Arundhati Roy

[Roy:] I’m just saying that, at one level, I am happy—awed—that there are people of such intelligence, such compassion, that have defected from the State. They are heroic. Absolutely. They’ve risked their lives, their freedom...but then there’s that part of me that thinks...how could you ever have believed in it? What do you feel betrayed by? Is it possible to have a moral State? A moral superpower? I can’t understand those people who believe that the excesses are just aberrations.

  Outlook India

I have the same question that she poses there. The question begins with her concern for the early photo of Edward Snowden on the cover of Wired magazine caressing the American flag. I took exception to it myself, but assumed, as John Cusack defends it with what I imagine is the correct answer: Snowden had to be very very careful about his image. But, he himself has said he was a believer in the US mission before he came into contact with the secrets held at the CIA/NSA. And I wonder about that myself. I'm always happy to see reality dawn on people, but I wonder how they could miss it. If you are over the age of 12, and you can read, how can you not notice the reality of the State? Perhaps most people don't do much reading.

But then, having ranted as I have, I always say that the grand thing in the United States is that there has been real resistance from within. There have been soldiers who’ve refused to fight, who’ve burned their medals, who’ve been conscientious objectors. I don’t think we have ever had a conscientious objector in the Indian Army.

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The great irony is that people who live in remote areas, who are illiterate and don’t own TVs, are in some ways more free because they are beyond the reach of indoctrination by the modern mass media

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Is it alright to force a country to disarm, and then bomb it? To continue to create mayhem in the area? To pretend that you are fighting radical Islamism, when you’re actually toppling all the regimes that are not radical Islamist regimes? Whatever else their faults may be, they were not radical Islamist states—Iraq was not, Syria is not, Libya was not. The most radical fundamentalist Islamist state is, of course, your ally Saudi Arabia.

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All this destruction that has come in the wake of 9/11, all the countries that have been bombed...it ignites and magnifies these ancient antagonisms. They don’t necessarily have to do with the United States; they pre-date the existence of the United States by centuries. But the United States is unable to understand how irrelevant it is, actually. And how wicked.... Your short-term gains are the rest of the world’s long-term disasters—for everybody, including yourselves. And, I’m sorry, I’ve been saying you and the United States or America, when I actually mean the US government. There’s a difference. Big one.

Yes, but on the other hand, we supposedly elect and approve the US government. If we actually don't, then we need to do something about that.

In 2001, we were told that the war in Afghanistan was a feminist mission. The marines were liberating Afghan women from the Taliban. Can you really bomb feminism into a country? And now, after 25 years of brutal war—10 years against the Soviet occupation, 15 years of US occupation—the Taliban is riding back to Kabul and will soon be back to doing business with the United States. I don’t live in the United States but when I’m here, I begin to feel like my head is in a grinder—my brains are being scrambled by this language that they’re using. Outside it’s not so hard to understand because people know the score. But here, so many seem to swallow the propaganda so obediently.

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JC: In the United States, we can talk about ISIS, but we can’t talk about Palestine.

AR: Oh, in India, we can talk about Palestine but we can’t talk about Kashmir.

And, we definitely cannot talk about socialism. Whatever else Bernie Sanders is or isn't, does or doesn't do, he is making at least a small wedge into our discourse where the country has to at least acknowledge that there is a socialist party in this country, and they aren't scary commies.

Our tragedy today is not just that millions of people who called themselves communist or socialist were physically liquidated in Vietnam, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, not just that China and Russia, after all that revolution, have become capitalist economies, not just that the working class has been ruined in the United States and its unions dismantled, not just that Greece has been brought to its knees, or that Cuba will soon be assimilated into the free market—it is also that the language of the Left, the discourse of the Left, has been marginalised and is sought to be eradicated. The debate [...] used to be about social justice, equality, liberty, and redistribution of wealth. All we seem to be left with now is paranoid gibberish about a War on Terror whose whole purpose is to expand the War, increase the Terror, and obfuscate the fact that the wars of today are not aberrations but systemic, logical exercises to preserve a way of life whose delicate pleasures and exquisite comforts can only be delivered to the chosen few by a continuous, protracted war for hegemony—Lifestyle Wars.

So we don't talk about justice any more. We talk about human rights. It's easier. Justice is a larger, more complicated concept.

Human rights takes history out of justice.

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The idea of “human rights”, for example—sometimes it bothers me. Not in itself, but because the concept of human rights has replaced the much grander idea of justice. Human rights are fundamental rights, they are the minimum, the very least we demand. Too often, they become the goal itself. What should be the minimum becomes the maximum—all we are supposed to expect—but human rights aren’t enough. The goal is, and must always be, justice.

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Look at the Israel-Palestine conflict, for example. If you look at a map from 1947 to now, you’ll see that Israel has gobbled up almost all of Palestinian land with its illegal settlements. To talk about justice in that battle, you have to talk about those settlements. But, if you just talk about human rights, then you can say, “Oh, Hamas violates human rights”, “Israel violates human rights”. Ergo, both are bad.

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The language of human rights tends to accept a status quo that is intrinsically unjust—and then tries to make it more accountable. But then, of course, Catch-22 is that violating human rights is integral to the project of neoliberalism and global hegemony.

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[NGOs have] moved in to the spaces that were left when “structural adjustment” forced states to pull back on public spending—on health, education, infrastructure, water supply—turning what ought to be people’s rights, to education, to healthcare and so on, into charitable activity available to a few. [...] It’s a way of managing public anger. We’re all being managed, and we don’t even know it. [...] The only thing that is allowed to move freely—unimpeded—around the world today is money...capital.

These things will always be the same until humans evolve, and maybe that won't ever happen. I'm in mind of something I heard Yanis Varoufakis say:  the idea of country borders is silly. I've lamented the silliness for years. Why should it be that when you cross a man-made imaginary line you come under different rules and pay large fees just to be there? Why are you not allowed to go wherever you are able to get to that suits you? If you're born into a country whose rules - or even its geography - don't suit you, why can't you simply go to one that does without the approval of either the state you left or the one you want to be in? Once upon a time, people could do that.  We may be becoming more enlightened scientifically and technologically, but we are reversing politically.

Arundhati Roy says it better:

It’s possible that our puffed-up, prideful intelligence has outstripped our instinct for survival and the road back to safety has already been washed away. In which case there’s nothing much to be done. If there is something to be done, then one thing is for sure: those who created the problem will not be the ones who come up with a solution. Encrypting our e-mails will help, but not very much. Recalibrating our understanding of what love means, what happiness means—and, yes, what countries mean—might. Recalibrating our priorities might. An old-growth forest, a mountain range or a river valley is more important and certainly more loveable than any country will ever be. I could weep for a river-valley, and I have. But for a country?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.