Until now I haven’t had the time or the stomach for this, but here goes. Famed novelist/activist Arundhati Roy appeared on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now program in May; transcript here. I’ve written critically about Roy before, also here and here. (I’m grateful to a reader for pointing out a circulating misquotation that I once cited and then corrected.)
The latest Goodman-Roy discussion ranges over a number of topics. In this passage she starts by referring to the Naxalites, a Maoist insurgent group in India:
Well, the Maoists are fighting on two fronts. One is that they are fighting a feudal society, their feudal landlords. You have, you know, the whole caste system which is arranged against the indigenous people and the Dalits, who are the untouchable caste. And they are fighting against this whole corporatization. But they are also very poor people, you know, barefoot with old rusty weapons. And, you know, what we — say someone like myself, watching what is happening in Kashmir, where — or in the northeast, where exactly what America is doing in Iraq, you know, where you’re fostering a kind of civil war and then saying, “Oh, if we pull out, these people just will massacre each other.”
But the longer you stay, the more you’re enforcing these tribal differences and creating a resistance, which obviously, on the one hand, someone like me does support; on the other hand, you support the resistance, but you may not support the vision that they are fighting for. And I keep saying, you know, I’m doomed to fight on the side of people that have no space for me in their social imagination, and I would probably be the first person that was strung up if they won. But the point is that they are the ones that are resisting on the ground, and they have to be supported, because what is happening is unbelievable. [Emphasis added.]
I’m struck first of all by the solipsism and self-pity of this assertion. Roy feels that she is “doomed” to support brutal and intolerant resistance movements. Her caveat about being hypothetically “strung up” renders her position more appalling, not less. For no one can claim she’s unaware of the true nature of what she’s supporting.
Now, a little while back I linked to an initiative called the National Organization for the Iraqi Freedom Struggles (NO-IFS). Lo and behold, here are progressive activists who recognize that they are not in any way “doomed”:
We recognize the overwhelming, steadily growing opposition of Iraqis to the occupation, but also the sharp divisions within the opposition. Accordingly, we do not support “the resistance” as such. In particular, we oppose all forms of outright or tacit support for the political Islamist and Ba’athist forces that overwhelmingly make up the armed insurgency.
[…]
We advocate that the antiwar movement as a whole adopt this approach to ending the war and occupation – active support for the secular, democratic, and progressive freedom struggles against both the U.S. occupation and the indigenous reactionary forces. This type of solidarity is a central way to build and sustain our movements here. It is by evincing an unyielding, principled commitment to human freedom and to people struggling for freedom – not by explicitly or tacitly supporting a supposedly “lesser evil” – that the antiwar movement and other movements will be able to grow.
Statements like these, among others, have prompted me to reconsider my overly broad critiques of the antiwar left. I should also add that Roy’s efforts against hydroelectric dam projects in India are laudable, and her warnings against the Wal-Martization of her country and the world cannot be brushed off. However, I continue to find her outlook on “resistance” disturbing, wrongheaded, and symptomatic of a wider problem in the anti-imperialist camp.
Also, note that softball interviews aren’t strictly limited to the establishment media. Amy Goodman didn’t bat an eye over Roy’s comment.
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