The speech delivers a strong narrative on the steps that brought us to today's global crises (the corruption of governments and the illusion of freedom in which its citizens live).
"...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 Organization, all three of which, in turn, are dominated by the U.S."
Arundhati Roy's speech can be viewed and heard in a documentary.
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Transcription of Arundhati Roy reading Lensic Performing Arts Center Santa Fe, New Mexico.
September 18, 2002
My talk today is called "Come September."
The theme of much of what I write, fiction and nonfiction, is the relationship between power and powerlessness and the endless, circular conflict they're engaged in.
John Berger 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 mean 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 about nations and histories but about power. About the paranoia and ruthlessness of power. About the physics of energy. 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, a friend, or a sibling -regardless of ideology, results in excesses... 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. In the global neighborhood of the War Against Terror (what President Bush somewhat biblically calls "The Task That Never Ends"), I think a lot about the relationship between Citizens and the State.
In India, those of us who have expressed views on Nuclear Bombs, Big Dams, Corporate Globalization, and the rising threat of communal Hindu fascism - opinions that are at variance with the Indian Government's - are branded 'anti-national.' While this accusation doesn't fill me with indignation, it doesn't accurately describe what I do or think. Because an 'anti-national' is a person who is against his or 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.
Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause
of most of the genocide of the twentieth century.
Flags are colored cloths that governments use to shrink-wrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. In the U.S., we saw it during the Gulf War. We see it now during the "War Against Terror." when independent-thinking people (and here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, and filmmakers 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.
Recently, those who have criticized 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 American establishment usually uses the term " anti-American " to discredit and define its critics. Once someone is branded anti-American, the chances are that they will be judged before they are heard, and the argument will be lost in the welter of bruised national pride.
But what does the term "anti-American" mean? Does it mean you are anti-jazz? Or that you're opposed to freedom of 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, and 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 highly effective strategy. It's like a retreating army taking cover in a heavily populated city, hoping the prospect of hitting civilian targets will deter enemy fire.
The most scholarly, scathing, incisive, hilarious critiques of the hypocrisy and the contradictions in U.S. government policy come from American citizens. But many Americans would be mortified to be associated with their government's policies. 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, Amy Goodman, and William Blum and tell us what's happening.
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 program against Muslims in Gujarat. It would be absurd to think those criticizing the Indian government are "anti-Indian."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 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. But I've realized 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. The goalposts have been moved now that the initial aim of the war - capturing Osama bin Laden (dead or alive) - seems to have run into bad weather. 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 are being asked to believe that the U.S. marines are on a feminist mission. (If so, will their next stop be America's military ally Saudi Arabia?) Think of it this way: in India, some pretty reprehensible social practices against "untouchables," Christians and Muslims, and 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?
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 and running shoes, is to cheapen and devalue suffering, to drain it of meaning. What we see now is a vulgar display of the business of grief, the commerce of grief, and the pillaging of even the most private human feelings for political purposes. It is a terrible, violent thing for a State to do to its people.
Twenty-nine years ago, in Chile, on September 11, 1973, General Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in a CIA-backed coup. "Chile should not 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. We'll never know whether he was killed or killed himself. In the regime of terror that ensured, 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 asked 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 and 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're 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 means. It isn't just those who Pinochet murdered; the lives he stole from the living must also be accounted for.
Chile was not the only country in South America to be singled out for the U.S. government's attention. Guatemala, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, El Salvador, Peru, Mexico, and Colombia have all been the playground for covert - and overt - operations by the CIA. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been killed, tortured, or simply disappeared under the despotic regimes that were propped up in their countries.
For how many Septembers for decades together have millions of Asian people been bombed, burned, and slaughtered? How many Septembers have passed since August 1945, when hundreds of thousands of ordinary Japanese people were obliterated by the nuclear strikes in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? This list does not include countries in Africa or Asia that suffered U.S. military interventions - Vietnam, Korea, Indonesia, Laos, and Cambodia.
For how many Septembers have the thousands who had the misfortune of surviving those strikes endured that living hell that was visited on them, their unborn children, their children's children, on the earth, the sky, the water, the wind, 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. A massacre dangling in each ear.
For how many Septembers have the thousands who had the misfortune of surviving those strikes endured that living hell that was visited on them, their unborn children, their children's children, on the earth, the sky, the water, the wind, 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. A massacre dangling in each ear. On September 11, 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 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 a school bully distributes marbles.)
How carelessly imperial power vivisected ancient civilizations. Palestine and Kashmir are imperial Britain's festering, blood-drenched gifts to the modem world. Both are fault lines in the raging international conflicts of today. 
In 1937, Winston Churchill said of the Palestinians, "I disagree that a dog in the 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 toward the Palestinians. In 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said, "Palestinians do not exist." Her successor, Prime Minister Levi Eschol, said, "What are Palestinians? When I came here (to Palestine), there were 250,000 non-Jews, mainly Arabs and Bedouins. It was a desert, more than underdeveloped. Nothing." Prime Minister Menachem Begin called Palestinians "two-legged beasts."
In 1947, the U.N. formally partitioned Palestine and allotted 55 percent of Palestine's land to the Zionists. Within a year, they had captured 76 percent. On May 14, 1948, the State of Israel was declared. Minutes after the declaration, the United States recognized Israel. The West Bank was annexed by Jordan. In 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza strip. The Gaza strip came under Egyptian military control, and formally Palestine ceased to exist except in the minds and hearts of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people who became refugees.
They are subjected to collective punishments and twenty-four-hour curfews, humiliated, and brutalized daily. They never know when their homes will be demolished,
when their children will be shot,
when their precious trees are cut,
when their roads will be closed,
when they can walk down to the market to buy food and medicine.
And when they will not. They live with no semblance of dignity. With little hope in sight. They have no control over their lands, security, movement, communication, or water supply. So when accords are signed, and words like "autonomy" and even "statehood" bandied about, it's always worth asking: What sort of autonomy? What kind of State? What kind of rights will its citizens have?Young Palestinians who cannot control 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 reprisal and even more hardship for the Palestinian people. But then, suicide bombing is an act of individual despair, not a revolutionary tactic. Although Palestinian attacks terrorize Israeli citizens, they provide the perfect cover for the Israeli government's daily incursions into Palestinian territory. It is 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 has always been the U.S. 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 nearly every war that Israel has fought. When Israel attacks Palestine, American missiles smash through Palestinian homes. And Israel receives several billion dollars from the United States - taxpayers' money annually.
What lessons should we draw from this tragic conflict? Is it impossible for Jewish people who suffered so cruelly themselves - more cruelly perhaps than any other people in history - to understand the vulnerability and yearning of those 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 it, what kind of state will it be? What horrors will be perpetrated under its flag? Is it a separate state that we should fight for or the right to a life of liberty and dignity for everyone, regardless of ethnicity or religion?
Palestine was once a secular bulwark in the Middle East. But now the weak, undemocratic, by all accounts corrupt but avowedly nonsectarian P.L.O. is losing ground to Hamas, which espouses an overtly sectarian ideology and fights in the name of Islam. Their manifesto states, "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 had journeyed on before they arrived at this destination? September 11, 1922, to September 11, 2002 - eighty years is a long time to have been waging war. Is there some advice the world can give the people of Palestine? Should they just take Golda Meir's suggestion and make a real effort not to exist?
September 11 strikes a more recent cord in another part of the Middle East. On September 11, 1990, 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 reasonably accurate description of the man.
S.Hussein. Kurdistan. G. Bush Sr. G.W.Bush Jr.
In 1988, Saddam Hussein 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 in subsidies to buy American farm products. The following year, after he had successfully completed his genocidal campaign, the U.S. government doubled its contribution to $1 billion. It also provided him with high-quality germ seed for anthrax, 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.
S.Hussein. Kurdistan. G. Bush Sr. G.W.Bush Jr.
In 1988, Saddam Hussein 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 in subsidies to buy American farm products. The following year, after he had successfully completed his genocidal campaign, the U.S. government doubled its contribution to $1 billion. It also provided him with high-quality germ seed for anthrax, 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.
So what changed? In 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. His sin was not so much that he had committed an act of war but that he had acted independently, without orders from his master. 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 on January '91. The world watched the prime-time war as it was played out on T.V. Tens of thousands of people were killed in a month of a devastating bombing. What many do not know is that the war never ended then. The initial fury simmered into the most extended 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. In the decade of economic sanctions that followed the war, Iraqi civilians have been denied food, medicine, hospital equipment, ambulances, and clean water - the bare essentials.
About half a million Iraqi children have died due to the sanctions.
"Moral equivalence" was used to denounce those of us who criticized the war in Afghanistan. Madeleine Albright, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, famously said, "It's a tough choice, but we think the price is worth it." Madeleine Albright cannot be accused of moral equivalence. What she said was just straightforward algebra.
A decade of bombing has not managed to dislodge Saddam Hussein, "the Beast of Baghdad." Now, almost 12 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 the Bush administration followed "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, and I quote, "From a marketing point of view," he said, "you don't introduce new products in August." This time the catchphrase 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 moralizing of peace lobbies," wrote Richard Perle, a former advisor to President Bush, "We need to get him before he gets us." Weapons inspectors have conflicting reports of the status of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and many have said clearly that its arsenal has been dismantled and that it cannot build one. However, there is no confusion over the extent and range of America's nuclear and chemical weapons arsenal. 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 world's largest arsenal of atomic weapons, and it's the only country to have used them on civilian populations. If the U.S. is justified in launching a pre-emptive strike on Iraq, why is any nuclear power justified in carrying out a pre-emptive strike 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 United States played an essential part in forcing India and Pakistan back from the brink of 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. Is it so hard for it to take its own advice? Who is guilty of feckless moralizing? Of preaching peace while it wages war?
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 involve 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. The oil keeps America's engines purring sweetly. The oil keeps the Free Market rolling. Whoever controls the world's oil contains the world's market. And how do you handle the oil?
Nobody puts it more elegantly than The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. In an article called "Craziness Pays," he said, "The U.S. has to make it clear to Iraq and U.S. allies that...American will use force without negotiation, hesitation, or U.N. approval." His advice was well taken. In the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan and the almost daily humiliation, the U.S. government heaps on the U.N. In his book on globalization, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Friedman says, and I quote, "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 the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps." Perhaps this was written in a moment of vulnerability, but it's the most succinct, accurate description of the project of corporate globalization that I have read.
After September 11, 2001, and the War Against Terror, the hidden hand and fist have had their cover blown - and we have a clear view 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, as in "p-r-o-f-i-t", is fayda. Al Qaida means The Word, The Word of God, The Law. So, in India, some call the War Against Terror Al Qaida versus Al Fayda - The Word versus The Profit (no pun intended.) For the moment, Al Fayda will carry the day. But then, you never know...
In the last ten years of unbridled Corporate Globalization, the world's total income has increased by an average of 2.5 percent yearly. And yet the number of poor worldwide has risen by 100 million. Of the top hundred most significant economies, 51 are corporations, not countries. The top 1 percent of the world has the same combined income as the bottom 57 percent, and that disparity is growing. And 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. At the same time, nuclear weapons are stockpiled to make the world safer, contracts are being signed, patents are being registered, oil pipelines are being laid, natural resources are being plundered, water is being privatized, and democracies are being undermined.
In a country like India, the "structural adjustment" end of the Corporate Globalization project is ripping people's lives. "Development" projects, massive privatization, and labor "reforms" are pushing people off their lands and out of their jobs, resulting in a 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, and India, the resistance movements against Corporate Globalization are growing. To contain them, governments are tightening their control. Protesters are labeled "terrorists" and then dealt with as such. But civil unrest does not only mean marches and demonstrations and protests against globalization. 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, gradually becomes a fertile breeding ground for terrible things - cultural nationalism, religious bigotry, fascism, and of course, terrorism.
All these marches are arm-in-arm with corporate globalization.
There is a notion gaining credence that the Free Market breaks down national barriers and that Corporate Globalization's ultimate destination is a hippie paradise where the heart is the only passport. We all live happily together inside a John Lennon song. ("Imagine there's no country...") But 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 State machinery - the police, the courts, and sometimes even the army. Today Corporate Globalization needs an international confederation of loyal, corrupt, preferably authoritarian governments in poorer countries to push through unpopular reforms and quell the mutinies. It requires 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 being globalized - 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. Even a gesture toward 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, country after country, freedoms are being curtailed to protect freedom, and civil liberties are being suspended in the name of protecting democracy. All kinds of dissent are 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 supposed to have made his escape on a motorbike. (They could have sent TinTin after him.) The Taliban may have disappeared, but their spirit and system of summary justice are surfacing in the unlikeliest places. In India, Pakistan, Nigeria, America, all the Central Asian republics run by all 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, eco-systems, 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.
[Applause]
But 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 hemorrhaging. 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 Organization, 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 knows anything about them, their politics, beliefs, and intentions. Nobody elected them. Nobody said they could make decisions on our behalf. A world run by a handful of greedy bankers and C.E.O.s whom nobody selected 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. Things may become worse and then better. Perhaps there's a minor 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 if I listen very carefully on a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
Thank you.
Comments
I always admired Arundhati Roy's grit. It's because of such people, we can still call our society democratic