WSJ on Arundhati Roy

[Guest guest]

Dotty Arundhati

A peace prize winner makes war on America.

 

BY TUNKU VARADARAJAN

Friday, December 3, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST

 

"But who is Osama bin Laden really? Let me rephrase that. What is

Osama bin Laden? He's America's family secret. He's the American

president's dark doppelganger. . . . He has been sculpted from the

spare rib of a world laid to waste by America's foreign policy . . .

[and] its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the

economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts."

 

 

--Arundhati Roy, Sept. 29, 2001

When a friend learned that I was pondering a piece critical of Ms.

Roy--the Indian author of "The God of Small Things" and,

subsequently, of numerous pamphlets whose leftist politics is so

utterly devoid of nuance that they make Eric Alterman's columns read

like David Brooks's--he e-mailed me reprovingly to ask whether that

would not be a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. But second

thoughts can strike at the speed of light. No sooner had he hit

the "send" button than he hit it again: "There are certain fish,

however, in certain barrels, that cannot be ignored."

 

Ms. Roy has just been awarded the Sydney Peace Prize. Of course, that

is not a big deal except in Sydney--and maybe, more broadly, in

liberal Australian circles. And the $50,000 she received (Aussie not

Yankee) is chump change so far as prizes of this sort go, slightly

less than $40,000 in U.S. currency. Besides, she isn't keeping the

money but donating it to aboriginal survivors of the Australian

Genocide.

 

 

 

 

 

The reason I thrust Ms. Roy before you is not to dwell on a picayune

peace prize but to draw your attention to remarks she made on

television while she was in Australia, a country whose soldiers are

fighting--and dying--in Iraq. Ms. Roy made an appeal to people

to "become the Iraqi resistance," adding that activists "need to

understand that Iraq is engaging in the frontlines of empire and we

have to throw our weight behind the Iraqi resistance."

Now it cannot have escaped Ms. Roy's attention that the "resistance"

of which she speaks--and which she exhorts the world to "become"--

kills innocent Iraqis daily, by bomb, by gun and by cutlass.

Beheading people--Iraqi and Western, Muslim and infidel--is the

macabre signature of this "resistance." Yet she persists in her

refusal to condemn their evil and attacks, instead, the very side

that allows her to flourish, to opine, to Be Important.

 

A certain segment of the American intelligentsia connects gleefully

with exotic leftists like Ms. Roy. In fact, the Ms. Roys of our age,

and their fans and subsidy-givers in the West, enjoy a touching

symbiosis. Arundhati Roy, I'd venture to say, is George Soros's

political poster girl.

 

The real epicenter of outrage for Ms. Roy lies not in Iraq but in

Washington. The whole world is a stage for a morality play that casts

the U.S., and all who support it, as diabolical. Ms. Roy and her type

pay the ultimate compliment to America by holding that all world

events occur at America's behest and that the six billion non-

Americans on the planet are but helpless pawns, incapable of doing

anything--especially anything bad--without Uncle Sam's imprimatur.

 

Accepting her Sydney prize, Ms Roy frothed up like a cappuccino laced

with arsenic: "As the battle to control the world's resources

intensifies, economic colonialism through formal military aggression

is staging a comeback. Iraq is the logical culmination of the process

of corporate globalization in which neo-colonialism and neo-

liberalism have fused. If we can find it in ourselves to peep behind

the curtain of blood, we would glimpse the pitiless transactions

taking place backstage."

 

 

 

 

 

This is sophistry masquerading as protest, rage unhinged from fact.

In her mind there is no history in Iraq, no Saddam, no context;

there's just one more chapter of America doing down brown people.

Third-Worldism, preachy nonalignment: They had both become so

outdated. But American action abroad--in Iraq, in Afghanistan--has,

alas, given Ms. Roy and her kind the chance to dust off the discarded

manuals. What a joy for her--the old verities again! Never mind that

the present battle is against those who would extinguish everything

she values, and extinguish her own country--India--to boot.

The system Ms. Roy deplores has furnished her with a cordon of

comfort: freedom of speech, and respect for women's views (not, by

the way, Osama's strongest suit). Hers is a kind of infantile

rebellion against the structure that houses her. Ms. Roy's celebrated

book, her lavish claim to fame, told us of "small things." Now one

marvels only at the smallness of her mind--and wishes, prays, that

she would grow up. Just a teeny bit.

 

Mr. Varadarajan is editorial features editor of The Wall Street

Journal.