Come September by Arundhati Roy

Come September by Arundhati Roy (Sept 18, 02)

Quite often these days, I find myself being described as a "social
activist." Those who agree with my views, call me "courageous." Those who
don't, call me all kinds of rude names which I won't repeat. I am not a
social activist, neither am I particularly courageous.... So please do not
underestimate the trepidation with which I stand here to say what I must
say.

Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I'm beginning to
believe that vanity makes them think so. That it's actually the other way
around.

Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The
public narrative, the private narrative - they colonise us. They commission
us. They insist on being told. Fiction and non-fiction are only different
techniques of storytelling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction
dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I
wake up to every morning.

The theme of much of what I write, fiction as well as non-fiction, is the
relationship between power and powerlessness and the endless, circular
conflict they're engaged in. John Berger, that most wonderful writer, once
wrote: Never again will a single story be told as though it's the only one.
There can never be a single story. There are only ways of seeing. So, when I
tell a story, I tell it not as an ideologue who wants to pit one absolutist
ideology against another, but as a storyteller who wants to share her way of
seeing. Though it might appear otherwise, my writing is not really about
nations and histories, it's about power. About the paranoia and ruthlessness
of power. About the physics of power. I believe that the accumulation of
vast unfettered power by a state or a country, a corporation or an
institution - or even an individual, a spouse, friend or sibling -
regardless of ideology, results in excesses such as the ones I will recount
here.

Living as I do, as millions of us do, in the shadow of the nuclear holocaust
that the governments of India and Pakistan keep promising their brain-washed
citizenry, and in the global neighbourhood of the War Against Terror (what
President Bush rather biblically calls 'The Task That Never Ends'), I find
myself thinking a great deal about the relationship between Citizens and the
State.

In India, those of us who have expressed views on Nuclear Bombs, Big Dams,
Corporate Globalisation and the rising threat of communal Hindu fascism -
views that are at variance with the Indian Government's - are branded
'anti-national'. While this accusation does not fill me with indignation,
it's not an accurate description of what I do or how I think. An
'anti-national' is a person who is against his/her own nation and, by
inference, is pro some other one. But it isn't necessary to be
'anti-national' to be deeply suspicious of all nationalism, to be
anti-nationalism. Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most
of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of coloured cloth
that governments use first to shrink-wrap peoples' minds and then as
ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. When independent, thinking people (and
here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when
writers, painters, musicians, film-makers suspend their judgment and blindly
yoke their art to the service of the 'Nation', it's time for all of us to
sit up and worry. In India we saw it happen soon after the Nuclear tests in
1998 and during the Kargil War against Pakistan in 1999. In the United
States we saw it during the Gulf War and we see it now, during the 'War
against Terror'. That blizzard of Made-in-China American flags.

Recently, those who have criticised the actions of the U.S. Government
(myself included) have been called 'anti-American'. Anti-Americanism is in
the process of being consecrated into an ideology.

The term 'anti-American' is usually used by the American establishment to
discredit and, not falsely - but shall we say inaccurately - define its
critics. Once someone is branded anti-American, the chances are that he or
she will be judged before they're heard and the argument will be lost in the
welter of bruised national pride.

What does the term 'anti-American' mean? Does it mean you're anti-jazz? Or
that you're opposed to free speech? That you don't delight in Toni Morrison
or John Updike? That you have a quarrel with giant Sequoias? Does it mean
you don't admire the hundreds of thousands of American citizens who marched
against nuclear weapons, or the thousands of war resisters who forced their
government to withdraw from Vietnam? Does it mean that you hate all
Americans?

This sly conflation of America's culture, music, literature, the
breathtaking physical beauty of the land, the ordinary pleasures of ordinary
people with criticism of the U.S. Government's foreign policy (about which,
thanks to America's "free press," sadly most Americans know very little) is
a deliberate and extremely effective strategy. It's like a retreating army
taking cover in a heavily populated city, hoping that the prospect of
hitting civilian targets will deter enemy fire.

There are many Americans who would be mortified to be associated with their
government's policies. The most scholarly, scathing, incisive, hilarious
critiques of the hypocrisy and the contradictions in U.S. Government policy
come from American citizens. When the rest of the world wants to know what
the U.S. Government is up to, we turn to Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Howard
Zinn, Ed Herman, Amy Goodman, Michael Albert, Chalmers Johnson, William Blum
and Anthony Arnove to tell us what's really going on.

Similarly, in India, not hundreds, but millions of us would be ashamed and
offended if we were in any way implicated with the present Indian
Government's fascist policies, which, apart from the perpetration of state
terrorism in the Valley of Kashmir (in the name of fighting terrorism), have
also turned a blind eye to the recent state-supervised pogrom against
Muslims in Gujarat. It would be absurd to think that those who criticise the
Indian Government are 'anti-Indian' - although the Government itself never
hesitates to take that line. It is dangerous to cede to the Indian
Government or the American Government or anyone for that matter, the right
to define what 'India' or 'America' are, or ought to be.

To call someone 'anti-American', indeed, to be anti-American, (or for that
matter anti-Indian, or anti-Timbuktuan) is not just racist, it's a failure
of the imagination. An inability to see the world in terms other than those
that the establishment has set out for you: If you're not a Bushie you're a
Taliban. If you don't love us, you hate us. If you're not Good you're Evil.
If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists.

Last year, like many others, I too made the mistake of scoffing at this
post-September 11th rhetoric, dismissing it as foolish and arrogant. I've
realised that it's not foolish at all. It's actually a canny recruitment
drive for a misconceived, dangerous war. Every day I'm taken aback at how
many people believe that opposing the war in Afghanistan amounts to
supporting terrorism, or voting for the Taliban. Now that the initial aim of
the war - capturing Osama Bin Laden (dead or alive) - seems to have run into
bad weather, the goal posts have been moved. It's being made out that the
whole point of the war was to topple the Taliban regime and liberate Afghan
women from their burqas. We're being asked to believe that the U.S. marines
are actually on a feminist mission. (If so, will their next stop be
America's military ally Saudi Arabia?) Think of it this way: In India there
are some pretty reprehensible social practices, against 'untouchables',
against Christians and Muslims, against women. Pakistan and Bangladesh have
even worse ways of dealing with minority communities and women. Should they
be bombed? Should Delhi, Islamabad, and Dhaka be destroyed? Is it possible
to bomb bigotry out of India? Can we bomb our way to a feminist paradise? Is
that how women won the vote in the U.S.? Or how slavery was abolished? Can
we win redress for the genocide of the millions of Native Americans upon
whose corpses the United States was founded by bombing Santa Fe?

None of us need anniversaries to remind us of what we cannot forget. So it
is no more than coincidence that I happen to be here, on American soil, in
September - this month of dreadful anniversaries. Uppermost on everybody's
mind of course, particularly here in America, is the horror of what has come
to be known as Nine Eleven. Nearly three thousand civilians lost their lives
in that lethal terrorist strike. The grief is still deep. The rage still
sharp. The tears have not dried. And a strange, deadly war is raging around
the world. Yet, each person who has lost a loved one surely knows secretly,
deeply, that no war, no act of revenge, no daisy-cutters dropped on someone
else's loved ones or someone else's children will blunt the edges of their
pain or bring their own loved ones back. War cannot avenge those who have
died. War is only a brutal desecration of their memory.

To fuel yet another war - this time against Iraq - by cynically manipulating
people's grief, by packaging it for TV specials sponsored by corporations
selling detergent or running shoes, is to cheapen and devalue grief, to
drain it of meaning. What we are seeing now is a vulgar display of the
business of grief, the commerce of grief, the pillaging of even the most
private human feelings for political purpose. It is a terrible, violent
thing for a state to do to its people.

It's not a clever-enough subject to speak of from a public platform, but
what I would really love to talk to you about is Loss. Loss and losing.
Grief, failure, brokenness, numbness, uncertainty, fear, the death of
feeling, the death of dreaming. The absolute, relentless, endless, habitual
unfairness of the world. What does loss mean to individuals? What does it
mean to whole cultures, whole peoples who have learned to live with it as a
constant companion?

Since it is September 11th that we're talking about, perhaps it's in the
fitness of things that we remember what that date means, not only to those
who lost their loved ones in America last year, but to those in other parts
of the world to whom that date has long held significance. This historical
dredging is not offered as an accusation or a provocation. But just to share
the grief of history. To thin the mist a little. To say to the citizens of
America, in the gentlest, most human way: Welcome to the World.

Twenty-nine years ago, in Chile, on the 11th of September 1973, General
Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende
in a CIA-backed coup. "Chile shouldn't be allowed to go Marxist just because
its people are irresponsible," said Henry Kissinger, Nobel Peace Laureate,
then the U.S. Secretary of State.

After the coup President Allende was found dead inside the presidential
palace. Whether he was killed or whether he killed himself, we'll never
know. In the regime of terror that ensued, thousands of people were killed.
Many more simply 'disappeared'. Firing squads conducted public executions.
Concentration camps and torture chambers were opened across the country. The
dead were buried in mine shafts and unmarked graves. For seventeen years,
the people of Chile lived in dread of the midnight knock, of routine
'disappearances', of sudden arrest and torture. Chileans tell the story of
how the musician Victor Jara had his hands cut off in front of a crowd in
the Santiago stadium. Before they shot him, Pinochet's soldiers threw his
guitar at him and mockingly ordered him to play.

In 1999, following the arrest of General Pinochet in Britain, thousands of
secret documents were declassified by the U.S. Government. They contain
unequivocal evidence of the CIA's involvement in the coup as well as the
fact that the U.S. Government had detailed information about the situation
in Chile during General Pinochet's reign. Yet Kissinger assured the general
of his support: "In the United States as you know, we are sympathetic to
what you are trying to do," he said, "we wish your government well."

Those of us who have only ever known life in a democracy, however flawed,
would find it hard to imagine what living in a dictatorship and enduring the
absolute loss of freedom really means. It isn't just those who Pinochet
murdered, but the lives he stole from the living that must be accounted for
too.

Sadly, Chile was not the only country in South America to be singled out for
the U.S. Government's attentions. Guatemala, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Brazil,
Peru, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, El
Salvador, Peru, Mexico and Colombia - they've all been the playground for
covert - and overt - operations by the CIA. Hundreds of thousands of Latin
Americans have been killed, tortured or have simply disappeared under the
despotic regimes and tin-pot dictators, drug runners and arms dealers that
were propped up in their countries. (Many of them learned their craft in the
infamous U.S. Government-funded School of Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia,
which has produced 60,000 graduates.) If this were not humiliation enough,
the people of South America have had to bear the cross of being branded as a
people who are incapable of democracy - as if coups and massacres are
somehow encrypted in their genes.

This list does not of course include countries in Africa or Asia that
suffered U.S. military interventions - Vietnam, Korea, Indonesia, Laos, and
Cambodia. For how many Septembers for decades together have millions of
Asian people been bombed, burned, and slaughtered? How many Septembers have
gone by since August 1945, when hundreds of thousands of ordinary Japanese
people were obliterated by the nuclear strikes in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
For how many Septembers have the thousands who had the misfortune of
surviving those strikes endured the living hell that was visited on them,
their unborn children, their children's children, on the earth, the sky, the
wind, the water, and all the creatures that swim and walk and crawl and fly?
Not far from here, in Albuquerque, is the National Atomic Museum where Fat
Man and Little Boy (the affectionate nicknames for the bombs that were
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) were available as souvenir earrings.
Funky young people wore them. A massacre dangling in each ear. But I am
straying from my theme. It's September that we're talking about, not August.

September 11th has a tragic resonance in the Middle East (West Asia) too. On
the 11th of September 1922, ignoring Arab outrage, the British Government
proclaimed a mandate in Palestine, a follow up to the 1917 Balfour
Declaration, which Imperial Britain issued, with its army massed outside the
gates of the city of Gaza. The Balfour Declaration promised European
Zionists a national home for Jewish people. (At the time, the Empire on
which the Sun Never Set was free to snatch and bequeath national homes like
the school bully distributes marbles.) Two years after the declaration, Lord
Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary said, "In Palestine we do not propose
to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants
of the country. Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in
age-old traditions, in present needs, in future hopes of far profounder
import than the desires or prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit
this ancient land."

How carelessly imperial power decreed whose needs were profound and whose
were not. How carelessly it vivisected ancient civilisations. Palestine and
Kashmir are Imperial Britain's festering, blood-drenched gifts to the modern
world. Both are fault-lines in the raging international conflicts of today.

In 1937, Winston Churchill said of the Palestinians: "I do not agree that
the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may
have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not
admit for instance that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of
America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has
been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade
race, a more worldly-wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken
their place." That set the trend for the Israeli state's attitude towards
Palestinians. In 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said, "Palestinians
do not exist." Her successor, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol said, "What are
Palestinians? When I came here [to Palestine] there were 250,000 non-Jews,
mainly Arabs and Bedouins. It was desert, more than underdeveloped.
Nothing." Prime Minister Menachem Begin called Palestinians "two-legged
beasts". Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir called them "grasshoppers" who could
be crushed. This is the language of Heads of State, not the words of
ordinary people.

In 1947, the United Nations formally partitioned Palestine and allotted 55
per cent of Palestine's land to the Zionists. Within a year they had
captured 76 per cent. On the 14th of May 1948 the state of Israel was
declared. Minutes after the declaration, the U.S. recognised Israel. The
West Bank was annexed by Jordan. The Gaza Strip came under Egyptian military
control. Formally, Palestine ceased to exist except in the minds and hearts
of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people who became refugees.

In the summer of 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Settlers were offered state subsidies and development aid to move into the
occupied territories. Almost every day more Palestinian families are forced
off their lands and driven into refugee camps. Palestinians who continue to
live in Israel do not have the same rights as Israelis and live as second
class citizens in their former homeland.

Over the decades, there have been uprisings, wars, intifadas. Tens of
thousands have lost their lives. Accords and treaties have been signed.
Ceasefires declared and violated. But the bloodshed doesn't end. Palestine
still remains illegally occupied. Its people live in inhuman conditions, in
virtual Bantustans, where they are subjected to collective punishments,
twenty-four hour curfews, where they are humiliated and brutalised on a
daily basis. They never know when their homes will be demolished, when their
children will be shot, when their precious trees will be cut, when their
roads will be closed, when they will be allowed to walk down to the market
to buy food and medicine. And when they will not. They live with no
semblance of dignity. With not much hope in sight. They have no control over
their lands, their security, their movement, their communication, their
water supply. So when accords are signed and words like 'autonomy' and even
'statehood' are bandied about, it's always worth asking: What sort of
autonomy? What sort of state? What sort of rights will its citizens have?

Young Palestinians who cannot contain their anger turn themselves into human
bombs and haunt Israel's streets and public places, blowing themselves up,
killing ordinary people, injecting terror into daily life, and eventually
hardening both societies' suspicion and mutual hatred of each other. Each
bombing invites merciless reprisals and even more hardship on Palestinian
people. But then suicide bombing is an act of individual despair, not a
revolutionary tactic. Although Palestinian attacks strike terror into
Israeli civilians, they provide the perfect cover for the Israeli
Government's daily incursions into Palestinian territory, the perfect excuse
for old-fashioned, nineteenth-century colonialism, dressed up as a
new-fashioned, twenty-first century "war."

Israel's staunchest political and military ally is and always has been the
U.S. Government. The U.S. Government has blocked, along with Israel, almost
every U.N. resolution that sought a peaceful, equitable solution to the
conflict. It has supported almost every war that Israel has fought. When
Israel attacks Palestine, it is American missiles that smash through
Palestinian homes. And every year Israel receives several billion dollars
from the U.S.

What lessons should we draw from this tragic conflict? Is it really
impossible for Jewish people who suffered so cruelly themselves - more
cruelly perhaps than any other people in history - to understand the
vulnerability and the yearning of those whom they have displaced? Does
extreme suffering always kindle cruelty? What hope does this leave the human
race with? What will happen to the Palestinian people in the event of a
victory? When a nation without a state eventually proclaims a state, what
kind of state will it be? What horrors will be perpetrated under its flag?
Is it a separate state that we should be fighting for, or the rights to a
life of liberty and dignity for everyone regardless of their ethnicity or
religion?

Palestine was once a secular bulwark in the Middle East. But now the weak,
undemocratic, by all accounts corrupt, but avowedly non-sectarian Palestine
Liberation Organisation, is losing ground to Hamas, which espouses an
overtly sectarian ideology and fights in the name of Islam. To quote from
their manifesto: "We will be its soldiers, and the firewood of its fire,
which will burn the enemies."

The world is called upon to condemn suicide bombers. But can we ignore the
long road they have journeyed on before they arrived at this destination?
September 11th 1922 to September 11th 2002 - eighty years is a long long
time to have been waging war. Is there some advice the world can give the
people of Palestine? Some scrap of hope we can hold out? Should they just
settle for the crumbs that are thrown their way and behave like the
grasshoppers or two-legged beasts they've been described as? Should they
just take Golda Meir's suggestion and make a real effort to not exist?

In another part of the Middle East, September 11th strikes a more recent
chord. It was on the 11th of September 1990 that George W. Bush Sr., then
President of the U.S., made a speech to a joint session of Congress
announcing his Government's decision to go to war against Iraq.

The U.S. Government says that Saddam Hussein is a war criminal, a cruel
military despot who has committed genocide against his own people. That's a
fairly accurate description of the man. In 1988, he razed hundreds of
villages in northern Iraq and used chemical weapons and machine-guns to kill
thousands of Kurdish people. Today we know that that same year the U.S.
Government provided him with 500 million dollars in subsidies to buy
American farm products. The next year, after he had successfully completed
his genocidal campaign, the U.S. Government doubled its subsidy to 1 billion
dollars. It also provided him with high quality germ seed for anthrax, as
well as helicopters and dual-use material that could be used to manufacture
chemical and biological weapons.

So it turns out that while Saddam Hussein was carrying out his worst
atrocities, the U.S. and the U.K. Governments were his close allies. Even
today, the Government of Turkey which has one of the most appalling human
rights records in the world is one of the U.S. Government's closest allies.
The fact that the Turkish Government has oppressed and murdered Kurdish
people for years has not prevented the U.S. Government from plying Turkey
with weapons and Development Aid. Clearly, it was not concern for the
Kurdish people that provoked President Bush's speech to Congress.

What changed? In August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. His sin was not
so much that he had committed an act of war, but that he acted
independently, without orders from his masters. This display of independence
was enough to upset the power equation in the Gulf. So it was decided that
Saddam Hussein be exterminated, like a pet that has outlived its owner's
affection.

The first Allied attack on Iraq took place in January 1991. The world
watched the prime-time war as it was played out on TV. (In India those days,
you had to go to a five star hotel lobby to watch CNN.) Tens of thousands of
people were killed in a month of devastating bombing. What many do not know
is that the war did not end then. The initial fury simmered down into the
longest sustained air attack on a country since the Vietnam War. Over the
last decade, American and British forces have fired thousands of missiles
and bombs on Iraq. Iraq's fields and farmlands have been shelled with 300
tons of depleted uranium. In countries like Britain and America, depleted
uranium shells are test-fired into specially constructed concrete tunnels.
The radioactive residue is washed off, sealed in cement and disposed off in
the ocean (which is bad enough). In Iraq it's aimed - deliberately, with
malicious intent - at people's food and water supply. In their bombing
sorties, the Allies specifically targeted and destroyed water treatment
plants, fully aware of the fact that they could not be repaired without
foreign assistance. In southern Iraq there has been a fourfold increase in
cancer among children. In the decade of economic sanctions that followed the
war, Iraqi civilians have been denied food, medicine, hospital equipment,
ambulances, clean water - the basic essentials.

About half a million Iraqi children have died as a result of the sanctions.
Of them, Madeleine Albright, then U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., famously
said, "It's a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it." 'Moral
equivalence' was the term that was used to denounce those who criticised the
war on Afghanistan. Madeleine Albright cannot be accused of moral
equivalence. What she said was just straight forward algebra.

A decade of bombing has not managed to dislodge Saddam Hussein, the 'Beast
of Baghdad'. Now, almost twelve years on, President George Bush Jr. has
ratcheted up the rhetoric once again. He's proposing an all-out war whose
goal is nothing short of a regime change. The New York Times says that the
Bush administration is "following a meticulously planned strategy to
persuade the public, the Congress and the allies of the need to confront the
threat of Saddam Hussein." Andrew H. Card, Jr., the White House Chief of
Staff, described how the administration was stepping up its war plans for
the fall: "From a marketing point of view", he said, "you don't introduce
new products in August.' This time the catch-phrase for Washington's "new
product' is not the plight of Kuwaiti people but the assertion that Iraq has
weapons of mass destruction. "Forget the feckless moralising of the peace
lobbies," wrote Richard Perle, a former adviser to President Bush, "we need
to get him before he gets us."

Weapons inspectors have conflicting reports about the status of Iraq's
Weapons of Mass Destruction, and many have said clearly that its arsenal has
been dismantled and that it does not have the capacity to build one.
However, there is no confusion over the extent and range of America's
arsenal of nuclear and chemical weapons. Would the U.S. Government welcome
weapons inspectors? Would the U.K.? Or Israel?

What if Iraq does have a nuclear weapon, does that justify a pre-emptive
U.S. strike? The U.S. has the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the
world. It's the only country in the world to have actually used them on
civilian populations. If the U.S. is justified in launching a pre-emptive
attack on Iraq, why, then any nuclear power is justified in carrying out a
pre-emptive attack on any other. India could attack Pakistan, or the other
way around. If the U.S. Government develops a distaste for the Indian Prime
Minister, can it just 'take him out' with a pre-emptive strike?

Recently the U.S. played an important part in forcing India and Pakistan
back from the brink of war. Is it so hard for it to take its own advice? Who
is guilty of feckless moralising? Of preaching peace while it wages war? The
U.S., which George Bush has called "the most peaceful nation on earth," has
been at war with one country or another every year for the last fifty years.

Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons. They're usually fought for
hegemony, for business. And then of course there's the business of war.
Protecting its control of the world's oil is fundamental to U.S. foreign
policy. The U.S. Government's recent military interventions in the Balkans
and Central Asia have to do with oil. Hamid Karzai, the puppet president of
Afghanistan installed by the U.S., is said to be a former employee of
Unocal, the American-based oil company. The U.S. Government's paranoid
patrolling of the Middle East is because it has two-thirds of the world's
oil reserves. Oil keeps America's engines purring sweetly. Oil keeps the
Free Market rolling. Whoever controls the world's oil controls the world's
market. And how do you control the oil?

Nobody puts it more elegantly than The New York Times' columnist Thomas
Friedman. In an article called "Craziness Pays" he says "the U.S. has to
make it clear to Iraq and U.S. allies that... America will use force without
negotiation, hesitation or U.N. approval." His advice was well taken. In the
wars against Iraq and Afghanistan as well as in the almost daily humiliation
the U.S. Government heaps on the U.N. In his book on globalisation, The
Lexus and the Olive Tree, Friedman says, "The hidden hand of the market will
never work without the hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without
McDonnell Douglas... and the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for
Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air
Force, Navy and Marine Corp." Perhaps this was written in a moment of
vulnerability, but it's certainly the most succinct, accurate description of
the project of Corporate Globalisation that I have read.

After September 11th, 2001 and the War Against Terror, the hidden hand and
fist have had their cover blown - and we have a clear view now of America's
other weapon - the Free Market - bearing down on the Developing World, with
a clenched unsmiling smile. 'The Task That Never Ends' is America's perfect
war, the perfect vehicle for the endless expansion of American Imperialism.
In Urdu, the word for Profit is fayda. Al Qaeda means The Word, The Word of
God, The Law. So, in India some of us call the War Against Terror, Al Qaeda
Vs Al Fayda - The Word Vs The Profit (no pun intended).

For the moment it looks as though Al Fayda will carry the day. But then you
never know...

In the last ten years of unbridled Corporate Globalisation, the world's
total income has increased by an average of 2.5 per cent a year. And yet the
numbers of the poor in the world has increased by 100 million. Of the top
hundred biggest economies, 51 are corporations, not countries. The top 1 per
cent of the world has the same combined income as the bottom 57 per cent and
the disparity is growing. Now, under the spreading canopy of the War Against
Terror, this process is being hustled along. The men in suits are in an
unseemly hurry. While bombs rain down on us, and cruise missiles skid across
the skies, while nuclear weapons are stockpiled to make the world a safer
place, contracts are being signed, patents are being registered, oil
pipelines are being laid, natural resources are being plundered, water is
being privatised and democracies are being undermined.

In a country like India, the 'structural adjustment' end of the Corporate
Globalisation project is ripping through people's lives. "Development"
projects, massive privatisation, and labour "reforms" are pushing people off
their lands and out of their jobs, resulting in a kind of barbaric
dispossession that has few parallels in history. Across the world, as the
"Free Market" brazenly protects Western markets and forces developing
countries to lift their trade barriers, the poor are getting poorer and the
rich richer. Civil unrest has begun to erupt in the global village. In
countries like Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Bolivia, India the resistance
movements against Corporate Globalisation are growing. To contain them,
governments are tightening their control. Protestors are being labelled
'terrorists' and then being dealt with as such. But civil unrest does not
only mean marches and demonstrations and protests against globalisation.
Unfortunately, it also means a desperate downward spiral into crime and
chaos and all kinds of despair and disillusionment which, as we know from
history (and from what we see unspooling before our eyes), gradually becomes
a fertile breeding ground for terrible things - cultural nationalism,
religious bigotry, fascism and of course, terrorism.

All these march arm in arm with Corporate Globalisation.

There is a notion gaining credence that the Free Market breaks down national
barriers, and that Corporate Globalisation's ultimate destination is a
hippie paradise where the heart is the only passport and we all live
together happily inside a John Lennon song (Imagine there's no country...).
This is a canard.

What the Free Market undermines is not national sovereignty, but democracy.
As the disparity between the rich and poor grows, the hidden fist has its
work cut out for it. Multinational corporations on the prowl for 'sweetheart
deals' that yield enormous profits cannot push through those deals and
administer those projects in developing countries without the active
connivance of the state machinery - the police, the courts, sometimes even
the army. Today, Corporate Globalisation needs an international
confederation of loyal, corrupt, preferably authoritarian governments in
poorer countries, to push through unpopular reforms and quell the mutinies.
It needs a press that pretends to be free. It needs courts that pretend to
dispense justice. It needs nuclear bombs, standing armies, sterner
immigration laws, and watchful coastal patrols to make sure that it's only
money, goods, patents and services that are globalised - not the free
movement of people, not a respect for human rights, not international
treaties on racial discrimination or chemical and nuclear weapons, or
greenhouse gas emissions, climate change, or god forbid, justice. It's as
though even a gesture towards international accountability would wreck the
whole enterprise.

Close to one year after the War Against Terror was officially flagged off in
the ruins of Afghanistan, in country after country, freedoms are being
curtailed in the name of protecting freedom, civil liberties are being
suspended in the name of protecting democracy. All kinds of dissent is being
defined as 'terrorism'. All kinds of laws are being passed to deal with it.
Osama Bin Laden seems to have vanished into thin air. Mullah Omar is said to
have made his escape on a motor-bike (They could have sent Tin-Tin after
him). The Taliban may have disappeared, but their spirit, and their system
of summary justice, is surfacing in the unlikeliest of places. In India, in
Pakistan, in Nigeria, in America, in all the Central Asian Republics run by
all manner of despots, and of course in Afghanistan under the U.S.-backed
Northern Alliance.

Meanwhile, down at the Mall there's a mid-season sale. Everything's
discounted - oceans, rivers, oil, gene pools, fig wasps, flowers,
childhoods, aluminum factories, phone companies, wisdom, wilderness, civil
rights, ecosystems, air - all 4,600 million years of evolution. It's packed,
sealed, tagged, valued and available off the rack. (No returns). As for
justice - I'm told it's on offer too. You can get the best that money can
buy.

Donald Rumsfeld said that his mission in the War Against Terror was to
persuade the world that Americans must be allowed to continue their way of
life. When the maddened King stamps his foot, slaves tremble in their
quarters. So, standing here today, it's hard for me to say this, but 'The
American Way of Life' is simply not sustainable. Because it doesn't
acknowledge that there is a world beyond America.

Fortunately, power has a shelf-life. When the time comes, maybe this mighty
empire will, like others before it, overreach itself and implode from
within. It looks as though structural cracks have already appeared. As the
War Against Terror casts its net wider and wider, America's corporate heart
is haemorrhaging. For all the endless empty chatter about democracy, today
the world is run by three of the most secretive institutions in the world:
the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade
Organisation, all three of which, in turn, are dominated by the U.S. Their
decisions are made in secret. The people who head them are appointed behind
closed doors. Nobody really knows anything about them, their politics, their
beliefs, their intentions. Nobody elected them. Nobody said they could make
decisions on our behalf. A world run by a handful of greedy bankers and CEOs
who nobody elected can't possibly last.

Soviet-style communism failed, not because it was intrinsically evil but
because it was flawed. It allowed too few people to usurp too much power.
Twenty-first century market-capitalism, American-style, will fail for the
same reasons. Both are edifices constructed by human intelligence, undone by
human nature.

The time has come, the Walrus said. Perhaps things will get worse and then
better. Perhaps there's a small god up in heaven readying herself for us.
Another world is not only possible, she's on her way. Maybe many of us won't
be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can
hear her breathing.


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