{"id":66406,"date":"2015-11-16T12:03:15","date_gmt":"2015-11-16T12:03:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=66406"},"modified":"2015-11-23T09:54:33","modified_gmt":"2015-11-23T09:54:33","slug":"meeting-ed-snowden-iii-the-arundhati-roy-john-cusack-conversation-continues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/11\/meeting-ed-snowden-iii-the-arundhati-roy-john-cusack-conversation-continues\/","title":{"rendered":"Meeting Ed Snowden \u2013 The Arundhati Roy\u2014John Cusack Conversation Continues (III)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"john_cusack_thumb\"<\/a>Things That Can and Cannot Be Said (Cont\u2019d) <\/strong><\/p>\n

16 Nov 2015 – <\/em>Over the next week or so, the logistics had to be planned. It was short notice and a bit of a mad scramble. Roy made her own arrangements, but I had in mind Dan Ellsberg\u2019s history as a nuclear weapons planner for America\u2019s retaliation to a possible Soviet first strike. In other words, he had only spent a few years of his life planning the physical obliteration of the Soviet Union. Nuclear secrets, domino theory\u2014he was in those rooms<\/em>. Then there were the 85-plus arrests for civil disobedience, one of those in Russia on the Sirius, the Greenpeace boat protesting Soviet nuclear testing. But Dan\u2019s visa came. And mine came, too.<\/p>\n

\"Consider<\/a>

Consider This: \u201cIn the United States, we can talk about ISIS, but we can\u2019t talk about Palestine\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n

Meanwhile in India, some of Roy\u2019s worst fears had materialised. Eight months before, Narendra Modi had become the new Prime Minister of India. (In May, I received this text: Election results are out. The fascists in a landslide. The phantoms are real. What you see is what you get<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

I met up with Roy in London. She had been there for two weeks giving talks in Cambridge and the South Bank on her new work on Gandhi and B.R. Ambedkar. At Heathrow, she told me quite casually that some folks in India were burning effigies of her. \u201cI seem to be goading the Gandhians to violence,\u201d she laughed, \u201cbut I was disappointed with the quality of the effigy.\u201d<\/p>\n

We flew together to Stockholm to meet up with Dan, who was attending the ceremony of the Right Livelihood Awards\u2014some call it the Alternative Nobel\u2014because Ed was one of the laureates. We would fly to Moscow together from there.<\/p>\n

The Stockholm streets were so clean you could eat off the ground.<\/p>\n

On our first night, there was a dinner at a nautical museum with the complete salvaged wreckage of a huge 16th-century wooden warship as the centrepiece of the modernist structure. The Wasa<\/em>, considered the Titanic<\/em> of Swedish disasters, was built on the orders of yet another power-hungry king who wanted control of seas and the future. It was so overloaded with weapons and top-heavy, it capsized and sank before it even left the harbour.<\/p>\n

It was a classic human rights evening, to be sure: gourmet food and good intentions, a choir singing beautiful Noels. I enjoyed watching the almost pathologically anti-gala Roy trying to mask her blind panic. Not her venue, as they say. Dan was busy and in great demand, meeting people, doing interviews. We caught occasional glimpses of him\u2014and managed to say a quick hello.<\/p>\n

The awards ceremony took place in the Swedish parliament. Roy and I were graciously invited. We were late. It occurred to us that if neither of us would be comfortable sitting in the parliament halls of our own countries, what the fuck would we be doing sitting in the Swedish parliament? So we skulked around the corridors like petty criminals until we found a cramped balcony from which we could watch the ceremony. Our empty seats reflected back at us. The speeches were long. We slipped away and walked through the great chambers and found an empty banquet hall with a laid out feast. There was a metaphor there somewhere. I switched on my recorder again.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> What is the meaning of charity as a political tool?<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> It\u2019s an old joke, right? If you want to control somebody, support them. Or marry them.<\/p>\n

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

JC:<\/strong> Sugar daddy politics….<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> Embrace the resistance, seize it, fund it.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> Domesticate it….<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> Make it depend on you. Turn it into an art project or a product of some kind. The minute what you think of as radical becomes an institutionalised, funded operation, you\u2019re in some trouble. And it\u2019s cleverly done. It\u2019s not all bad…some are doing genuinely good work.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> Like the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union)….<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> They have money from the Ford Foundation, right? But they do excellent work. You can\u2019t fault people for the work they\u2019re doing, taken individually.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> People want to do something good, something useful….<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> Yes. And it is these good intentions that are dragooned and put to work. It\u2019s a complicated thing. Think of a bead necklace. The beads on their own may be lovely, but when they\u2019re threaded together, they\u2019re not really free to skitter around as they please. When you look around and see how many NGOs are on, say, the Gates, Rockefeller or Ford Foundation\u2019s handout list, there has to be something wrong, right? They turn potential radicals into receivers of their largesse\u2014and then, very subtly, without appearing to\u2014they circumscribe the boundaries of radical politics. And you\u2019re sacked if you disobey…sacked, unfunded, whatever. And then there\u2019s always the game of pitting the \u201cfunded\u201d against the \u201cunfunded\u201d, in which the funder takes centrestage. So, I mean, I\u2019m not against people being funded\u2014because we\u2019re running out of options\u2014but we have to understand\u2014are you walking the dog or is the dog walking you? Or who\u2019s the dog and who is you?<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> I\u2019m definitely the dog…and I\u2019ve definitely been walked.<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> Everywhere\u2014not just in America…repress, beat up, shoot, jail those you can, and throw money at those whom you can\u2019t\u2014and gradually sandpaper the edge off them. They\u2019re in the business of creating what we in India call Paaltu Sher, which means Tamed Tigers. Like a pretend resistance…so you can let off steam without damaging anything.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> The first time you spoke at the World Social Forum…when was that?<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> In 2002, I think, Porto Alegre…just before the US invasion of Iraq.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> In Mumbai. And then you went the next year and it was….<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> Totally NGO-ised. So many major activists had turned into travel agents, just having to organise tickets and money, flying people up and down. The forum suddenly declared, \u201cOnly non-violence, no armed struggles….\u201d They had turned Gandhian.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> So anyone involved in armed resistance….<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> All out, all out. Many of the radical struggles were out. And I thought, fuck this. My question is, if, let\u2019s 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\u2014what brand of non-violence would the stalwarts of the establishment recommend? Non-violence is radical political theatre.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> Effective only when there\u2019s an audience….<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> Exactly<\/em>. And who can pull in an audience? You need some capital, some stars, right? Gandhi was a superstar. The people in the forest don\u2019t have that capital, that drawing power. So they have no audience<\/strong>. Non-violence should be a tactic\u2014not an ideology preached from the sidelines to victims of massive<\/em> violence…. With me, it\u2019s been an evolution of seeing through these things.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> You begin to smell the digestive enzymes….<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> (Laughing<\/em>) But you know, the revolution cannot be funded. It\u2019s not the imagination of trusts and foundations that\u2019s going to bring real change.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> But what\u2019s the bigger game that we can name?<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> The bigger game is keeping the world safe for the Free Market. Structural Adjustment, Privatisa\u00adtion, Free Market fundamentalism\u2014all masquerading as Democracy and the Rule of Law. Many corporate foundation-funded NGOs\u2014not all, but many\u2014become the missionaries of the \u201cnew economy\u201d. They tinker with your imagination, with language. The idea of \u201chuman rights\u201d, for example\u2014sometimes 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<\/em> becomes the maximum<\/em>\u2014all we are supposed to expect\u2014but human rights aren\u2019t enough. The goal is, and must always be, justice.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> The term human rights<\/em> is, or can be, a kind of pacifier\u2014filling the space in the political imagination that justice deserves?<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> Look at the Israel-Palestine conflict, for example. If you look at a map from 1947 to now, you\u2019ll see that Israel has gobbled up almost all of Palestinian land with its illegal settlements. To talk about justice in that battle, you have to talk about those settlements. But, if you just talk about human rights, then you can say, \u201cOh, Hamas violates human rights\u201d, \u201cIsrael violates human rights\u201d. Ergo, both are bad.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> You can turn it into an equivalence….<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> …though it isn\u2019t one. But this discourse of human rights, it\u2019s a very good format for TV\u2014the great atrocity analysis and condemnation industry (laughs<\/em>). Who comes out smelling sweet in the atrocity analysis? States have invested themselves with the right to legitimise violence\u2014so who gets criminalised and delegitimised? Only\u2014or well that\u2019s excessive\u2014usually<\/em>, the resistance.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> So the term human rights<\/em> can take the oxygen out of justice?<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> Human rights takes history<\/em> out of justice.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> Justice always has context….<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> I sound as though I\u2019m trashing human rights…I\u2019m not. All I\u2019m saying is that the idea of justice\u2014even just dreaming of justice\u2014is revolutionary. The language of human rights tends to accept a status quo that is intrinsically unjust\u2014and then tries to make it more accountable. But then, of course, Catch-22 is that violating human rights is integral<\/em> to the project of neoliberalism and global hegemony.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> …as there\u2019s no other way of implementing those policies except violently.<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> No way at all\u2014but talk loud enough about human rights and it gives the impression of democracy at work, justice at work. There was a time when the United States waged war to topple democracies, because back then democracy was a threat to the Free Market. Countries were nationalising their resources, protecting their markets…. So then, real democracies were being toppled. They were toppled in Iran, they were toppled all across Latin America, Chile….<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> The list is too long….<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> Now we\u2019re in a situation where democracy has been taken into the workshop and fixed, remodeled to be market-friendly. So now the United States is fighting wars to instal democracies. First it was topple them, now it\u2019s instal them, right? And this whole rise of corporate-funded NGOs in the modern world, this notion of CSR, corporate social responsibility\u2014it\u2019s all part of a New Managed Democracy. In that sense, it\u2019s all part of the same machine.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> Tentacles of the same squid.<\/p>\n

AR: <\/strong>They moved in to the spaces that were left when \u201cstructural adjustment\u201d forced states to pull back on public spending\u2014on health, education, infrastructure, water supply\u2014turning what ought to be people\u2019s rights, to education, to healthcare and so on, into charitable activity available to a few. Peace, Inc. is sometimes as worrying as War, Inc. It\u2019s a way of managing public anger. We\u2019re all being managed, and we don\u2019t even know it…. The IMF and the World Bank, the most opaque and secretive entities, put millions into NGOs who fight against \u201ccorruption\u201d and for \u201ctransparency\u201d. They want the Rule of Law\u2014as long as they make the laws. They want transparency in order to standardise a situation, so that global capital can flow without any impediment. Cage the People, Free the Money. The only thing that is allowed to move freely\u2014unimpeded\u2014around the world today is money…capital.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> It\u2019s all for efficiency, right? Stable markets, stable world…there\u2019s a great violence in the idea of a uniform \u201cinvestment climate\u201d.<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> In India, that\u2019s a phrase we use interchangeably with \u201cmassacre\u201d. Stable markets, unstable<\/em> world. Efficiency. Everybody hears about it. It\u2019s enough to make you want to be pro-inefficiency and pro-corruption. (Laughing<\/em>) But seriously, if you look at the history of the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller, in Latin America, in Indonesia, where almost a million people, mainly Communists, were killed by General Suharto, who was backed by the CIA, in South Africa, in the US Civil Rights Movement\u2014or even now, it\u2019s very disturbing. They have always worked closely with the US State Department.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> And yet now Ford funds The Act of Killing<\/em>\u2014the film about those same massacres. They profile the butchers…but not their masters. They won\u2019t follow the money.<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> They have so much money, they can fund everything, very bad things as well as very good things\u2014documentary films, nuclear weapons planners, gender rights, feminist conferences, literature and film festivals, university chairs…anything, as long as it doesn\u2019t upset the \u201cmarket\u201d and the economic status quo. One of Ford\u2019s \u201cgood works\u201d was to fund the CFR, the Council of Foreign Relations, which worked closely with the CIA. All the World Bank presidents since 1946 are from the CFR. Ford-funded RAND, the Research and Development Corporation, which works closely with the US defence forces.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> That was where Dan worked. That\u2019s where he laid his hands on the Pentagon papers.<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> The Pentagon papers…. I couldn\u2019t believe what I was reading…that stuff about bombing dams, planning famines…. I wrote an introduction to an edition of Noam Chomsky\u2019s For Reasons of State<\/em> in which he analyses the Pentagon papers. There was a chapter in the book called \u2018The Backroom Boys\u2019\u2014maybe that wasn\u2019t the Pentagon papers part, I don\u2019t remember…but there was a letter or a note of some kind, maybe from soldiers in the field, about how great it was that white phosphorous had been mixed in with napalm…. \u201cIt sticks to the gooks like shit to a blanket, and burns them to the bone.\u201d They were happy because white phosphorous kept burning even when the Vietnamese who had been firebombed tried to jump into water to stop their flesh from burning off….<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> You remember that by rote?<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> I can\u2019t forget it. It burned me to the bone…. I grew up in Kerala, remember. Communist country….<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> You were talking about how the Ford Foundation funded RAND and the CFR.<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> (Laughs<\/em>) Yes…it\u2019s a bedroom comedy…actually a bedroom tragedy…is that a genre? Ford funded CFR and RAND. Robert McNamara moved from heading Ford Motors to the Pentagon. So, as you can see, we\u2019re encircled.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> …and not just by the past.<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> No\u2014by the future, too. The future is Google, isn\u2019t it? In Julian Assange\u2019s book\u2014brilliant book\u2014When Google Met WikiLeaks<\/em>, he suggests that there isn\u2019t much daylight between Google and the NSA. The three people who went along with Eric Schmidt\u2014CEO of Google\u2014to interview Julian were Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas\u2014ex-State Department and senior something or other on the CFR, adviser to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clin\u00adton. The two others were Lisa Shields and Scott Malcolmson, also former State Department and CFR. It\u2019s serious shit. But when we talk about NGOs, there\u2019s something we must be careful about….<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> What\u2019s that?<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> When the attack on NGOs comes from the opposite end, from the far right, then those of us who\u2019ve been criticising NGOs from a completely different perspective will look terrible…to liberals we\u2019ll be the bad guys….<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> Once again pitting the \u201cfunded\u201d against the \u201cunfunded\u201d.<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> For example, in India the new government\u2014the members of the radical Hindu Right who want India to be a \u2018Hindu Nation\u2019\u2014they\u2019re big\u00adots. Butchers. Massacres are their unofficial election campaigns\u2014orc\u00adhestrated to polarise communities and bring in the vote. It was so in Gujarat in 2002, and this year, in the run-up to the general elections, in a place called Muzaffarnagar, after which tens of thousands of Muslims had to flee from their villages and live in camps. Some of those who are accused of all that murdering are now cabinet ministers. Their supp\u00adort for straightforward, chest-thu\u00admping butchery makes you long for even the hypocrisy of the human rights discourse. But now if the \u201chuman rights\u201d NGOs make a noise, or even whisper too loudly…this government will shut them down. And it can, very easily. All it has to do is to go after the funders…and the funders, whoever they are, especially those who are interested in India\u2019s huge \u201cmarket\u201d will either cave in or scuttle over to the other side. Those NGOs will blow over because they\u2019re a chimera, they don\u2019t have deep roots in society among the people, really, so they\u2019ll just disappear. Even the pretend resistance that has sucked the marrow out of genuine resistance will be gone.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> Is Modi going to succeed long-term?<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> It\u2019s hard to say. There\u2019s no real opposition, you know? He has an absolute majority and a government that he completely controls, and he himself\u2014and I think this is true of most people with murky pasts\u2014doesn\u2019t trust any of his own people, so he\u2019s become this person who has to interface directly with people. The government is secondary. Public institutions are being peopled by his acolytes, school and university syllabi are being revamped, history is being rewritten in absurd ways. It\u2019s very dangerous, all of it. And a large section of young people, students, the IT crowd, the educated middle class and, of course, Big Business, are with him\u2014the Hindu right-wing is with him. He\u2019s lowering the bar of public discourse\u2014saying things like, \u201cOh, Hindus discovered plastic surgery in the Vedas because how else would we have had an elephant-headed god.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Taliban<\/a>

Taliban Rule The US was liberating Aghan women from the Taliban? Can you bomb feminism into a country?<\/p><\/div>\n

JC:<\/strong> (Laughing<\/em>) He said that?<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> Yes! It\u2019s dangerous. On the other hand, it\u2019s so corny that I don\u2019t know how long it can last. But for now people are wearing Modi masks and waving back at him…. He was democratically elected. There\u2019s no getting away from that. That\u2019s why when people say \u201cthe people\u201d or \u201cthe public\u201d as though it\u2019s the final repository of all morality, I sometimes flinch.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> As they say, \u201cKitsch is the Mask of Death\u201d….<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> Sounds about right…. But then, while there\u2019s no real opposition to him in Parliament, India\u2019s a very interesting place….there\u2019s no formal opposition, but there\u2019s genuine on-the-ground opposition. If you travel around\u2014there are all kinds of people, brilliant people…journalists, activists, filmmakers, whether you go to Kashmir, the Indian part, or to an Adivasi village about to be submerged by a dam reservoir\u2014the level of understanding of everything we\u2019ve talked about\u2014surveillance, globalisation, NGO-isation\u2014is so high, you know? The wisdom of the resistance movements, which are ragged and tattered and pushed to the wall, is incredible. So…I look to them and keep the faith. (Laughs<\/em>)<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> So this isn\u2019t new to you…the debate about mass surveillance?<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> Of course, the details are new to me, the technical stuff and the scale of it all\u2014but for many of us in India who don\u2019t consider ourselves \u2018innocent\u2019, surveillance is something we have all always been aware of. Most of those who have been summarily executed by the army or the police\u2014we call them \u2018encounters\u2019\u2014have been tracked down using their cellphones. In Kashmir, for years they have monitored every phone call, every e-mail, every Facebook account\u2014that plus beating doors down, shooting into crowds, mass arrests, torture that puts Abu Ghraib in the shade. It\u2019s the same in Central India.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> In the forest where you went Walking with the Comrades<\/em><\/a>?<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> Yes. Where the poorest people in the world have stopped some of the richest mining corporations in their tracks. The great irony is that people who live in remote areas, who are illiterate and don\u2019t own TVs, are in some ways more free because they are beyond the reach of indoctrination by the modern mass media. There\u2019s a virtual civil war going on there and few know about it. Anyway, before I went into the forest, I was told by the Superintendent of Police, \u201cWhoever crosses that river, can be shot on sight by my boys.\u201d The police call the area across the river \u2018Pakistan\u2019. Anyway, then the cop says to me, \u201cYou know, Arundhati, I\u2019ve told my seniors that however many police we put into this area, into the forest, we can\u2019t win this battle with force\u2014the only way we can win it is to put a TV in every tribal person\u2019s house because these tribals don\u2019t understand greed.\u201d His point was that watching TV would teach them greed.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> Greed…. That\u2019s what this whole circus is about…huh?<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> Yes.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

That evening, after the awards ceremony, we met up with Dan. The next morning, we caught the flight to Moscow. Travelling with us was Ole von Uexk\u00fcll from the Right Livelihood Foundation, a lovely man with clear eyes and impeccable manners. Ole was going to give Ed the prize since he couldn\u2019t travel to Stockholm to receive it. Ole would be our companion for the next few days. On the flight, Dan, who is 83 years old, was furiously reading Roy\u2019s new essay, The Doctor and the Saint<\/em>, scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad. My mind began to race, wondering what Roy was making of this mini flying-circus hurtling toward Moscow. What I would learn from what she calls\u2014with sinister silkiness and mischief twinkling in her dark brown eyes\u2014\u201cthe gook perspective\u201d? She can disarm you at any time with her friendly hustler\u2019s grin but her eyes see things and love things so fiercely, it\u2019s frightening at times.<\/p>\n

Going through immigration of the country he once planned to annihilate, Dan flashed the peace sign. Soon we were driving through the freezing streets of Moscow. The Ritz Carlton is perched literally a few hundred yards from the Kremlin. The Red Square always seemed so much bigger on TV, during all those horror show military parades. It\u2019s so much smaller to the naked eye. We checked in and were whisked up to a VIP reception lounge with great views of the Kremlin and an Audi car display on its roof deck: The Ritz Terrace Brought to you by Audi<\/em>. Another reminder hanging over Lenin\u2019s tomb that capitalism had supposedly ended history.<\/p>\n

At noon the next day, I got the call I was waiting for in my room.<\/p>\n

The meeting between these two living symbols of American conscience was historic. It needed to happen. Seeing Ed and Dan together, trading stories, exch\u00adan\u00adging notes, was both heartwarming and deeply inspiring, and the conversation with Roy and the two former Presi\u00addent\u2019s Men was extraordinary. It had depth, insight, wit, generosity and a ligh\u00adtness of touch not possible in a formal, structured interview. Aware that we were being watched and monitored by forces greater than ourselves, we talked. Maybe one day the NSA will give us the minutes of our meeting. What was remarkable was how much agreement there was in the room. It wasn\u2019t just what was said, but the way it was said, not just the text, but the subtext, the warmth, and laughter that was so exhilarating. But that\u2019s ano\u00adther story. After two unforgettable days and 20 hours spent together, we said goodbye to Ed, wondering if we\u2019d ever see him again.<\/p>\n

During the last few hours with Ed, Dan had recounted in horrifying and empirical detail the history of the nuclear arms race\u2014a history of lies\u2014an apocalyptic tome of charnel monologues and murder rites.<\/p>\n

At one point, Dan referred to Robert McNamara, his boss in the Pentagon, as a \u201cmoderate\u201d. Roy\u2019s eyes snapped wide open at the assertion. Dan then explained how, compared to the other lunatics in the Pentagon like Edwin Teller and Curtis LeMay, he was one. McNamara\u2019s moderate and reasonable argument, Dan said, was that the United States needed only 400 warheads instead of 1,000. Because after 400, there were \u201cdiminishing returns on genocide\u201d. It begins to flatten out. \u201cYou kill most people with 400, so if you have 800, you don\u2019t kill that many more\u2014400 warheads would kill 1.2 billion people out of the then total population of 3.7 billion. So why have 1,000?\u201d<\/p>\n

Roy listened to all this without saying very much. In The End of Imagination<\/em><\/a>, the essay she wrote after India\u2019s 1998 nuclear tests, she had gotten herself into serious trouble when she declared, \u201cIf it is anti-national to protest against nuclear weapons, then I sec\u00adede. I declare myself a mobile republic.\u201d Dan, who is writing a book on the nuclear arms race, told me it was one of the finest things he\u2019s ever read on the subject. \u201cWouldn\u2019t you say,\u201d Roy said for the record, or to anybody willing to listen, \u201cthat nuclear wea\u00adpons are the inevitable, toxic corollary of the idea of the Great Nation?\u201d<\/p>\n

Just after Ed left, Dan collapsed on to my bed\u2014exhausted and blissful\u2014with his arms stretched wide, but then a deep storm erupted. He became distressed and emotional. He quoted from The Man Without a Country<\/em> by Edward Everett Hale, a short story about an American naval officer who was tried and court martialed. Hale\u2019s sentence was that he should forever go from ship to ship, and he should never hear the name \u201cAmerica\u201d again. In the story, a character quotes the poem Patriotism<\/em> by Sir Walter Scott:<\/p>\n

Breathes there the man with soul so dead,<\/em><\/p>\n

Who never to himself hath said,<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThis is my own, my native land!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Dan began to weep. Through his tears, he said, \u201cI\u2019m still that much of a patriot in some sense…not for the State but….\u201d He tal\u00adked about his son and how he came of age during the Vietnam war, and how he, Dan, used to think his son was born for jail. \u201cThat the best thing that the best people in our country like Ed can do is to go to prison…. Or be an exile in Russia? This is what it\u2019s come to in my country…it\u2019s horrible, you know….\u201d Roy\u2019s eyes were sympathetic but distin\u00adctly unsettled.<\/p>\n

\"Democracy<\/a>

Democracy Masquerade Uniform investment climate. A phrase interchangeable with Massacre.<\/p><\/div>\n

It was our last night in Moscow. We went for a walk in the Red Square. The Kremlin was lit with fairy lights. Dan went off to buy himself a Cossack fur hat. We stepped carefully on to the treacherous sheet of ice that covered the Red Square, trying to guess where Putin\u2019s window might be and whether he was still at work. Roy kept talking as if she was still in room 1001.<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> The diminishing returns of genocide…what\u2019s the subject heading? Math or economics? Zoology it should be. Mao said he was prepared to have millions of Chinese people perish in a nuclear war as long as China survived…. I\u2019m beginning to find it more and more sick that only humans make it into our calculations…. Annihilate life on earth, but save the nation…what\u2019s the subject heading? Stupidity or Insanity?<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> Social Service…. What do you think those maniacs look like in binary code?<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> Good-looking. When you think of how much violence, how much blood…how much has been destroyed to create the great nations, America, Australia, Britain, Germany, France, Belgium\u2014even India, Pakistan.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> The Soviet Union….<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> Yes. Having destroyed so much to make them, we must have nuclear weapons to protect them\u2014and climate change to hold up their way of life…a two-pronged annihilation project.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> We must all bow down to the flags.<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> And\u2014I might as well say it now that I\u2019m in the Red Square\u2014to capitalism. Every time I say the word capitalism<\/em>, everyone just assumes….<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> You must be a Marxist.<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> I have plenty of Marxism in me, I do…but Russia and China had their bloody revolutions and even while they were Communist, they had the same idea about generating wealth\u2014tear it out of the bowels of the earth. And now they have come out with the same idea in the end…you know, capitalism. But capitalism will fail, too. We need a new imagination. Until then, we\u2019re all just out here….<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> Wandering….<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> Thousands of years of ideological, philosophical and practical decisions were made. They altered the surface of the earth, the coordinates of our souls. For every one of those decisions, maybe there\u2019s another decision that could have been made, should have been made.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> Can<\/em> be made….<\/p>\n

AR:<\/strong> Of course. So I don\u2019t have the Big Idea. I don\u2019t have the arrogance to even want to have the Big Idea. But I believe the physics of resisting power is as old as the physics of accumulating power. That\u2019s what keeps the balance in the universe…the refusal to obey<\/strong>. I mean what\u2019s a country? It\u2019s just an administrative unit, a glorified municipality. Why do we imbue it with esoteric mea\u00adning and protect it with nuclear bombs? I can\u2019t bow down to a municipality….it\u2019s just not intelligent. The bastards will do what they have to do, and we\u2019ll do what we have to do. Even if they annihilate us, we\u2019ll go down on the other side.<\/p>\n

I looked at Roy, and wondered what trouble awaited her back in India…an old Yugoslavian proverb came to mind\u2014\u201cTell the truth and run\u201d. But some creatures will not run…even when maybe they should. They know that to show weakness only emboldens the bastards….<\/p>\n

Suddenly she turned to me and thanked me formally for organising the meeting with Edward Snowden. \u201cHe presents himself as this cool systems man, but it\u2019s only passion that could make him do what he did. He\u2019s not just a systems man. That\u2019s what I needed to know.\u201d<\/p>\n

We kept an eye on Dan in the distance bargaining with the hat-seller. I was worried he might slip on the ice.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, for the record, Ms Roy,\u201d I asked, \u201cas someone with \u2018plenty of Marxism\u2019 in her, how does it feel to be walking on ice in the Red Square?\u201d She nodded sagely, appearing to give my talk-show question serious consideration. \u201cI think it should be privatised…handed over to a foundation that works tirelessly for the empowerment of women prisoners, abolishing of child labour and the improvement of relations between mass media and mining companies. Maybe to Bill and Melinda Gates.\u201d<\/p>\n

She grinned with sadness in it…. I could almost hear the chimes of harmonic thinking, as clear as the church bells that suddenly filled the frozen air and the wind that chopped through the bleak winter night.<\/p>\n

\u201cListen man,\u201d she said. \u201cGod\u2019s back in the Red Square.\u201d<\/p>\n

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

Over the next week or so, the logistics had to be planned. It was short notice and a bit of a mad scramble. Roy made her own arrangements, but I had in mind Dan Ellsberg\u2019s history as a nuclear weapons planner for America\u2019s retaliation to a possible Soviet first strike.<\/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-66406","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\/66406","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=66406"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66406\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}