence to back its
claim) and moved all its soldiers to the border. War is now considered a legitimate
reaction to terrorist strikes. Now through the hottest summers, through the
bleakest winters, we have a million armed men on hair-trigger alert facing each
other on the border between India and Pakistan. They've been on red alert for
months together. India and Pakistan are threatening each other with nuclear
annihilation. So, in effect, terrorists now have the power to ignite war. They
almost have their finger on the nuclear button. They almost have the status
of heads of state. And that has enhanced the effectiveness and romance of terrorism.
The U.S. government's response to September 11 has actually privileged terrorism.
It has given it a huge impetus, and made it look like terrorism is the only
effective way to be heard. Over the years, every kind of nonviolent resistance
movement has been crushed, ignored, kicked aside. But if you're a terrorist,
you have a great chance of being negotiated with, of being on TV, of getting
all the attention you couldn't have dreamt of earlier.
* * *
DB: You're a critic of corporate globalization. But what kind of arrangements would you like to see, in terms of governance, of relations between different countries?
AR: I am a critic of corporate globalization because it has increased the distance between the people who take decisions and the people who have to suffer those decisions. Earlier, for a person in a village in Kerala, his or her life was being decided maybe in Trivandrum or, eventually, in Delhi. Now it could be in the Hague or in Washington, by people who know little or nothing of the consequences their decisions could have. And that distance between the decision-taker and the person who has to endure or suffer that decision is a very perilous road, full of the most unanticipated pitfalls. It's not that everything is designed to be malevolent, of course. Most of it is, but the distance between what happens on paper, in policy documents, and what happens on the ground is increasing enormously. That distance has to be eliminated. Decentralization and the devolving of power to local groups is very important. The current process is fundamentally undemocratic.
DB: You have written that "a writer's bad dream" is "the ritualistic slaughter of language." Can you talk about some examples of how language is constructed.
AR: The language of dissent has been co-opted. WTO documents and World Bank resettlement policies are now written in very noble-sounding, socially just, politically democratic-sounding language. They have co-opted that language. They use language to mask their intent. But what they say they'll do and what they actually do are completely different. The resettlement policy for the Sardar Sarovar Dam sounds reasonably enlightened. But it isn't meant to be implemented. There isn't the land. It says communities should be resettled as communities. But just nineteen villages from Gujarat have been scattered in one hundred and seventy-five different locations. The policy's only function is to ease the middle class's conscience. They all say "Oh, how humane the world is now compared to what it used to be." They can't be bothered that there's no connection between what's happening on the ground and what the policy says. So the issue is not how nice the World Bank president is or how wonderfully drafted their documents are. The issue is, who are they to make these decisions?
* * *
DB: You spoke in New York at the Riverside Church on May 13, 2003. How did you prepare for that, knowing that that church was where Martin Luther King gave his April 4, 1967, speech opposing the Vietnam War.
AR: It was important to me to come to the United States and speak in that church. Apart from what I said in the talk, which is available as a text, there was a lot unsaid which was very political. A black woman from India speaking about America to an American audience in an American church. It's always historically been the other way around. It's always been white people coming to black countries to tell us about ourselves. And if anybody from there comes here, it's only to tell you about us and what a bad time we're having. But here is something else happening. Here citizens of an empire want to know what other people think of what that empire is doing. Globalization of dissent begins like that. That process is very, very important.
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