[spectre] Arundhati Roy: The Algebra Of Infinite Justice:briefing the Briefing?

[Lorenzo Taiuti]

Dear Benson
the "wonderful piece of thought" still stands so even after your critics.
Because Arundhat Roy  she is just re-writing ( and very well) a compendium
of many years of progressive thought, at least fitfy years, face to the
world equlibrium and new wars outbursts.
But my message was not only that.
And it seems to me that you focused only on a part of it.
By recognizing the basic and classic quality of her writing ( and connecting
it with an important part of Sontag's interview) i was putting in a few
doubts.
1) The necessity of a further proceeding from those basic positions.
2) The necessity of recognizing the different quality of the new terrorists
face to the classic figures of  revolutionary leaders (Guevara, Mandela,
Arafat...) and their not beeing expression of a people, but at most an
immaginary  projection of a huge malaise.
And i quote from my previous message:"But the problem with what is going on
now is that we do not face a terrorism
that is only provoqued by the old mistakes and horrors of american foreign
policy.
The terrorists we are facing are not Guevara, Mandela, Arafat, etc...the
popular heroes representing the needs of their own people.
They represent particular power groups of people convinced of the
superiority of their own culture and obsessed by the inferiority of their
power to buy.
Their culture (Taleban) for instance  is based on repression of all cultural
and psychological needs we consider basical for individual life and living.
The terrorists are not symbolic representations of all wrongs happened
between west and the World.
They are doing their own thing.
So Arhundati Roy says again what all the socio/cultural movements have been
sayng in the last fifty years.
Different global politics.
Different relatonships between rich west and poor societies.
Did we ever stop to say that?
Has jurgen Habermas recently said "...war cannot be the exclusive answer,
even if it presents itself as a necessity..."
It seems to me that i made clear a complex point of view, not to be defined
as an a-critic acceptance of Roy article.
Don't brief the brief messages we send.
Ciao
Lorenzo Taiuti


----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Benson" <michael.benson@pristop.si>
To: <spectre@mikrolisten.de>
Sent: Sunday, October 14, 2001 11:16 PM
Subject: Re: [spectre] Arundhati Roy: The Algebra Of Infinite Justice


> 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
>
>
>
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