People vs. Empire

In These Times, Jan. 3, '05 issue
People vs. Empire by Arundhati Roy,, excerpts:

      "Ordinary people in the United States have been manipulated into imagining they are a people under siege whose sole refuge and protector is their government. If it isn't the Communists, it's al Qaeda. If it isn't Cuba, it's Nicaragua. As a result, the most powerful nation in the world is peopled by a terrified citizenry jumping at shadows. A people bonded to the state not by social services, or public health care, or employment guarantees, but by fear."

      "Before Washington's illegal invasion of Iraq, a Gallup International poll showed that in no European country was support for a unilateral war higher than 11 percent. On February 15, 2003, weeks before the invasion, more than 10 million people marched against the war on different continents, including North America. And yet the governments of many supposedly democratic countries still went to war." 

     "...Empire does not always appear in the form of cruise missiles and tanks ... It appears in lives in very local avatars -- losing jobs, being sent unpayable electricity bills, having water supply cut, being evicted from homes and uprooted from land. It is a process of relentless impoverishment with which the poor are historically familiar. What Empire does is further entrench and exacerbate already existing inequalities.

 "Until quite recently, it was sometimes difficult for people to see themselves as victims of Empire. But now, local struggles have begun to see their role with increasing clarity. ...they are confronting Europe and the United States.  This is the beginning of real globalization, the globalization of dissent."

 "...Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) defuse political anger and dole out as aid or benevolence what people ought to have by right. They alter the public psyche, they turn people into dependent victims and they blunt the edges of political resistance."

 "...In the United States, you have the USA Patriot Act ... Freedoms are being curbed in the name of protecting freedom. And once we surrender our freedoms, to win them back will take a revolution."

 "Terrorism is vicious, ugly and dehumanizing for its perpetrators as well as its victims. But so is war. ..."