[spectre] Arundhati Roy: The Algebra Of Infinite Justice

[Michael Benson]

I agree with most of what Taiuti wrote -- except the "wonderful piece of
thought" part.

There's a fundamental(ist?) problem in listing all the many, and certainly
by me admitted, crimes committed by US foreign policy and multinational
capitalism in all these many years -- Bhopal being one of them, certainly --
and then using that to rationalize or even justify the slaughter of 5,000
innocents. Which is what Arundhati Roy does in that "wonderful piece of
thought." It's equivalent to saying that the injustices of Versailles
produced German 'behavior' from 1933-45, the bombing of Cambodia by the
United States produced Pol Pot, or the centuries of Ottoman control of the
Balkans produced Srebrenica.

The Versailles Agreement, it is widely agreed, was cruelly unjust towards
Germany. Does this let Hitler, Himmler, the SS, etc., off the hook?

The bombing of Cambodia was a war crime, and I firmly believe that Henry
Kissinger should be in the cell next to Milosevic at the Hague. Does this
justify the genocide Pol Pot committed against his own people, or in any way
take away the culpability of the Khmer Rouge?

The Ottoman domination of the Balkans, which forcibly incorporated Serbia
into an empire controlled from Constantinople, produced high body counts and
also resulted in the conversion of certain populations of Balkan Slavs to
the Islamic faith. Did this justify Serbian massacres of Bosnian Moslems in
the 90's?

Here in Ljubljana various people, including theorist Rastko Mocnik, have
been making the same error as Roy, which means to sweep together all manner
of disparate movements with various types of grievance against US
imperialism -- he includes, for example, the anti-globalization movement,
the Zapatistas, etc -- and proffer them as reasons behind the attacks on New
York. But most of the causes and people he would see as being in an alliance
with those who committed this crime would be viewed as being every bit as
worthy of an infidel's death as those already killed in New York. (In the
latest message from Al Quieda, released today, only _Muslims_ were asked to
stay away from airplanes and tall buildings.)

It's a mistake to blithely assume the enemy of your enemy is your friend. (I
have a feeling Arundhati Roy wouldn't agree to the draconian Taliban
restrictions on women, for example.) What Mocnik, Roy and many others betray
in this impulse to knit together their own litany of grievances directed at
the US, however justified, and then tie it to these terrorist activities is
specifically their own sense that the US deserved it or had it coming. But
they don't feel quite comfortable saying that so openly, so they write
essays that in the end fail to camouflage the sentiment. So why not just say
so openly? Because it appears to justify the slaughter of thousands of
innocent people.

For her part Roy's "wonderful thought" is remarkable fuzzy, and all over the
place. She feels confident to proclaim:

>American people ought to know that it is not them, but their government's
policies that are so
>hated.

Is that what Bin Laden meant when he said, in a video tape distributed all
over the Middle East and Asia, that all "good Muslims" should kill Americans
whenever and wherever they can, including civilians?

She writes, of Americans:

"They can't possibly doubt that they themselves, their extraordinary
musicians, their writers,
their actors, their spectacular sportsmen and their cinema, are universally
welcomed."

What planet has this person been living on?

And she says: "In the absence of information, politicians, political
commentators, writers (like myself) will invest the act with their own
politics, with their own interpretations. This speculation, this analysis of
the political climate in which the attacks took place, can only be a good
thing."

Speculation in the absence of information isn't the same as analysis, and is
not necessarily a good thing, and when Roy "invests" the murder of five
thousand people with her own litany of grievance -- again, even if that
litany is well founded -- she forgets (if she ever knew) that nothing can
justify that murder. In this the Koran, for example, is specific: the murder
of one innocent is like the destruction of the entire world. (This is
exactly why it is so disturbing and infuriating to see innocents now being
killed in Afghanistan. To feel otherwise is to make the same mistake as
Roy.)

In the one short text I read by her from The New Yorker, Susan Sontag made
it clear that this is a time for clear thinking and analysis, not pedantry
and fatuous ideological posing. Presumably this applies to any side of the
various ideological divides. I don't see how Arundhati Roy's "Algebra of
Infinite Justice", as Taiuti puts it, "links very well" with Sontag's
views -- except as an illustration of the nature of the problem.

I have to admit, though, that Roy's line:

>President George Bush can no more "rid the world of evil-doers" than he can
stock it with saints.

...makes me tip my hat in respect. Now _that_ is a sentence I will remember.

Greetings,
MB