Do Turkeys Enjoy Thanksgiving?

Last January thousands of us from across the world gathered in Porto Allegre in Brazil and declared —reiterated — that "Another World is Possible". A few thousand miles north, in Washington, GeorgeBush 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 NewAmerican Century.

In the great cities of Europe and America, where a few years ago these things would only have beenwhispered, now people are openly talking about the good side of Imperialism and the need for a strong Empireto police an unruly world. The new missionaries want order at the cost of justice. Discipline at the cost ofdignity. 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 ofrape. What can we say? That we really miss it?

In any case, New Imperialism is already upon us. It's a remodelled, streamlined version of what we onceknew. For the first time in history, a single Empire with an arsenal of weapons that could obliterate theworld in an afternoon has complete, unipolar, economic and military hegemony. It uses different weapons tobreak open different markets. There isn't a country on God's earth that is not caught in the cross hairs ofthe American cruise missile and the IMF chequebook. Argentina's the model if you want to be the poster-boy ofneoliberal capitalism, Iraq if you're the black sheep.

Poor countries that are geo-politically of strategic value to Empire, or have a `market' of any size, orinfrastructure 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 ofnatural 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 appearsto be, executives of concerned companies are allowed to influence foreign policy decisions. The Centre forPublic Integrity in Washington found that nine out of the 30 members of the Defence Policy Board of the U.S.Government were connected to companies that were awarded defence contracts for $ 76 billion between 2001 and2002. George Shultz, former U.S. 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 thecase of a war in Iraq he said, " I don't know that Bechtel would particularly benefit from it. But ifthere's work to be done, Bechtel is the type of company that could do it. But nobody looks at it as somethingyou benefit from." After the war, Bechtel signed a $680 million contract for reconstruction in Iraq.

This brutal blueprint has been used over and over again, across Latin America, Africa, Central andSouth-East Asia. It has cost millions of lives. It goes without saying that every war Empire wages becomes aJust War. This, in large part, is due to the role of the corporate media. It's important to understand thatthe corporate media doesn't just support the neo-liberal project. It is the neo-liberal project. Thisis not a moral position it has chosen to take, it's structural. It's intrinsic to the economics of how themass media works.

Most nations have adequately hideous family secrets. So it isn't often necessary for the media to lie. It'swhat's emphasised and what's ignored. Say for example India was chosen as the target for a righteous war. Thefact that about 80,000 people have been killed in Kashmir since 1989, most of them Muslim, most of them byIndian Security Forces (making the average death toll about 6000 a year); the fact that less than a year ago,in March of 2003, more than two thousand Muslims were murdered on the streets of Gujarat, that women weregang-raped and children were burned alive and a 150,000 people driven from their homes while the police andadministration watched, and sometimes actively participated; the fact that no one has been punished for thesecrimes and the Government that oversaw them was re-elected ... all of this would make perfect headlines ininternational newspapers in the run-up to war.

Next we know, our cities will be levelled by cruise missiles, our villages fenced in with razor wire, U.S.soldiers will patrol our streets and, Narendra Modi, Pravin Togadia or any of our popular bigots could, likeSaddam Hussein, be in U.S. custody, having their hair checked for lice and the fillings in their teethexamined on prime-time TV.

But as long as our `markets' are open, as long as corporations like Enron, Bechtel, Halliburton, ArthurAndersen are given a free hand, our `democratically elected' leaders can fearlessly blur the lines betweendemocracy, majoritarianism and fascism.

Our government's craven willingness to abandon India's proud tradition of being Non-Aligned, its rush tofight its way to the head of the queue of the Completely Aligned (the fashionable phrase is `natural ally' —India, Israel and the U.S. are `natural allies'), has given it the leg room to turn into a repressive regimewithout compromising its legitimacy.

A government's victims are not only those that it kills and imprisons. Those who are displaced anddispossessed and sentenced to a lifetime of starvation and deprivation must count among them too. Millions ofpeople have been dispossessed by `development' projects. In the past 55 years, Big Dams alone have displacedbetween 33 million and 55 million people in India. They have no recourse to justice.

In the last two years there has been a series of incidents when police have opened fire on peacefulprotestors, most of them Adivasi and Dalit. When it comes to the poor, and in particular Dalit and Adivasicommunities, they get killed for encroaching on forest land, and killed when they're trying to protect forestland from encroachments — by dams, mines, steel plants and other `development' projects. In almost everyinstance in which the police opened fire, the government's strategy has been to say the firing was provoked byan 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 POTA (Preventionof Terrorism Act) and are being held in jail indefinitely and without trial. In the era of the War againstTerror, poverty is being slyly conflated with terrorism. In the era of corporate globalisation, poverty is acrime. Protesting against further impoverishment is terrorism. And now, our Supreme Court says that going onstrike is a crime. Criticising the court of course is a crime, too. They're sealing the exits.

Like Old Imperialism, New Imperialism too relies for its success on a network of agents — corrupt, localelites who service Empire. We all know the sordid story of Enron in India. The then Maharashtra Governmentsigned a power purchase agreement which gave Enron profits that amounted to sixty per cent of India's entirerural development budget. A single American company was guaranteed a profit equivalent to funds forinfrastructural development for about 500 million people!

Unlike in the old days the New Imperialist doesn't need to trudge around the tropics risking malaria ordiahorrea or early death. New Imperialism can be conducted on e-mail. The vulgar, hands-on racism of OldImperialism is outdated. The cornerstone of New Imperialism is New Racism.

The tradition of  'turkey pardoning' in the U.S. is a wonderful allegory for New Racism. Every yearsince 1947, the National Turkey Federation presents the U.S. President with a turkey for Thanksgiving. Everyyear, 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 itsnatural life. The rest of the 50 million turkeys raised for Thanksgiving are slaughtered and eaten onThanksgiving Day. ConAgra Foods, the company that has won the Presidential Turkey contract, says it trains thelucky birds to be sociable, to interact with dignitaries, school children and the press. (Soon they'll evenspeak English!)

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

Part of the project of New Racism is New Genocide. In this new era of economic interdependence, NewGenocide can be facilitated by economic sanctions. It means creating conditions that lead to mass deathwithout actually going out and killing people. Dennis Halliday, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Iraqbetween '97 and '98 (after which he resigned in disgust), used the term genocide to describe the sanctions inIraq. In Iraq the sanctions outdid Saddam Hussein's best efforts by claiming more than half a millionchildren's lives.

In the new era, Apartheid as formal policy is antiquated and unnecessary. International instruments oftrade and finance oversee a complex system of multilateral trade laws and financial agreements that keep thepoor in their Bantustans anyway. Its whole purpose is to institutionalise inequity. Why else would it be thatthe U.S. taxes a garment made by a Bangladeshi manufacturer 20 times more than it taxes a garment made in theU.K.? Why else would it be that countries that grow 90 per cent of the world's cocoa bean produce only 5 percent of the world's chocolate? Why else would it be that countries that grow cocoa bean, like the Ivory Coastand Ghana, are taxed out of the market if they try and turn it into chocolate? Why else would it be that richcountries that spend over a billion dollars a day on subsidies to farmers demand that poor countries likeIndia withdraw all agricultural subsidies, including subsidised electricity? Why else would it be that afterhaving been plundered by colonising regimes for more than half a century, former colonies are steeped in debtto those same regimes, and repay them some $ 382 billion a year?

For all these reasons, the derailing of trade agreements at Cancun was crucial for us. Though ourgovernments try and take the credit, we know that it was the result of years of struggle by many millions ofpeople in many, many countries. What Cancun taught us is that in order to inflict real damage and forceradical change, it is vital for local resistance movements to make international alliances. From Cancun welearned the importance of globalising resistance.

No individual nation can stand up to the project of Corporate Globalisation on its own. Time and again wehave seen that when it comes to the neo-liberal project, the heroes of our times are suddenly diminished.Extraordinary, charismatic men, giants in Opposition, when they seize power and become Heads of State, theybecome powerless on the global stage. I'm thinking here of President Lula of Brazil. Lula was the hero of theWorld Social Forum last year. This year he's busy implementing IMF guidelines, reducing pension benefits andpurging radicals from the Workers' Party. I'm thinking also of ex-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 programme of privatisation and structural adjustment, which has left millions ofpeople homeless, jobless and without water and electricity.

Why does this happen? There's little point in beating our breasts and feeling betrayed. Lula and Mandelaare, by any reckoning, magnificent men. But the moment they cross the floor from the Opposition intoGovernment they become hostage to a spectrum of threats — most malevolent among them the threat of capitalflight, which can destroy any government overnight. To imagine that a leader's personal charisma and a c.v. ofstruggle will dent the Corporate Cartel is to have no understanding of how Capitalism works, or for thatmatter, how power works. Radical change will not be negotiated by governments; it can only be enforced bypeople.

This week at the World Social Forum, some of the best minds in the world will exchange ideas about what ishappening around us. These conversations refine our vision of the kind of world we're fighting for. It is avital process that must not be undermined. However, if all our energies are diverted into this process at thecost of real political action, then the WSF, which has played such a crucial role in the Movement for GlobalJustice, runs the risk of becoming an asset to our enemies. What we need to discuss urgently is strategies ofresistance. We need to aim at real targets, wage real battles and inflict real damage. Gandhi's Salt March wasnot just political theatre. When, in a simple act of defiance, thousands of Indians marched to the sea andmade their own salt, they broke the salt tax laws. It was a direct strike at the economic underpinning of theBritish Empire. It was real. While our movement has won some important victories, we must not allownon-violent resistance to atrophy into ineffectual, feel-good, political theatre. It is a very precious weaponthat needs to be constantly honed and re-imagined. It cannot be allowed to become a mere spectacle, a photoopportunity for the media.

It was wonderful that on February 15th last year, in a spectacular display of public morality, 10 millionpeople in five continents marched against the war on Iraq. It was wonderful, but it was not enough. February15th was a weekend. Nobody had to so much as miss a day of work. Holiday protests don't stop wars. George Bushknows 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 colonised — as Afghanistan has been, as Tibet has been, asChechnya is being, as East Timor once was and Palestine still is. He thinks that all he has to do is hunkerdown and wait until a crisis-driven media, having picked this crisis to the bone, drops it and moves on. Soonthe carcass will slip off the best-seller charts, and all of us outraged folks will lose interest. Or so hehopes.

This movement of ours needs a major, global victory. It's not good enough to be right. Sometimes, if onlyin order to test our resolve, it's important to win something. In order to win something, we — all of usgathered here and a little way away at Mumbai Resistance — need to agree on something. That something doesnot need to be an over-arching pre-ordained 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 resistanceto the exclusion of everything else. It could be a minimum agenda.

If all of us are indeed against Imperialism and against the project of neo-liberalism, then let's turn ourgaze on Iraq. Iraq is the inevitable culmination of both. Plenty of anti-war activists have retreated inconfusion since the capture of Saddam Hussein. Isn't the world better off without Saddam Hussein? they asktimidly.

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

So if we are against Imperialism, shall we agree that we are against the U.S. occupation and that webelieve that the U.S. must withdraw from Iraq and pay reparations to the Iraqi people for the damage that thewar has inflicted?

How do we begin to mount our resistance? Let's start with something really small. The issue is not about supportingthe resistance in Iraq against the occupation or discussing who exactly constitutes the resistance. (Are theyold Killer Ba'athists, 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 U.S. occupation of Iraq. Itmeans acting to make it materially impossible for Empire to achieve its aims. It means soldiers should refuseto fight, reservists should refuse to serve, workers should refuse to load ships and aircraft with weapons. Itcertainly means that in countries like India and Pakistan we must block the U.S. government's plans to haveIndian and Pakistani soldiers sent to Iraq to clean up after them.