John Cusack and Arundhati Roy | Things That Can and Cannot Be Said

[marmar]

John Cusack and Arundhati Roy | Things That Can and Cannot Be Said

Monday, 16 November 2015 00:00
By John Cusack and Arundhati Roy, Outlook | Op-Ed


1. Things That Can and Cannot Be Said: A Conversation With Arundhati Roy
by John Cusack

"Every nation-state tends towards the imperial - that is the point. Through banks, armies, secret police, propaganda, courts and jails, treaties, taxes, laws and orders, myths of civil obedience, assumptions of civic virtue at the top. Still it should be said of the political left, we expect something better. And correctly. We put more trust in those who show a measure of compassion, who denounce the hideous social arrangements that make war inevitable and human desire omnipresent; which fosters corporate selfishness, panders to appetites and disorder, waste the earth."—Daniel Berrigan, poet, Jesuit priest.

***

One morning as I scanned the news - horror in the Middle East, Russia and America facing off in the Ukraine, I thought of Edward Snowden and wondered how he was holding up in Moscow. I began to imagine a conversation between him and Daniel Ellsberg (who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam war). And then, interestingly, in my imagination a third person made her way into the room - the writer Arundhati Roy. It occurred to me that trying to get the three of them together would be a fine thing to do.

I had heard Roy speak in Chicago, and had met her several times. One gets the feeling very quickly with her and comes to the rapid conclusion that there are no pre-formatted assumptions or givens. Through our conversations I became very aware that what gets lost, or goes unsaid, in most of the debates around surveillance and whistleblowing is a perspective and context from outside the United States and Europe. The debates around them have gradually centred around corporate overreach and the rights of privacy of US citizens.

The philosopher/theosophist Rudolf Steiner says that any perception or truth that is isolated and removed from its larger context ceases to be true.

"When any single thought emerges in consciousness, I cannot rest until this is brought into harmony with the rest of my thinking. Such an isolated concept, apart from the rest of my mental world, is entirely unendurable...there exists an inwardly sustained harmony among thoughts...when our thought world bears the character of inner harmony, we can feel we are in possession of the truth.... All elements are related one to the other...every such isolation is an abnormality, an untruth." In other words, every isolated idea that doesn't relate to others yet is taken as true (as a kind of niche truth) is not just bad politics, it is somehow also fundamentally untrue.... To me, Arundhati Roy's writing and thinking strives for such unity of thought. And for her, like for Steiner, reason comes from the heart. .................(more)

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/33664-things-that-can-and-cannot-be-said-a-conversation-between-john-cusack-and-arundhati-roy

[Octafish]

1. ''...a perception or truth that is isolated and removed from its larger context ceases to be true.''

From the OP:

AR: It isn't the lies they tell, it's the quality of the lies that becomes so humiliating. They've stopped caring about even that. It's all a play. Hiroshima and Nagasaki happen, there are hundreds of thousands of dead, and the curtain comes down, and that's the end of that. Then Korea happens. Vietnam happens, all that happened in Latin America happens. And every now and then, this curtain comes down and history begins anew. New moralities and new indignations are manufactured...in a disappeared history.

JC: And a disappeared context.

AR: Yes, without any context or memory. But the people of the world have memories. There was a time when the women of Afghanistan - at least in Kabul - were out there. They were allowed to study, they were doctors and surgeons, walking free, wearing what they wanted. That was when it was under Soviet occupation. Then the United States starts funding the mujahideen. Reagan called them Afghanistan's "founding fathers." It reincarnates the idea of "jehad," virtually creates the Taliban. And what happens to the women? In Iraq, until before the war, the women were scientists, museum directors, doctors. I'm not valourising Saddam Hussein or the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, which was brutal and killed hundreds of thousands of people - it was the Soviet Union's Vietnam. I'm just saying that now, in these new wars, whole countries have slipped into mayhem - the women have just been pushed back into their burqas - and not by choice. I mean, to me, one thing is a culture in which women have not broken out of their subservience, but the horror of tomorrow, somebody turning around and telling me: "Arundhati, just go back into your veil, and sit in your kitchen and don't come out." Can you imagine the violence of that? That's what has happened to these women. In 2001, we were told that the war in Afghanistan was a feminist mission. The marines were liberating Afghan women from the Taliban. Can you really bomb feminism into a country? And now, after 25 years of brutal war - 10 years against the Soviet occupation, 15 years of US occupation - the Taliban is riding back to Kabul and will soon be back to doing business with the United States. I don't live in the United States but when I'm here, I begin to feel like my head is in a grinder - my brains are being scrambled by this language that they're using. Outside it's not so hard to understand because people know the score. But here, so many seem to swallow the propaganda so obediently.
So that was one exchange. Here's another:

JC: So, what do you think? What do we think are the things we can't talk about in a civilised society, if you're a good, domesticated house pet?

AR: (Laughs) The occasional immorality of preaching nonviolence?
(This was a reference to Walking with the Comrades, Roy's account of her time spent with armed guerrillas in the forests of central India who were fighting paramilitary forces and vigilante militias trying to clear indigenous people off their land, which had been handed over to mining companies.)

Thank you, marmar! It's most gratifying to see there are people who can connect the dots.

[FlatBaroque]

2. A. Roy

One of the best.

[hifiguy]

4. Yep. nt

[dixiegrrrrl]

3. kick and rec and kick

[Cheese Sandwich]

5. rec