[News] Arundhati Roy: TIDE? OR IVORY SNOW?

[News at freedomarchives.org]

Transcript of full speech by Arundhati Roy in San Francisco, California on 
August 16th, 2004.
Copyright 2004 Arundhati Roy. For permission to reprint contact arnove at igc.org

TIDE? OR IVORY SNOW?
Public Power in the Age of Empire

I've been asked to speak about "Public Power in the Age of Empire." I'm not 
used to doing as I'm told, but by happy coincidence, it's exactly what I'd 
like to speak about tonight.

When language has been butchered and bled of meaning, how do we understand 
"public power"? When freedom means occupation, when democracy means 
neo-liberal capitalism, when reform means repression, when words like 
"empowerment" and "peacekeeping" make your blood run cold - why, then, 
"public power" could mean whatever you want it to mean. A biceps building 
machine, or a Community Power Shower. So, I'll just have to define "public 
power" as I go along, in my own self-serving sort of way.

In India, the word public is now a Hindi word. It means people. In Hindi, 
we have sarkar and public, the government and the people. Inherent in this 
use is the underlying assumption that the government is quite separate from 
"the people." This distinction has to do with the fact that India's freedom 
struggle, though magnificent, was by no means revolutionary. The Indian 
elite stepped easily and elegantly into the shoes of the British 
imperialists. A deeply impoverished, essentially feudal society became a 
modern, independent nation state. Even today, fifty seven years on to the 
day, the truly vanquished still look upon the government as mai-baap, the 
parent and provider. The somewhat more radical, those who still have fire 
in their bellies, see it as chor, the thief, the snatcher-away of all things.

Either way, for most Indians, sarkar is very separate from public. However, 
as you make your way up India's social ladder, the distinction between 
sarkar and public gets blurred. The Indian elite, like the elite anywhere 
in the world, finds it hard to separate itself from the state. It sees like 
the state, it thinks like the state, it speaks like the state.

In the United States, on the other hand, the blurring of the distinction 
between sarkar and public has penetrated far deeper into society. This 
could be a sign of a robust democracy, but unfortunately, it's a little 
more complicated and less pretty than that. Among other things, it has to 
do with the elaborate web of paranoia generated by the U.S. sarkar and spun 
out by the corporate media and Hollywood. Ordinary Americans have been 
manipulated into imagining they are a people under siege whose sole refuge 
and protector is their government. If it isn't the Communists, it's 
al-Qaeda. If it isn't Cuba. it's Nicaragua. As a result, this, the most 
powerful nation in the world - with its unmatchable arsenal of weapons, its 
history of having waged and sponsored endless wars, and the only nation in 
history to have actually used nuclear bombs - is peopled by a terrified 
citizenry, jumping at shadows. A people bonded to the state not by social 
services, or public health care, or employment guarantees, but by fear.

This synthetically manufactured fear is used to gain public sanction for 
further acts of aggression. And so it goes, building into a spiral of 
self-fulfilling hysteria, now formally calibrated by the U.S government's 
Amazing Technicolored Terror Alerts: fuchsia, turquoise, salmon pink.

To outside observers, this merging of sarkar and public in the United 
States sometimes makes it hard to separate the actions of the U.S. 
government from the American people. It is this confusion that fuels 
anti-Americanism in the world. Anti-Americanism is then seized upon and 
amplified by the U.S. government and its faithful media outlets. You know 
the routine: "Why do they hate us? They hate our freedoms" . . . etc. . . . 
etc. This enhances the sense of isolation among American people and makes 
the embrace between sarkar and public even more intimate. Like Red Riding 
Hood looking for a cuddle in the wolf's bed.

Using the threat of an external enemy to rally people behind you is a tired 
old horse, which politicians have ridden into power for centuries. But 
could it be that ordinary people are fed up of that poor old horse and are 
looking for something different? There's an old Hindi film song that goes 
yeh public hai, yeh sab jaanti hai (the public, she knows it all). Wouldn't 
it be lovely if the song were right and the politicians wrong?

Before Washington's illegal invasion of Iraq, a Gallup International poll 
showed that in no European country was the support for a unilateral war 
higher than 11 percent. On February 15, 2003, weeks before the invasion, 
more than ten million people marched against the war on different 
continents, including North America. And yet the governments of many 
supposedly democratic countries still went to war.

The question is: is "democracy" still democratic?

Are democratic governments accountable to the people who elected them? And, 
critically, is the public in democratic countries responsible for the 
actions of its sarkar?

If you think about it, the logic that underlies the war on terrorism and 
the logic that underlies terrorism is exactly the same. Both make ordinary 
citizens pay for the actions of their government. Al-Qaeda made the people 
of the United States pay with their lives for the actions of their 
government in Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The U.S 
government has made the people of Afghanistan pay in their thousands for 
the actions of the Taliban and the people of Iraq pay in their hundreds of 
thousands for the actions of Saddam Hussein.

The crucial difference is that nobody really elected al-Qaeda, the Taliban, 
or Saddam Hussein. But the president of the United States was elected (well 
... in a manner of speaking).

The prime ministers of Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom were elected. 
Could it then be argued that citizens of these countries are more 
responsible for the actions of their government than Iraqis are for the 
actions of Saddam Hussein or Afghans for the Taliban?

Whose God decides which is a "just war" and which isn't? George Bush senior 
once said: "I will never apologize for the United States. I don't care what 
the facts are." When the president of the most powerful country in the 
world doesn't need to care what the facts are, then we can at least be sure 
we have entered the Age of Empire.

So what does public power mean in the Age of Empire? Does it mean anything 
at all? Does it actually exist?

In these allegedly democratic times, conventional political thought holds 
that public power is exercised through the ballot. Scores of countries in 
the world will go to the polls this year. Most (not all) of them will get 
the governments they vote for. But will they get the governments they want?

In India this year, we voted the Hindu nationalists out of office. But even 
as we celebrated, we knew that on nuclear bombs, neo-liberalism, 
privatization, censorship, big dams - on every major issue other than overt 
Hindu nationalism - the Congress and the BJP have no major ideological 
differences. We know that it is the fifty-year legacy of the Congress Party 
that prepared the ground culturally and politically for the far right. It 
was also the Congress Party that first opened India's markets to corporate 
globalization.

In its election campaign, the Congress Party indicated that it was prepared 
to rethink some of its earlier economic policies. Millions of India's 
poorest people came out in strength to vote in the elections. The spectacle 
of the great Indian democracy was telecast live - the poor farmers, the old 
and infirm, the veiled women with their beautiful silver jewelry, making 
quaint journeys to election booths on elephants and camels and bullock 
carts. Contrary to the predictions of all India's experts and pollsters, 
Congress won more votes than any other party. India's communist parties won 
the largest share of the vote in their history. India's poor had clearly 
voted against neo-liberalism's economic "reforms" and growing fascism. As 
soon as the votes were counted, the corporate media dispatched them like 
badly paid extras on a film set. Television channels featured split 
screens. Half the screen showed the chaos outside the home of Sonia Gandhi, 
the leader of the Congress Party, as the coalition government was cobbled 
together.

The other half showed frenzied stockbrokers outside the Bombay Stock 
Exchange, panicking at the thought that the Congress Party might actually 
honor its promises and implement its electoral mandate. We saw the Sensex 
stock index move up and down and sideways. The media, whose own publicly 
listed stocks were plummeting, reported the stock market crash as though 
Pakistan had launched ICBMs on New Delhi.

Even before the new government was formally sworn in, senior Congress 
politicians made public statements reassuring investors and the media that 
privatization of public utilities would continue. Meanwhile the BJP, now in 
opposition, has cynically, and comically, begun to oppose foreign direct 
investment and the further opening of Indian markets.

This is the spurious, evolving dialectic of electoral democracy.

As for the Indian poor, once they've provided the votes, they are expected 
to bugger off home. Policy will be decided despite them.

And what of the U.S. elections? Do U.S. voters have a real choice?

It's true that if John Kerry becomes president, some of the oil tycoons and 
Christian fundamentalists in the White House will change. Few will be sorry 
to see the back of Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld or John Ashcroft and 
their blatant thuggery. But the real concern is that in the new 
administration their policies will continue. That we will have Bushism 
without Bush.

Those positions of real power - the bankers, the CEOs - are not vulnerable 
to the vote (. . . and in any case, they fund both sides).

Unfortunately the importance of the U.S elections has deteriorated into a 
sort of personality contest. A squabble over who would do a better job of 
overseeing empire. John Kerry believes in the idea of empire as fervently 
as George Bush does.

The U.S. political system has been carefully crafted to ensure that no one 
who questions the natural goodness of the military-industrial-corporate 
power structure will be allowed through the portals of power.

Given this, it's no surprise that in this election you have two Yale 
University graduates, both members of Skull and Bones, the same secret 
society, both millionaires, both playing at soldier-soldier, both talking 
up war, and arguing almost childishly about who will lead the war on terror 
more effectively.

Like President Bill Clinton before him, Kerry will continue the expansion 
of U.S. economic and military penetration into the world. He says he would 
have voted to authorize Bush to go to war in Iraq even if he had known that 
Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. He promises to commit more troops 
to Iraq. He said recently that he supports Bush's policies toward Israel 
and Ariel Sharon 100 percent. He says he'll retain 98% of Bush's tax cuts.

So, underneath the shrill exchange of insults, there is almost absolute 
consensus. It looks as though even if Americans vote for Kerry, they'll 
still get Bush. President John Kerbush or President George Berry.

It's not a real choice. It's an apparent choice. Like choosing a brand of 
detergent. Whether you buy Ivory Snow or Tide, they're both owned by 
Proctor & Gamble.

This doesn't mean that one takes a position that is without nuance, that 
the Congress and the BJP, New Labor and the Tories, the Democrats and 
Republicans are the same. Of course, they're not. Neither are Tide and 
Ivory Snow. Tide has oxy-boosting and Ivory Snow is a gentle cleanser.

In India, there is a difference between an overtly fascist party (the BJP) 
and a party that slyly pits one community against another (Congress), and 
sows the seeds of communalism that are then so ably harvested by the BJP.

There are differences in the I.Q.s and levels of ruthlessness between this 
year's U.S. presidential candidates. The anti-war movement in the United 
States has done a phenomenal job of exposing the lies and venality that led 
to the invasion of Iraq, despite the propaganda and intimidation it faced.

This was a service not just to people here, but to the whole world. But 
now, if the anti-war movement openly campaigns for Kerry, the rest of the 
world will think that it approves of his policies of "sensitive" 
imperialism. Is U.S. imperialism preferable if it is supported by the 
United Nations and European countries? Is it preferable if UN asks Indian 
and Pakistani soldiers to do the killing and dying in Iraq instead of U.S. 
soldiers? Is the only change that Iraqis can hope for that French, German, 
and Russian companies will share in the spoils of the occupation of their 
country?

Is this actually better or worse for those of us who live in subject 
nations? Is it better for the world to have a smarter emperor in power or a 
stupider one? Is that our only choice?

I'm sorry, I know that these are uncomfortable, even brutal questions, but 
they must be asked.

The fact is that electoral democracy has become a process of cynical 
manipulation. It offers us a very reduced political space today. To believe 
that this space constitutes real choice would be naïve.

The crisis in modern democracy is a profound one.

On the global stage, beyond the jurisdiction of sovereign governments, 
international instruments of trade and finance oversee a complex system of 
multilateral laws and agreements that have entrenched a system of 
appropriation that puts colonialism to shame. This system allows the 
unrestricted entry and exit of massive amounts of speculative capital - hot 
money - into and out of third world countries, which then effectively 
dictates their economic policy. Using the threat of capital flight as a 
lever, international capital insinuates itself deeper and deeper into these 
economies. Giant transnational corporations are taking control of their 
essential infrastructure and natural resources, their minerals, their 
water, their electricity. The World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the 
International Monetary Fund, and other financial institutions like the 
Asian Development Bank, virtually write economic policy and parliamentary 
legislation. With a deadly combination of arrogance and ruthlessness, they 
take their sledgehammers to fragile, interdependent, historically complex 
societies, and devastate them.

All this goes under the fluttering banner of "reform."

As a consequence of this reform, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, 
thousands of small enterprises and industries have closed down, millions of 
workers and farmers have lost their jobs and land.

The Spectator newspaper in London assures us that "[w]e live in the 
happiest, healthiest and most peaceful era in human history." Billions 
wonder: who's "we"? Where does he live? What's his Christian name?

The thing to understand is that modern democracy is safely premised on an 
almost religious acceptance of the nation state. But corporate 
globalization is not. Liquid capital is not. So, even though capital needs 
the coercive powers of the nation state to put down revolts in the 
servants' quarters, this set up ensures that no individual nation can 
oppose corporate globalization on its own.

Radical change cannot and will not be negotiated by governments; it can 
only be enforced by people. By the public. A public who can link hands 
across national borders.

So when we speak of "Public Power in the Age of Empire," I hope it's not 
presumptuous to assume that the only thing that is worth discussing 
seriously is the power of a dissenting public. A public which disagrees 
with the very concept of empire. A public which has set itself against 
incumbent power - international, national, regional, or provincial 
governments and institutions that support and service empire.

What are the avenues of protest available to people who wish to resist 
empire? By resist I don't mean only to express dissent, but to effectively 
force change. Empire has a range of calling cards. It uses different 
weapons to break open different markets. You know the check book and the 
cruise missile

For poor people in many countries, Empire does not always appear in the 
form of cruise missiles and tanks, as it has in Iraq or Afghanistan or 
Vietnam. It appears in their lives in very local avatars - losing their 
jobs, being sent unpayable electricity bills, having their water supply 
cut, being evicted from their homes and uprooted from their land. All this 
overseen by the repressive machinery of the state, the police, the army, 
the judiciary. It is a process of relentless impoverishment with which the 
poor are historically familiar. What Empire does is to further entrench and 
exacerbate already existing inequalities.

Even until quite recently, it was sometimes difficult for people to see 
themselves as victims of the conquests of Empire. But now local struggles 
have begun to see their role with increasing clarity. However grand it 
might sound, the fact is, they are confronting Empire in their own, very 
different ways. Differently in Iraq, in South Africa, in India, in 
Argentina, and differently, for that matter, on the streets of Europe and 
the United States.

Mass resistance movements, individual activists, journalists, artists, and 
film makers have come together to strip Empire of its sheen. They have 
connected the dots, turned cash-flow charts and boardroom speeches into 
real stories about real people and real despair. They have shown how the 
neo-liberal project has cost people their homes, their land, their jobs, 
their liberty, their dignity. They have made the intangible tangible. The 
once seemingly in-CORP-o-real enemy is now CORP-o-real.

This is a huge victory. It was forged by the coming together of disparate 
political groups, with a variety of strategies. But they all recognized 
that the target of their anger, their activism, and their doggedness is the 
same. This was the beginning of real globalization. The globalization of 
dissent.

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of mass resistance movements in third 
world countries today. The landless peoples' movement in Brazil, the 
anti-dam movement in India, the Zapatistas in Mexico, the 
Anti-Privatization Forum in South Africa, and hundreds of others, are 
fighting their own sovereign governments, which have become agents of the 
neo-liberal project. Most of these are radical struggles, fighting to 
change the structure and chosen model of "development" of their own societies.

Then there are those fighting formal and brutal neocolonial occupations in 
contested territories whose boundaries and fault lines were often 
arbitrarily drawn last century by the imperialist powers. In Palestine, 
Tibet, Chechnya, Kashmir, and several states in India's northeast 
provinces, people are waging struggles for self-determination.

Several of these struggles might have been radical, even revolutionary when 
they began, but often the brutality of the repression they face pushes them 
into conservative, even retrogressive spaces in which they use the same 
violent strategies and the same language of religious and cultural 
nationalism used by the states they seek to replace.

Many of the foot soldiers in these struggles will find, like those who 
fought apartheid in South Africa, that once they overcome overt occupation, 
they will be left with another battle on their hands - a battle against 
covert economic colonialism.

Meanwhile, as the rift between rich and poor is being driven deeper and the 
battle to control the world's resources intensifies. Economic colonialism 
through formal military aggression is staging a comeback.

Iraq today is a tragic illustration of this process. An illegal invasion. A 
brutal occupation in the name of liberation. The rewriting of laws that 
allow the shameless appropriation of the country's wealth and resources by 
corporations allied to the occupation, and now the charade of a local 
"Iraqi government."

For these reasons, it is absurd to condemn the resistance to the U.S. 
occupation in Iraq, as being masterminded by terrorists or insurgents or 
supporters of Saddam Hussein. After all if the United States were invaded 
and occupied, would everybody who fought to liberate it be a terrorist or 
an insurgent or a Bushite?

The Iraqi resistance is fighting on the frontlines of the battle against 
Empire. And therefore that battle is our battle.

Like most resistance movements, it combines a motley range of assorted 
factions. Former Baathists, liberals, Islamists, fed-up collaborationists, 
communists, etc. Of course, it is riddled with opportunism, local rivalry, 
demagoguery, and criminality. But if we are only going to support pristine 
movements, then no resistance will be worthy of our purity.

This is not to say that we shouldn't ever criticize resistance movements. 
Many of them suffer from a lack of democracy, from the iconization of their 
"leaders," a lack of transparency, a lack of vision and direction. But most 
of all they suffer from vilification, repression, and lack of resources.

Before we prescribe how a pristine Iraqi resistance must conduct their 
secular, feminist, democratic, nonviolent battle, we should shore up our 
end of the resistance by forcing the U.S. and its allies government to 
withdraw from Iraq.

The first militant confrontation in the United States between the global 
justice movement and the neo-liberal junta took place famously at the WTO 
conference in Seattle in December 1999. To many mass movements in 
developing countries that had long been fighting lonely, isolated battles, 
Seattle was the first delightful sign that their anger and their vision of 
another kind of world was shared by people in the imperialist countries.

In January 2001, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 20,000 activists, students, film 
makers - some of the best minds in the world - came together to share their 
experiences and exchange ideas about confronting Empire. That was the birth 
of the now historic World Social Forum. It was the first, formal coming 
together of an exciting, anarchic, unindoctrinated, energetic, new kind of 
"Public Power." The rallying cry of the WSF is "Another World is Possible." 
It has become a platform where hundreds of conversations, debates, and 
seminars have helped to hone and refine a vision of what kind of world it 
should be.

By January 2004, when the fourth WSF was held in Mumbai, India, it 
attracted 200,000 delegates. I have never been part of a more electrifying 
gathering. It was a sign of the social forum's success that the mainstream 
media in India ignored it completely. But now, the WSF is threatened by its 
own success. The safe, open, festive atmosphere of the forum has allowed 
politicians and nongovernmental organizations that are imbricated in the 
political and economic systems that the forum opposes to participate and 
make themselves heard.

Another danger is that the WSF, which has played such a vital role in the 
movement for global justice, runs the risk of becoming an end unto itself. 
Just organizing it every year consumes the energies of some of the best 
activists. If conversations about resistance replace real civil 
disobedience, then the WSF could become an asset to those whom it was 
created to oppose. The forum must be held and must grow, but we have to 
find ways to channel our conversations there back into concrete action.

As resistance movements have begun to reach out across national borders and 
pose a real threat, governments have developed their own strategies of how 
to deal with them. They range from cooptation to repression.

I'm going to speak about three of the contemporary dangers that confront 
resistance movements: the difficult meeting point between mass movements 
and the mass media, the hazards of the NGO-ization of resistance, and the 
confrontation between resistance movements and increasingly repressive states.

The place in which the mass media meets mass movements is a complicated one.

Governments have learned that a crisis-driven media cannot afford to hang 
about in the same place for too long. Like business houses need a cash 
turnover, the media need crises turnover. Whole countries become old news. 
They cease to exist, and the darkness becomes deeper than before the light 
was briefly shone on them. We saw it happen in Afghanistan when the Soviets 
withdrew. And now, after Operation Enduring Freedom put the CIA's Hamid 
Karzai in place, Afghanistan has been thrown to its warlords once more.

Another CIA operative, Iyad Allawi, has been installed in Iraq, so perhaps 
it's time for the media to move on from there, too.

While governments hone the art of waiting out crisis, resistance movements 
are increasingly being ensnared in a vortex of crisis production, seeking 
to find ways of manufacturing them in easily consumable, spectator-friendly 
formats.

Every self-respecting peoples' movement, every "issue" is expected to have 
its own hot air balloon in the sky advertising its brand and purpose.

For this reason, starvation deaths are more effective advertisements for 
impoverishment than millions of malnourished people, who don't quite make 
the cut. Dams are not newsworthy until the devastation they wreak makes 
good television. (And by then, it's too late).

Standing in the rising water of a reservoir for days on end, watching your 
home and belongings float away to protest against a big dam used to be an 
effective strategy, but isn't any more. The media is dead bored of that 
one. So the hundreds of thousands of people being displaced by dams are 
expected to either conjure new tricks or give up the struggle.

Colorful demonstrations and weekend marches are vital but alone are not 
powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when soldiers 
refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and 
aircrafts, when people boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are 
strung across the globe.

If we want to reclaim the space for civil disobedience, we will have to 
liberate ourselves from the tyranny of crisis reportage and its fear of the 
mundane. We have to use our experience, our imagination, and our art to 
interrogate the instruments of that state that ensure that "normality" 
remains what it is: cruel, unjust, unacceptable. We have to expose the 
policies and processes that make ordinary things - food, water, shelter and 
dignity - such a distant dream for ordinary people. Real pre-emptive strike 
is to understand that wars are the end result of flawed and unjust peace.

As far as mass resistance movements are concerned, the fact is that no 
amount of media coverage can make up for mass strength on the ground. There 
is no option, really, to old-fashioned, back-breaking political mobilization.

Corporate globalization has increased the distance between those who make 
decisions and those who have to suffer the effects of those decisions. 
Forums like the WSF enable local resistance movements to reduce that 
distance and to link up with their counterparts in rich countries. That 
alliance is an important and formidable one. For example, when India's 
first private dam, the Maheshwar Dam, was being built, alliances between 
the Narmada Bachao Andolan (the NBA), the German organization Urgewald, the 
Berne Declaration in Switzerland, and the International Rivers Network in 
Berkeley worked together to push a series of international banks and 
corporations out of the project. This would not have been possible had 
there not been a rock solid resistance movement on the ground. The voice of 
that local movement was amplified by supporters on the global stage, 
embarrassing and forcing investors to withdraw.

An infinite number of similar, alliances, targeting specific projects and 
specific corporations would help to make another world possible. We should 
begin with the corporations who did business with Saddam Hussein and now 
profit from the devastation and occupation of Iraq.

A second hazard facing mass movements is the NGO-ization of resistance. It 
will be easy to twist what I'm about to say into an indictment of all NGOs. 
That would be a falsehood. In the murky waters of fake NGOs set up or to 
siphon off grant money or as tax dodges (in states like Bihar, they are 
given as dowry), of course there are NGOs doing valuable work. But it's 
important to consider the NGO phenomenon in a broader political context.

In India, for instance, the funded NGO boom began in the late 1980s and 
1990s. It coincided with the opening of India's markets to neo-liberalism. 
At the time, the Indian state, in keeping with the requirements of 
structural adjustment, was withdrawing funding from rural development, 
agriculture, energy, transport, and public health. As the state abdicated 
its traditional role, NGOs moved in to work in these very areas. The 
difference, of course, is that the funds available to them are a minuscule 
fraction of the actual cut in public spending. Most large funded NGOs are 
financed and patronized by aid and development agencies, which are in turn 
funded by Western governments, the World Bank, the UN, and some 
multinational corporations. Though they may not be the very same agencies, 
they are certainly part of the same loose, political formation that 
oversees the neo-liberal project and demands the slash in government 
spending in the first place.

Why should these agencies fund NGOs? Could it be just old-fashioned 
missionary zeal? Guilt? It's a little more than that. NGOs give the 
impression that they are filling the vacuum created by a retreating state. 
And they are, but in a materially inconsequential way. Their real 
contribution is that they defuse political anger and dole out as aid or 
benevolence what people ought to have by right.

They alter the public psyche. They turn people into dependent victims and 
blunt the edges of political resistance. NGOs form a sort of buffer between 
the sarkar and public. Between Empire and its subjects. They have become 
the arbitrators, the interpreters, the facilitators.

In the long run, NGOs are accountable to their funders, not to the people 
they work among. They're what botanists would call an indicator species. 
It's almost as though the greater the devastation caused by neo-liberalism, 
the greater the outbreak of NGOs. Nothing illustrates this more poignantly 
than the phenomenon of the U.S. preparing to invade a country and 
simultaneously readying NGOs to go in and clean up the devastation.

In order make sure their funding is not jeopardized and that the 
governments of the countries they work in will allow them to function, NGOs 
have to present their work in a shallow framework more or less shorn of a 
political or historical context. At any rate, an inconvenient historical or 
political context.

Apolitical (and therefore, actually, extremely political) distress reports 
from poor countries and war zones eventually make the (dark) people of 
those (dark) countries seem like pathological victims. Another malnourished 
Indian, another starving Ethiopian, another Afghan refugee camp, another 
maimed Sudanese . . . in need of the white man's help. They unwittingly 
reinforce racist stereotypes and re-affirm the achievements, the comforts, 
and the compassion (the tough love) of Western civilization. They're the 
secular missionaries of the modern world.

Eventually - on a smaller scale but more insidiously - the capital 
available to NGOs plays the same role in alternative politics as the 
speculative capital that flows in and out of the economies of poor 
countries. It begins to dictate the agenda. It turns confrontation into 
negotiation. It depoliticizes resistance. It interferes with local peoples' 
movements that have traditionally been self-reliant. NGOs have funds that 
can employ local people who might otherwise be activists in resistance 
movements, but now can feel they are doing some immediate, creative good 
(and earning a living while they're at it). Real political resistance 
offers no such short cuts.

The NGO-ization of politics threatens to turn resistance into a 
well-mannered, reasonable, salaried, 9-to-5 job. With a few perks thrown 
in. Real resistance has real consequences. And no salary.

This brings us to a third danger I want to speak about tonight: the deadly 
nature of the actual confrontation between resistance movements and 
increasingly repressive states. Between public power and the agents of Empire.

Whenever civil resistance has shown the slightest signs of evolving from 
symbolic action into anything remotely threatening, the crack down is 
merciless. We've seen what happened in the demonstrations in Seattle, in 
Miami, in Göthenberg, in Genoa.

In the United States, you have the USA PATRIOT Act, which has become a 
blueprint for antiterrorism laws passed by governments across the world. 
Freedoms are being curbed in the name of protecting freedom. And once we 
surrender our freedoms, to win them back will take a revolution.

Some governments have vast experience in the business of curbing freedoms 
and still smelling sweet. The government of India, an old hand at the game, 
lights the path.

Over the years the Indian government has passed a plethora of laws that 
allow it to call almost anyone a terrorist, an insurgent, a militant. We 
have the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, the Public Security Act, the 
Special Areas Security Act, the Gangster Act, the Terrorist and Disruptive 
Areas Act (which has formally lapsed but under which people are still 
facing trial), and, most recently, POTA (the Prevention of Terrorism Act), 
the broad-spectrum antibiotic for the disease of dissent.

There are other steps that are being taken, such as court judgments that in 
effect curtail free speech, the right of government workers to go on 
strike, the right to life and livelihood. Courts have begun to micro-manage 
our lives in India. And criticizing the courts is a criminal offense.

But coming back to the counter-terrorism initiatives, over the last decade, 
the number of people who have been killed by the police and security forces 
runs into the tens of thousands. In the state of Andhra Pradesh (the pin-up 
girl of corporate globalization in India), an average of about 200 
"extremists" are killed in what are called "encounters" every year. The 
Bombay police boast of how many "gangsters" they have killed in "shoot 
outs." In Kashmir, in a situation that almost amounts to war, an estimated 
80,000 people have been killed since 1989. Thousands have simply 
"disappeared." In the northeastern provinces, the situation is similar.

In recent years, the Indian police have opened fire on unarmed people, 
mostly Dalit and Adivasi. Their preferred method is to kill them and then 
call them terrorists. India is not alone, though. We have seen similar 
thing happen in countries such Bolivia, Chile, and South Africa. In the era 
of neo-liberalism, poverty is a crime and protesting against it is more and 
more being defined as terrorism.

In India, POTA (the Prevention of Terrorism Act) is often called the 
Production of Terrorism Act. It's a versatile, hold-all law that could 
apply to anyone from an al-Qaeda operative to a disgruntled bus conductor. 
As with all anti-terrorism laws, the genius of POTA is that it can be 
whatever the government wants. After the 2002 state-assisted pogrom in 
Gujarat, in which an estimated 2,000 Muslims were savagely killed by Hindu 
mobs and 150,000 driven from their homes, 287 people have been accused 
under POTA. Of these, 286 are Muslim and one is a Sikh.

POTA allows confessions extracted in police custody to be admitted as 
judicial evidence. In effect, torture tends to replace investigation. The 
South Asia Human Rights Documentation Center reports that India has the 
highest number of torture and custodial deaths in the world. Government 
records show that there were 1,307 deaths in judicial custody in 2002 alone.

A few months ago, I was a member of a peoples' tribunal on POTA. Over a 
period of two days, we listened to harrowing testimonies of what is 
happening in our wonderful democracy. It's everything - from people being 
forced to drink urine, to being stripped, humiliated, given electric 
shocks, burned with cigarette butts, having iron rods put up their anuses, 
to being beaten and kicked to death.

The new government has promised to repeal POTA. I'd be surprised if that 
happens before similar legislation under a different name is put in place. 
If its not POTA it'll be MOTA or something.

When every avenue of non-violent dissent is closed down, and everyone who 
protests against the violation of their human rights is called a terrorist, 
should we really be surprised if vast parts of the country are overrun by 
those who believe in armed struggle and are more or less beyond the control 
of the state: in Kashmir, the north eastern provinces, large parts of 
Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Andhra Pradesh. Ordinary people 
in these regions are trapped between the violence of the militants and the 
state.

In Kashmir, the Indian army estimates that 3,000 to 4,000 militants are 
operating at any given time. To control them, the Indian government deploys 
about 500,000 soldiers. Clearly, it isn't just the militants the army seeks 
to control, but a whole population of humiliated, unhappy people who see 
the Indian army as an occupation force.

The Armed Forces Special Powers Act allows not just officers, but even 
junior commissioned officers and non-commissioned officers of the army, to 
use force and even kill any person on suspicion of disturbing public order. 
It was first imposed on a few districts in the state of Manipur in 1958. 
Today, it applies to virtually all of the north east and Kashmir. The 
documentation of instances of torture, disappearances, custodial deaths, 
rape, and summary execution by security forces is enough to turn your stomach.

In Andhra Pradesh, in India's heartland, the militant Marxist-Leninist 
Peoples' War Group - which for years been engaged in a violent armed 
struggle and has been the principal target of many of the Andhra police's 
fake "encounters" - held its first public meeting in years on July 28, 
2004, in the town of Warangal.

It was attended by about hundreds of thousands of people. Under POTA, all 
of them are considered terrorists. Are they all going to be detained in 
some Indian equivalent of Guantánamo Bay?

The whole of the north east and the Kashmir valley is in ferment. What will 
the government do with these millions of people?

There is no discussion taking place in the world today that is more crucial 
than the debate about strategies of resistance. And the choice of strategy 
is not entirely in the hands of the public. It is also in the hands of sarkar.

After all, when the U.S. invades and occupies Iraq in the way it has done, 
with such overwhelming military force, can the resistance be expected to be 
a conventional military one? (Of course, even if it were conventional, it 
would still be called terrorist.) In a strange sense, the U.S. government's 
arsenal of weapons and unrivalled air and fire power makes terrorism an 
all-but-inescapable response. What people lack in wealth and power, they 
will make up with stealth and strategy.

In this restive, despairing time, if governments do not do all they can to 
honor nonviolent resistance, then by default they privilege those who turn 
to violence. No government's condemnation of terrorism is credible if it 
cannot show itself to be open to change by to nonviolent dissent.

But instead nonviolent resistance movements are being crushed. Any kind of 
mass political mobilization or organization is being bought off, or broken, 
or simply ignored.

Meanwhile, governments and the corporate media, and let's not forget the 
film industry, lavish their time, attention, technology, research, and 
admiration on war and terrorism. Violence has been deified.

The message this sends is disturbing and dangerous: If you seek to air a 
public grievance, violence is more effective than nonviolence.

As the rift between the rich and poor grows, as the need to appropriate and 
control the world's resources to feed the great capitalist machine becomes 
more urgent, the unrest will only escalate.

For those of us who are on the wrong side of Empire, the humiliation is 
becoming unbearable.

Each of the Iraqi children killed by the United States was our child. Each 
of the prisoners tortured in Abu Ghraib was our comrade. Each of their 
screams was ours. When they were humiliated, we were humiliated. The U.S. 
soldiers fighting in Iraq - mostly volunteers in a poverty draft from small 
towns and poor urban neighborhoods - are victims just as much as the Iraqis 
of the same horrendous process, which asks them to die for a victory that 
will never be theirs.

The mandarins of the corporate world, the CEOs, the bankers, the 
politicians, the judges and generals look down on us from on high and shake 
their heads sternly. "There's no Alternative," they say. And let slip the 
dogs of war.

Then, from the ruins of Afghanistan, from the rubble of Iraq and Chechnya, 
from the streets of occupied Palestine and the mountains of Kashmir, from 
the hills and plains of Colombia and the forests of Andhra Pradesh and 
Assam comes the chilling reply: "There's no alternative but terrorism." 
Terrorism. Armed struggle. Insurgency. Call it what you want.

Terrorism is vicious, ugly, and dehumanizing for its perpetrators, as well 
as its victims. But so is war. You could say that terrorism is the 
privatization of war. Terrorists are the free marketers of war. They are 
people who don't believe that the state has a monopoly on the legitimate 
use of violence.

Human society is journeying to a terrible place.

Of course, there is an alternative to terrorism. It's called justice.

It's time to recognize that no amount of nuclear weapons or full-spectrum 
dominance or daisy cutters or spurious governing councils and loya jirgas 
can buy peace at the cost of justice.

The urge for hegemony and preponderance by some will be matched with 
greater intensity by the longing for dignity and justice by others.


The Freedom Archives
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