{"id":66374,"date":"2015-11-16T12:05:29","date_gmt":"2015-11-16T12:05:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=66374"},"modified":"2015-11-23T09:53:02","modified_gmt":"2015-11-23T09:53:02","slug":"things-that-can-and-cannot-be-said-john-cusack-in-conversation-with-arundhati-roy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/11\/things-that-can-and-cannot-be-said-john-cusack-in-conversation-with-arundhati-roy\/","title":{"rendered":"Meeting Ed Snowden – John Cusack in Conversation with Arundhati Roy (I)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Things That Can and Cannot Be Said (First Part)
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Room<\/a>

Room 1001, Ritz Carlton, Moscow: Edward Snowden\u2019s exiled quarters where actor-writer John Cusack brings Arundhati and Dan Ellsberg to meet him.<\/p><\/div>\n

Snowden is Part of America’s Proud History of Resistance<\/p>\n

“Every nation-state tends towards the imperial\u2014that is the point. Through banks, armies, secret police, propaganda, courts and jails, treaties, taxes, laws and orders, myths of civil obedience, assumptions of civic virtue at the top. Still it should be said of the political left, we expect something better. And correctly. We put more trust in those who show a measure of compassion, who denou\u00adnce the hideous social arrangements that make war inevitable and human desire omnipresent; which fosters corporate selfishness, panders to appetites and disorder, waste the earth.”<\/em>
\n\u2014Daniel Berrigan – poet, Jesuit priest<\/p>\n

16 Nov 2015 – <\/em>One morning as I scanned the news\u2014horror in the Middle East, Russia and America facing off in the Ukraine, I thought of Edward Snowden and wondered how he was holding up in Moscow. I began to imagine a conversation between him and Daniel Ellsberg (who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam war). And then, interestingly, in my imagination a third person made her way into the room\u2014the writer Arundhati Roy. It occurred to me that trying to get the three of them together would be a fine thing to do.<\/p>\n

I had heard Roy speak in Chicago, and had met her several times. One gets the feeling very quickly with her and comes to the rapid conclusion that there are no pre-formatted assumptions or givens. Through our conversations I became very aware that what gets lost, or goes unsaid, in most of the debates around surveillance and whistleblowing is a perspective and context from outside the United States and Europe. The debates around them have gradually centred around corporate overreach and the rights of privacy of US citizens.<\/p>\n

The philosopher\/theosophist Rudolf Steiner says that any perception or truth that is isolated and removed from its larger context ceases to be true.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen any single thought emerges in consciousness, I cannot rest until this is brought into harmony with the rest of my thinking. Such an isolated concept, apart from the rest of my mental world, is entirely unendurable…there exists an inwardly sustained harmony among thoughts…when our thought world bears the character of inner harmony, we can feel we are in possession of the truth…. All elements are related one to the other…every such isolation is an abnormality, an untruth.\u201d In other words, every isolated idea that doesn\u2019t relate to others yet is taken as true (as a kind of niche truth) is not just bad politics, it is somehow also fundamentally untrue…. To me, Arundhati Roy\u2019s writing and thinking strives for such unity of thought. And for her, like for Steiner, reason comes from the heart.<\/p>\n

I knew Dan and Ed because we all worked together on the Freedom of Press Foundation. And I knew Roy admired both of them greatly, but she was disconcerted by the photograph of Ed cradling the American flag in his arms that had appeared on the cover of Wired<\/em>. On the other hand, she was impressed by what he had said in the interview\u2014in particular that one of the factors that pushed him into doing what he did was the NSA\u2019s (National Security Agency) sharing real-time data of Palestinians in the United States with the Israeli government.<\/p>\n

She thought what Dan and Ed had done were tremendous acts of courage, though as far as I could tell, her own politics were more in sync with Julian Assange\u2019s. \u201cSnowden is the thoughtful, courageous saint of liberal reform,\u201d she once said to me. \u201cAnd Julian Assange is a sort of radical, feral prophet who has been prowling this wilderness since he was 16 years old.\u201d<\/p>\n

I had recorded many of our conversations, Roy\u2019s and mine\u2014for no reason other than that they were so intense that I felt I needed to listen to them several times over to understand what we were really saying to each other. She didn\u2019t seem to notice, or if she did, she didn\u2019t seem to mind. When I asked her if I could use some of the transcripts, she said, \u201cOK, but make sure you edit out the idiocy. At least mine.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll roll the tapes:<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> All I\u2019m saying is: what does that American flag mean to people outside of America? What does it mean in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Pakistan\u2014even in India, your new natural ally?<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> In his (Ed\u2019s) situation, he\u2019s got very little margin for error when it comes to controlling his image, his messaging, and he\u2019s done an incredible job up to this point. But you\u2019re troubled by that isolated iconography?<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> Forget the genocide of American Indians, forget slavery, forget Hiroshima, forget Cambodia, forget Vietnam, you know….<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> Why do we have to forget?<\/p>\n

(Laughter<\/em>)<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> I\u2019m just saying that, at one level, I am happy\u2014awed\u2014that there are people of such intelligence, such compassion, that have defected from the State. They are heroic. Absolutely. They\u2019ve risked their lives, their freedom…but then there\u2019s that part of me that thinks…how could you ever have believed in it? What do you feel betrayed by? Is it possible to have a moral State? A moral superpower? I can\u2019t understand those people who believe that the excesses are just aberrations…. Of course, I understand it intellectually, but…part of me wants to retain that incomprehension…. Sometimes my anger gets in the way of their pain.<\/p>\n

JC: <\/strong>Fair enough, but don\u2019t you think you\u2019re being a little harsh?<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> Maybe (laughs<\/em>). But then, having ranted as I have, I always say that the grand thing in the United States is that there has been real resistance from within. There have been soldiers who\u2019ve refused to fight, who\u2019ve burned their medals, who\u2019ve been conscientious objectors. I don\u2019t think we have ever had a conscientious objector in the Indian Army. Not one. In the United States, you have this proud history, you know? And Snowden is part of that.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> My gut tells me Snowden is more radical than he lets on. He has to be so tactical….<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> Just since 9\/11…we\u2019re supposed to forget whatever happened in the past because 9\/11 is where history begins. Okay, since 2001, how many wars have been started, how many countries have been destroyed? So now ISIS is the new evil\u2014but how did that evil begin? Is it more evil to do what ISIS is doing, which is to go around massacring people\u2014mainly, but not only, Shi\u2019a\u2014slitting throats? By the way, the US-backed militias are doing similar things, except they don\u2019t show beheadings of white folks on TV. Or is it more evil to contaminate the water supply, to bomb a place with depleted uranium, to cut off the supply of medicines, to say that half a million children dying from economic sanctions is a \u201chard price\u201d, but \u201cworth it\u201d?<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> Madeleine Albright said so\u2014about Iraq.<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> Yes. Iraq. Is it alright to force a country to disarm, and then bomb it? To continue to create mayhem in the area? To pretend that you are fighting radical Islamism, when you\u2019re actually toppling all the regimes that are not radical Islamist regimes? Whatever else their faults may be, they were not radical Islamist states\u2014Iraq was not, Syria is not, Libya was not. The most radical fundamentalist Islamist state is, of course, your ally Saudi Arabia. In Syria, you\u2019re on the side of those who want to depose Assad, right? And then suddenly, you\u2019re with Assad, wanting to fight ISIS. It\u2019s like some crazed, bewildered, rich giant bumbling around in a poor area with his pockets stuffed with money, and lots of weapons\u2014just throwing stuff around<\/strong>. You don\u2019t even really know who you\u2019re giving it to\u2014which murderous faction you are arming against which\u2014feeling very relevant when actually…. All this destruction that has come in the wake of 9\/11, all the countries that have been bombed…it ignites and magnifies these ancient antagonisms. They don\u2019t necessarily have to do with the United States; they pre-date the existence of the United States by centuries. But the United States is unable to understand how irrelevant it is, actually. And how wicked…. Your short-term gains are the rest of the world\u2019s long-term disasters\u2014for everybody, including yourselves. And, I\u2019m sorry, I\u2019ve been saying you<\/em> and the United States or America, when I actually mean the US government. There\u2019s a difference. Big one.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> Yeah.<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> Conflating the two the way I just did is stupid…walking into a trap\u2014it makes it easy for people to say, \u201cOh, she\u2019s anti-American, he\u2019s anti-American\u201d, when we\u2019re not. Of course not. There are things I love about America. Anyway, what is a country? When people say, \u201cTell me about India\u201d, I say, \u201cWhich India?…. The land of poetry and mad rebellion? The one that produces haunting music and exquisite textiles? The one that invented the caste system and celebrates the genocide of Muslims and Sikhs and the lynching of Dalits? The country of dollar billionaires? Or the one in which 800 million live on less than half-a-dollar a day? Which India?\u201d When people say \u201cAmerica\u201d, which one? Bob Dylan\u2019s or Barack Obama\u2019s? New Orleans or New York? Just a few years ago India, Pakistan and Bangladesh were one country. Actually, we were many countries if you count the princely states…. Then the British drew a line, and now we\u2019re three countries, two of them pointing nukes at each other\u2014the radical Hindu bomb and the radical Muslim bomb.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> Radical Islam and US exceptionalism are in bed with each other. They\u2019re like lovers, methinks….<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> It\u2019s a revolving bed in a cheap motel…. Radical Hinduism is snuggled up somewhere in there, too. It\u2019s hard to keep track of the partners, they change so fast. Each new baby they make is the latest progeny of the means to wage eternal war.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> If you help manufacture an enemy that\u2019s really<\/em> evil, you can point to the fact that it\u2019s really evil, and say, \u201cHey, it\u2019s really<\/em> evil.\u201d<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> Your enemies are always manufactured to suit your purpose, right? How can you have a good enemy? You have to have an utterly evil enemy\u2014and then the evilness has to progress.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> It has to metastasise, right?<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> Yes. And then…how often are we going to keep on saying the same things?<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> Yeah, you get worn out by it.<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> Truly, there\u2019s no alternative to stupidity. Cretinism is the mother of fascism. I have no defence against it, really….<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> It\u2019s a real problem.<\/p>\n

(Both laugh<\/em>)<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> It isn\u2019t the lies they tell, it\u2019s the quality<\/em> of the lies that becomes so humiliating. They\u2019ve stopped caring about even that. It\u2019s all a play. Hiroshima and Nagasaki happen, there are hundreds of thousands of dead, and the curtain comes down, and that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\"edward_snowden_20151116\"<\/a>JC:<\/strong> And a disappeared context.<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> Yes, without any context or memory. But the people of the world have memories. There was a time when the women of Afghanistan\u2014at least in Kabul\u2014were out there. They were allowed to study, they were doctors and surgeons, walking free, wearing what they wanted. That was when it was under Soviet occupation. Then the United States starts funding the mujahideen. Reagan called them Afghanistan\u2019s \u201cfounding fathers\u201d. It reincarnates the idea of \u201cjehad\u201d, virtually creates the Taliban. And what happens to the women? In Iraq, until before the war, the women were scientists, museum directors, doctors. I\u2019m not valourising Saddam Hussein or the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, which was brutal and killed hundreds of thousands of people\u2014it was the Soviet Union\u2019s Vietnam. I\u2019m just saying that now, in these new wars, whole countries have slipped into mayhem\u2014the women have just been pushed back into their burqas\u2014and not by choice. 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: \u201cArundhati, just go back into your veil, and sit in your kitchen and don\u2019t come out\u201d. Can you imagine the violence of that? That\u2019s what has happened to these women. In 2001, we were told that the war in Afghanistan was a feminist mission. The marines were liberating Afghan women from the Taliban. Can you really bomb feminism into a country? And now, after 25 years of brutal war\u201410 years against the Soviet occupation, 15 years of US occupation\u2014the Taliban is riding back to Kabul and will soon be back to doing business with the United States. I don\u2019t live in the United States but when I\u2019m here, I begin to feel like my head is in a grinder\u2014my brains are being scrambled by this language that they\u2019re using. Outside it\u2019s not so hard to understand because people know the score. But here, so many seem to swallow the propaganda so obediently.<\/p>\n

So that was one exchange. Here\u2019s another:<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> So, what do you think? What do we think are the things we can\u2019t talk about in a civilised society, if you\u2019re a good, domesticated house pet?<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> (Laughs<\/em>) The occasional immorality of preaching nonviolence?<\/p>\n

(This was a reference to Walking with the Comrades<\/em><\/a>, Roy\u2019s account of her time spent with armed guerrillas in the forests of central India who were fighting paramilitary forces and vigilante militias trying to clear indigenous people off their land, which had been handed over to mining companies.)<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> In the United States, we can talk about ISIS, but we can\u2019t talk about Palestine.<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> Oh, in India, we can talk about Palestine but we can\u2019t talk about Kashmir. Nowadays, we can\u2019t talk about the daylight massacre of thousands of Muslims in Gujarat, because Narendra Modi might become prime minister. (As he did, subsequently in May 2014.) They like to say, \u201cLet bygones be bygones\u201d. Bygones. Nice word…old-fashioned.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> Sounds like a sweet goodbye.<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> And we can decide the most convenient place on which to airdrop history\u2019s markers. History is really a study of the future, not the past.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> I just want to know what I can\u2019t talk about, so I\u2019ll avoid it in social settings.<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> You can say, for example, that it\u2019s wrong to behead people physically, like with a knife, which implies that it\u2019s alright to blow their heads off with a drone…isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

JC: <\/strong>Well a drone is so surgical…and it\u2019s like, a quick thing. They don\u2019t suffer, right?<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> But some muzzlims, as you call them, are also good, professional butchers. They do it quick.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> What else can and cannot be said?<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> This is a lovely theme…. About Vietnam, you can say, \u201cThese Asians, they don\u2019t value their life, and so they force us to bear the burden of genocide.\u201d This is more or less a direct quote.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> From Robert McNamara, who then went on to \u201cserve the poor\u201d.<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> Who, before he supervised the destruction at Vietnam, planned the bombing of Tokyo in which 80,000 people were killed in a single night. Then he became the president of the World Bank, where he took great care of the world\u2019s poor. At the end of his life, he was tormented by one question\u2014\u201cHow much evil do you have to do in order to do good?\u201d That\u2019s a quote, too.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> It\u2019s tough love.<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> Fucking selfless stuff….<\/p>\n

We had these conversations sitting at my kitchen table, in New York corner booths, in a Puerto Rican diner that became a favourite spot. On impulse, I called New Delhi.<\/p>\n

Wanna go to Moscow and meet Dan Ellsberg and Ed Snowden?<\/em><\/p>\n

Don\u2019t talk rubbish…<\/em><\/p>\n

Listen…if I can pull it off, should we go?<\/em><\/p>\n

There was silence, and I felt the smile over the phone.<\/p>\n

Yaa, Maan. Let\u2019s go.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 outlookindia.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The United States cannot understand how irrelevant it is. And how wicked. Your short-term gains are the rest of the world\u2019s long-term disasters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[225,60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spotlight","category-whistleblowing-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66374\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}