The Nation

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040209&s=roy

The New American Century
by ARUNDHATI ROY

[from the February 9, 2004 issue]

In January 2003 thousands of us from across the world gathered in Porto
Alegre in Brazil and declared--reiterated--that "Another World Is
Possible." A few thousand miles north, in Washington, George W. Bush and
his aides were thinking the same thing.

Our project was the World Social Forum. Theirs--to further what many call
the Project for the New American Century.

In the great cities of Europe and America, where a few years ago these
things would only have been whispered, now people are openly talking about
the good side of imperialism and the need for a strong empire to police an
unruly world. The new missionaries want order at the cost of justice.
Discipline at the cost of dignity. And ascendancy at any price.
Occasionally some of us are invited to "debate" the issue on "neutral"
platforms provided by the corporate media. Debating imperialism is a bit
like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really
miss it?

In any case, New Imperialism is already upon us. It's a remodeled,
streamlined version of what we once knew. For the first time in history, a
single empire with an arsenal of weapons that could obliterate the world
in an afternoon has complete, unipolar, economic and military hegemony. It
uses different weapons to break open different markets. There isn't a
country on God's earth that is not caught in the cross-hairs of the
American cruise missile and the IMF checkbook. Argentina's the model if
you want to be the poster boy of neoliberal capitalism, Iraq if you're the
black sheep. Poor countries that are geopolitically of strategic value to
Empire, or have a "market" of any size, or infrastructure that can be
privatized, or, God forbid, natural resources of value--oil, gold,
diamonds, cobalt, coal--must do as they're told or become military
targets. Those with the greatest reserves of natural wealth are most at
risk. Unless they surrender their resources willingly to the corporate
machine, civil unrest will be fomented or war will be waged.
In this new age of empire, when nothing is as it appears to be, executives
of concerned companies are allowed to influence foreign policy decisions.
The Center for Public Integrity in Washington found that at least nine out
of the thirty members of the Bush Administration's Defense Policy Board
were connected to companies that were awarded military contracts for $76
billion between 2001 and 2002. George Shultz, former Secretary of State,
was chairman of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. He is also on
the board of directors of the Bechtel Group. When asked about a conflict
of interest in the case of war in Iraq he said, "I don't know that Bechtel
would particularly benefit from it. But if there's work to be done,
Bechtel is the type of company that could do it. But nobody looks at it as
something you benefit from." In April 2003, Bechtel signed a $680 million
contract for reconstruction.

This brutal blueprint has been used over and over again across Latin
America, in Africa and in Central and Southeast Asia. It has cost millions
of lives. It goes without saying that every war Empire wages becomes a
Just War. This, in large part, is due to the role of the corporate media.
It's important to understand that the corporate media don't just support
the neoliberal project. They are the neoliberal project. This is not a
moral position they have chosen to take; it's structural. It's intrinsic
to the economics of how the mass media work.

Most nations have adequately hideous family secrets. So it isn't often
necessary for the media to lie. It's all in the editing--what's emphasized
and what's ignored. Say, for example, India was chosen as the target for a
righteous war. The fact that about 80,000 people have been killed in
Kashmir since 1989, most of them Muslim, most of them by Indian security
forces (making the average death toll about 6,000 a year); the fact that
in February and March of 2002 more than 2,000 Muslims were murdered on the
streets of Gujarat, that women were gang-raped and children were burned
alive and 150,000 driven from their homes while the police and
administration watched and sometimes actively participated; the fact that
no one has been punished for these crimes and the government that oversaw
them was re-elected...all of this would make perfect headlines in
international newspapers in the run-up to war.

Next thing we know, our cities will be leveled by cruise missiles, our
villages fenced in with razor wire, US soldiers will patrol our streets,
and Narendra Modi, Pravin Togadia or any of our popular bigots will, like
Saddam Hussein, be in US custody having their hair checked for lice and
the fillings in their teeth examined on prime-time TV.

But as long as our "markets" are open, as long as corporations like Enron,
Bechtel, Halliburton and Arthur Andersen are given a free hand to take
over our infrastructure and take away our jobs, our "democratically
elected" leaders can fearlessly blur the lines between democracy,
majoritarianism and fascism.

Our government's craven willingness to abandon India's proud tradition of
being non-aligned, its rush to fight its way to the head of the queue of
the Completely Aligned (the fashionable phrase is "natural ally"--India,
Israel and the United States are "natural allies"), has given it the leg
room to turn into a repressive regime without compromising its legitimacy.

A government's victims are not only those it kills and imprisons. Those
who are displaced and dispossessed and sentenced to a lifetime of
starvation and deprivation must count among them too. Millions of people
have been dispossessed by "development" projects. In the past fifty-five
years, big dams alone have displaced between 33 million and 55 million in
India. They have no recourse to justice. In the past two years there have
been a series of incidents in which police have opened fire on peaceful
protesters, most of them Adivasi and Dalit. When it comes to the poor, and
in particular Dalit and Adivasi communities, they get killed for
encroaching on forest land, and killed when they're trying to protect
forest land from encroachments--by dams, mines, steel plants and
other "development" projects. In almost every instance in which the police
opened fire, the government's strategy has been to say the firing was
provoked by an act of violence. Those who have been fired upon are
immediately called militants.

Across the country, thousands of innocent people, including minors, have
been arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act and are being held in
jail indefinitely and without trial. In the era of the War against Terror,
poverty is being slyly conflated with terrorism. In the era of corporate
globalization, poverty is a crime. Protesting against further
impoverishment is terrorism. And now our Supreme Court says that going on
strike is a crime. Criticizing the court is a crime too, of course.
They're sealing the exits.

Like Old Imperialism, New Imperialism relies for its success on a network
of agents--corrupt local elites who service Empire. We all know the sordid
story of Enron in India. The then-Maharashtra government signed a power
purchase agreement that gave Enron profits that amounted to 60 percent of
India's entire rural development budget. A single American company was
guaranteed a profit equivalent to funds for infrastructural development
for about 500 million people!

Unlike in the old days, the New Imperialist doesn't need to trudge around
the tropics risking malaria or diarrhea or early death. New Imperialism
can be conducted on e-mail. The vulgar, hands-on racism of Old Imperialism
is outdated. The cornerstone of New Imperialism is New Racism.
The best allegory for New Racism is the tradition of "turkey pardoning" in
the United States. Every year since 1947, the National Turkey Federation
has presented the US President with a turkey for Thanksgiving. Every year,
in a show of ceremonial magnanimity, the President spares that particular
bird (and eats another one). After receiving the presidential pardon, the
Chosen One is sent to Frying Pan Park in Virginia to live out its natural
life. The rest of the 50 million turkeys raised for Thanksgiving are
slaughtered and eaten on Thanksgiving Day. ConAgra Foods, the company that
has won the Presidential Turkey contract, says it trains the lucky birds
to be sociable, to interact with dignitaries, school children and the
press. (Soon they'll even speak English!)

That's how New Racism in the corporate era works. A few carefully bred
turkeys--the local elites of various countries, a community of wealthy
immigrants, investment bankers, the occasional Colin Powell or Condoleezza
Rice, some singers, some writers (like myself)--are given absolution and a
pass to Frying Pan Park. The remaining millions lose their jobs, are
evicted from their homes, have their water and electricity connections
cut, and die of AIDS. Basically they're for the pot. But the Fortunate
Fowls in Frying Pan Park are doing fine. Some of them even work for the
IMF and the WTO--so who can accuse those organizations of being
antiturkey? Some serve as board members on the Turkey Choosing Committee--
so who can say that turkeys are against Thanksgiving? They participate in
it! Who can say the poor are anti-corporate globalization? There's a
stampede to get into Frying Pan Park. So what if most perish on the way?

As part of the project of New Racism we also have New Genocide. New
Genocide in this new era of economic interdependence can be facilitated by
economic sanctions. New Genocide means creating conditions that lead to
mass death without actually going out and killing people. Denis Halliday,
who was the UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq between 1997 and 1998
(after which he resigned in disgust), used the term genocide to describe
the sanctions in Iraq. In Iraq the sanctions outdid Saddam Hussein's best
efforts by claiming more than half a million children's lives.

In the new era, apartheid as formal policy is antiquated and unnecessary.
International instruments of trade and finance oversee a complex system of
multilateral trade laws and financial agreements that keep the poor in
their bantustans anyway. Its whole purpose is to institutionalize
inequity. Why else would it be that the US taxes a garment made by a
Bangladeshi manufacturer twenty times more than a garment made in Britain?
Why else would it be that countries that grow cocoa beans, like the Ivory
Coast and Ghana, are taxed out of the market if they try to turn it into
chocolate? Why else would it be that countries that grow 90 percent of the
world's cocoa beans produce only 5 percent of the world's chocolate? Why
else would it be that rich countries that spend over a billion dollars a
day on subsidies to farmers demand that poor countries like India withdraw
all agricultural subsidies, including subsidized electricity? Why else
would it be that after having been plundered by colonizing regimes for
more than half a century, former colonies are steeped in debt to those
same regimes and repay them some $382 billion a year?

For all these reasons, the derailing of trade agreements at Cancún was
crucial for us. Though our governments try to take the credit, we know
that it was the result of years of struggle by many millions of people in
many, many countries. What Cancún taught us is that in order to inflict
real damage and force radical change, it is vital for local resistance
movements to make international alliances. From Cancún we learned the
importance of globalizing resistance.

No individual nation can stand up to the project of corporate
globalization on its own. Time and again we have seen that when it comes
to the neoliberal project, the heroes of our times are suddenly
diminished. Extraordinary, charismatic men, giants in the opposition, when
they seize power and become heads of state, are rendered powerless on the
global stage. I'm thinking here of President Lula of Brazil. Lula was the
hero of the World Social Forum last year. This year he's busy implementing
IMF guidelines, reducing pension benefits and purging radicals from the
Workers' Party. I'm thinking also of the former president of South Africa,
Nelson Mandela. Within two years of taking office in 1994, his government
genuflected with hardly a caveat to the Market God. It instituted a
massive program of privatization and structural adjustment that has left
millions of people homeless, jobless and without water and electricity.

Why does this happen? There's little point in beating our breasts and
feeling betrayed. Lula and Mandela are, by any reckoning, magnificent men.
But the moment they cross the floor from the opposition into government
they become hostage to a spectrum of threats--most malevolent among them
the threat of capital flight, which can destroy any government overnight.
To imagine that a leader's personal charisma and a c.v. of struggle will
dent the corporate cartel is to have no understanding of how capitalism
works or, for that matter, how power works. Radical change cannot be
negotiated by governments; it can only be enforced by people.

At the World Social Forum some of the best minds in the world come
together to exchange ideas about what is happening around us. These
conversations refine our vision of the kind of world we're fighting for.
It is a vital process that must not be undermined. However, if all our
energies are diverted into this process at the cost of real political
action, then the WSF, which has played such a crucial role in the movement
for global justice, runs the risk of becoming an asset to our enemies.
What we need to discuss urgently is strategies of resistance. We need to
aim at real targets, wage real battles and inflict real damage. Gandhi's
salt march was not just political theater. When, in a simple act of
defiance, thousands of Indians marched to the sea and made their own salt,
they broke the salt tax laws. It was a direct strike at the economic
underpinning of the British Empire. It was real. While our movement has
won some important victories, we must not allow nonviolent resistance to
atrophy into ineffectual, feel-good, political theater. It is a very
precious weapon that must be constantly honed and reimagined. It cannot be
allowed to become a mere spectacle, a photo opportunity for the media.

It was wonderful that on February 15 last year, in a spectacular display
of public morality, 10 million people on five continents marched against
the war on Iraq. It was wonderful, but it was not enough. February 15 was
a weekend. Nobody had to so much as miss a day of work. Holiday protests
don't stop wars. George Bush knows that. The confidence with which he
disregarded overwhelming public opinion should be a lesson to us all. Bush
believes that Iraq can be occupied and colonized as Afghanistan has been,
as Tibet has been, as Chechnya is being, as East Timor once was and
Palestine still is. He thinks that all he has to do is hunker down and
wait until a crisis-driven media, having picked this crisis to the bone,
drops it and moves on. Soon the carcass will slip off the bestseller
charts, and all of us outraged folks will lose interest. Or so he hopes.

This movement of ours needs a major, global victory. It's not good enough
to be right. Sometimes, if only in order to test our resolve, it's
important to win something. In order to win something, we need to agree on
something. That something does not need to be an overarching preordained
ideology into which we force-fit our delightfully factious, argumentative
selves. It does not need to be an unquestioning allegiance to one or
another form of resistance to the exclusion of everything else. It could
be a minimum agenda.

If all of us are indeed against imperialism and against the project of
neoliberalism, then let's turn our gaze on Iraq. Iraq is the inevitable
culmination of both. Plenty of antiwar activists have retreated in
confusion since the capture of Saddam Hussein. Isn't the world better off
without Saddam Hussein? they ask timidly.

Let's look this thing in the eye once and for all. To applaud the US
Army's capture of Saddam Hussein, and therefore in retrospect justify its
invasion and occupation of Iraq, is like deifying Jack the Ripper for
disemboweling the Boston Strangler. And that after a quarter-century
partnership in which the Ripping and Strangling was a joint enterprise.
It's an in-house quarrel. They're business partners who fell out over a
dirty deal. Jack's the CEO.

So if we are against imperialism, shall we agree that we are against the
US occupation and that we believe the United States must withdraw from
Iraq and pay reparations to the Iraqi people for the damage that the war
has inflicted?

How do we begin to mount our resistance? Let's start with something really
small. The issue is not about supporting the resistance in Iraq against
the occupation or discussing who exactly constitutes the resistance. (Are
they old killer Baathists, are they Islamic fundamentalists?)

We have to become the global resistance to the occupation.

Our resistance has to begin with a refusal to accept the legitimacy of the
US occupation of Iraq. It means acting to make it materially impossible
for Empire to achieve its aims. It means soldiers should refuse to fight,
reservists should refuse to serve, workers should refuse to load ships and
aircraft with weapons. It certainly means that in countries like India and
Pakistan we must block the US government's plans to have Indian and
Pakistani soldiers sent to Iraq to clean up after them.

I suggest we choose by some means two of the major corporations that are
profiting from the destruction of Iraq. We could then list every project
they are involved in. We could locate their offices in every city and
every country across the world. We could go after them. We could shut them
down. It's a question of bringing our collective wisdom and experience of
past struggles to bear on a single target. It's a question of the desire
to win.

The Project for the New American Century seeks to perpetuate inequity and
establish American hegemony at any price, even if it's apocalyptic. The
World Social Forum demands justice and survival.

For these reasons, we must consider ourselves at war.

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