Things that Can and Cannot Be Said (3 page)

This is the history of surveillance in the country that has offered asylum to Ed Snowden—wanted by the US government for exposing a surveillance apparatus that makes the operatives of the KGB and the Stasi look like preschool children. If the Snowden story were fiction, a good editor would dismiss its mirrored narrative symmetry as a cheap gimmick.

A man finally appeared at one of the counters at the Russian embassy and accepted my passport and visa form (as well as the sealed, stamped hard copy of the confirmation of my hotel booking). He asked me to come back the next morning.

When I got home, I went straight to my bookshelf, looking for a passage I had marked long ago in Arthur Koestler's
Darkness at Noon
.
15
Comrade N. S. Rubashov, once a high-level officer in the Soviet government, has been arrested for treason. He reminisces in his prison cell:

All our principles were right, but our results were wrong. This is a diseased century. We diagnosed the disease and its causes with microscopic exactness, but wherever we applied the healing knife a new sore appeared. Our will was hard and pure, we should have been loved by the people. But they hate us. Why are we so odious and detested?

We brought you truth, and in our mouth it sounded a lie. We brought you freedom, and it looks in our hands like a whip. We brought you the living life, and where our voice is heard the trees wither and there is a rustling of dry leaves. We brought you the promise of the future, but our tongue stammered and barked . . .
16

Read now, it sounds like pillow talk between two old enemies who have fought a long, hard war and can no longer tell each other apart.

 

I got my visa the next morning. I was going to Russia.

John Cusack

Things That

Can and Cannot

Be Said

(Continued)

Over the next week or so, the logistics had to be planned. It was short notice and a bit of a mad scramble. Roy made her own arrangements, but I had in mind Dan Ellsberg's history as a nuclear weapons planner for America's retaliation to a possible Soviet first strike. In other words, he had only spent a few years of his life planning the physical obliteration of the Soviet Union. Nuclear secrets, domino theory—
he was in those rooms.
Then there were the 85-plus arrests for civil disobedience, one of those in Russia on the
Sirius
, the Greenpeace boat protesting Soviet nuclear testing.
1
But Dan's visa came. And mine came, too.

Meanwhile in India, some of Roy's worst fears had materialized. Eight months before, Narendra Modi had become the new prime minister of India. (In May, I received this text:
Election results are out. The fascists in a landslide. The phantoms are real. What you see is what you get.
)

I met up with Roy in London. She had been there for two weeks giving talks in Cambridge and the Southbank Centre on her new work on Gandhi and B. R. Ambedkar.
2
At Heathrow, she told me quite casually that some folks in India were burning effigies of her. “I seem to be goading the Gandhians to violence,” she laughed, “but I was disappointed with the quality of the effigy.”

We flew together to Stockholm to meet up with Dan, who was attending the ceremony of the Right Livelihood Awards—some call it the Alternative Nobel—because Ed was one of the laureates.
3
We would fly to Moscow together from there.

The Stockholm streets were so clean you could eat off the ground.

On our first night, there was a dinner at a nautical museum with the complete salvaged wreckage of a huge 17th-century wooden warship as the centerpiece of the modernist structure. The
Vasa
, considered the
Titanic
of Swedish disasters, was built on the orders of yet another power-hungry king who wanted control of seas and the future. It was so overloaded with weapons and top-heavy, it capsized and sank before it even left the harbor.

It was a classic human rights evening, to be sure: gourmet food and good intentions, a choir singing beautiful noels. I enjoyed watching the almost pathologically anti-gala Roy trying to mask her blind panic. Not her venue, as they say. Dan was busy and in great demand, meeting people, doing interviews. We caught occasional glimpses of him—and managed to say a quick hello.

The awards ceremony took place in the Swedish Parliament. Roy and I were graciously invited. We were late. It occurred to us that if neither of us would be comfortable sitting in the parliament halls of our own countries, what the fuck would we be doing sitting in the Swedish Parliament? So we skulked around the corridors like petty criminals until we found a cramped balcony from which we could watch the ceremony. Our empty seats reflected back at us. The speeches were long. We slipped away and walked through the great chambers and found an empty banquet hall with a laid out feast. There was a metaphor there somewhere. I switched on my recorder again.

JC:
What is the meaning of charity as a political tool?

AR:
It's an old joke, right? If you want to control somebody, support them. Or marry them.

(
Laughter
)

JC:
Sugar daddy politics . . .

AR:
Embrace the resistance, seize it, fund it.

JC:
Domesticate it . . .

AR:
Make it depend on you. Turn it into an art project or a product of some kind. The minute what you think of as radical becomes an institutionalized, funded operation, you're in some trouble. And it's cleverly done. It's not all bad . . . some are doing genuinely good work.

JC:
Like the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) . . .

AR:
They have money from the Ford Foundation, right? But they do excellent work. You can't fault people for the work they're doing, taken individually.

JC:
People want to do something good, something useful . . .

AR:
Yes. And it is these good intentions that are dragooned and put to work. It's a complicated thing. Think of a bead necklace. The beads on their own may be lovely, but when they're threaded together, they're not really free to skitter around as they please. When you look around and see how many NGOs are on, say, the Gates, Rockefeller, or Ford Foundation's handout list, there has to be something wrong, right? They turn potential radicals into receivers of their largesse—and then, very subtly, without appearing to—they circumscribe the boundaries of radical politics. And you're sacked if you disobey . . . sacked, unfunded, whatever. And then there's always the game of pitting the “funded” against the “unfunded,” in which the funder takes center stage. So, I mean, I'm not against people being funded—because we're running out of options—but we have to understand—are you walking the dog or is the dog walking you? Or who's the dog and who is you?

JC:
I'm definitely the dog . . . and I've definitely been walked.

AR:
Everywhere—not just in America . . . repress, beat up, shoot, jail those you can, and throw money at those whom you can't—and gradually sandpaper the edge off them. They're in the business of creating what we in India call
Paaltu Sher
, which means Tamed Tigers. Like a pretend resistance . . . so you can let off steam without damaging anything.

JC:
The first time you spoke at the World Social Forum . . . when was that?

AR:
In 2003, in Porto Alegre . . . just before the US invasion of Iraq.
4

JC:
And then you went the next year in Mumbai and it was . . .

AR:
. . . totally NGO-ized.
5
So many major activists had turned into travel agents, just having to organize tickets and money, flying people up and down. The forum suddenly declared, “Only nonviolence, no armed struggles . . .” They had turned Gandhian.

JC:
So anyone involved in armed resistance . . .

AR:
All out, all out. Many of the radical struggles were out. And I thought, fuck this. My question is, if, let's say, there are people who live in villages deep in the forest, four days' walk from anywhere, and a thousand soldiers arrive and burn their villages and kill and rape people to scare them off their land because mining companies want it—what brand of nonviolence would the stalwarts of the establishment recommend? Nonviolence is radical political theater.

JC:
Effective only when there's an audience . . .

AR:
Exactly.
And who can pull in an audience? You need some capital, some stars, right? Gandhi was a superstar. The indigenous people in the forest don't have that capital, that drawing power. So they have no audience. Nonviolence should be a tactic—not an ideology preached from the sidelines to victims of
massive
violence . . . With me, it's been an evolution of seeing through these things.

JC:
You begin to smell the digestive enzymes . . .

AR:
(
Laughing
) But you know, the revolution cannot be funded. It's not the imagination of trusts and foundations that's going to bring real change.

JC:
But what's the bigger game that we can name?

AR:
The bigger game is keeping the world safe for the Free Market. Structural Adjustment, Privatization, Free Market fundamentalism—all masquerading as Democracy and the Rule of Law. Many corporate foundation–funded NGOs—not all, but many—become the missionaries of the “new economy.” They tinker with your imagination, with language. The idea of “human rights,” for example—sometimes it bothers me. Not in itself, but because the concept of human rights has replaced the much grander idea of justice. Human rights are fundamental rights, they are the minimum, the very least we demand. Too often, they become the goal itself. What should be the
minimum
becomes the
maximum
—all we are supposed to expect—but human rights aren't enough. The goal is, and must always be, justice.

JC:
The term
human rights
is, or can be, a kind of pacifier—filling the space in the political imagination that justice deserves?

AR:
Look at the Israel-Palestine conflict, for example. If you look at a map from 1947 to now, you'll see that Israel has gobbled up almost all of Palestinian land with its illegal settlements. To talk about justice in that battle, you have to talk about those settlements. But, if you just talk about human rights, then you can say, “Oh, Hamas violates human rights,” “Israel violates human rights.” Ergo, both are bad.

JC:
You can turn it into an equivalence . . .

AR:
. . . though it isn't one. But this discourse of human rights, it's a very good format for TV—the great atrocity analysis and condemnation industry (
laughs
). Who comes out smelling sweet in the atrocity analysis? States have invested themselves with the right to legitimize violence—so who gets criminalized and delegitimized? Only—or well that's excessive—
usually
, the resistance.

JC:
So the term
human rights
can take the oxygen out of justice?

AR:
Human rights takes
history
out of justice.

JC:
Justice always has context . . .

AR:
I sound as though I'm trashing human rights . . . I'm not. All I'm saying is that the idea of justice—even just dreaming of justice—is revolutionary. The language of human rights tends to accept a status quo that is intrinsically unjust—and then tries to make it more accountable. But then, of course, the catch-22 is that violating human rights is
integral
to the project of neoliberalism and global hegemony.

JC:
. . . As there's no other way of implementing those policies except violently.

AR:
No way at all—but talk loud enough about human rights and it gives the impression of democracy at work, justice at work. There was a time when the United States waged war to topple democracies, because back then democracy was a threat to the Free Market. Countries were nationalizing their resources, protecting their markets. . . . So then, real democracies were being toppled. They were toppled in Iran, they were toppled all across Latin America, Chile . . .

JC:
The list is too long . . .

AR:
Now we're in a situation where democracy has been taken into the workshop and fixed, remodeled to be market friendly. So now the United States is fighting wars to install democracies. First it was topple them, now it's install them, right? And this whole rise of corporate-funded NGOs in the modern world, this notion of CSR, corporate social responsibility—it's all part of a New Managed Democracy. In that sense, it's all part of the same machine.

JC
: Tentacles of the same squid.