Category: Asia

So, here’s Stephen Moss interviewing Arundhati Roy:

I want to talk more about Mary Roy – and eventually we do – but there’s one important point to clear up first. Guerrillas use violence, generally directed against the police and army, but sometimes causing injury and death to civilians caught in the crossfire. Does she condemn that violence? “I don’t condemn it any more,” she says. “If you’re an adivasi [tribal Indian] living in a forest village and 800 CRP [Central Reserve Police] come and surround your village and start burning it, what are you supposed to do? Are you supposed to go on hunger strike? Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation.”

Her critics label her a Maoist sympathiser. Is she? “I am a Maoist sympathiser,” she says. “I’m not a Maoist ideologue, because the communist movements in history have been just as destructive as capitalism. But right now, when the assault is on, I feel they are very much part of the resistance that I support.”

Roy talks about the resistance as an “insurrection”; she makes India sound as if it’s ripe for a Chinese or Russian-style revolution. So how come we in the west don’t hear about these mini-wars? “I have been told quite openly by several correspondents of international newspapers,” she says, “that they have instructions – ‘No negative news from India’ – because it’s an investment destination. So you don’t hear about it. But there is an insurrection, and it’s not just a Maoist insurrection. Everywhere in the country, people are fighting.” I find the suggestion that such an injunction exists – or that self-respecting journalists would accept it – ridiculous. Foreign reporting of India might well be lazy or myopic, but I don’t believe it’s corrupt…

I question her absolutism, her Manichaean view of the world, but I admire her courage.

Could Moss be a bigger sack of sanctimonious shit?  Calling her Manichaean for allowing that people have the right to self defense, while not recognizing his own Manichean thinking that only the state should engage in violence, no matter what it does?  Thinking that his business is not corrupt, the business which repeated the lies which lead to the Iraq war, and that he knows better what’s going on in India than she does.  Thinking that what journalists think matters, as if such injunctions can be disobeyed when they are enforced by editors neither assigning such stories nor running such stories if submitted without being asked for.

There has been a major insurrection going on in India for a long time, it’s true that newspapers like the Guardian don’t cover it, but a cursory google search brings up plenty of information: entire provinces are in dispute, this is not in question.  Moss hasn’t even bothered to do any research before dismissing Roy.

The sanctimony of Moss, where ordinary people who might kill people fighting back should just take it and always engage in peaceful protest, while the nations of the world, including India, kill far far more people than those guerillas do, ever day, is staggering in its immensity.  The willful ignorance, the assertion of moral superiority, the smug judgment is all immense in its self-absorption.

It’s such a pity that the Glorious Revolution and Founders of the US, and so on, didn’t have people like Stephen Moss around to tell them that non-violence is always the way to go.

Non-violence works when you are dealing with people who give a fuck what you think.  When you’re a bunch of dirt-poor peasants whose only value is the land you’re living on, you have no leverage.  None.  There is nothing you can do that outweighs the money that is to be made by moving you out of the way, and if moving you means getting you dead, that works too.

This lesson, of the sharp limits of non-violence, is one the world’s effete leftists are going to have learn, and learn the hard way.  At the very least you have to be willing to make life unpleasant for your enemies, to get in their face, to shut down their hotels, their factories, their airports, their refineries, their businesses.  That is at the least.  Modern elites are selected for their ability to do make decisions based on cost-benefit analysis, taking into account only money, the possibility of harm to self or the immediate family, and the possibility of going to jail (minimal).  Everything else is irrelevant to their decision making calculus.  If the cost of moving you aside, to them, not to you, or to the environment, or society, or to the children, or to God, is less than the benefit of doing so, for them, they will do so. End of story.  Morals and ethics do not come into it.  Period.  The communications industry runs on minerals out of the Congo, which is a region ruled by mass systemic rape.

There used to be some in-groups.  That is to say, if you were American or European, you could expect to not be treated like a black African.  You could expect that the benefits of hegemony would be spread around.  And as Asian nations joined the club, their governments took care of them too.  If you didn’t have a government capable of or interested in looking out for you, well, too bad (see South America, post-war decline).

Those in-groups are fading.  In the Western world they are gone or going in major nations.  American elites do not think they need share anything with Americans.  The Brits are heading down this road.  The French still will share with whites, but dark immigrants can suck on it.  Harsh austerity is being pushed on Spanish, Portuguese, Irish and so on, and their own elites are have their hand on the pointy end of the stick, driving it into their citizens throats.  “Cough it up,” they scream, “we know you have more blood to give! More!  More!  MORE!”

This is the modern world, where in nation after nation the elites have become unmoored from any concern, not for general humanity, neither they nor the populations they rule have ever had that, but even for concern for their own populations.  The disease is not at the same stage everywhere, the Chinese still care for the Han, the Indians take care of non-aborigines, but the in-groups are shrinking, and what is shared with them, what they are seen as deserving, is being reduced, step by step.  I remember when I was in England, being told by a friendly ex-Pol that of course austerity was no big deal, and those multi-generation welfare bums had it coming, as if welfare had anything to do with the financial crisis, and if the amount of money which could be saved by screwing the poor would be enough to make a difference.

As Thucydides said, “the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.”  I don’t think he approved of that maxim the way that Moss appears to.

Instead men like Stephen Moss are there to justify the abuse of the weak by the strong, to denigrate the right of people who are having everything taken from them to fight back, to spew their bullshit about how violence is only justified when it’s the state bombing someone, but never in fighting back against an unjust state.  The world has many Stephen Moss’s, the world will have many more, and the world has always had Stephen Moss’s, the moral apologists of corrupt systems, the men who wring their hands and tell the powerless they should stay powerless, that they should never fight their enemies with the same violence their enemies use against them.