Things That Can and Cannot Be Said

by John Cusack

It isn’t the lies they tell, it’s the quality of the lies that becomes so humiliating.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki happen, there are hundreds of thousands of dead, and the curtain comes down, and that’s the end of that. Then Korea happens. Vietnam happens, all that happened in Latin America happens. And every now and then, this curtain comes down and history begins anew. New moralities and new indignations are manufactured . . . in a disappeared history. JC: And a disappeared context.

I mean, to me, one thing is a culture in which women have not broken out of their subservience, but the horror of tomorrow, somebody turning around and telling me: “Arundhati, just go back into your veil, and sit in your kitchen and don’t come out.” Can you imagine the violence of that?

Can you really bomb feminism into a country?

History is really a study of the future, not the past.

The debate—even though the protagonists on both sides betrayed everything they claimed to believe in—used to be about social justice, equality, liberty, and redistribution of wealth. All we seem to be left with now is paranoid gibberish about a War on Terror whose whole purpose is to expand the War, increase the Terror, and obfuscate the fact that the wars of today are not aberrations but systemic, logical exercises to preserve a way of life whose delicate pleasures and exquisite comforts can only be delivered to the chosen few by a continuous, protracted war for hegemony—Lifestyle Wars.

But seriously—what is one couple doing with that much money, which is just a small percentage of the indecent profits they make from Microsoft? And even that small percentage runs into billions. It’s enough to set the world’s agenda, enough to buy government policy, determine university curricula, fund NGOs and activists. It gives them the power to bend the whole world to their will. Forget the politics, is that even polite? Even if it’s “good” will? Who’s to decide what’s good and what’s not?

All our principles were right, but our results were wrong. This is a diseased century. We diagnosed the disease and its causes with microscopic exactness, but wherever we applied the healing knife a new sore appeared. Our will was hard and pure, we should have been loved by the people. But they hate us. Why are we so odious and detested?

Read now, it sounds like pillow talk between two old enemies who have fought a long, hard war and can no longer tell each other apart.

They turn potential radicals into receivers of their largesse—and then, very subtly, without appearing to—they circumscribe the boundaries of radical politics. And you’re sacked if you disobey . . . sacked, unfunded, whatever. And then there’s always the game of pitting the “funded” against the “unfunded,” in which the funder takes center stage. So, I mean, I’m not against people being funded—because we’re running out of options—but we have to understand—are you walking the dog or is the dog walking you? Or who’s the dog and who is you?

Nonviolence is radical political theater. JC: Effective only when there’s an audience . . . AR: Exactly. And who can pull in an audience? You need some capital, some stars, right? Gandhi was a superstar. The indigenous people in the forest don’t have that capital, that drawing power. So they have no audience.

Nonviolence should be a tactic—not an ideology preached from the sidelines to victims of massive violence

“Gandhi was a superstar. The indigenous people in the forest don’t have that capital, that drawing power. So they have no audience. Nonviolence should be a tactic—not an ideology preached from the sidelines to victims of massive violence.”

The idea of “human rights,” for example—sometimes it bothers me. Not in itself, but because the concept of human rights has replaced the much grander idea of justice. Human rights are fundamental rights, they are the minimum, the very least we demand. Too often, they become the goal itself. What should be the minimum becomes the maximum—all we are supposed to expect—but human rights aren’t enough. The goal is, and must always be, justice.

JC: So the term human rights can take the oxygen out of justice? AR: Human rights takes history out of justice.

the idea of justice—even just dreaming of justice—is revolutionary. The language of human rights tends to accept a status quo that is intrinsically unjust—and then tries to make it more accountable. But then, of course, the catch-22 is that violating human rights is integral to the project of neoliberalism and global hegemony.

The great irony is that people who live in remote areas, who are illiterate and don’t own TVs, are in some ways more free because they are beyond the reach of indoctrination by the modern mass media. There’s a virtual civil war going on there and few know about it.

Having destroyed so much to make them, we must have nuclear weapons to protect them—and climate change to hold up their way of life . . . a two-pronged annihilation project.

But I believe the physics of resisting power is as old as the physics of accumulating power. That’s what keeps the balance in the universe . . . the refusal to obey.

I mean what’s a country? It’s just an administrative unit, a glorified municipality. Why do we imbue it with esoteric meaning and protect it with nuclear bombs? I can’t bow down to a municipality . . . it’s just not intelligent.

It was a little late for this conversation, of course. Iraq has been all but destroyed. And now the map of what is so condescendingly called the “Middle East” is being brutally redrawn (yet again).

If we do nothing, we sort of sleepwalk into a total surveillance state where we have both a superstate that has unlimited capacity to apply force with an unlimited ability to know [about the people it is targeting]—and that’s a very dangerous combination. That’s the dark future. The fact that they know everything about us and we know nothing about them—because they are secret, they are privileged, and they are a separate class . . . the elite class, the political class, the resource class—we don’t know where they live, we don’t know what they do, we don’t know who their friends are. They have the ability to know all that about us.

What sort of love is this love that we have for countries? What sort of country is it that will ever live up to our dreams?

Isn’t the greatness of great nations directly proportionate to their ability to be ruthless, genocidal?

And what about our failure? Writers, artists, radicals, anti-nationals, mavericks, malcontents—what of the failure of our imaginations? What of our failure to replace the idea of flags and countries with a less lethal Object of Love? Human beings seem unable to live without war, but they are also unable to live without love. So the question is, what shall we love?

I never understand why we worry so much about climate change and not about nuclear war. Both have the potential of annihilating life on earth.