Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy.Buy One, Get One Free

This is the full text of the Center for Economic and Social Rights(CESR)-sponsored lecture delivered by Arundhati Roy at the Riverside Church in Harlem, New York, on May 13. Historically known for its social activism, this is the church where Nelson Mandela spoke and where Martin Luther King Jr. first protested the Vietnam War.

Roy's talk was announced on CESR's website last month, and all 3,000 tickets -- priced inexpensively, at her request, to make them democratically accessible -- sold out withinhours. In response to the huge demand, free "overflow" seating with closed circuit TV was arranged; when that was filled to capacity (audience included U.N. officials, well-known actors, activists and intellectuals), hundreds of fans were turned away.

Roy's speech, honored with long standing ovations, and the discussion that followed it, was broadcast on live radio in five major U.S. cities;C-Span, a TV channel that usually airs U.S. Senate hearings, will air the full address this weekend.

In these times when we have to race to keep abreast of the speed at which our freedoms are being snatched from us, and when few can afford the luxury of retreating from the streets for a while in order to return with an exquisite, fully formed political thesis replete with footnotes and references, what profound gift can I offer you tonight? As we lurch from crisis to crisis, beamed directly into our brains by satellite TV, we have to think on our feet. On the move. We enter histories through the rubble of war. Ruined cities, parched fields, shrinking forests and dying rivers are our archives. Craters left by daisy-cutters, our libraries. So what can I offer you tonight? Some uncomfortable thoughts about money, war, empire, racism and democracy. Some worries that flit around my brain like a family of persistent moths that keep me awake at night.

Some of you will think it bad manners for a person like me, officially entered in the Big Book of Modern Nations as an "Indian citizen", to come here and criticise the US government. Speaking for myself, I'm no flag-waver, no patriot, and am fully aware that venality, brutality, and hypocrisy are imprinted on the leaden soul of every state. But when a country ceases to be merely a country and becomes an empire, then the scale of operations changes dramatically. So may I clarify that tonight I speak as a subject of the American Empire? I speak as a slave who presumes to criticise her king.

Since lectures must be called something, mine tonight is called:

Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy. 
Buy One, Get One Free

Way back in 1988, on July 3, the USS Vincennes, a missile cruiser stationed in the Persian Gulf, accidentally shot down an Iranian airliner and killed 290 civilian passengers. George Bush the First, who was at the time on his presidential campaign, was asked to comment on the incident. He said quite subtly, "I will never apologise for the United States. I don’t care what the facts are."

I don’t care what the facts are. What a perfect maxim for the New American Empire. Perhaps a slight variation on the theme would be more apposite: The facts can be whatever we want them to be.

When the United States invaded Iraq, a New York Times/CBS News survey estimated that 42 per cent of the American public believed that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And an abc News poll said that 55 per cent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein directly supported Al Qaeda. None of this opinion is based on evidence (because there isn’t any). All of it is based on insinuation, auto-suggestion and outright lies circulated by the US corporate media, otherwise known as the ‘Free Press’, that hollow pillar on which contemporary American democracy rests.

Public support in the US for the war against Iraq was founded on a multi-tiered edifice of falsehood and deceit, coordinated by the US government and faithfully amplified by the corporate media.

Apart from the invented links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, we had the manufactured frenzy about Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. George Bush the Lesser went to the extent of saying it would be "suicidal" for the US not to attack Iraq. We once again witnessed the paranoia that a starved, bombed, besieged country was about to annihilate almighty America. (Iraq was only the latest in a succession of countries—earlier there was Cuba, Nicaragua, Libya, Grenada, Panama). But this time it wasn’t just your ordinary brand of friendly neighbourhood frenzy. It was Frenzy with a Purpose. It ushered in an old doctrine in a new bottle: the Doctrine of Pre-emptive Strike, aka The United States Can Do Whatever The Hell It Wants, And That’s Official.

The war against Iraq has been fought and won and no Weapons of Mass Destruction have been found. Not even a little one. Perhaps they’ll have to be planted before they’re discovered. And then, the more troublesome amongst us will need an explanation for why Saddam Hussein didn’t use them when his country was being invaded.

Of course, there’ll be no answers. True Believers will make do with those fuzzy TV reports about the discovery of a few barrels of banned chemicals in an old shed. There seems to be no consensus yet about whether they are really chemicals, whether they are actually banned, and whether the vessels they’re contained in can technically be called barrels. (There were unconfirmed rumours that a teaspoonful of potassium permanganate and an old harmonica were found there too.)

Meanwhile, in passing, an ancient civilisation has been casually decimated by a very recent, casually brutal nation.

Then there are those who say, so what if Iraq had no chemical and nuclear weapons? So what if there is no Al Qaeda connection? So what if Osama bin Laden hates Saddam Hussein as much as he hates the United States? Bush the Lesser has said Saddam Hussein was a ‘Homicidal Dictator’. And so, the reasoning goes, Iraq needed a "regime change".

Never mind that forty years ago, the CIA, under President John F. Kennedy, orchestrated a regime change in Baghdad. In 1963, after a successful coup, the Ba’ath party came to power in Iraq. Using lists provided by the CIA, the new Ba’ath regime systematically eliminated hundreds of doctors, teachers, lawyers and political figures known to be leftists. An entire intellectual community was slaughtered. (The same technique was used to massacre hundreds of thousands of people in Indonesia and East Timor.) The young Saddam Hussein was said to have had a hand in supervising the bloodbath. In 1979, after factional infighting within the Ba’ath Party, Saddam Hussein became the President of Iraq. In April 1980, while he was massacring Shias, the US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinksi declared, "We see no fundamental incompatibility of interests between the United States and Iraq." Washington and London overtly and covertly supported Saddam Hussein. They financed him, equipped him, armed him and provided him with dual-use materials to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. They supported his worst excesses financially, materially and morally. They supported the eight-year war against Iran and the 1988 gassing of Kurdish people in Halabja, crimes which 14 years later were re-heated and served up as reasons to justify invading Iraq. After the first Gulf War, the ‘Allies’ fomented an uprising of Shias in Basra and then looked away while Saddam Hussein crushed the revolt and slaughtered thousands in an act of vengeful reprisal.

The point is, if Saddam Hussein was evil enough to merit the most elaborate, openly declared assassination attempt in history (the opening move of Operation Shock and Awe), then surely those who supported him ought at least to be tried for war crimes? Why aren’t the faces of US and UK government officials on the infamous pack of cards of wanted men and women?

Because when it comes to Empire, facts don’t matter.

Yes, but all that’s in the past, we’re told. Saddam Hussein is a monster who must be stopped now. And only the US can stop him. It’s an effective technique, this use of the urgent morality of the present to obscure the diabolical sins of the past and the malevolent plans for the future. Indonesia, Panama, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan—the list goes on and on. Right now there are brutal regimes being groomed for the future—Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, the Central Asian Republics.

US Attorney General John Ashcroft recently declared that US freedoms are "not the grant of any government or document, but...our endowment from God". (Why bother with the United Nations when God himself is on hand?)

So here we are, the people of the world, confronted with an Empire armed with a mandate from heaven (and, as added insurance, the most formidable arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in history). Here we are, confronted with an Empire that has conferred upon itself the right to go to war at will, and the right to deliver people from corrupting ideologies, from religious fundamentalists, dictators, sexism, and poverty by the age-old, tried-and-tested practice of extermination. Empire is on the move, and Democracy is its sly new war cry. Democracy, home-delivered to your doorstep by daisy-cutters. Death is a small price for people to pay for the privilege of sampling this new product: Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy (bring to a boil, add oil, then bomb).

Ali Ismail Abbas, 12: the freedom to not fly

But then perhaps chinks, negroes, dinks, gooks and wogs don’t really qualify as real people. Perhaps our deaths don’t qualify as real deaths. Our histories don’t qualify as history. They never have.

Speaking of history, in these past months, while the world watched, the US invasion and occupation of Iraq was broadcast on live TV. Like Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan, the regime of Saddam Hussein simply disappeared. This was followed by what analysts called a "power vacuum". Cities that had been under siege, without food, water and electricity for days, cities that had been bombed relentlessly, people who had been starved and systematically impoverished by the UN sanctions regime for more than a decade, were suddenly left with no semblance of urban administration. A 7,000-year-old civilisation slid into anarchy. On live TV.

Vandals plundered shops, offices, hotels and hospitals. American and British soldiers stood by and watched. They said they had no orders to act. In effect, they had orders to kill people, but not to protect them. Their priorities were clear. The safety and security of Iraqi people was not their business. The security of whatever little remained of Iraq’s infrastructure was not their business. But the security and safety of Iraq’s oil fields were. Of course they were. The oil fields were ‘secured’ almost before the invasion began.

On CNN and BBC the scenes of the rampage were played and replayed. TV commentators, army and government spokespersons portrayed it as a ‘liberated people’ venting their rage at a despotic regime. US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said: "It’s untidy. Freedom’s untidy and free people are free to commit crimes and make mistakes and do bad things." Did anybody know that Donald Rumsfeld was an anarchist? I wonder—did he hold the same view during the riots in Los Angeles following the beating of Rodney King? Would he care to share his thesis about the Untidiness of Freedom with the two million people being held in US prisons right now? (The world’s ‘freest’ country has the highest number of prisoners in the world.) Would he discuss its merits with young African-American men, 28 per cent of whom will spend some part of their adult lives in jail? Could he explain why he serves under a president who oversaw 152 executions when he was governor of Texas?

Before the war on Iraq began, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) sent the Pentagon a list of 16 crucial sites to protect. The National Museum was second on that list. Yet the Museum was not just looted, it was desecrated. It was a repository of an ancient cultural heritage. Iraq as we know it today was part of the river valley of Mesopotamia. The civilisation that grew along the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates produced the world’s first writing, first calendar, first library, first city, and, yes, the world’s first democracy. King Hammurabi of Babylon was the first to codify laws governing the social life of citizens. It was a code in which abandoned women, prostitutes, slaves, and even animals had rights. The Hammurabi code is acknowledged not just as the birth of legality, but the beginning of an understanding of the concept of social justice. The US government could not have chosen a more inappropriate land in which to stage its illegal war and display its grotesque disregard for justice.

At a Pentagon briefing during the days of looting, Secretary Rumsfeld, Prince of Darkness, turned on his media cohorts who had served him so loyally through the war. "The images you are seeing on television, you are seeing over and over and over, and it’s the same picture, of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it twenty times and you say, ‘My god, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?’."

Laughter rippled through the press room. Would it be alright 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 16 sites to be protected was the Ministry of Oil. It was the only one that was given protection. 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 21st 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.

Undaunted by all this, on May 2, 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 sea as his background instead of the San Diego coastline".

President Bush, who never served his term in the military, 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".

It was important to avoid making a straightforward victory announcement, because under the Geneva Convention a victorious army is bound by legal obligations of an occupying force, a responsibility that the Bush administration does not want to burden itself with. 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 Herman 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."

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." Maybe he’s right.

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

After using the ‘good offices’ of UN diplomacy (economic sanctions and weapons inspections) to ensure that Iraq was brought to its knees, its people starved, half a million children dead, its infrastructure severely damaged, after making sure that most of its weapons had been destroyed, in an act of cowardice that must surely be unrivalled in history, the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ (better known as the Coalition of the Bullied and Bought) sent in an invading army!