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The philosopher/theosophist Rudolf Steiner says that any perception or truth that is isolated and removed from its larger context ceases to be true:
Your short-term gains are the rest of the world’s long-term disasters—for everybody, including yourselves.
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?
The occasional immorality of preaching nonviolence?
“How much evil must we do in order to do good?”
(According to the testimonies in the recently published book about the US war in Vietnam, Kill Anything That Moves by Nick Turse, what the US Army did in Vietnam as it moved from village to village with orders to “kill anything that moves”—which included women, children, and livestock—was just as vicious, though on a much larger scale, as anything ISIS is doing now.
Even capitalists must surely admit that, intellectually at least, socialism is a worthy opponent. It imparts intelligence even to its adversaries.
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?
No queue whatsoever in the embassy of a country with a history of every imaginable type of queue. Varlam Shalamov describes them so vividly in Kolyma Tales, his stories about the labor camp in Kolyma—queues for food, for shoes, for a meager scrap of clothing—a fight to the death over a piece of stale bread.
If the Snowden story were fiction, a good editor would dismiss its mirrored narrative symmetry as a cheap gimmick.
My question is, if, let’s say, there are people who live in villages deep in the forest, four days’ walk from anywhere, and a thousand soldiers arrive and burn their villages and kill and rape people to scare them off their land because mining companies want it—what brand of nonviolence would the stalwarts of the establishment recommend? Nonviolence is radical political theater. JC: Effective only when there’s an audience . . . AR: Exactly.
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.
Human rights takes history out of justice. JC: Justice always has context
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 opulent lobby of the Moscow Ritz-Carlton was teeming with drunk millionaires, high on new money, and gorgeous, high-stepping young women, half-peasant, half-supermodel, draped on the arms of toady men—gazelles on their way to fame and fortune, paying their dues to the satyrs who would get them there.
“We are not in a police state now, not yet. I’m talking about what may come. I realize I shouldn’t put it that way . . . White, middle-class, educated people like myself are not living in a police state . . . Black, poor people are living in a police state. The repression starts with the semi-white, the Middle Easterners, including anybody who is allied with them, and goes on from there . . . We don’t have a police state. One more 9/11, and then I believe we will have hundreds of thousands of detentions. Middle Easterners and Muslims will be put in detention camps or deported.
I was glad to see that when Snowden made his debut on Twitter (and chalked up half a million followers in half a second) he said, “I used to work for the government. Now I work for the public.”3 Implicit in that sentence is the belief that the government does not work for the public.
The elite is usually fused with the government pretty seamlessly. Viewed from an international perspective, if there really is such a thing as “the US public,” it’s a very privileged public indeed. The only “public” I know is a maddeningly tricky labyrinth.
Isn’t the greatness of great nations directly proportionate to their ability to be ruthless, genocidal? Doesn’t the height of a country’s “success” usually also mark the depths of its moral failure?
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?
