My Seditious Heart

by Arundhati Roy

  Laughter rippled through the press room. Would it be all right for the poor of Harlem to loot the Metropolitan Museum? Would it be greeted with similar mirth?

  The last building on the ORHA list of sixteen sites to be protected was the Ministry of Oil.25 It was the only one that was given adequate protection.26 Perhaps the occupying army thought that in Muslim countries lists are read upside down?

  Television tells us that Iraq has been “liberated” and that Afghanistan is well on its way to becoming a paradise for women—thanks to Bush and Blair, the twenty-first century’s leading feminists. In reality, Iraq’s infrastructure has been destroyed. Its people brought to the brink of starvation. Its food stocks depleted. And its cities devastated by a complete administrative breakdown. Iraq is being ushered in the direction of a civil war between Shias and Sunnis. Meanwhile, Afghanistan has lapsed back into the pre-Taliban era of anarchy, and its territory has been carved up into fiefdoms by hostile warlords.27

  Undaunted by all this, on May 2, 2003, Bush the Lesser launched his 2004 campaign hoping to be finally elected US president. In what probably constitutes the shortest flight in history, a military jet landed on an aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, which was so close to shore that, according to the Associated Press, administration officials “acknowledged positioning the massive ship to provide the best TV angle for Bush’s speech, with the vast sea as his background instead of the very visible San Diego coastline.”28 President Bush, who never served his term in the military,29 emerged from the cockpit in fancy dress—a US military bomber jacket, combat boots, flying goggles, helmet. Waving to his cheering troops, he officially proclaimed victory over Iraq. He was careful to say that it was just “one victory in a war on terror … [which] still goes on.”30

  It was important to avoid making a straightforward victory announcement, because under the Geneva Convention a victorious army is bound by the legal obligations of an occupying force, a responsibility that the Bush administration does not want to burden itself with.31 Also, closer to the 2004 elections, in order to woo wavering voters, another victory in the war on terror might become necessary. Syria is being fattened for the kill.

  It was Hermann Goering, that old Nazi, who said, “People can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders…. All you have to do is tell them they’re being attacked and denounce the pacifists for a lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”32

  He’s right. It’s dead easy. That’s what the Bush regime banks on. The distinction between election campaigns and war, between democracy and oligarchy, seems to be closing fast.

  The only caveat in these campaign wars is that US lives must not be lost. It shakes voter confidence. But the problem of US soldiers being killed in combat has been licked. More or less.

  At a media briefing before Operation Shock and Awe was unleashed, general Tommy Franks announced, “This campaign will be like no other in history.”33 Maybe he’s right.

  I’m no military historian, but when was the last time a war was fought like this?

  As soon as the war began, the governments of France, Germany, and Russia, which refused to allow a final resolution legitimizing the war to be passed in the UN Security Council, fell over each other to say how much they wanted the United States to win. President Jacques Chirac offered French airspace to the Anglo-American air force.34 US military bases in Germany were open for business.35 German foreign minister Joschka Fischer publicly hoped that Saddam Hussein’s regime would “collapse as soon as possible.”36 Vladimir Putin publicly hoped for the same.37 These are governments that colluded in the enforced disarming of Iraq before their dastardly rush to take the side of those who attacked it. Apart from hoping to share the spoils, they hoped empire would honor their pre-war oil contracts with Iraq. Only the very naive could expect old Imperialists to behave otherwise.

  Leaving aside the cheap thrills and the lofty moral speeches made in the UN during the run-up to the war, eventually, at the moment of crisis, the unity of Western governments—despite the opposition from the majority of their people—was overwhelming.

  When the Turkish government temporarily bowed to the views of 90 percent of its population and turned down the US government’s offer of billions of dollars of blood money for the use of Turkish soil, it was accused of lacking “democratic credentials.”38 According to a Gallup International poll, in no European country was support for a war carried out “unilaterally by America and its allies” higher than 11 percent.39 But the governments of England, Italy, Spain, Hungary, and other countries of Eastern Europe were praised for disregarding the views of the majority of their people and supporting the illegal invasion. That, presumably, was fully in keeping with democratic principles. What’s it called? New Democracy? (Like Britain’s New Labour?)

  In stark contrast to the venality displayed by their governments, on February 15, 2003, weeks before the invasion, in the most spectacular display of public morality the world has ever seen, more than ten million people marched against the war on five continents.40 Many of you, I’m sure, were among them. They—we—were disregarded with utter disdain. When asked to react to the antiwar demonstrations, President Bush said, “It’s like deciding, well, I’m going to decide policy based upon a focus group. The role of a leader is to decide policy based upon the security, in this case, the security of the people.”41

  Democracy, the modern world’s holy cow, is in crisis. And the crisis is a profound one. Every kind of outrage is being committed in the name of democracy. It has become little more than a hollow word, a pretty shell, emptied of all content or meaning. It can be whatever you want it to be. Democracy is the Free World’s whore, willing to dress up, dress down, willing to satisfy a whole range of tastes, available to be used and abused at will.

  Until quite recently, right up to the 1980s, democracy did seem as though it might actually succeed in delivering a degree of real social justice.

  But modern democracies have been around for long enough for neoliberal capitalists to learn how to subvert them. They have mastered the technique of infiltrating the instruments of democracy—the “independent” judiciary, the “free” press, the parliament—and molding them to their purpose. The project of corporate globalization has cracked the code. Free elections, a free press, and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities on sale to the highest bidder.

  To fully comprehend the extent to which democracy is under siege, it might be an idea to look at what goes on in some of our contemporary democracies. The world’s largest: India (which I have written about at some length and, therefore, will not speak about tonight). The world’s most interesting: South Africa. The world’s most powerful: the United States of America. And, most instructive of all, the plans that are being made to usher in the world’s newest: Iraq.

  In South Africa, after three hundred years of brutal domination of the Black majority by a white minority through colonialism and apartheid, a nonracial, multiparty democracy came to power in 1994. It was a phenomenal achievement. Within two years of coming to power, the African National Congress had genuflected with no caveats to the Market God. Its massive program of structural adjustment, privatization, and liberalization has only increased the hideous disparities between the rich and the poor. Official unemployment among Blacks has increased from 40 percent to 50 percent since the end of apartheid.42 The corporatization of basic services—electricity, water, and housing—has meant that ten million South Africans, almost a quarter of the population, have been disconnected from water and electricity.43 Two million have been evicted from their homes.

  Meanwhile, a small white minority that has been historically privileged by centuries of brutal exploitation is more secure than ever before. They continue to control the land, the farms, the factories, and the abundant natural resources of that country. For them, the transition from apartheid to neoliberalism barely disturbed the grass. It’s a
partheid with a clean conscience. And it goes by the name of democracy.

  Democracy has become empire’s euphemism for neoliberal capitalism.

  In countries of the first world, too, the machinery of democracy has been effectively subverted. Politicians, media barons, judges, powerful corporate lobbyists, and government officials are imbricated in an elaborate underhand configuration that completely undermines the lateral arrangement of checks and balances between the constitution, courts of law, parliament, the administration, and, perhaps most important of all, the independent media that form the structural basis of a parliamentary democracy. Increasingly, the imbrication is neither subtle nor elaborate.

  Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, for instance, has a controlling interest in major Italian newspapers, magazines, television channels, and publishing houses. The Financial Times reported that he controls about 90 percent of Italy’s TV viewership.44 Recently, during a trial on bribery charges, while insisting he was the only person who could save Italy from the left, he said, “How much longer do I have to keep living this life of sacrifices?”45 That bodes ill for the remaining 10 percent of Italy’s TV viewership. What price free speech? Free speech for whom?

  In the United States, the arrangement is more complex. Clear Channel Communications is the largest radio station owner in the country. It runs more than twelve hundred channels, which together account for 9 percent of the market.46 When hundreds of thousands of American citizens took to the streets to protest against the war on Iraq, Clear Channel organized pro-war patriotic “Rallies for America” across the country.47 It used its radio stations to advertise the events and then sent correspondents to cover them as though they were breaking news. The era of manufacturing consent has given way to the era of manufacturing news. Soon media newsrooms will drop the pretense and start hiring theater directors instead of journalists.

  As America’s show business gets more and more violent and warlike, and America’s wars get more and more like show business, some interesting crossovers are taking place. The designer who built the $250,000 set in Qatar from which general Tommy Franks stage-managed news coverage of Operation Shock and Awe also built sets for Disney, MGM, and Good Morning America.48

  It is a cruel irony that the United States, which has the most ardent, vociferous defenders of the idea of free speech, and (until recently) the most elaborate legislation to protect it, has so circumscribed the space in which that freedom can be expressed. In a strange, convoluted way, the sound and fury that accompany the legal and conceptual defense of free speech in America serve to mask the process of the rapid erosion of the possibilities of actually exercising that freedom.

  The news and entertainment industry in the United States is for the most part controlled by a few major corporations—AOL–Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, News Corporation.49 Each of these corporations owns and controls TV stations, film studios, record companies, and publishing ventures. Effectively, the exits are sealed.

  America’s media empire is controlled by a tiny coterie of people. Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission Michael Powell, the son of secretary of state Colin Powell, has proposed even further deregulation of the communications industry, which will lead to even greater consolidation.50

  So here it is—the world’s greatest democracy, led by a man who was not legally elected. America’s Supreme Court gifted him his job. What price have American people paid for this spurious presidency?

  In the three years of George Bush the Lesser’s term, the American economy has lost more than two million jobs.51 Outlandish military expenses, corporate welfare, and tax giveaways to the rich have created a financial crisis for the US educational system. According to a survey by the National Conference of State Legislatures, US states cut $49 billion in public services, health, welfare benefits, and education in 2002. They plan to cut another $25.7 billion this year.52 That makes a total of $75 billion. Bush’s initial budget request to Congress to finance the war in Iraq was $80 billion.53

  So who’s paying for the war? America’s poor. Its students, its unemployed, its single mothers, its hospital and home-care patients, its teachers, and its health workers.

  And who’s actually fighting the war?

  Once again, America’s poor. The soldiers who are baking in Iraq’s desert sun are not the children of the rich. Only one of all the representatives in Congress and the Senate has a child fighting in Iraq.54 America’s “volunteer” army in fact depends on a poverty draft of poor whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians looking for a way to earn a living and get an education. Federal statistics show that African Americans make up 21 percent of the total armed forces and 29 percent of the US Army. They account for only 12 percent of the general population.55 It’s ironic, isn’t it—the disproportionately high representation of African Americans in the army and prison? Perhaps we should take a positive view and look at this as affirmative action at its most effective. Nearly 4 million Americans (2 percent of the population) have lost the right to vote because of felony convictions.56 Of that number, 1.4 million are African Americans, which means that 13 percent of all voting-age Black people have been disenfranchised.57

  For African Americans there’s also affirmative action in death. A study by the economist Amartya Sen shows that African Americans as a group have a lower life expectancy than people born in China, in the Indian state of Kerala (where I come from), Sri Lanka, or Costa Rica.58 Bangladeshi men have a better chance of making it to the age of sixty-five than African American men from here in Harlem.59

  This year, on what would have been Martin Luther King Jr.’s seventy-fourth birthday, President Bush denounced the University of Michigan’s affirmative action program favoring Blacks and Latinos. He called it “divisive,” “unfair,” and unconstitutional.60 The successful effort to keep Blacks off the voting rolls in the state of Florida in order that George Bush be elected was of course neither unfair nor unconstitutional. I don’t suppose affirmative action for White Boys From Yale ever is.

  So we know who’s paying for the war. We know who’s fighting it. But who will benefit from it? Who is homing in on the reconstruction contracts estimated to be worth up to $100 billion?61 Could it be America’s poor and unemployed and sick? Could it be America’s single mothers? Or America’s Black and Latino minorities?

  Consider this: The Defense Policy Board advises the Pentagon on defense policy. Its members are appointed by the under secretary of defense and approved by Donald Rumsfeld. Its meetings are classified. No information is available for public scrutiny.

  The Washington-based Center for Public Integrity found that nine out of the thirty members of the Defense Policy Board are connected to companies that were awarded defense contracts worth $76 billion between the years 2001 and 2002.62 One of them, Jack Sheehan, a retired Marine Corps general, is a senior vice president at Bechtel, the giant international engineering outfit.63 Riley Bechtel, the company chairman, is on the President’s Export Council.64 Former Secretary of State George Shultz, who is also on the board of directors of the Bechtel Group, is the chairman of the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.65 When asked by the New York Times whether he was concerned about the appearance of a conflict of interest, 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.”66

  Bechtel has been awarded a $680 million reconstruction contract in Iraq.67 According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Bechtel contributed $1.3 million toward the 1999–2000 Republican campaign.68

  Arcing across this subterfuge, dwarfing it by the sheer magnitude of its malevolence, is America’s antiterrorism legislation. The USA Patriot Act, passed on October 12, 2001, has become the blueprint for similar antiterrorism bills in countries across the world. It was passed in the US House of Representatives by a majority vote of 337–79. According to the New York Times, “Many lawmakers said it had been impossible to truly debate, or e
ven read, the legislation.”69

  The Patriot Act ushers in an era of systemic automated surveillance. It gives the government the authority to monitor phones and computers and spy on people in ways that would have seemed completely unacceptable a few years ago.70 It gives the FBI the power to seize all of the circulation, purchasing, and other records of library users and bookstore customers on the suspicion that they are part of a terrorist network.71 It blurs the boundaries between speech and criminal activity, creating the space to construe acts of civil disobedience as violating the law.

  Already hundreds of people are being held indefinitely as “unlawful combatants.”72 (In India, the number is also in the hundreds.73 In Israel, five thousand Palestinians are now being detained.74) Noncitizens, of course, have no rights at all. They can simply be “disappeared” like the people of Chile under Washington’s old ally General Pinochet. More than one thousand people, many of them Muslim or of Middle Eastern origin, have been detained, some without access to legal representatives.75

  Apart from paying the actual economic costs of war, American people are paying for these wars of “liberation” with their own freedoms. For the ordinary American, the price of New Democracy in other countries is the death of real democracy at home.

  Meanwhile, Iraq is being groomed for “liberation.” (Or did they mean “liberalization” all along?) The Wall Street Journal reports that “the Bush administration has drafted sweeping plans to remake Iraq’s economy in the U.S. image.”76

  Iraq’s constitution is being redrafted. Its trade laws, tax laws, and intellectual property laws rewritten in order to turn it into an American-style capitalist economy.77

  The United States Agency for International Development has invited US companies to bid for contracts that range from road building and water systems to textbook distribution and cell-phone networks.78