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

[Michael Benson]

Dear Taiuti:

You should take care not to condense as well, nor so easily take offense.
Apparently my message raised hackles, thought it was not intended to do so
but to raise another issue which I won't raise again here, as I said what I
intended to say. It's your right to call Roy's thoughts "wonderful" just as
it is mine to call them into question. In fact, you also did the latter
yourself, and very well.

It's interesting to me that the part of your own mail which you cut and
paste into this latest -- what you attach a number "2" to -- is exactly that
part I was referring to when I wrote (and here let me cut and paste):

>> I agree with most of what Taiuti wrote

It was very clear from your message that you were critical of Roy's text.
You misinterpret my quibble over your interpretation of her thought with a
disagreement regarding the core of your previous -- yes brief -- message,
which in fact I agree with, even if you'd rather not accept that
uncomfortable fact!

I would like to read this Sontag interview, as I've only read her short
sharp critique of US mass media fatuousness (fatwahness?) in the NYer. No
idea where it was published, however.

Later, MB



-----Original Message-----
From: Lorenzo Taiuti <md3169@mclink.it>
To: spectre@mikrolisten.de <spectre@mikrolisten.de>
Date: Monday, October 15, 2001 10:37 AM
Subject: Re: [spectre] Arundhati Roy: The Algebra Of Infinite
Justice:briefing the Briefing?


>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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