Confronting Empire, Passionately

by Fakrul Alam

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0513-23.htm

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Among the global chorus of voices in opposition to America's new policy of strident action against suspects to its security shield none has been louder than Arundhoti's Roy. This, at least, is clear to anyone who reads her latest book, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire, for it is nothing less than an indictment of the arrogance and folly of current American imperial policy. In this work--also a collection of essays, speeches, and polemical pieces like her previous book--Roy has once again turned her seemingly infinite capacity to expose injustice and to speak up for the downtrodden to write a book that is powerful, persuasive, and--the word seems to be inevitable when discussing her productions--passionate.

The centerpiece of An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire is titled, simply and allusively, "come September." In this lecture-essay delivered in Santa Fe, USA, almost a year after '9/11,' Roy identifies her primary theme: "the relationship between power and powerlessness and the endless, circular conflict they're engaged in" (14). Power, she notes can inflate national egos, as in a country like the United States, and can manifest itself in "state terrorism" as in Indian policies in Kashmir. People in power, she notes, cynically manipulate the media to perpetuate themselves and pummel the powerless. Occasionally, however, she suggests, these people too get a taste of their medicine, as was the case on September 11, 2002. But while not withholding sympathy for the victims of the terrorist action of that day, she reminds us that its horrors should not blot out at least three other "black" September days: 11 September 1973, when a CIA-backed coup in Chile saw thousands of people dead or "disappeared"; 11 September 1922, when imperial Britain mandated action in Palestine that would ultimately lead to the partition of Palestine; and 11 September 1990, when George Bush, Sr., declared to a joint session of Congress that his country was going to war in Iraq. Through displaying these depressing backward linkages of September 11, 2002, Roy rests her case: the deaths and destruction America witnessed that day is linked to fateful decisions taken by once-imperial Britain and neo-imperial USA. Is it any wonder, she is bent on asking, that such imperial folly would come home to roost?

Other targets of Roy's intense scrutiny as an opponent of neo-imperialism is the western media and the IMF, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. The ultimate villain, complicit in all recent aggressive or covert action adopted by western governments, however is "corporate globalization." Roy notes how after September 11, 2002, the "free" US media began to kowtow the line of the military-industrial complex that now runs the USA and how "the myth of the Free Press in America" came "crashing down." The task of the cultural critic, according to Roy, is therefore "to expose the complex mess of cables that connect power to money to the supposedly 'neutral' press." She shows the duplicity involved in "live reporting"--"live" reportage on TV that is doctored to induce "orchestrated mass hysteria" in unsuspecting viewers and to make profit out of concocted or real crisis, of "crisis as spectacle, as theatre."

Roy is also scathing in writing about the Hindu nationalism in BJP India that has led to the Gujarati goonda Modi massacring Muslims brazenly. She is also scornful about laws such as the Prevention of Terrorism Act where "police torture tends to replace police investigation." For enlightened readers in Bangladesh who applaud RAB actions, "How Deep Shall We Dig," a lecture she delivered at Aligarh Muslim University, should be eye-opening, as when she declares "In this age of hyper-nationalism, as long as the people who are killed are labeled gangsters, terrorists, insurgents or extremists, their killers can strut around as crusaders in the national interest and are answerable to no one...there is something terribly wrong with a society that drives so many people to take such desperate measures." Surely, conscientious people in Bangladesh must learn from her when she notes the implications of the success resulting from the hard work the RSS and Sangh Parivar put into "disseminating deadly propaganda" in educational and other institutions and in a situation where a party like "the Congress sowed the seed and the BJP swept in to reap the hideous harvest?"...