She commends the efforts of New Media in showing what Old Media really is - an elaborate boardroom bulletin that reports and analyses the concerns of powerful people. The mainstream media practice “crisis reportage”, but Roy challenges journalists in New Media to become “peace correspondents instead of war correspondents,” and expose the “policies and processes that make ordinary things… such a distant dream for ordinary people”.

In An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, Roy depicts the brutal barbaric destruction of a civilization by the American army. Agreed, Saddam Hussein was a dictator, but the fact is that the American and British governments supported him during his military excesses, against Iran and during the extermination of Kurds. It was only when he invaded Kuwait that he turned into a liability - a dog who wouldn’t obey his master anymore. And so, he deserved to be killed. The enormous level of double standards that the United States committed during the war is appalling. Bombing civilian areas is just one example. Western ‘embedded’ journalists are called heroes for doing their duty from the frontlines of war but Iraqi viewpoints were denounced. In fact, the Allies even bombed the Iraqi television station.

And the most ironic thing is - while the American taxpayers end up footing the spiralling war costs, the MNC friends of Bush, Cheney et al, gain plump contracts for the "reconstruction" of Iraq. The American Empire is “a superpower’s self destructive impulse towards supremacy, global hegemony.” Roy commends those Americans who have opposed the war as the "true heroes", not the soldiers fighting in Iraq.

In “Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy”, a talk originally in New York City, Roy suggests that some of her listeners might think it “bad manners” for an Indian citizen to come to New York to criticize the U.S. government, but “when a country ceases to be merely a country and becomes an empire, then the scale of operations changes dramatically. So may I clarify that tonight I speak as a subject of the American empire? I speak as a slave who presumes to criticize her king”. In snappy, provocative prose, Roy argues that democracy “has become Empire’s euphemism for neo-liberal capitalism” and gives numerous examples from India, South Africa and the United States itself! She urges Americans to engage in civil disobedience in resistance to the war in Iraq because “the only institution more powerful than the U.S. government is American civil society.”

“When the Saints Go Marching Out” was first broadcast on the BBC and reflects on what has happened in the lands of Martin Luther King, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Nelson Mandela after their times have passed. These three public figures were the representatives of three different struggles, the only common feature being the reliance on the mode of non-violent resistance. Yet, in today’s India, religious fundamentalism is on the rise; South Africa is still festering with the pre-apartheid problems of extreme economic and social disparity; the United States has lost all manner of legitimate authority by the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq - more importantly, the blacks, for whom Martin Luther King devoted his life, make up nearly one fifth of America’s armed forces and nearly one third of the U.S. army (though they account for only 12% of America’s population) by way of the poverty draft. Roy appeals to black Americans to follow the teachings of King and to take to the streets in protest of the war in Iraq.

Article Author: kanjisheik

kanjisheik is just an ordinary whizkid trying to find his place in life. His idea of paradise is a house on a beach, with a HUGE collection of books. Check out his blog Chronicles of Kanjisheik for more articles. He also blogs at DesiCritics.

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