Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy:
Buy One, Get One Free 

ARUNDHATI ROY
at the Riverside Church, Harlem, New York City 13may03

Arundhati Roy, author of "The God of Small Things," which received the 1997 Booker Prize. It sold 6 million copies and has been translated into many languages. She's also authored 3 nonfiction books; The Cost of Living, Power Politics, and War Talk. She delivered this address to to more than 3000 people. The applauses were not noted because there were so many of them. Transcribed by Paul Goettlich from video by Democracy Now! The video also includes a conversation between Arundhati Roy and Howard Zinn.

In these times, we have to race to keep abreast of the speed at which our freedoms are being snatched from us. And when few can afford the luxury of retreating from the streets for awhile in order to return with an exquisite, fully-formed political thesis, with footnotes and references, what profound gift can I offer you tonight?

As we lurch from crisis to crisis beamed directly into our brains by satellite TV, we have to think on our feet, on the move. We enter histories through the rubble of war. Ruined cities, parched fields, shrinking forests, and dying rivers are our archives. Craters left by daisy-cutters are libraries.

So, what can I offer you tonight?—some uncomfortable thoughts about money, war, empire, racism, and democracy—some worries that flit around my brain like a family of persistent moths to keep me awake at night.

Some of you will think it bad manners for a person like me, officially entered into the big book of nations as an Indian citizen, to come here and criticize the U.S. Government. But, speaking for myself, I'm no flag-waver, no patriot. And I'm fully aware that venality, brutality, and hypocrisy are imprinted in the soul of every nation.

But when a country ceases to be merely a country and becomes an empire, then the scale of operations changes dramatically. So, may clarify that tonight, I speak as as a subject of the American Empire. I speak as a slave who presumes to criticize her king.

Since lectures must be called something, mine, tonight, is called Instant Mix: Imperial Democracy. Buy One, Get One Free.

Way back in 1988, on the third of July, the USS Vincennes, and missile cruiser, stationed in the Persian Gulf, accidentally shut down an Iranian airliner and killed 290 civilian passengers. George Bush, the 1st, who was, at the time, on his presidential campaign, was asked to comment on the incident. He said, quite subtly, "I will never apologize for the United States, I don't care what the facts are." I don't care what the facts are. What a perfect maxim for the new American Empire.

Perhaps a slight variation on the theme would be more apposite. The facts can be what ever we want them to be. When the United States invaded Iraq, a New York Times/CBS News survey estimated that 42 percent of the American public believed that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And an ABC News poll said that 55 percent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein directly supported Al Qaeda.

None of this opinion is based on evidence, because there isn't any. All of it is based on insinuation, auto-suggestion, and outright lies, circulated by the US corporate media, otherwise known as the Free Press—that hollow pillar on which American democracy rests.

Public support in the US for the war against Iraq was founded on a multitiered edifice of falsehood and deceit, coordinated by the US Government, and faithfully amplified by the corporate media. Apart from the invented links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, we had the manufactured frenzy about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

George Bush to lesser, went to the extent of saying it would be suicidal for the US not to attack Iraq. We once again witnessed the paranoia that a started, bombed, besieged country was about to annihilate almighty America. Iraq was only the latest in a succession of countries. Earlier there was Cuba, Nicaragua, Granada, Panama. But this time it wasn't just your ordinary brand of friendly neighborhood frenzy. It was frenzy with the purpose. It ushered in a new doctrine and a new bottle—the doctrine of preemptive strike, also known as the United States can do what ever to hell it wants. And that's the official.

The war against Iraq has been fought and won, and the weapons of mass destruction have been found, not even a little one. Perhaps they'll have to be planted before their discovered.

And then, for more troublesome amongst us will need an explanation for wise Saddam Hussein didn't use them, when his country was being invaded. Of course, there'll be no answers. True believers will make do with those fuzzy TV reports about the discovery of a few barrels of banned chemicals in an old shed.

There seems to be no consensus get about whether they're really chemicals, whether they're actually banned, and whether the vessels they're contained in canned technically be called barrels.

There were unconfirmed rumors that a teaspoon-full of potassium permanganate and an old harmonica were found there too.

Meanwhile, in passing, an ancient civilization has been casually decimated by a very recent casually-brutal nation. Then there are those who say, "So what if Iraq had no chemical and nuclear weapons. So what if there is no Al Qaeda connection. So what if Osama bin Laden hates Saddam Hussein as much as he hates the United States."

Bush to lesser has said, "Saddam Hussein was a homicidal dictator." And so, the reasoning goes, Iraq needed a regime change. Never mind that 40 years ago, the CIA, under President John F. Kennedy, orchestrated a regime change in Baghdad. In 1963, after a successful coup, the Baath Party came to power and Iraq. Using lists, provided by the CIA, the new Baath regime systematically eliminated hundreds of doctors, lawyers, teachers, and political figures known to be leftists. An entire intellectual community was slaughtered.

The same technique was used to massacre hundreds of thousands of people in Indonesia and East Timor. The young Saddam Hussein was said to have had a hand in supervising the bloodbath. But in 1979, after factional infighting within the Baath Party, Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq.

In April, 1980, while he was massacring Shias, the US National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brezinski declared, "We see no fundamental incompatibility of the interests between the United States and Iraq."

Washington and London overtly and covertly supported Saddam Hussein. They financed him, equipped him, armed him, and provided him with dual-use materials to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. They supported his worst excesses, financially, materially, and morally. They supported the eight-year war against Iran and the 1988 gassing of Kurdish people in Halabja—crimes, which 14 years later, were reheated and served up as reasons to justify invading Iraq.

After the first Gulf War, the allies fomented an uprising of Shiites in Bozrah. And then looked away while Saddam Hussein crushed the revolt and slaughtered thousands in an act of vengeful reprisal.

The point is, if Saddam Hussein was evil enough to merit for most elaborate, openly-declared assassination attempt in history—the opening move of Operation Shock and Awe—then surely those who supported him ought to at least be tried for war crimes. Why aren't the faces of US and UK government officials on that infamous pack cards of wanted man and women?

Because, when it comes to empire, facts don't matter.. Undo

"Yes, but all that in the past," we are told. Saddam Hussein is a monster who must be stopped now. And only the US can stop him.

It's an effective technique, this use of urgent morality of the present to obscure the diabolical sins of the past and the malevolent plans for the future. Indonesia, Panama, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan...list goes on and on. Right now there are brutal regime is being groomed for the future—Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, the Central Asian republics.

US Attorney General John Ashcroft recently declared that US freedoms are, and I quote, "Not the grant of any government or document, but are endowment from God."

Why bother with the United Nations when God himself is on hand?

So, here we are, the people of the world, confronted with an empire armed with a mandate from heaven. And, as added insurance, for most formidable arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in history. Here we are, confronted with an empire that has conferred upon itself to write to go to war that will, and the right to deliver people from corrupting ideologies, from religious fundamentalists, dictators, sexism, and poverty by the age-old, tried and tested practice of extermination.

Empire is on the move. And democracy is its sly new war cry. Democracy, home-delivered to your doorstep by daisy cutters. Death is a small price for people to pay for the privilege of sampling this new product—instant mix, imperial democracy... bring to a boil, at a boil, then bomb.

But then perhaps, chinks, Negroes, dinks, gooks, and wogs [not sure of spellings] don't really qualify as real people. Perhaps our deaths don't qualify as real deaths, our histories don't qualify as real history. They never have.

Speaking of history, and these past months, the world watched the US invasion and occupation of Iraq broadcast on live television. Like Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan, to regime of Saddam Hussein simply disappeared. This was followed by what analysts call a power vacuum. Cities that had been under siege, without food, water, and electricity for days, cities that had been bombed relentlessly, people that had been starved and systematically impoverished by the US sanction regime for more than a decade were suddenly left with no semblance of urban administration.

A 7000-year-old civilization slid into anarchy on live TV. Vandals plundered shops, offices, hotels, and hospitals. American and British soldiers stood by and watched. They said they had no orders to act. In effect, they had orders to kill people but not to protect them. Their priorities were clear. The safety and security Iraqi people was not the business. The security of whatever Little remained of Iraq's infrastructure was not their business.

But the security and safety of Iraq's oil fields where. Of course they were. The oil fields where secured almost before the invasion began.

On CNN and BBC, the scenes of the rampage where played and replayed. The commentators, Army, and government spokespersons portrayed it as a liberated people venting their rage at a despotic regime. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "It's untidy. Freedom's untidy. And free people are free to commit crimes and make mistakes and the best things."

Did anybody know that Donald Rumsfeld was an anarchist?

I wonder, did he hold the same view during their riots in Los Angeles following the beating of Rodney King?

What he cared to share his thesis about the untidiness of freedom with a 2 million people being held in US prisons right now?

The world's freest country has the highest number of prisoners in the world. What he discuss its merits with young African-American men, 28 percent of whom will spend some part of their adult lives in jail? Could he explain why he serves under the president who oversaw 152 executions when he was governor of Texas?

Before the war on Iraq began, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance—the ORHA—sent the Pentagon a list of 16 crucial sites to protect. The national museum was second on a list, and yet the museum was not just looted, it was designated. It was a repository of an ancient cultural heritage. Iraq, as we know it today, as part of the River Valley civilization of Mesopotamia, the civilization that grew the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates produced the world's first writing, first calendar, first library, first city, and yes, the world's first democracy.

King Hammurabi of Babylon was the first to codify laws governing the social lives of citizens. It was a code in which abandoned women, prostitutes, slaves, and even animals had riots. The Hammurabi code is acknowledged, not just as the birth of legality, but the beginning of an understanding of the concept of social justice.

The US government could not have chosen in more inappropriate land in which to state it's illegal war and display its grotesque disregard for justice of any kind.

At a Pentagon briefing, during the days of looting, Secretary Rumsfeld, Prince of Darkness, turned on his media cohorts, who had served him so loyally through the war, and this is what he said, "The images you're seeing on television, you're seeing over and over and over. And it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase. And you see it 20 times, and you say, ' My God, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases and the whole country?'" Laughter rippled through the pressroom.

Would it be all right for the poor of Harlem to looted the Metropolitan Museum?

Would it be greeted with similar mirth?

The last building on the ORHA list of 16 sites to be protected was the Ministry of Oil. It was the only one that was given protection. Perhaps the occupying Army thought that in Muslim countries lists are read upside-down.

Television tells us that Iraq has been liberated and that Afghanistan is well on its way to becoming a paradise for women thanks to Bush and Blair, the 21st century's leading feminists.

In reality, Iraq's infrastructure has been destroyed, its people brought to the brink of starvation, its food stocks depleted, and it's cities devastated by administrative breakdown. Iraq is being ushered in the direction of a civil war between Shia and Sunnis. Meanwhile, Afghanistan lapsed back into an era of anarchy, and its territory has been carved up into fiefdoms by hostile warlords.

Undaunted by all this, on the 2nd of May, Bush for Lesser launched his 2004 campaign, hoping to be finally elected US President.

In what is probably constitutes the shortest flight in history, a military jet landed on an aircraft carrier, the U. S. S. Abraham Lincoln, which was so close to shore that, according to the Associated Press, administration officials acknowledged, "Positioning the massive shipment to provide the best TV angles for Bush's speech, with the sea as his background instead of San Diego coastline."

President Bush, who never served his term in the U.S. military, emerge from the cockpit and fancy dress—a U.S. military bomber jacket, combat boots, flying goggles, helmet—waving to his cheering troops, he officially proclaimed victory over Iraq. He was careful to say that it was, "It was just one victory in the war on terror, which still goes on." It was important to avoid making a straightforward victory announcement because under The Geneva Convention, a victorious Army is bound by legal obligations of an occupying force, a responsibility that the Bush administration doesn't want to Burton itself with.

And also, closer to the 2004 elections, in order to woo wagering voters, another victory in the war against terror might be necessary. Syria is being fattened for the kill.

It was Herman Goehring, that old Nazi who said, "People can always be brought to the bidding of leaders. All you have to do is to tell them their being attacked and denounce pacifists for a lack of patriotism." It works the same in any country. He's right. It's that easy. That's what the Bush regime banks on. The distinction between the election campaigns and war, between democracy and oligarchy seems to be closing fast.

The only caveat in these campaign wars is that U.S. lives must not be lost. It shakes voter confidence. But the problem of U.S. soldiers being killed in combat has been licked, more or less. At a media briefing before Operation Shock and Awe was unleashed, Gen. Tommy Franks announced, "This campaign will be like no other in history."

Maybe he's right.

I'm no military historian, but when was the last time a war was fought like this?

After using for good offices of U.N. diplomacy—economic sanctions and weapons inspections to ensure that Iraq was brought to its knees, its people starve, half a million children dead, its infrastructure severely damaged. After making sure that most of its weapons had been destroyed, and an active cowardice that must surely be unrivaled in history, a coalition of the willing, better known as the coalition of the bullied and bought sent in an invading army.

Operation Iraqi Freedom...I don't think so. It was more like Operation Let's Run a Race, But First Let Me Break Your Knees.

As soon as the war began, the governments of France, Germany, and Russia, which refused to to allow a final resolution legitimizing the war to the past in the U.N. Security Council, fill over each other to say how much they wanted the United States to win. President Jacques Chirac offered French airspace to the Anglo-American Air Force. U.S. military bases in Germany were opened for business. German foreign minister you Joschka Fisher publicly hope for their rapid collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime. Vladimir Putin publicly hope for the same.

These are governments that colluded in the enforced disarming of Iraq before their dastardly rush to take this side of those who attacked at. Apart from hoping to share the spoils, they hoped Empire would honor their prewar oil contracts with Iraq. Only the very naive could expect old imperialists to behave otherwise.

Leaving aside the cheap thrills and the lofty moral speeches made in the U.N. during the run up to the war, eventually, at the moment of crisis, the unity of Western governments, despite the opposition from the majority of the people, was overwhelming. When the Turkish government temporarily battered to the use of 90 percent of its population and turned down the U.S. governments offer of billions of dollars of blood money for the use of Turkish soil, it was accused of lacking democratic principles.

According to a Gallup international poll, in no European country was the support for a war carried out unilaterally by America and its allies higher than 11 percent. But the governments of England, Italy, Spain, Hungary, and other countries of Eastern Europe were praised for disregarding the views of the majority of the people and supporting the illegal invasion. That, presumably, was fully in keeping with democratic principles.

What's it called? New Democracy, like Britain's New Labor?

In stark contrast to the venality displayed by their governments, on the 15th of February, weeks before the invasion, and the most spectacular display of public morality the world has ever seen, more than 10 million people marched against the war on five continents.

Many of you, I'm sure, were among them. They/we were disregarded with other disdain. When asked to react to the anti-war demonstrations, President Bush said, "It's like deciding, well, I'm going to decide policy based upon a focus group. The role of the leader is to decide policy based upon the security, in this case, the security of the people."

Democracy, the modern world's holy cow, is in crisis. And the crisis is a profound one. Every kind of outrage is being committed in the name of democracy. It has become little more than a hollow word, a pretty shell, and deed of all content or meeting. It can be whatever you want to be.

Democracy is the free world's whore, willing to dress up, dress down, willing to satisfy a whole range of taste, available to be used and abused at will. Until quite recently, right up to the 1980s, democracy digs seem as though it might actually succeed in delivering a degree of real social justice. But, modern democracies have been around for long enough for neoliberal capitalists to learn how to subvert them. They have mastered the technique of infiltrating the instruments of democracy—the independent judiciary, the free press, the Parliament—and molding them to their purpose.

The project of corporate globalization has cracked the code. Free elections, a free press, and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodity is available on sale to the highest bidder.

To fully comprehend the extent to which democracy is under siege, it might be an idea to look at what goes in undue what goes on and some of our contemporary democracies. The world's largest, India, which I've written about had some length, and therefore will not speak about tonight. The world's most interesting, South Africa. The world's most powerful, the USA. And most instructive of all the plans that are being made to usher in the world's newest, Iraq.

In South Africa, after 300 years of brutal domination of the black majority by a white minority, through colonialism and apartheid, and nonracial, multiparty democracy came to power in 1994. It was a phenomenal achievement. Within two years of coming to power, the African National Congress had genuflected with no caveats to the market God.

Its massive program of structural adjustment, privatization, and liberalization has only increased the hideous disparities between the regiment war. More than one million people have lost their jobs. The corporatization of basic services—electricity, water, and housing—has meant the 10 million South Africans, almost a quarter of the population, has been disconnected from water and electricity. Two million have been evicted from their homes.

Meanwhile, a small, white minority that has been historically privileged by centuries of brutal exploitation, are more secure than ever before. They continue to control the land, the farms, the factories, and the abundant natural resources of that country. For them, the transition from apartheid to neoliberal is the barely disturbed grass. It's apartheid that mean conscience, and it goes by the name of democracy.

It has become Empire's euphemism for neoliberal capitalism. In countries of the first world too, the machinery of democracy has been effectively subverted. Politicians, media barons, judges, powerful corporate lobbies, and government officials are imbricated in and elaborate underhand configuration that completely undermines the natural arrangement of checks and balances between the Constitution, courts of law, Parliament, the administration, and, perhaps the most important of all, the independent media that formed the structural basis of a parliamentary democracy.

Increasingly the imbrication is neither subtle nor elaborate. Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, for instance, has a controlling interest in major Italian newspapers, magazines, television channels, and publishing houses. The Financial Times reported that he controls about 90 percent of Italy's television viewership. Recently, during a trial on bribery charges, while insisting he was the only person who could save Italy from the left, he said, "How much longer do I have to keep living this life of sacrifices?" That bodes ill for the remaining 10 percent of Italy's TV viewership.

What price free speech? 

Free speech for whom?

In United States, the arrangement is more complex. Clear Channel Worldwide Inc. is the largest radio station owner in the country. It runs more than 1200 channels, which together account for 9 percent of the market. Its CEO contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Bush's election campaign. When hundreds of thousands of Americans took to the streets to protest against the war on Iraq, Clear Channel organized pro-war, patriotic rallies for America across the country. It used its radio stations to advertise the events and then sent correspondents to the cover them, as though they were breaking news.

The era of manufacturing consent has given way to the era of manufacturing news. Soon, media newsrooms will drop the pretense and start hiring theater directors instead of journalists.

As America's show business gets more and more violent and warlike, and America's wars get more and more like show business, some interesting crossovers are taking place. The designer who built the $250,000 set in Qatar, from which General Tommy Franks stage-managed news coverage of Operation Shock and Awe, also built sets for Disney, MGM, and Good Morning America.

It's a cruel irony that the U.S., which has the most ardent, vociferous defenders of the idea of the free speech, and until recently, the most elaborate legislation to protect it, has so circumscribed for space in which the freedom can be expressed. In a strange way, the sound and fury that accompanies the legal and conceptual defense of free speech in America serves to mask the process of the rapid erosion of the possibilities of actually exercising that freedom.

The news and entertainment industry of U.S. is, for the most part, controlled by a few major corporations—AOL, Time Warner, Disney, Viacom News Corp. Each of these corporations owns and controls TV stations, film studios, record companies, and publishing ventures. Effectively the exits are sealed.

America's media empire is controlled by tiny coterie of people. Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Michael Powell, the son, by coincidence, of course, of the Secretary of State Colin Powell, has proposed even further deregulation of the telecommunications industry, which will lead to even greater consolidation.

So, here it is, the world's greatest democracy led by a man who is not legally elected. America's Supreme Court gifted him his job. What price has a American people paid for this spurious presidency? In the three years of George Bush the Lesser's term, the American economy has lost more than 2 million jobs. Outlandish military expenses, corporate welfare, and tax giveaways to the rich have created a financial crisis for the U.S. educational system.

According to a survey by the National Council of State Legislatures, U.S. states cut $49 billion and public services—health, welfare benefits, and education—in 2002. They plan to cut another $25.7 billion this year. That makes a total of $75 billion. Bush's initial budget request to the Congress to finance the war in Iraq was $80 billion.

So who's paying for the war?

America's poor, its students, its unemployed, its single mothers, its hospital and home care patients, its teachers and health workers.

And who's actually fighting the war?

Once again, America's poor. The soldiers for baking in Iraq's desert sun are not the children of the rich. Only one of all the representatives in Congress and the Senate has a child fighting in Iraq. America's volunteer army in fact depends on a poverty draft of poor whites, blacks, Latinos, and Asians who are looking for a way to earn a living and get education.

Federal statistics show that African-Americans make up 21 percent of the total Armed Forces and 29 percent of U.S. Army. And they account for only 12 percent of the general population. It's ironic isn't it? The disproportionately high representation of African-Americans in the army in prison. Perhaps we should take a positive view and look at this as affirmative action at its most effective.

Nearly 4 million Americans, 2 percent of the population, have lost the right to vote because of felony convictions. Of that number, 1.4 million are African-Americans, which means that 13 percent of all voting age black people have been disenfranchised.

For African-Americans there's also affirmative action in death. A study by the economist Amartya Sen [Sen autobiography] shows that African-Americans, as a group, have a low life expectancy then people born in China, in the Indian state of Kerala, where I come from, Sri Lanka, or Costa Rica. Bangladeshi men have a better chance of making it to the age of 40 then African-American men from here, in Harlem.

This year, on what would have been Martin Luther King's 74th birthday, President Bush denounced the University of Michigan as affirmative action programs favoring blacks and Latinos. He denounced it. He called it divisive, unfair, and unconstitutional. The successful effort to keep blacks of the voting lists in the state of Florida, in order that George Bush the elected, was, of course, neither unfair nor unconstitutional. I don't suppose affirmative action for white boys from Yale ever is.

So now we know who's paying for the war. We know who's fighting it. But who will benefit from it? Who is homing in on the reconstruction contracts, estimated to be worth up to $100 billion? Could it be America's poor and unemployed and sick? Could it be America's single mothers or America's black and Latino minorities?

Operation Iraqi Freedom, George Bush assures us, is about returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people. That is returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people via corporate multinationals like Bechtel, like Chevron, like Halliburton. Once again, it's a small tight circle that connects corporate military and government leadership to one another. The promiscuousness, the cross-pollination is outrageous.

Consider this: the Defense Policy Board is a government-appointed group that advises the Pentagon. Its members are appointed by the under secretary of defense and approved by Donald Rumsfeld. Its meetings are classified. No information is available for public scrutiny.

The Washington-based Center for Public Integrity found that 9 out of the 30 members of the Defense Policy Board are connected to companies that were awarded defense contracts worth 76 billion dollars between the years 2001 and 2002. One of them, Jack Sheehan, a retired Marine Corps general, is a senior vice president at Bechtel, the giant international engineering outfit. Riley Bechtel, the company chairman, is on the President's Export Council. Former Secretary of State George Shultz, who is also on the Board of Directors of the Bechtel Group, is the chairman of the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. When asked by the New York Times whether he was concerned about the appearance of a conflict of interest, he said, "I don't know that Bechtel would particularly benefit from it. But if there's work to be done, Bechtel is the type of company that could do it."

Bechtel has been awarded a 680 million dollar reconstruction contract in Iraq. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Bechtel contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican campaign efforts.

Arcing across this subterfuge, dwarfing it by the sheer magnitude of its malevolence, is America's anti-terrorism legislation. The U.S.A. Patriot Act, passed in October 2001, has become the blueprint for similar anti-terrorism bills in countries across the world. It was passed in the House of Representatives by a majority vote of 337 to 79. According to the New York Times, "Many lawmakers said it had been impossible to truly debate or even read the legislation."

The Patriot Act ushers in an era of systemic automated surveillance. It gives the government the authority to monitor phones and computers and spy on people in ways that would have seemed completely unacceptable a few years ago. It gives the FBI the power to seize all of the circulation, purchasing, and other records of library users and bookstore customers on the suspicion that they are part of a terrorist network. It blurs the boundaries between speech and criminal activity creating the space to construe acts of civil disobedience as violating the law.

Already hundreds of people are being held indefinitely as "unlawful combatants." In India, the number is in the thousands. In Israel, 5,000 Palestinians are now being detained. Non-citizens, of course, have no rights at all. They can simply be "disappeared" like the people of Chile under Washington's old ally, General Pinochet. More than 1,000 people, many of them Muslim or of Middle Eastern origin, have been detained, some without access to legal representatives.

Apart from paying the actual economic costs of war, American people are paying for these wars of "liberation" with their own freedoms. For the ordinary American, the price of "New Democracy" in other countries is the death of real democracy at home.

Meanwhile, Iraq is being groomed for "liberation." Or did they mean "liberalization" all along? The Wall Street Journal reports that "the Bush administration has drafted sweeping plans to remake Iraq's economy in the U.S. image."

Iraq's constitution is being redrafted. Its trade laws, tax laws, and intellectual property laws rewritten in order to turn it into an American-style capitalist economy.

The United States Agency for International Development [USAID] has invited U.S. companies to bid for contracts that range between road building, water systems, text book distribution, and cell phone networks.

Soon after Bush the Second announced that he wanted American farmers to feed the world, Dan Amstutz, a former senior executive of Cargill, the biggest grain exporter in the world, was put in charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq. Kevin Watkins, Oxfam's policy director, said, "Putting Dan Amstutz in charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq is like putting Saddam Hussein in the chair of a human rights commission."

The two men who have been short-listed to run operations for managing Iraqi oil have worked with Shell, BP, and Fluor. Fluor is embroiled in a lawsuit by black South African workers who have accused the company of exploiting and brutalizing them during the apartheid era. Shell, of course, is well known for its devastation of the Ogoni tribal lands in Nigeria.

Tom Brokaw (one of America's best-known TV anchors) was inadvertently succinct about the process. "One of the things we don't want to do," he said, "is to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq because in a few days we're going to own that country."

Now that the ownership deeds are being settled, Iraq is ready for New Democracy.

So, as Lenin used to ask: What Is To Be Done?

Well…

We might as well accept the fact that there is no conventional military force that can successfully challenge the American war machine. Terrorist strikes only give the U.S. Government an opportunity that it is eagerly awaiting to further tighten its stranglehold. Within days of an attack you can bet that Patriot II would be passed. To argue against U.S. military aggression by saying that it will increase the possibilities of terrorist strikes is futile. It's like threatening Brer Rabbit that you'll throw him into the bramble bush. Any one who has read the documents written by The Project for the New American Century can attest to that. The government's suppression of the Congressional committee report on September 11th, which found that there was intelligence warning of the strikes that was ignored, also attests to the fact that, for all their posturing, the terrorists and the Bush regime might as well be working as a team. They both hold people responsible for the actions of their governments. They both believe in the doctrine of collective guilt and collective punishment. Their actions benefit each other greatly.

The U.S. government has already displayed in no uncertain terms the range and extent of its capability for paranoid aggression. In human psychology, paranoid aggression is usually an indicator of nervous insecurity. It could be argued that it's no different in the case of the psychology of nations. Empire is paranoid because it has a soft underbelly.

Its "homeland" may be defended by border patrols and nuclear weapons, but its economy is strung out across the globe. Its economic outposts are exposed and vulnerable. Already the Internet is buzzing with elaborate lists of American and British government products and companies that should be boycotted. Apart from the usual targets—Coke, Pepsi, McDonalds—government agencies like USAID, the British DFID, British and American banks, Arthur Andersen, Merrill Lynch, and American Express could find themselves under siege. These lists are being honed and refined by activists across the world. They could become a practical guide that directs the amorphous but growing fury in the world. Suddenly, the "inevitability" of the project of Corporate Globalization is beginning to seem more than a little evitable.

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.

Another urgent challenge is to expose the corporate media for the boardroom bulletin that it really is. We need to create a universe of alternative information. We need to support independent media like Democracy Now!, Alternative Radio, and South End Press.

The battle to reclaim democracy is going to be a difficult one. Our freedoms were not granted to us by any governments. They were wrested from them by us. And once we surrender them, the battle to retrieve them is called a revolution. It is a battle that must range across continents and countries. It must not acknowledge national boundaries but, if it is to succeed, it has to begin here. In America. The only institution more powerful than the U.S. government is American civil society. The rest of us are subjects of slave nations. We are by no means powerless, but you have the power of proximity. You have access to the Imperial Palace and the Emperor's chambers. Empire's conquests are being carried out in your name, and you have the right to refuse. You could refuse to fight. Refuse to move those missiles from the warehouse to the dock. Refuse to wave that flag. Refuse the victory parade.

You have a rich tradition of resistance. You need only read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States to remind yourself of this.

Hundreds of thousands of you have survived the relentless propaganda you have been subjected to, and are actively fighting your own government. In the ultra-patriotic climate that prevails in the United States, that's as brave as any Iraqi or Afghan or Palestinian fighting for his or her homeland.

If you join the battle, not in your hundreds of thousands, but in your millions, you will be greeted joyously by the rest of the world. And you will see how beautiful it is to be gentle instead of brutal, safe instead of scared. Befriended instead of isolated. Loved instead of hated.

I hate to disagree with your president. Yours is by no means a great nation. But you could be a great people.

History is giving you the chance.

Seize the time.