AMY GOODMAN: As part of our ongoing teach-in on war and peace, today we bring you the voice of Arundhati Roy. She recently came to the United States to Santa Fe. She was awarded the highest prize of the Lannan Foundation, the Cultural Freedom Award, and she gave a major address. Her speech was entitled “Come September.” Arundhati Roy is the well-known Indian writer, author of, among other books, The God of Small Things, for which she won the Booker Prize. This is Arundhati Roy and her speech, “Come September.”

ARUNDHATI ROY: Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I’m beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it’s actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative — they colonize us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and nonfiction are only different techniques of storytelling. For reasons that I don’t fully understand, fiction dances out of me, and nonfiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.

The theme of much of what I write, fiction as well as nonfiction, is the relationship between power and powerlessness and the endless, circular conflict they’re engaged in. John Berger, that most wonderful writer, once wrote: “Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one.” There can never be a single story. There are only ways of seeing. So when I tell a story, I tell it not as an ideologue who wants to pit one absolutist ideology against another, but as a storyteller who wants to share her way of seeing. Though it might appear otherwise, my writing is not really about nations and histories; it’s about power. About the paranoia and ruthlessness of power. About the physics of power. I believe that the accumulation of vast unfettered power by a state or a country, a corporation or an institution — or even an individual, a spouse, a friend, a sibling — regardless of ideology, results in excesses such as the ones I will recount here.

Living as I do, as millions of us do, in the shadow of the nuclear holocaust that the governments of India and Pakistan keep promising their brainwashed citizenry, and in the global neighborhood of the “war against terror” (what President Bush rather biblically calls “the task that never ends”), I find myself thinking a great deal about the relationship between citizens and the state.

In India, those of us who have expressed views on nuclear bombs, big dams, corporate globalization and the rising threat of communal Hindu fascism — views that are at variance with the Indian government’s — are branded “anti-national.” While this accusation doesn’t fill me with indignation, it’s not an accurate description of what I do or how I think. Because an “anti-national” is a person who is against his or her own nation and, by inference, is pro some other one. But it isn’t necessary to be “anti-national” to be deeply suspicious of all nationalism, to be anti-nationalism. Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the 20th century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. When independent-thinking people (and here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, filmmakers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the “nation,” it’s time for all of us to sit up and worry. In India we saw it happen soon after the nuclear tests in 1998 and during the Kargil War against Pakistan in 1999. In the U.S. we saw it during the Gulf War, and we see it now during the “war against terror.” That blizzard of made-in-China American flags.

Recently, those who have criticized the actions of the U.S. government (myself included) have been called “anti-American.” Anti-Americanism is in the process of being consecrated into an ideology. The term “anti-American” is usually used by the American establishment to discredit and, not falsely — but shall we say inaccurately — define its critics. Once someone is branded anti-American, the chances are that he or she will be judged before they are heard, and the argument will be lost in the welter of bruised national pride.

But what does the term “anti-American” mean? Does it mean you are anti-jazz? Or that you’re opposed to freedom of speech? That you don’t delight in Toni Morrison or John Updike? That you have a quarrel with giant sequoias? Does it mean that you don’t admire the hundreds of thousands of American citizens who marched against nuclear weapons, or the thousands of war resisters who forced their government to withdraw from Vietnam? Does it mean that you hate all Americans?

This sly conflation of America’s culture, music, literature, the breathtaking physical beauty of the land, the ordinary pleasures of ordinary people with criticism of the U.S. government’s foreign policy (about which, thanks to America’s “free press,” sadly most Americans know very little) is a deliberate and extremely effective strategy. It’s like a retreating army taking cover in a heavily populated city, hoping that the prospect of hitting civilian targets will deter enemy fire.

But there are many Americans who would be mortified to be associated with their government’s policies. The most scholarly, scathing, incisive, hilarious critiques of the hypocrisy and the contradictions in U.S. government policy come from American citizens. When the rest of the world wants to know what the U.S. government is up to, we turn to Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Howard Zinn, Ed Herman, Amy Goodman, Michael Albert, Chalmers Johnson, William Blum and Anthony Arnove to tell us what’s really going on.

Similarly, in India, not hundreds, but millions of us would be ashamed and offended if we were in any way implicated with the present Indian government’s fascist policies which, apart from the perpetration of state terrorism in the valley of Kashmir (in the name of fighting terrorism), have also turned a blind eye to the recent state-supervised pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat. It would be absurd to think that those who criticize the Indian government are “anti-Indian” — although the government itself never hesitates to take that line. It is dangerous to cede to the Indian government or the American government — or anyone, for that matter — the right to define what “India” or “America” are or ought to be.

To call someone “anti-American”, indeed to be anti-American (or, for that matter, anti-Indian or anti-Timbuktuan), is not just racist, it’s a failure of the imagination. An inability to see the world in terms other than those the establishment has set out for you. If you’re not a Bushie, you’re a Taliban. If you don’t love us, you hate us. If you’re not good, you’re evil. If you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists.

Last year, like many others, I too made the mistake of scoffing at this post-September 11th rhetoric, dismissing it as foolish and arrogant. But I’ve realized that it’s not foolish at all. It’s actually a canny recruitment drive for a misconceived, dangerous war. Every day I’m taken aback at how many people believe that opposing the war in Afghanistan amounts to supporting terrorism, of voting for the Taliban. Now that the initial aim of the war — capturing Osama bin Laden (dead or alive) — seems to have run into bad weather. The goalposts have been moved. It’s being made out that the whole point of the war was to topple the Taliban regime and liberate Afghan women from their burqas. We are being asked to believe that the U.S. marines are actually on a feminist mission. (If so, will their next stop be America’s military ally Saudi Arabia?) Think of it this way: In India there are some pretty reprehensible social practices against “untouchables,” against Christians and Muslims, against women. Pakistan and Bangladesh have even worse ways of dealing with minority communities and women. Should they be bombed? Should Delhi, Islamabad and Dhaka be destroyed? Is it possible to bomb bigotry out of India? Can we bomb our way to a feminist paradise? Is that how women won the vote in the U.S.? Or how slavery was abolished? Can we win redress for the genocide of the millions of Native Americans upon whose corpses the United States was founded by bombing Santa Fe?

None of us need anniversaries to remind us of what we cannot forget. So it’s no more than coincidence that I happen to be here, on American soil, in September — this month of dreadful anniversaries. Uppermost on everybody’s mind, of course, particularly here in America, is the horror of what has come to be known as 9/11. Nearly 3,000 civilians lost their lives in that lethal terrorist strike. The grief is still deep. The rage still sharp. The tears have not dried. And a strange, deadly war is raging around the world. Yet, each person who has lost a loved one surely knows secretly, deeply, that no war, no act of revenge, no daisy-cutters dropped on someone else’s loved ones or someone else’s children, will blunt the edges of their pain or bring their own loved ones back. War cannot avenge those who have died. War is only a brutal desecration of their memory.

To fuel yet another war — this time against Iraq — by cynically manipulating people’s grief, by packaging it for TV specials sponsored by corporations selling detergent and running shoes, is to cheapen and devalue grief, to drain it of meaning. What we are seeing now is a vulgar display of the business of grief, the commerce of grief, the pillaging of even the most private human feelings for political purpose. It is a terrible, violent thing for a state to do to its people.

It’s not a clever-enough subject to speak of from a public platform, but what I would really love to talk to you about is loss. Loss and losing. Grief, failure, brokenness, numbness, uncertainty, fear, the death of feeling, the death of dreaming. The absolute relentless, endless, habitual, unfairness of the world. What does loss mean to individuals? What does it mean to whole cultures, whole people who have learned to live with it as a constant companion?

Since it is September 11th we’re talking about, perhaps it’s in the fitness of things that we remember what that date means, not only to those who lost their loved ones in America last year, but to those in other parts of the world to whom that date has long held significance. This historical dredging is not offered as an accusation or a provocation. But just to share the grief of history. To thin the mists a little. To say to the citizens of America, in the gentlest, most human way: “Welcome to the world.”

Twenty-nine years ago, in Chile, on the 11th of September 1973, General Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in a CIA-backed coup. “Chile should not be allowed to go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible,” said Henry Kissinger, Nobel Peace laureate, then the U.S. secretary of state.

After the coup, President Allende was found dead inside the presidential palace. Whether he was killed or whether he killed himself, we’ll never know. In the regime of terror that ensued, thousands of people were killed. Many more simply “disappeared.” Firing squads conducted public executions. Concentration camps and torture chambers were opened across the country. The dead were buried in mine shafts and unmarked graves. For 17 years the people of Chile lived in dread of the midnight knock, of routine “disappearances,” of sudden arrest and torture. Chileans tell the story of how the musician Víctor Jara had his hands cut off in front of a crowd in the Santiago stadium. Before they shot him, Pinochet’s soldiers threw his guitar at him and mockingly asked him to play.

In 1999, following the arrest of General Pinochet in Britain, thousands of secret documents were declassified by the U.S. government. They contain unequivocal evidence of the CIA’s involvement in the coup as well as the fact that the U.S. government had detailed information about the situation in Chile during General Pinochet’s reign. Yet, Kissinger assured the general of his support: “In the United States as you know, we are sympathetic to what you’re trying to do,” he said. “We wish your government well.”

Those of us who have only ever known life in a democracy, however flawed, would find it hard to imagine what living in a dictatorship and enduring the absolute loss of freedom means. It isn’t just those who Pinochet murdered, but the lives he stole from the living that must be accounted for, too.

Sadly, Chile was not the only country in South America to be singled out for the U.S. government’s attentions. Guatemala, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, El Salvador, Peru, Mexico and Colombia — they’ve all been the playground for covert — and overt — operations by the CIA. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been killed, tortured or have simply disappeared under the despotic regimes that were propped up in their countries. If this were not humiliation enough, the people of South America have had to bear the cross of being branded as people who are incapable of democracy — as if coups and massacres are somehow encrypted in their genes.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Arundhati Roy, the author of The God of Small Things, her latest book is War Talk, speaking in Santa Fe, her speech, “Come September.” Our website is www.democracynow.org. We’ll go back to Arundhati Roy’s speech in a minute.

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AMY GOODMAN: “I Painted Peace” by Samsara, here Democracy Now!, The War and Peace Report, Breaking the Sound Barrier. I’m Amy Goodman, as we return now to the writer Arundhati Roy speaking in Santa Fe last September. The name of her speech, the address that she gave, was “Come September.”

ARUNDHATI ROY: The first Allied attack on Iraq took place in January ’91. The world watched the primetime war as it was played out on TV (In India those days, you had to go to a five-star hotel lobby to watch CNN). Tens of thousands of people were killed in a month of devastating bombing. What many do not know is that the war never ended then. The initial fury simmered down into the longest sustained air attack on a country since the Vietnam War. Over the last decade American and British forces have fired thousands of missiles and bombs on Iraq. In the decade of economic sanctions that followed the war, Iraqi civilians have been denied food, medicine, hospital equipment, ambulances, clean water — the basic essentials.

About half a million Iraqi children have died as a result of the sanctions. Of them, Madeleine Albright, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, famously said, “It’s a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it.” “Moral equivalence” was the term that was used to denounce those of us who criticized the War on Afghanistan. Madeleine Albright cannot be accused of moral equivalence. What she said was just straightforward algebra.

A decade of bombing has not managed to dislodge Saddam Hussein, “the Beast of Baghdad.” Now, almost 12 years on, President George Bush Jr. has ratcheted up the rhetoric once again. He’s proposing an all-out war whose goal is nothing short of a regime change. The New York Times says that the Bush administration is, quote, “following a meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the Congress, and the Allies of the need to confront the threat of Saddam Hussein.” Andrew. H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, described how the administration was stepping up its war plans for the fall. And I quote: “From a marketing point of view,” he said, “you don’t introduce new products in August.” This time the catch-phrase for Washington’s “new product” is not the plight of Kuwaiti people but the assertion that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.”Forget the feckless moralizing of peace lobbies,” wrote Richard Perle, a former adviser to President Bush. “We need to get him before he gets us.”

Weapons inspectors have conflicting reports of the status of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and many have said clearly that its arsenal has been dismantled and that it does not have the capacity to build one. However, there is no confusion over the extent and range of America’s arsenal of nuclear and chemical weapons. Would the U.S. government welcome weapons inspectors? Would the U.K.? Or Israel?

What if Iraq does have a nuclear weapon? Does that justify a preemptive U.S. strike? The U.S. has the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world, and it’s the only country in the world to have actually used them on civilian populations. If the U.S. is justified in launching a preemptive strike on Iraq, why, then, any nuclear power is justified in carrying out a preemptive strike on any other. India could attack Pakistan, or the other way around. If the U.S. government develops a distaste for, say, the Indian prime minister, can it just “take him out” with a preemptive strike?

Recently the United States played an important part in forcing India and Pakistan back from the brink of war. Is it so hard for it to take its own advice? Who is guilty of feckless moralizing? Of preaching peace while it wages war? The U.S., which George Bush has called “the most peaceful nation on Earth,” has been at war with one country or another every year for the last 50 years.

Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons. They’re usually fought for hegemony, for business. And then, of course, there’s the business of war.

Protecting its control of the world’s oil is fundamental to U.S. foreign policy. The U.S. government’s recent military interventions in the Balkans and Central Asia have to do with oil. Hamid Karzai, the puppet president of Afghanistan installed by the U.S., is said to be a former employee of Unocal, the American-based oil company. The U.S. government’s paranoid patrolling of the Middle East is because it has two-thirds of the world’s oil reserves. Oil keeps America’s engines purring sweetly. Oil keeps the free market rolling. Whoever controls the world’s oil, controls the world’s market. And how do you control the oil?

Nobody puts it more elegantly than The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. In an article called “Craziness Pays,” he said, quote, “The U.S. has to make it clear to Iraq and U.S. allies that … American will use force without negotiation, hesitation or U.N. approval.” His advice was well taken. In the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in the almost daily humiliation the U.S. government heaps on the U.N. In his book on globalization, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Friedman says — and I quote — “The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas … and the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps.” Perhaps this was written in a moment of vulnerability, but it’s certainly the most succinct, accurate description of the project of corporate globalization that I have read.

After the 11th of September 2001 and the war against terror, the hidden hand and fist have had their cover blown, and we have a clear view now of America’s other weapon — the free market — bearing down on the developing world, with a clenched, unsmiling smile. The task that never ends is America’s perfect war, the perfect vehicle for the endless expansion of American imperialism. In Urdu, the word for profit, as in P-R-O-F-I-T, is fayda. Al-Qaeda means “the word,” “the word of God,” “the law.” So, in India, some of us call the war against terror, al-Qaeda versus al-fayda — the word versus the profit (no pun intended).

For the moment it looks as though al-fayda will carry the day. But then you never know…

In the last 10 years of unbridled corporate globalization, the world’s total income has increased by an average of 2.5% a year. And yet the number of poor in the world has increased by 100 million. Of the top hundred biggest economies, 51 are corporations, not countries. The top 1% of the world has the same combined income as the bottom 57%, and that disparity is growing. And now, under the spreading canopy of the war against terror, this process is being hustled along. The men in suits are in an unseemly hurry. While bombs rain down on us, and cruise missiles skid across the skies, while nuclear weapons are stockpiled to make the world a safer place, contracts are being signed, patents are being registered, oil pipelines are being laid, natural resources are being plundered, water is being privatized, and democracies are being undermined.

In a country like India, the structural adjustment end of the corporate globalization project is ripping through people’s lives. “Development” projects, massive privatization, and labor “reforms” are pushing people off their lands and out of their jobs, resulting in a kind of barbaric dispossession that has few parallels in history. Across the world, as the “free market” brazenly protects Western markets and forces developing countries to lift their trade barriers, the poor are getting poorer and the rich richer. Civil unrest has begun to erupt in the global village. In countries like Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Bolivia and India, the resistance movements against corporate globalization are growing. To contain them, governments are tightening their control. Protesters are being labeled “terrorists” and then being dealt with as such. But civil unrest does not only mean marches and demonstrations and protests against globalization. Unfortunately, it also means a desperate downward spiral into crime and chaos and all kinds of despair and disillusionment, which as we know from history (and from what we see unspooling before our eyes), gradually becomes a fertile breeding ground for terrible things — cultural nationalism, religious bigotry, fascism and, of course, terrorism. All these march arm in arm with corporate globalization.

There is a notion gaining credence that the free market breaks down national barriers and that corporate globalization’s ultimate destination is a hippie paradise where the heart is the only passport and we all live happily together inside a John Lennon song (“Imagine there’s no country …”). But this is a canard.

What the free market undermines is not national sovereignty, but democracy. As the disparity between the rich and poor grows, the hidden fist has its work cut out for it. Multinational corporations on the prowl for “sweetheart deals” that yield enormous profits cannot push through those deals and administer those projects in developing countries without the active connivance of state machinery — the police, the courts, sometimes even the army. Today corporate globalization needs an international confederation of loyal, corrupt, preferably authoritarian governments in poorer countries to push through unpopular reforms and quell the mutinies. It needs a press that pretends to be free. It needs courts that pretend to dispense justice. It needs nuclear bombs, standing armies, sterner immigration laws and watchful coastal patrols to make sure that it’s only money, goods, patents and services that are being globalized — not the free movement of people, not a respect for human rights, not international treaties on racial discrimination or chemical and nuclear weapons, or greenhouse gas emissions, climate change or, god forbid, justice. It’s as though even a gesture towards international accountability would wreck the whole enterprise.

Close to one year after the war against terror was officially flagged off in the ruins of Afghanistan, in country after country freedoms are being curtailed in the name of protecting freedom, civil liberties are being suspended in the name of protecting democracy. All kinds of dissent is being defined as “terrorism.” All kinds of laws are being passed to deal with it. Osama bin Laden seems to have vanished into thin air. Mullah Omar is supposed to have made his escape on a motorbike. (They could have sent TinTin after him). The Taliban may have disappeared, but their spirit and their system of summary justice is surfacing in the unlikeliest of places — in India, in Pakistan, in Nigeria, in America, in all the Central Asian republics run by all manner of despots, and of course in Afghanistan under the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance.

Meanwhile, down at the mall there’s a mid-season sale. Everything’s discounted — oceans, rivers, oil, gene pools, fig wasps, flowers, childhoods, aluminum factories, phone companies, wisdom, wilderness, civil rights, ecosystems, air — all 4,600 million years of evolution. It’s packed, sealed, tagged, valued and available off the rack. (No returns). As for justice — I’m told it’s on offer, too. You can get the best that money can buy.

Donald Rumsfeld said that his mission in the war against terror was to persuade the world that Americans must be allowed to continue their way of life. When the maddened king stamps his foot, slaves tremble in their quarters. So, standing here today, it’s hard for me to say this, but “the American way of life” is simply not sustainable. Because it doesn’t acknowledge that there is a world beyond America.

But fortunately, power has a shelf life. When the time comes, maybe this mighty empire will, like others before it, overreach itself and implode from within. It looks as though structural cracks have already appeared. As the war against terror casts its net wider and wider, America’s corporate heart is hemorrhaging. For all the endless, empty chatter about democracy, today the world is run by three of the most secretive institutions in the world: the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, all three of which, in turn, are dominated by the U.S. Their decisions are made in secret. The people who head them are appointed behind closed doors. Nobody really knows anything about them, their politics, their beliefs, their intentions. Nobody elected them. Nobody said they could make decisions on our behalf. A world run by a handful of greedy bankers and CEOs whom nobody elected can’t possibly last.

Soviet-style communism failed, not because it was intrinsically evil but because it was flawed. It allowed too few people to usurp too much power. Twenty-first century market capitalism, American style, will fail for the same reasons. Both are edifices constructed by the human intelligence, undone by human nature.

The time has come, the Walrus said. Perhaps things will become worse and then better. Perhaps there’s a small god up in heaven readying herself for us. Another world is not only possible, she’s on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati Roy, speaking in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in an event sponsored by the Lannan Foundation. She’s won the Lannan Foundation’s highest prize, its Cultural Freedom Award. And I’ll be coming to New Mexico this weekend, looking forward to being at the Salt of the Earth conference at the College of Santa Fe.

That does it for today’s show. If you want to get a copy of the program, you can call 1-800-881-2359, 1-800-881-2359. Democracy Now! is produced by Kris Abrams, Mike Burke, Angie Karran, Ana Nogueira, Alex Wolfe. Mike Di Filippo is our engineer. Our website, www.democracynow.org. Our email address is mail@democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for listening.