A respondent has prompted me to reconsider my criticism of antiwar activist Arundhati Roy in light of her remarks upon winning the Sydney Peace Prize in Nov. ’04.
Roy’s advocacy of “non-violent resistance” to the occupation of Iraq is indeed to be noted. In her acceptance speech she ventured this description of post-Saddam Iraq:
Prisons have been privatized. Torture has been privatized. We have seen what that leads to. Other attractions in New Iraq include newspapers being shut down. Television stations bombed. Reporters killed. US soldiers have opened fire on crowds of unarmed protestors killing scores of people. The only kind of resistance that has managed to survive is as crazed and brutal as the occupation itself.
Calling the “resistance” “crazed and brutal” is entirely accurate, but note that Roy, after detailing U.S. misdeeds, can’t be bothered to describe atrocities carried out by the “resistance,” so as to clearly and unequivocally condemn them. She goes on:
Is there space for a secular, democratic, feminist, non-violent resistance in Iraq? There isn’t really.
That is why it falls to those of us living outside Iraq to create that mass-based, secular and non-violent resistance to the US occupation. If we fail to do that, then we run the risk of allowing the idea of resistance to be hi-jacked and conflated with terrorism and that will be a pity because they are not the same thing…
I’m not at all sure what this means. She supports non-violent resistance, but not in Iraq itself? Hijacked and conflated by whom?
Perhaps the above is her way of revising this earlier statement from “Public Power in the Age of Empire,” which sparked my initial interest:
The Iraqi resistance is fighting on the frontlines of the battle against Empire. And therefore that battle is our battle…. Of course, it is riddled with opportunism, local rivalry, demagoguery, and criminality. But if we are only going to support pristine movements, then no resistance will be worthy of our purity.
Here Roy tells us that we should look squarely at the criminality of the Iraqi “resistance” and support it anyway. How this qualified her for a peace prize in late 2004 is beyond me. Her more recent comments notwithstanding, has she explicitly renounced the statement quoted above? Thousands of Iraqis have been killed and maimed by the “resistance” she endorsed.
Then there’s this, from the same essay:
The mandarins of the corporate world, the CEOs, the bankers, the politicians, the judges and generals look down on us from on high and shake their heads sternly. “There’s no Alternative,” they say. And let slip the dogs of war.
Then, from the ruins of Afghanistan, from the rubble of Iraq and Chechnya, from the streets of occupied Palestine and the mountains of Kashmir, from the hills and plains of Colombia and the forests of Andhra Pradesh and Assam comes the chilling reply: “There’s no alternative but terrorism.” Terrorism. Armed struggle. Insurgency. Call it what you want.
I recently heard a friend describe Roy as a political theorist. She is in fact a novelist, and the above is not a theory, it is a fable. From all these places, across continents and cultures — Iraq, Chechnya, Kashmir, Colombia — comes a monolithic stance on terrorism? A single “chilling reply” to the West? This is simplistic in the extreme, and it’s hard not to read it as a thinly veiled apologia for the world’s most implacable holy warriors.
Further on Roy adds: “Of course, there is an alternative to terrorism. It’s called justice.” We’re to believe, then, that terrorists, however misguided, are in fact motivated by a quest for justice, when in fact they are seeking to impose the most unjust social and political conditions imaginable. In Roy’s work you’ll get no account of what al-Qaedaists actually believe.
Take the recent series of bombings in Bangladesh. What military and corporate injustices provoked these? The bombers have plainly stated that they are trying to impose a Talibanist order in the country.
I’ve been thinking lately about Vieques. Non-violent protest recently stopped the U.S. Navy from using this Puerto Rican territory as a bombing range. Did a single Puerto Rican blow up a plane or building, or so much as pick up a gun? This is not to say that Puerto Ricans possess virtue that Muslims lack — it is simply to note that terrorism is not an inevitable response to imperialism and injustice.
I read Roy’s novel The God of Small Things in 1999 and I enjoyed it; I’m inclined to read it again. But I continue to have little regard for her political views.
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