'People vs. Empire'

[Guest guest]

An article from the lastest issue of the great magazine "In These

Times," penned by Arundhati Roy, the Booker Prize-winning author

of "The God of Small Things." It's adapted from "Public Power in the

Age of Empire" (Seven Stories, 2004) which is based on a speech Roy

gave to the American Sociological Association in August 2004.

 

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PEOPLE VS. EMPIRE: Only Global Resistance From Below Can Counter

Repressive States.

 

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." However, as you make

your way up India's complex 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.

 

In the United States, on the other hand, the blurring of this

distinction between sarkar and public has penetrated far deeper into

society. This could be a sign of 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 people in the United States 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, the most

powerful nation in the world 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

government from the people. Such confusion fuels anti-Americanism in

the world—anti-Americanism that is 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," et cetera.

This enhances the U.S. people's sense of isolation, making the

embrace between sarkar and public even more intimate.

 

Over the last few years, the "war on terrorism" has mutated into the

more generic "war on terror." Using the threat of an external enemy

to rally people behind you is a tired old horse that politicians

have ridden into power for centuries. But could it be that ordinary

people, fed up with that poor old horse, are looking for something

different? Before Washington's illegal invasion of Iraq, a Gallup

International poll showed that in no European country was support

for a unilateral war higher than 11 percent. On February 15, 2003,

weeks before the invasion, more than 10 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.

 

We must question then: 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 terror

and the logic that underlies terrorism are 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 the thousands for the actions of the Taliban and the people

of Iraq pay in the hundreds of thousands for the actions of Saddam

Hussein. 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 be sure we have entered the Age of Empire.

 

For more ... http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1740/