My Seditious Heart

by Arundhati Roy

Soon after Bush the Second announced that he wanted American farmers to feed the world, Dan Amstutz, a former senior executive of Cargill, the biggest grain exporter in the world, was put in charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq. Kevin Watkin, Oxfam’s policy director, said, “Putting Dan Amstutz in charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq is like putting Saddam Hussein in the chair of a human rights commission.”79

  The two men who have been shortlisted to run operations for managing Iraqi oil have worked with Shell, BP, and Fluor. Fluor is embroiled in a lawsuit by Black South African workers who have accused the company of exploiting and brutalizing them during the apartheid era.80 Shell, of course, is well known for its devastation of the Ogoni tribal lands in Nigeria.81

  Tom Brokaw (one of America’s best-known TV anchors) was inadvertently succinct about the process. “One of the things we don’t want to do,” he said, “is to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq because in a few days we’re going to own that country.”82

  Now that the ownership deeds are being settled, Iraq is ready for New Democracy.

  So, as Lenin used to ask: What Is To Be Done? Well … We might as well accept the fact that there is no conventional military force that can successfully challenge the American war machine. Terrorist strikes only give the US government an opportunity that it is eagerly awaiting to further tighten its stranglehold. Within days of an attack you can bet that Patriot II would be passed. To argue against US military aggression by saying that it will increase the possibilities of terrorist strikes is futile. It’s like threatening Brer Rabbit that you’ll throw him into the bramble bush. Anybody who has read the document called “The Project for the New American Century” can attest to that. The government’s suppression of the congressional Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which found that there was intelligence warning of the strikes that was ignored,83 also attests to the fact that, for all their posturing, the terrorists and the Bush regime might as well be working as a team. They both hold people responsible for the actions of their governments. They both believe in the doctrine of collective guilt and collective punishment. Their actions benefit each other greatly.

  The US government has already displayed in no uncertain terms the range and extent of its capability for paranoid aggression. In human psychology, paranoid aggression is usually an indicator of nervous insecurity. It could be argued that it’s no different in the case of the psychology of nations. Empire is paranoid because it has a soft underbelly.

  Its homeland may be defended by border patrols and nuclear weapons, but its economy is strung out across the globe. Its economic outposts are exposed and vulnerable.

  Yet it would be naive to imagine that we can directly confront empire. Our strategy must be to isolate empire’s working parts and disable them one by one. No target is too small. No victory too insignificant. We could reverse the idea of the economic sanctions imposed on poor countries by empire and its allies. We could impose a regime of Peoples’ Sanctions on every corporate house that has been awarded a contract in postwar Iraq, just as activists in this country and around the world targeted institutions of apartheid. Each one of them should be named, exposed, and boycotted. Forced out of business. That could be our response to the Shock and Awe campaign. It would be a great beginning.

  Another urgent challenge is to expose the corporate media for the boardroom bulletin that it really is. We need to create a universe of alternative information. We need to support independent media like Democracy Now, Alternative Radio, South End Press.

  The battle to reclaim democracy is going to be a difficult one. Our freedoms were not granted to us by any governments. They were wrested from them by us. And once we surrender them, the battle to retrieve them is called a revolution. It is a battle that must range across continents and countries. It must not acknowledge national boundaries, but if it is to succeed, it has to begin here. In America. The only institution more powerful than the US government is American civil society. The rest of us are subjects of slave nations. We are by no means powerless, but you have the power of proximity. You have access to the Imperial Palace and the Emperor’s chambers. Empire’s conquests are being carried out in your name, and you have the right to refuse. You could refuse to fight. Refuse to move those missiles from the warehouse to the dock. Refuse to wave that flag. Refuse the victory parade.

  You have a rich tradition of resistance. You need only read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States to remind yourself of this.84

  Hundreds of thousands of you have survived the relentless propaganda you have been subjected to, and are actively fighting your own government. In the ultra-patriotic climate that prevails in the United States, that’s as brave as any Iraqi or Afghan or Palestinian fighting for his or her homeland.

  If you join the battle, not in your hundreds of thousands but in your millions, you will be greeted joyously by the rest of the world. And you will see how beautiful it is to be gentle instead of brutal, safe instead of scared. Befriended instead of isolated. Loved instead of hated.

  I hate to disagree with your president. Yours is by no means a great nation. But you could be a great people.

  History is giving you the chance. Seize the time.

  This talk was first delivered May 13, 2003, at the Riverside Church, New York City, and broadcast live on Pacifica Radio. The lecture, sponsored by Lannan Foundation and the Center for Economic and Social Rights, was delivered as an acceptance speech for the 2002 Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom.

  WHEN THE SAINTS GO MARCHING OUT: THE STRANGE FATE OF MARTIN, MOHANDAS, AND MANDELA

  We’re coming up to the fortieth anniversary of the March on Washington, when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Perhaps it’s time to reflect—again—on what has become of that dream.

  It’s interesting how icons, when their time has passed, are commodified and appropriated (some voluntarily, others involuntarily) to promote the prejudice, bigotry, and inequity they battled against. But then in an age when everything’s up for sale, why not icons? In an era when all of humanity, when every creature of God’s earth, is trapped between the IMF checkbook and the American cruise missile, can icons stage a getaway?

  Martin Luther King is part of a trinity. So it’s hard to think of him without two others elbowing their way into the picture: Mohandas Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. The three high priests of nonviolent resistance. Together they represent (to a greater or lesser extent) the twentieth century’s nonviolent liberation struggles (or should we say “negotiated settlements”?): of colonized against colonizer, former slave against slave owner.

  Today the elites of the very societies and peoples in whose name the battles for freedom were waged use them as mascots to entice new masters.

  Mohandas, Mandela, Martin.

  India, South Africa, the United States.

  Broken dreams, betrayal, nightmares.

  A quick snapshot of the supposedly “Free World” today.

  Last March in India, in Gujarat—Gandhi’s Gujarat— right-wing Hindu mobs murdered two thousand Muslims in a chillingly efficient orgy of violence. Women were gang-raped and burned alive. Muslim tombs and shrines were razed to the ground. More than a hundred fifty thousand Muslims have been driven from their homes. The economic base of the community has been destroyed. Eyewitness accounts and several fact-finding commissions have accused the state government and the police of collusion in the violence.1 I was present at a meeting where a group of victims kept wailing, “Please save us from the police! That’s all we ask …”

  In December 2002, the same state government was voted back to office. Narendra Modi, who was widely accused of having orchestrated the riots, has embarked on his second term as chief minister of Gujarat. On August 15, 2003, Independence Day, he hoisted the Indian flag before thousands of cheering people. In a gesture of menacing symbolism, he wore the black RSS cap—which proclaims him
as a member of the Hindu nationalist guild that has not been shy of admiring Hitler and his methods.2

  One hundred thirty million Muslims—not to mention the other minorities, Dalits, Christians, Sikhs, Adivasis—live in India under the shadow of Hindu nationalism.

  As his confidence in his political future brimmed over, Narendra Modi, master of seizing the political moment, invited Nelson Mandela to Gujarat to be the chief guest at the celebration of Gandhi’s birth anniversary on October 2, 2002.3 Fortunately, the invitation was turned down.4

  And what of Mandela’s South Africa? Otherwise known as the Small Miracle, the Rainbow Nation of God? South Africans say that the only miracle they know of is how quickly the rainbow has been privatized, sectioned off, and auctioned to the highest bidders. In its rush to replace Argentina as neoliberalism’s poster child, it has instituted a massive program of privatization and structural adjustment. The government’s promise to redistribute agricultural land to twenty-six million landless people has remained in the realm of dark humor.5 While more than 50 percent of the population remains landless, almost all agricultural land is owned by sixty thousand white farmers.6 (Small wonder that George Bush on his recent visit to South Africa referred to Thabo Mbeki as his “point man” on the Zimbabwe issue.)

  Post-apartheid, the income of the poorest 40 percent of Black families has diminished by about 20 percent.7 Two million have been evicted from their homes.8 Six hundred die of AIDS every day. Forty percent of the population is unemployed, and that number is rising sharply.9 The corporatization of basic services has meant that millions have been disconnected from water and electricity.10

  A fortnight ago, I visited the home of Teresa Naidoo in Chatsworth, Durban. Her husband had died the previous day of AIDS. She had no money for a coffin. She and her two small children are HIV-positive. The government disconnected her water supply because she was unable to pay her water bills and her rent arrears for her tiny council flat. The government dismisses her troubles and those of millions like her as a “culture of non-payment.”11

  In what ought to be an international scandal, this same government has officially asked the judge in a US court case to rule against forcing companies to pay reparations for the role they played during apartheid.12 Its reasoning is that reparations—in other words, justice—will discourage foreign investment.13 So South Africa’s poorest must pay apartheid’s debts, so that those who amassed profit by exploiting Black people during apartheid can profit even more from the goodwill generated by Nelson Mandela’s Rainbow Nation of God. President Thabo Mbeki is still called “comrade” by his colleagues in government. In South Africa, Orwellian parody goes under the genre of Real Life.

  What’s left to say about Martin Luther King’s America? Perhaps it’s worth asking a simple question: Had he been alive today, would he have chosen to stay warm in his undisputed place in the pantheon of Great Americans? Or would he have stepped off his pedestal, shrugged off the empty hosannas, and walked out on to the streets to rally his people once more?

  On April 4, 1967, one year before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King spoke at the Riverside Church in New York City. That evening he said: “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.”14

  Has anything happened in the thirty-six years between 1967 and 2003 that would have made him change his mind? Or would he be doubly confirmed in his opinion after the overt and covert wars and acts of mass killing that successive governments of his country, both Republican and Democrat, have engaged in since then?

  Let’s not forget that Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t start out as a militant. He began as a Persuader, a Believer. In 1964 he won the Nobel Peace Prize. He was held up by the media as an exemplary Black leader, unlike, say, the more militant Malcolm X. It was only three years later that Martin Luther King publicly connected the US government’s racist war in Vietnam with its racist policies at home.

  In 1967, in an uncompromising, militant speech, he denounced the American invasion of Vietnam. He said:

  We have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit.15

  The New York Times had some wonderful counter-logic to offer the growing antiwar sentiment among Black Americans: “In Vietnam,” it said, “the Negro for the first time has been given the chance to do his share of fighting for his country.”16

  It omitted to mention Martin Luther King Jr.’s remark that “there are twice as many Negroes dying in Vietnam as whites in proportion to their size in the population.”17 It omitted to mention that when the body bags came home, some of the Black soldiers were buried in segregated graves in the Deep South.

  What would Martin Luther King Jr. say today about the fact that federal statistics show that African Americans, who account for 12 percent of America’s population, make up 21 percent of the total armed forces and 29 percent of the US Army?18

  Perhaps he would take a positive view and look at this as affirmative action at its most effective?

  What would he say about the fact that having fought so hard to win the right to vote, today 1.4 million African Americans, which means 13 percent of all voting-age Black people, have been disenfranchised because of felony convictions?19

  To Black soldiers fighting in Vietnam, Martin Luther King Jr. said, “As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation’s role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection.”20

  In April 1967, at a massive antiwar demonstration in Manhattan, Stokely Carmichael described the draft as “white people sending Black people to make war on yellow people in order to defend land they stole from red people.”21

  What’s changed? Except of course the compulsory draft has become a poverty draft—a different kind of compulsion. Would Martin Luther King Jr. say today that the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan are in any way morally different from the US government’s invasion of Vietnam? Would he say that it was just and moral to participate in these wars? Would he say that it was right for the US government to have supported a dictator like Saddam Hussein politically and financially for years while he committed his worst excesses against Kurds, Iranians, and Iraqis—in the 1980s when he was an ally against Iran? And that when that dictator began to chafe at the bit, as Saddam Hussein did, would he say it was right to go to war against Iraq, to fire several hundred tons of depleted uranium into its fields, to degrade its water supply systems, to institute a regime of economic sanctions that resulted in the death of half a million children, to use UN weapons inspectors to force it to disarm, to mislead the public about an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction that could be deployed in a matter of minutes, and then, when the country was on its knees, to send in an invading army to conquer it, occupy it, humiliate its people, take control of its natural resources and infrastructure, and award contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to American corporations like Bechtel?

  When he spoke out against the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King Jr. drew some connections that many these days shy away from making. He said, “The problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.”22 Would he tell people today that it is right for the US government to export its cruelties—its racism, its economic bullying, and its war machine—to poorer countries?

  Would he say that Black Americans must fight for their fair share of the American pie and the bigger the pie, the better their share—never mind the terrible price that the people of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America are paying for the American Way of Life?
Would he support the grafting of the Great American Dream onto his own dream, which was a very different, very beautiful sort of dream? Or would he see that as a desecration of his memory and everything that he stood for?

  The Black American struggle for civil rights gave us some of the most magnificent political fighters, thinkers, public speakers, and writers of our times. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, James Baldwin, and of course the marvelous, magical, mythical Muhammad Ali.

  Who has inherited their mantle?

  Could it be the likes of Colin Powell? Condoleezza Rice? Michael Powell?

  They’re the exact opposite of icons or role models. They appear to be the embodiment of Black people’s dreams of material success, but in actual fact they represent the Great Betrayal. They are the liveried doormen guarding the portals of the glittering ballroom against the press and swirl of the darker races. Their role and purpose is to be trotted out by the Bush administration looking for brownie points in its racist wars and African safaris.

  If these are Black America’s new icons, then the old ones must be dispensed with because they do not belong in the same pantheon. If these are Black America’s new icons, then perhaps the haunting image that Mike Marqusee describes in his beautiful book Redemption Song—an old Muhammad Ali, afflicted with Parkinson’s disease, advertising a retirement pension—symbolizes what has happened to Black Power, not just in the United States but the world over.23

  If Black America genuinely wishes to pay homage to its real heroes, and to all those unsung people who fought by their side, if the world wishes to pay homage, then it’s time to march on Washington. Again. Keeping hope alive—for all of us.

  This text is an expanded version of an essay originally broadcast by BBC Radio 4, August 25, 2003. By request of the BBC, which had determined that copyright restrictions prohibited it from broadcasting direct quotations from King’s public speeches, the original used only paraphrases of King’s words. In this version, direct quotations have been used.