Do turkeys enjoy thanksgiving?

Human Quest, Mar/Apr 2004

Viewpoint from India

Introduction to Arundahti Roy

In liberal or progressive journals in recent years some very pointed and intelligent criticism of American economic and foreign policy has been written under the name Arundahti Roy. How did this still relatively young woman, a citizen of India, come to be one of our sharpest critics? She began as an activist against what she calls Big Dams, the merciless development which dislocated millions of Indians in pursuit of more electric power and other economic advantages to the ruling elites of India. Her novel, The God of Small Things, dramatized this brilliantly and won the prestigious British Booker Prize for literature in 1977. She has since observed and written about the even larger dislocation of people and the distortion of power in what she calls Corporate Globalization or The Corporate Cartel.

Following is her address to delegates from around the world to the World Social Forum in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) India on Jan. 16, 2004 By Arundhati Roy

A year ago January, thousands of us from across the world gathered in Porto Allegre in Brazil and declared - reiterated - that "Another World is Possible". A few thousand miles north, in Washington, George W. Bush and his aides were thinking the same thing.

Our project was the World Social Forum. Theirs...to further what many call The Project for the New American Century. [See pg. 5 of Jan-Feb The Human Quest.]

In the great cities of Europe and America, where a few years ago these things would only have been whispered, now people are openly talking about the good side of Imperialism and the need for a strong Empire to police an unruly world.

The new missionaries want order at the cost of justice. Discipline at the cost of dignity. And ascendancy at any price. Occasionally some of us are invited to "debate" the issue on "neutral" platforms provided by the corporate media. Debating Imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it?

In any case, New Imperialism is already upon us. It's a remodelled, streamlined version of what we once knew. For the first time in history, a single Empire with an arsenal of weapons that could obliterate the world in an afternoon has complete, unipolar, economic and military hegemony. It uses different weapons to break open different markets.

There isn't a country on God's earth that is not caught in the cross hairs of the American cruise missile and the IMF chequebook. Argentina's the model if you want to be the poster-boy of neo-liberal capitalism, Iraq if you're the black sheep.

Poor countries that are geo-politically of strategic value to Empire, or have a "market" of any size, or infrastructure that can be privatized, or, God forbid, natural resources of value- oil, gold, diamonds, cobalt, coal -must do as they're told, or become military targets.

Those with the greatest reserves of natural wealth are most at risk. Unless they surrender their resources willingly to the corporate machine, civil unrest will be fomented, or war will be waged. In this new age of Empire, when nothing is as it appears to be, executives of concerned companies are allowed to influence foreign policy decisions.

The Centre for Public Integrity in Washington found that nine out of the 30 members of the Defence Policy Board of the U.S. Government were connected to companies that were awarded defence contracts for $76 billion between 2001 and 2002.

George Shultz, U.S. secretary of State under the first George Bush, was Chairman of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. he is also on the board of directors of the Bechtel Group. When asked about a conflict of interest, in the case of a war in Iraq 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. But nobody looks at it as something you benefit from."

After the war, Bechtel signed a $680 million contract for reconstruction in Iraq.

This brutal blueprint has been used over and over again, across Latin America, Africa, Central and Southeast Asia. It has cost millions of lives. It goes without saying that every war Empire wages becomes a just War. This, in large part, is due to the role of the corporate media.

It's important to understand that the corporate media doesn't just support the neo-liberal project. It is the neo-liberal project. This is not a moral position it has chosen to take, it's structural. It's intrinsic to the economics of how the mass media works.

Most nations have adequately hideous family secrets. So it isn't often necessary for the media to lie. It's what's emphasised and what's ignored. Say for example India was chosen as the target for a righteous war.

The fact that about 80,000 people have been killed in Kashmir since 1989, most of them Muslim, most of them by Indian security Forces (making the average death toll about 6,000 a year); the fact that a year ago, in March of 2003, more than 2,000 Muslims were murdered on the streets of Gujarat, that women were gang-raped and children were burned alive and 150,000 people driven from their homes while the police and administration watched, and sometimes actively participated; the fact that no one has been punished for these crimes and the government that oversaw them was re-elected-all of this would make perfect headlines in international newspapers in the run-up to war.