DE: Yeah, but this wasn’t just industrial, you see. They hadn’t built anything. We thought the Soviets must want the capability to have a first-strike capability against us. We would bend every effort to get that capability if we were them. We estimate they must have it! So they neither had a first-strike capability nor were they going to have a first-strike capability, nor had they tried to have a first-strike capability.
“We had something like two thousand bombers, strategic bombers, and one thousand tactical bombers in range of the Soviet Union, the Russians had one hundred and ninety-two.”
Our best first strike, then and now, has never, for a moment—since the mid-’50s—never been able to keep the Soviets from annihilating every last person in West Europe.
By the way, you know we were going to kill—depending on how the wind blew—which depends on the season . . . our private, top-secret estimates were that we would kill every European, a hundred million Europeans, without a single US or Soviet warhead landing on West Europe. Just from the fallout of the attacks we were planning on Russia and East Europe. One hundred million depending on . . .
ES: How the wind blows west across Europe?
DE: Yes.
JC: So the blast radius . . . Dan, tell them about the calculation of fire and smoke . . . the state secret.
DE: Yes, their damage calculations . . . okay, hold on to your socks . . . they don’t calculate the fire and the smoke . . . only blast and radiation. And fallout . . . because you could calculate those quite accurately. That was their excuse. Their excuse was we can’t calculate fire. . . . It’s fire that kills most people—but they left that out of their calculations.
JC: So it just doesn’t exist.
DE: So ignore it, ignore it, the reality. Fire is the main effect of thermonuclear weapons . . . to this day they do not calculate the fire. So they didn’t have to ask the question “What about the smoke?” Finally in ’83 somebody calculated the effect of just one of these things . . . what 150,000 tons of smoke and soot would cause, lofted into the stratosphere, reducing sunlight for a decade . . . basically it’s nuclear famine . . . crops die, livestock dies . . . everybody dies. With a small war between India and Pakistan, fifty Hiroshima-size bombs each, smoke would reduce sunlight enough to starve two billion people to death . . . In a US-Russian war—it’s nuclear winter. I never understand why we worry so much about climate change and not about nuclear war. Both have the potential of annihilating life on earth.
AR: Nuclear bombs are the logical corollary to the idea of the nation-state . . . no?
Notes
Things That Can and Cannot Be Said
1. “Field Notes on Democracy: A Conversation with Arundhati Roy,” Lannan Foundation in Pursuit of Cultural Freedom lecture series, Thorne Auditorium, Northwestern Law School, Chicago, Illinois, March 18, 2013. Available online at: http://wearemany.org/v/2015/08/field-notes-on-democracy.
2. Richard Seddon, Philosophy as an Approach to the Spirit: An Introduction to the Fundamental Works of Rudolf Steiner (East Sussex: Temple Lodge Press, 2005), 28.
3. For information on Freedom of the Press Foundation, visit: https://freedom.press.
4. See James Bamford, “The Most Wanted Man in the World,” Wired, September 2014. Available online at: http://www.wired.com/2014/08/edward-snowden/.
5. Press Trust of India, “India a Natural Ally of US in Fight Against Terrorism: Walter Russel Mead,” August 26, 2013.
6. See, among other historical accounts, David Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005), with a foreword by Howard Zinn.
7. In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then the US ambassador to the United Nations, was asked on national television what she felt about the fact that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of US economic sanctions. She replied that it was “a very hard choice,” but that all things considered, “we think the price is worth it.” From Leslie Stahl, “Punishing Saddam,” produced by Catherine Olian, CBS, 60 Minutes, May 12, 1996. For analysis, see Anthony Arnove, Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007).
8. See Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (New York: Nation Books, 2013) and Nick Turse, The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Spies, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyber Warfare (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012).
9. See Arundhati Roy, Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009) and Arundhati Roy, Capitalism: A Ghost Story (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014).
10. See Arundhati Roy, “The End of Imagination,” in The End of Imagination (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016).
11. See Eqbal Ahmad, Terrorism: Theirs and Ours (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001).
12. See Sharon Smith, “Using Women’s Rights to Sell Washington’s War,” International Socialist Review 21 (January–February 2002). Available online at: http://isreview.org/issues/21/afghan_women.shtml. See also Malalai Joya, A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice (New York: Scribner, 2009).
13. Arundhati Roy, Walking with the Comrades (New York: Penguin Books, 2011).
14. For an important analysis of Kashmir, see Sanjay Kak, ed., Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013). Also see Arundhati Roy, “Listening to Grasshoppers: Genocide, Denial, and Celebration,” chapter 9 in Field Notes on Democracy (Chicago: Haymarket, 2009) and Arundhati Roy, “Kashmir’s Fruits of Discord,” op-ed, New York Times, November 8, 2010. Available online at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/opinion/09roy.html?_r=1
15. On Modi’s role in the 2002 Gujarat massacre, see Roy, “Democracy: Who’s She When She’s at Home?” in Field Notes on Democracy, 30–49.
16. “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner,” William Westmoreland said. “We value life and human dignity. They don’t care about life and human dignity.” Quoted in Peter Davis, director, Hearts and Minds (Criterion Collection, 1974), 112 minutes.
17. See Howard Zinn, The Bomb (San Francisco: City Lights Books / Open Media Series, 2010), 42 and 58.
18. Robert McNamara, interviewed by Errol Morris in The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (Sony Pictures, 2004), 95 minutes. Transcript available online at: www.errolmorris.com/film/fow_transcript.html.
“We Brought You the Promise of the Future, but Our Tongue Stammered and Barked . . .”
1. John Cusack, “The Snowden Principle,” Huffington Post, June 14, 2014. Available online at: www.huffingtonpost.com/john-cusack/snowden-principle_b_3441237.html. Cusack writes, “At the heart of Edward Snowden’s decision to expose the NSA’s massive phone and Internet spying programs was a fundamental belief in the people’s right-to-know. ‘My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them,’ he said in an interview with the Guardian. From the State’s point of view, he’s committed a crime. From his point of view, and the view of many others, he has sacrificed for the greater good because he knows people have the right to know what the government is doing in their name. And legal, or not, he saw what the government was doing as a crime against the people and our rights. For the sake of argument—this should be called The Snowden Principle.”
2. Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (New York: Viking, 2002).
3. Ibid., 68.
4. Ibid., 66.
5. Ibid., 68–69.
6. Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013.)
7. In addition to Turse, Kill Anything That Moves, see Noam Chomsky, At War with Asia: Essays on Indochina (Oakland: AK Press, 2004).
8. Ellsberg, Secrets, 72.
9. For one instructive account, see Nigel Harris, The Mandate of Heaven: Marx and Mao in Modern China (Chicago: Haymarket Books / IS Books, 2015).
10. Nicholas Kristof, “Bil
l and Melinda Gates’s Pillow Talk,” New York Times, July 19, 2015. Available online at: www.nytimes.com/2015/07/19/opinion/sunday/nicholas-kristof-bill-and-melinda-gatess-pillow-talk.html.
11. John Oliver, interview with Edward Snowden, Last Week Tonight, HBO, April 5, 2015. Available online at: www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1217&v=XEVlyP4_11M.
12. Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales (New York: Penguin Classics, 1995.
13. Anna Akhmatova, “Instead of a Preface,” in Roberta Reeder, ed., The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, expanded ed. (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1997), 384. Translation by Judith Hemschemeyer.
14. See J. M. Coetzee, “Osip Mandelstam and the Stalin Ode,” Representations 35 (Summer, 1991), 72–83.
15. Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon: A Novel (New York: Scribner, 2006).
16. Ibid., 59.
Things That Can and Cannot Be Said (Continued)
1. “Irked by Atom Test Protestors, Soviet Hauls Them Out to Sea,” New York Times, June 4, 1982.
2. B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition, introduction by Arundhati Roy (New York: Verso Books, 2014).
3. The Right Livelihood Award Ceremony, December 1, 2014. Available online at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJDhzTzXzu8. For additional details, visit: www.rightlivelihood.org/snowden.html. “Snowden’s revelations have caused a worldwide reevaluation of the meaning of privacy and the boundaries of rights,” the committee noted in its commendation.
4. See Arundhati Roy, “Confronting Empire,” Outlook (India), January 30, 2003. Available online at: www.outlookindia.com/article/confronting-empire/218738. See also Arundhati Roy, The End of Imagination (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016).
5. See “Arundhati Roy Addresses Tens of Thousands at World Social Forum Opening in Bombay,” Democracy Now! January 20, 2004. Available online at: www.democracynow.org/2004/1/20/arundhati_roy_addresses_tens_of_thousands.
6. See, among other sources, Robert Arnove, ed., Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982) and Joan Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003). On Indonesia, see Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: The Political Economy of Human Rights—Volume I (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015) and After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology: The Political Economy of Human Rights—Volume II (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015).
7. Joshua Oppenheimer, director, The Act of Killing (Cinedigm, 2013), 123 minutes.
8. See Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977).
9. Roy, Capitalism: A Ghost Story, 24.
10. Noam Chomsky, For Reasons of State (New York: New Press, 2003), with a foreword by Arundhati Roy.
11. Ibid., 3–4.
12. Julian Assange, When Google Met WikiLeaks (New York: OR Books, 2014).
13. See Nakul Singh Sawhney, Muzaffarnagar Baaqi Hai [Muzaffarnagar Eventually] (2015), 136 minutes.
14. John Elliott, “India’s Modi Merges Myth and Reality,” Asia Sentinel, October 31, 2014. Available online at: www.asiasentinel.com/politics/india-modi-merges-myth-and-reality/.
15. See Modris Eksteins, The Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (New York: Mariner Books, 2000), 304.
16. Roy, Walking with the Comrades, 52.
17. Ibid., 51.
18. Ibid., 51.
19. “The Doctor and the Saint” is the title of Arundhati Roy’s introduction to B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste.
20. Roy, End of Imagination, 54.
21. Edward Everett Hale, “The Man Without a Country.” Available online at: www.bartleby.com/310/6/1.html.
22. Sir Walter Scott, “Patriotism.” Available online at http://bartleby.com/101/547.html.
23. Afterward, as Siddhartha Deb notes, “Arundhati Roy was issued a criminal contempt notice by a Nagpur court, for an article she published in Outlook magazine about G. N. Saibaba, a disabled political dissident confined to a wheelchair, who had been awaiting trial for a year. Roy argued Saibaba should not be prevented from getting bail if Bajrangi and Kodnani, convicted for their role in the 2002 massacres, could, and if Amit Shah, once charged with ordering extrajudicial executions, functioned with impunity as president of the BJP ‘and the right-hand man of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.’” (Deb, “Unmasking Modi,” New Republic, May 3, 2016.) See also Roy’s own account of these developments in her essay “My Seditious Heart: An Unfinished Diary of Nowadays,” in The End of Imagination.
What Shall We Love?
1. For context, see Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014). See also William M. Arkin, Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs, and Operations in the 9/11 World (Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 2005).
2. See Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept, The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program (New York, Simon and Shuster, 2016).
3. Olivia B. Waxman, “Here’s How Edward Snowden Was Welcomed on Twitter,” Time, September 29, 2015. Available online at: http://time.com/4054441/edward-snowden-twitter/. Snowden’s Twitter account can be found at: https://twitter.com/Snowden.
4. “WikiLeaks Issues Call for $100,000 Bounty on Monster Trade Treaty,” WikiLeaks, June 2, 2015. Available at: https://wikileaks.org/WikiLeaks-issues-call-for-100-000.html and “WikiLeaks Launches Campaign to Offer $100,000 ‘Bounty’ for Leaked Drafts of Secret TPP Chapters,” Democracy Now! June 2, 2015. Available online at: www.democracynow.org/2015/6/2/wikileaks_launches_campaign_to_offer_100.
About the Authors
John Cusack is a writer, actor, filmmaker, and board member of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
Arundhati Roy studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives. She is the author of the novel The God of Small Things, for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize. The novel has been translated into forty languages worldwide. She has written several nonfiction books, including Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers and Capitalism: A Ghost Story, both published by Haymarket Books.
Also by Arundhati Roy
Capitalism: A Ghost Story examines the dark side of democracy in contemporary India, and shows how the demands of globalized capitalism have subjugated billions of people to the highest and most intense forms of racism and exploitation.
Field Notes on Democracy tracks the fault lines that threaten to destroy India’s precarious democracy and send shockwaves through the region and beyond.
The End of Imagination brings together five of Arundhati Roy’s acclaimed books of essays into one comprehensive volume for the first time and features a new introduction by the author.
About Haymarket Books
Haymarket Books is a nonprofit, progressive book distributor and publisher, a project of the Center for Economic Research and Social Change. We believe that activists need to take ideas, history, and politics into the many struggles for social justice today. Learning the lessons of past victories, as well as defeats, can arm a new generation of fighters for a better world. As Karl Marx said, “The philosophers have merely interpreted the world; the point however is to change it.”
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y hanging us you can stamp out the labor movement,” Spies told the judge, “then hang us. Here you will tread upon a spark, but here, and there, and behind you, and in front of you, and everywhere, the flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out. The ground is on fire upon which you stand.”
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Arundhati Roy, Things That Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations
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