Chomsky, Roy Shred Bush and Co.

By Marwaan Macan-Markar

Two minds – a North American and a South Asian – combined to serve an intellectual treat to the thousands of charged activists who had packed the cavernous Gigantinho stadium Sunday.

With a perfect blend of wit and wisdom, fact and farce, they delivered lines that had the crowd in raptures given the ‘evil one’ on their minds – the U.S. government and its grand designs of empire building.

Noam Chomsky, the U.S. linguist and trenchant critic of Washington’s foreign policies, was first to take on the ‘evil one’. He argued that the current U.S. regime had outdone its predecessors in “arrogance” in declaring that it will rule by force and not tolerate any opposition.

The U.S. government’s attitude towards the spreading anti-war sentiments in Europe reveals “its contempt for democracy,’’ he added. “Washington wants us to tremble about Iraq.”

September last year was pivotal in this evolving strategy, he revealed, since the U.S. government of President George W. Bush exposed how it was going to pursue its enemies – through a massive propaganda blitz.

Arundathi Roy, the prize-winning Indian novelist and political activist, followed that line by mocking what she called the Bush administration’s efforts to invent facts to justify its military ambitions in Iraq.

“Every argument being used by the United States for war is a lie,” she declared. “The most ludicrous being the U.S. government wanting to bring democracy to Iraq after the war.”

She received a burst of cheers with this line: “The whole world will be better off without a certain Mr. Bush.”

Yet Chomsky and Roy also urged the crowd not to despair at Washington flexing its muscles nor the other strategy by the supporters of the “empire” to crush the world’s poor – the neo-liberal colonisation of the developing countries.

The anti-war protest in the United States is one reason for hope, said Chomsky. “Protests in the U.S. are at a level that has no historic precedent. It reveals public unwillingness to tolerate war.”

Then there is the heat the Bush administration is facing from the mainstream U.S. foreign policy think-tanks. One leading publication, according to Chomsky, had this view in an article: “The U.S. is becoming a menace to itself and to mankind under the present leadership.”

For Roy, an impressive achievement of the protest movement is its success at forcing the ambitions of the empire builders out in the open. “We, all of us gathered here, have laid siege to the empire. We have stood up and forced it to drop its mask.”

The same is true in the world of capitalism, they asserted, where the work of grassroots activism has struck a few painful blows. The mood among the financial elite at the World Economic Forum in Davos is “dark” unlike the “hopeful and vigorous” energy at the WSF, said Chomsky.

“They know they are in trouble, because the recent polls show that the public’s faith in corporations has dropped,” he added. “NGOs, the U.N. and religious leaders are more trusted.”