The only thing worth globalizing is dissent.
Arundhati Roy, the fantastic writer from India, winner of the 1997 Booker Prize for The God of Small Things, has relevant things to say on democracy, regarding her country and in turn, America and the world. Her comments apply to America, because as she has noted, America is the model for the world. Countries follow our model.
While India and America are not totally the same in their current tension points, they are both countries that hold themselves out as democracies. They are also free market nations that believe mostly in unfettered capitalism of the few at the expense of the many.
India and America are caste based societies who are fighting a civil war with authoritarian rule. India is losing (the Hindu nationalists are winning, I guess you can say). Prime Minister Modi remains in power and has hit the accelerator. Modi’s hardcore supporters have literally called for open violence on the country’s Muslims and also the Sikh population at times.
In America, the war marches on. The goal, by some, is to stop authoritarianism in its tracks. For others, it is to also punish those who sought to overthrow the government on January 6, 2021. The current hearings in Congress might get to the bottom of that.
Notice below in Roy’s comments how the issues she identifies in India resemble the issues in the United States. There is, for example, constant use of the word ‘democracy’ in America without qualifying that terminology.
There is also a serious issue with voting rights. The Republican Party cannot win elections without suppressing voting rights, so everything the party does is designed to stop voting, not encourage it.
Here’s Roy in all her intellectual beauty and humanity —
On Democracy:
“A democracy doesn’t just mean having regular elections. You cannot be a democracy when 200 million people who constitute a religious minority are expected to live without rights. When you can lynch them, kill them, incarcerate them, economically and socially boycott them, bulldoze their homes with complete immunity and threaten to strip them of citizenship. When the murderers and lynchers can aspire to move swiftly up the political ladder.” (CNN)
On Elections
“…the elections are compromised. I don’t think we have free and fair elections because you have a system now of secret electoral bonds, which allows business corporations to secretly fund political parties. We have today a party that is the richest political party in the world, the BJP. Elections in India have become a spectator sport — it’s like watching a Ferrari racing a few old bicycles.” (Nieman Foundation)
On Digital Media
“The drug of Netflix and Amazon Prime and looking at each other’s reality forgetting about our own. There is a world outside of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, a world that needs to be listened to very carefully. The whole world has been whipped into a kind of obedience. We slowly have to learn to be disobedient again.” (on Laura Flanders Show)
On Social Media
…studies of the algorithms of Facebook and Twitter show that hatefulness gets far more traction than decency. Miserable people, oppressed people, unemployed people, people living in crushing poverty are voting themselves into further hellishness, their sunken eyes fixed on the object of their hate.
The last sentence there, in America, is the white working class and others who swallowed the lies. Many of these individuals are those who voted the 45th President into office and accelerated hate, white supremacy and crazy conspiracies that sow division.
They have given up on a better life. They, as Roy says, “their sunken eyes fixed on the object of their hate.”
In this instance, in America, it is immigrants from the South (not anywhere else really). If only we could get rid of those Latino immigrants, things would be better.
Believe me, immigration is not the problem in America. It is mostly white male supremacy.
And, no things won’t be better until America is transformed into a modern democracy. That no longer looks possibly for large swaths of this country.
“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
— Arundhati Roy
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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