Things That Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations

by Arundhati Roy

  JC: Greed. . . . That’s what this whole circus is about, huh?

  AR: Yes.

  That evening, after the awards ceremony, we met up with Dan. The next morning, we caught the flight to Moscow. Traveling with us was Ole von Uexküll from the Right Livelihood Foundation, a lovely man with clear eyes and impeccable manners. Ole was going to give Ed the prize since he couldn’t travel to Stockholm to receive it. Ole would be our companion for the next few days. On the flight, Dan was furiously reading Roy’s new essay, “The Doctor and the Saint,” scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad.19 My mind began to race, wondering what Roy was making of this mini flying circus hurtling toward Moscow. What I would learn from what she calls—with sinister silkiness and mischief twinkling in her dark brown eyes—“the gook perspective”? She can disarm you at any time with her friendly hustler’s grin, but her eyes see things and love things so fiercely, it’s frightening at times.

  Going through immigration of the country he once planned to annihilate, Dan flashed the peace sign. Soon we were driving through the freezing streets of Moscow. The Ritz-Carlton is perched literally a few hundred yards from the Kremlin. The Red Square always seemed so much bigger on TV, during all those horror show military parades. It’s so much smaller to the naked eye. We checked in and were whisked up to a VIP reception lounge with great views of the Kremlin and an Audi car display on its roof deck: The Ritz Terrace Brought to You by Audi. Another reminder hanging over Lenin’s tomb that capitalism had supposedly ended history.

  At noon the next day, I got the call I was waiting for in my room.

  The meeting between these two living symbols of American conscience was historic. It needed to happen. Seeing Ed and Dan together, trading stories, exchanging notes, was both heartwarming and deeply inspiring, and the conversation with Roy and the two former President’s Men was extraordinary. It had depth, insight, wit, generosity, and a lightness of touch not possible in a formal, structured interview. Aware that we were being watched and monitored by forces greater than ourselves, we talked. Maybe one day the NSA will give us the minutes of our meeting. What was remarkable was how much agreement there was in the room. It wasn’t just what was said, but the way it was said, not just the text, but the subtext, warmth, and laughter that was so exhilarating. But that’s another story. After two unforgettable days and twenty hours spent together, we said goodbye to Ed, wondering if we’d ever see him again.

  During the last few hours with Ed, Dan had recounted in horrifying and empirical detail the history of the nuclear arms race—a history of lies—an apocalyptic tome of charnel monologues and murder rites.

  At one point, Dan referred to Robert McNamara, his boss in the Pentagon, as a “moderate.” Roy’s eyes snapped wide open at the assertion. Dan then explained how, compared to the other lunatics in the Pentagon like Edward Teller and Curtis LeMay, he was one. McNamara’s moderate and reasonable argument, Dan said, was that the United States needed only four hundred warheads instead of a thousand. Because after four hundred, there were “diminishing returns on genocide.” It begins to flatten out. “You kill most people with four hundred, so if you have eight hundred, you don’t kill that many more—four hundred warheads would kill 1.2 billion people out of the then total population of 3.7 billion. So why have a thousand?”

  Roy listened to all this without saying very much. In “The End of Imagination,” the essay she wrote after India’s 1998 nuclear tests, she had gotten herself into serious trouble when she declared, “If protesting against having a nuclear bomb implanted in my brain is anti-Hindu and antinational, then I secede. I hereby declare myself an independent, mobile republic.”20 Dan, who is writing a book on the nuclear arms race, told me it was one of the finest things he’s ever read on the subject. “Wouldn’t you say,” Roy said for the record, or to anybody willing to listen, “that nuclear weapons are the inevitable, toxic corollary of the idea of the Great Nation?”

  Just after Ed left, Dan collapsed on to my bed—exhausted and blissful—with his arms stretched wide, but then a deep storm erupted. He became distressed and emotional. He quoted from “The Man Without a Country” by Edward Everett Hale, a short story about an American naval officer who was tried and court martialed.21 Hale’s sentence was that he should forever go from ship to ship, and he should never hear the name “America” again. In the story, a character quotes the poem “Patriotism” by Sir Walter Scott:

  Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,

  Who never to himself hath said,

  “This is my own, my native land!”22

  Dan began to weep. Through his tears, he said, “I’m still that much of a patriot in some sense . . . not for the State, but. . . .” He talked about his son and how he came of age during the war in Vietnam, and how he, Dan, used to think his son was born for jail. “That the best thing that the best people in our country like Ed can do is to go to prison . . . or be an exile in Russia? This is what it’s come to in my country . . . it’s horrible, you know. . . .” Roy’s eyes were sympathetic but distinctly unsettled.

  It was our last night in Moscow. We went for a walk in the Red Square. The Kremlin was lit with fairy lights. Dan went off to buy himself a Cossack fur hat. We stepped carefully on to the treacherous sheet of ice that covered the Red Square, trying to guess where Putin’s window might be and whether he was still at work. Roy kept talking as if she were still in Room 1001.

  AR: The diminishing returns of genocide . . . what’s the subject heading? Math or economics? Zoology it should be. Mao said he was prepared to have millions of Chinese people perish in a nuclear war as long as China survived. . . . I’m beginning to find it more and more sick that only humans make it into our calculations. . . . Annihilate life on earth, but save the nation . . . what’s the subject heading? Stupidity or Insanity?

  JC: Social Service . . . What do you think those maniacs look like in binary code?

  AR: Good-looking. When you think of how much violence, how much blood . . . how much has been destroyed to create the great nations, America, Australia, Britain, Germany, France, Belgium—even India, Pakistan.

  JC: The Soviet Union . . .

  AR: Yes. Having destroyed so much to make them, we must have nuclear weapons to protect them—and climate change to hold up their way of life . . . a two-pronged annihilation project.

  JC: We must all bow down to the flags.

  AR: And—I might as well say it now that I’m in the Red Square—to capitalism. Every time I say the word capitalism, everyone just assumes . . .

  JC: You must be a Marxist.

  AR: I have plenty of Marxism in me, I do . . . but Russia and China had their bloody revolutions and even while they were Communist, they had the same idea about generating wealth—tear it out of the bowels of the earth. And now they have come out with the same idea in the end . . . you know, capitalism. But capitalism will fail, too. We need a new imagination. Until then, we’re all just out here . . .

  JC: Wandering . . .

  AR: Thousands of years of ideological, philosophical, and practical decisions were made. They altered the surface of the earth, the coordinates of our souls. For every one of those decisions, maybe there’s another decision that could have been made, should have been made.

  JC: Can be made . . .

  AR: Of course. So I don’t have the Big Idea. I don’t have the arrogance to even want to have the Big Idea. But I believe the physics of resisting power is as old as the physics of accumulating power. That’s what keeps the balance in the universe . . . the refusal to obey. I mean what’s a country? It’s just an administrative unit, a glorified municipality. Why do we imbue it with esoteric meaning and protect it with nuclear bombs? I can’t bow down to a municipality . . . it’s just not intelligent. The bastards will do what they have to do, and we’ll do what we have to do. Even if they annihilate us, we’ll go down on the other side.

  I looked at Roy, and wondered what trouble awaited her back in India23 . . . an old Yugoslavian prove
rb came to mind—“Tell the truth and run.” But some creatures will not run . . . even when maybe they should. They know that to show weakness only emboldens the bastards . . .

  Suddenly she turned to me and thanked me formally for organizing the meeting with Edward Snowden. “He presents himself as this cool systems man, but it’s only passion that could make him do what he did. He’s not just a systems man. That’s what I needed to know.”

  We kept an eye on Dan in the distance bargaining with the hat-seller. I was worried he might slip on the ice.

  “So, for the record, Ms. Roy,” I asked, “as someone with ‘plenty of Marxism’ in her, how does it feel to be walking on ice in the Red Square?” She nodded sagely, appearing to give my talk-show question serious consideration. “I think it should be privatized . . . handed over to a foundation that works tirelessly for the empowerment of women prisoners, abolishing of child labor, and the improvement of relations between mass media and mining companies. Maybe to Bill and Melinda Gates.”

  She grinned with sadness in it . . . I could almost hear the chimes of harmonic thinking, as clear as the church bells that suddenly filled the frozen air and the wind that chopped through the bleak winter night.

  “Listen, man,” she said. “God’s back in the Red Square.”

  Arundhati Roy

  What Shall

  We Love?

  The Moscow Un-Summit wasn’t a formal interview. Nor was it a cloak-and-dagger underground rendezvous. The upshot is that we didn’t get the cautious, diplomatic, regulation Edward Snowden. The downshot (that isn’t a word, I know) is that the jokes, the humor, and repartee that took place in Room 1001 cannot be reproduced. The Un-Summit cannot be written about in the detail that it deserves. Yet it definitely cannot not be written about. Because it did happen. And because the world is a millipede that inches forward on millions of real conversations. And this, certainly, was a real one.

  What mattered, perhaps even more than what was said, was the spirit in the room. There was Edward Snowden who after 9/11 was in his own words “straight up singing highly of Bush” and signing up for the war in Iraq. And there were those of us who after 9/11 had been straight up doing exactly the opposite. It was a little late for this conversation, of course. Iraq has been all but destroyed. And now the map of what is so condescendingly called the “Middle East” is being brutally redrawn (yet again). But still, there we were, all of us, talking to each other in a bizarre hotel in Russia.

  Bizarre it certainly was. The opulent lobby of the Moscow Ritz-Carlton was teeming with drunk millionaires, high on new money, and gorgeous, high-stepping young women, half-peasant, half-supermodel, draped on the arms of toady men—gazelles on their way to fame and fortune, paying their dues to the satyrs who would get them there. In the corridors, you passed serious fistfights, loud singing, and quiet, liveried waiters wheeling trolleys with towers of food and silverware in and out of rooms. In Room 1001 we were so close to the Kremlin that if you put your hand out of the window, you could almost touch it. It was snowing outside. We were deep into the Russian winter—never credited enough for its part in the Second World War.

  Edward Snowden was much smaller than I thought he’d be. Small, lithe, neat, like a housecat. He greeted Dan ecstatically and us warmly.

  “I know why you’re here,” he said to me smiling.

  “Why?”

  “To radicalize me.”

  I laughed. We settled down on various perches, stools, chairs, and John’s bed.

  Dan and Ed were so pleased to meet each other, and had so much to say to each other, that it felt a little impolite to intrude on them. At times they broke into some kind of arcane code language: “I jumped from nobody on the street straight to TSSCI.” “No, because, again, this isn’t DS at all, this is NSA. At CIA, it’s called COMO.” “. . . It’s kind of a similar role, but is it under support?” “PRISEC or PRIVAC?” “They start out with the TALENT-KEYHOLE thing. Everyone then gets read into TS, SI, TK, and GAMMA—G clearance . . . Nobody knows what it is . . .”1

  It took a while before I felt it was alright to interrupt them. Snowden’s disarming answer to my question about being photographed cradling the American flag was to roll his eyes and say: “Oh, man. I don’t know. Somebody handed me a flag, they took a picture.” And when I asked him why he signed up for the war in Iraq, when millions of people all over the world were marching against it, he replied, equally disarmingly: “I fell for the propaganda.”

  Dan talked at some length about how it would be unusual for US citizens who joined the Pentagon and the NSA to have read much literature on US exceptionalism and its history of warfare. (And once they joined, it was unlikely to be a subject that interested them.) He and Ed had watched it play out live, in real time, and were horrified enough to stake their lives and their freedom when they decided to be whistleblowers. What the two of them clearly had in common was a strong, almost corporeal sense of moral righteousness—of right and wrong. A sense of righteousness that was obviously at work not just when they decided to blow the whistle on what they thought to be morally unacceptable, but also when they signed up for their jobs—Dan to save his country from Communism, Ed to save it from Islamist terrorism. What they did when they grew disillusioned was so electrifying, so dramatic, that they have come to be identified by that single act of moral courage.

  I asked Ed Snowden what he thought about Washington’s ability to destroy countries and its inability to win a war (despite mass surveillance). I think the question was phrased quite rudely—something like “When was the last time the United States won a war?” We spoke about whether the economic sanctions and subsequent invasion of Iraq could be accurately called genocide. We talked about how the CIA knew—and was preparing for the fact—that the world was heading to a place of not just inter-country war but of intra-country war in which mass surveillance would be necessary to control populations. And about how armies were being turned into police forces to administer countries they have invaded and occupied, while the police, even in places like India and Pakistan and Ferguson, Missouri, in the United States, were being trained to behave like armies to quell internal insurrections.

  Ed spoke at some length about “sleepwalking into a total surveillance state.” And here I quote him, because he’s said this often before:

  If we do nothing, we sort of sleepwalk into a total surveillance state where we have both a super-state that has unlimited capacity to apply force with an unlimited ability to know [about the people it is targeting]—and that’s a very dangerous combination. That’s the dark future. The fact that they know everything about us and we know nothing about them—because they are secret, they are privileged, and they are a separate class . . . the elite class, the political class, the resource class—we don’t know where they live, we don’t know what they do, we don’t know who their friends are. They have the ability to know all that about us. This is the direction of the future, but I think there are changing possibilities in this . . .

  I asked Ed whether the NSA was just feigning annoyance at his revelations but might actually be secretly pleased at being known as the All Seeing, All Knowing Agency—because that would help to keep people fearful, off balance, always looking over their shoulders, and easy to manage.

  Dan spoke about how even in the United States, a police state was only another 9/11 away: “We are not in a police state now, not yet. I’m talking about what may come. I realize I shouldn’t put it that way . . . White, middle-class, educated people like myself are not living in a police state . . . Black, poor people are living in a police state. The repression starts with the semi-white, the Middle Easterners, including anybody who is allied with them, and goes on from there . . . We don’t have a police state. One more 9/11, and then I believe we will have hundreds of thousands of detentions. Middle Easterners and Muslims will be put in detention camps or deported. After 9/11, we had thousands of people arrested without charges . . . But I’m talking about the future. I’m talking
the level of the Japanese in World War II . . . I’m talking of hundreds of thousands in camps or deported. I think the surveillance is very relevant to that. They will know who to put away—the data is already collected.” (When he said this, I did wonder, though I did not ask—how different would things have been if Snowden had not been white?)

  We talked about war and greed, about terrorism, and what an accurate definition of it would be. We spoke about countries, flags, and the meaning of patriotism. We talked about public opinion and the concept of public morality and how fickle it could be, and how easily manipulated.

  It wasn’t a Q&A type of conversation. We were an incongruous gathering. Ole, myself, and three troublesome Americans. John Cusack, who thought up and organized this whole disruptive enterprise, comes from a fine tradition, too—of musicians, writers, actors, athletes who have refused to buy the bullshit, however beautifully it was packaged.

  What will become of Edward Snowden? Will he ever be able to return to the United States? His chances don’t look good. The US government—the Deep State, as well as both the major political parties—wants to punish him for the enormous damage he has inflicted, in their perception, on the security establishment. (It’s got Chelsea Manning and the other whistleblowers where it wants them.) If it does not manage to kill or jail Snowden, it must use everything in its power to limit the damage that he’s done and continues to do. One of those ways is to try to contain, co-opt, and usher the debate around whistleblowing in a direction that suits it. And it has, to some extent, managed to do that. In the Public Security versus Mass Surveillance debate that is taking place in the establishment Western media, the Object of Love is America. America and her actions. Are they moral or immoral? Are they right or wrong? Are the whistleblowers American patriots or American traitors? Within this constricted matrix of morality, other countries, other cultures, other conversations—even if they are the victims of US wars—usually appear only as witnesses in the main trial. They either bolster the outrage of the prosecution or the indignation of the defense. The trial, when it is conducted on these terms, serves to reinforce the idea that there can be a moderate, moral superpower. Are we not witnessing it in action? Its heartache? Its guilt? Its self-correcting mechanisms? Its watchdog media? Its activists who will not stand for ordinary (innocent) American citizens being spied on by their own government? In these debates that appear to be fierce and intelligent, words like public and security and terrorism are thrown around, but they remain, as always, loosely defined and are used more often than not in the way the US state would like them to be used.