An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire Quotes

“Debating Imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it?”
― Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire

“Democracy has become Empire's euphemism for neo-liberal capitalism.”
― Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire

“It's odd how those who dismiss the peace movement as Utopian proffer the most absurdly dreamy reasons for war.”
― Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire

“The US empire rests on a grisly foundation: the massacre of millions of indigenous people, the stealing of their lands and, following this, the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of black people from Africa to work that land. Thousands died on the seas while they were being shipped like caged cattle between continents.
'Stolen from Africa, brought to America' - Bob Marley's 'Buffalo Soldier' contains a whole universe of unspeakable sadness.”
― Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire

“How has the United States survived its terrible past and emerged smelling so sweet? Not by owning up to it, not by making reparations, not by apologizing to black Americans or native Americans, and certainly not by changing its ways (it exports its cruelties now). Like most other countries, the United States has rewritten its history. But what sets the United States apart from other countries, and puts it ahead in the race, is that it has enlisted the services of the most powerful, most successful publicity firm in the world: Hollywood.”
― Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire

“Speaking for myself, I am no flag waver, no patriot, and I am fully aware that venality, brutality, and hypocrisy are imprinted on the leaden soul of every state. But when a country ceases to be merely a country and becomes an empire, then the scale of operations changes dramatically. So may I clarify that tonight I speak as a subject of the American empire? I speak as a slave who presumes to criticize her king.”
― Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire

“The war against terror is not really about terror. It's about a superpower's self-destructive impulse toward supremacy, stranglehold, global hemegony.”
― Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire

“Democracy is the Free World's whore, willing to dress up, dress down, willing to satisfy a whole range of tastes.”
― Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire

“When we speak of confronting Empire, we need to identify what Empire means. Does it mean the US government (and its European satellites), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and multinational corporations? Or is it something more than that?”
― Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire

“It is a myth that the free market breaks down national barriers. The free market does not threaten national sovereignty, it undermines democracy. As the disparity between the rich and the poor grows, the fight to corner resources is intensifying. To push through their 'sweetheart deals', to corporatize the crops we grow, the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the dreams we dream, corporate globalization needs an international confederation of loyal, corrupt, authoritarian governments in poorer countries to push through unpopular reforms and quell the mutinies. Corporate globalization - or shall we call by its name? Imperialism - needs a press that pretends to be free. It needs courts that pretend to dispense justice.
Meanwhile, the countries of the north harden their borders and stockpile weapons of mass destruction. Afterall, they have to make sure that it is only money, goods, patents, and services that are globalized. Not a respect for human rights. Not international treaties on racial discrimnation or chemical and nuclear weapons or greenhouse gas emissions or climate change or - God forid - justice.
So this - all this - is Empire. This loyal confederation, this obscene accumulation of power, this greatly increased distance between those who make the decisions and those who have to suffer them.
Our fight, our goal, our vision of another world must be to eliminate that distance. So how do we resist Empire?”
― Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire

“Why should propaganda be the exclusive preserve of the Western media? Just because they do it better?”
― Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire

“Argentina & Iraq have been decimated by the same process with different weapons; an IMF cheque & cruise missiles.”
― Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire

“When the sun sets on the American empire, as it will, as it must, Noam Chomsky's work will survive. It will point a cool incriminating finger at a merciless Machiavellian empire as cruel, self-righteous and hypocritical as the ones it has replaced. (The only difference is that it is armed with technology that can visit the kind of devastation on the world that history has never known and the human race cannot begin to imagine.)”
― Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire

“And now this talk of bringing the UN back into the picture.
But that old UN girl - it turns out that she just ain't what she was cracked up to be. She's been demoted (although she retains her high salary). Now she's the world's janitor. She's the Filipino cleaning lady, the Indian jamardini, the postal bride from Thailand, the Mexican household help, the Jamaican au pair. She's employed to clean other people's shit. She's used and abused at will.”
― Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire

“On the global stage, beyond the jurisdiction of sovereign governments, international instruments of trade and finance oversee a complex web of multilateral laws and agreements that have entrenched a system of appropriation that puts colonialism to shame. This system allows the unrestricted entry and exit of massive amounts of speculative capital—hot money—into and out of third world countries, which then effectively dictates their economic policy. Using the threat of capital flight as a lever, international capital insinuates itself deeper and deeper into these economies. Giant transnational corporations are taking control of their essential infrastructure and natural resources, their minerals, their water, their electricity.”
― Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person's Guide To Empire

“Our freedoms were not granted to us by any governments. They were wrested from them by us. And once we surrender them, the battle to retrieve them is called a revolution.”
― Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person's Guide To Empire

“For the South African White minority, neo-liberalism is apartheid with a clean conscience, called Democracy.”
― Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire