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Not again ... global capitalism is driving us to war
(Arundati Roy, The Guardian, September 27, 2002)
To call someone anti-American, indeed, to be anti-American, is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination. An inability to see the world in terms other than those that the establishment has set out for you: 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. . . . Every day I'm taken aback at how many people believe that opposing the war in Afghanistan amounts to supporting terrorism. Now that the initial aim of the war - capturing Osama bin Laden - seems to have run into bad weather, the goalposts have been moved. . . . It turns out that while Saddam was carrying out his worst atrocities, the US and UK governments were his close allies. So what changed? . . . A decade of bombing has not managed to dislodge him. Now, almost 12 years on, Bush Jr is ratcheting up the rhetoric once again. He's proposing an all-out war whose goal is nothing short of a regime change. . . . Forget "the feckless moralising of the 'peace' lobbies," wrote Richard Perle, chairman of the Defence Policy Board. The US will " act alone if necessary" and use a "pre-emptive strike" if it determines it is in US interests. . . . What if Iraq does have a nuclear weapon? Does that justify a pre-emptive US strike? The US has the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world. It's the only country in the world to have actually used them on civilian populations. If the US is justified in launching a pre-emptive attack on Iraq, why, any nuclear power is justified in carrying out a pre-emptive attack on any other. India could attack Pakistan, or the other way around. . . . 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. . . . 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". 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, 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. . . . 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 haemorrhaging. 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: 21st-century market-capitalism, American-style, will fail for the same reasons.

posted by LoZo 6:04 PM