Deconstructing Empire
"We need to reexamine our ideas of resistance. I think we need to think about this very carefully, because we saw perhaps the most spectacular display of public morality ever on the 15th of February when millions of people across five continents marched against the war. It was discarded with disdain. Those marches were important. Those marches were important for us to rally our forces, to understand our strengths.
But those marches didn't affect the other side. So we need to now understand that the time has come for civil disobedience to become real. It's no longer symbolic. The marches can only be the symbol of something else that's real that we are doing, you know? Our meetings in Porto Allegre, our marches, and our demonstrations are for us. But they are not weapons when using against them, you know? So we need to now change our way of thinking to be effective. It's enough of being right; now we need to win. And now we need to win not necessarily by confronting empire, but by taking it apart part by part, and disabling those parts.
I think we need to make a list of every single company that has benefited from a reconstruction contract in Iraq and we need to go after them and we need to shut them down. That's what we need to do ... It's beyond the stage of resistance songs and marches; those are for us. Those are important for us. But we need to pick these people off one by one because we can't confront empire. We can't confront it all together. We can't -- nobody can deal with America's war machine. But we need to reverse those sanctions, you know. We need to make people sanctions. We need to look to our strengths and do it right. We need to undo the nuts and bolts of empire."
--Arundhati Roy, interviewed by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales on May 12, 2003. For a transcript, see Democracy Now. To watch the interview online, click here or here.
It would be naïve to imagine that we can directly confront Empire. Our strategy must be to isolate Empire's working parts and disable them one by one. No target is too small. No victory too insignificant. We could reverse the idea of the economic sanctions imposed on poor countries by Empire and its Allies. We could impose a regime of Peoples' Sanctions on every corporate house that has been awarded with a contract in postwar Iraq, just as activists in this country and around the world targeted institutions of apartheid. Each one of them should be named, exposed, and boycotted. Forced out of business. That could be our response to the Shock and Awe campaign. It would be a great beginning.
-- Arundhati Roy
at The Riverside Church in New York City
May 13, 2003For the whole speech, see The Center for Economic and Social Rights.
For an archive of Roy, see Democracy Now.