Saturday morning. The rain has let up, I'm fully awake (finally) and it's time to clean up and get ready for Guy to come over.

I'm having a lot of concern about the integrity of my Fabulair concept, as people CAN'T STOP TALKING ABOUT IT. Ugh. No matter what I say or do. I'm going to start this morning with confidentiality agreements, and get everyone to sign those ASAP. I'm also doing up the agreement with the venture capital guys today, and Guy and I are re-working the financial projections and marketing budget. He's coming in about a half hour.

I have tax returns to do today (old ones) and I have to work on some other things. What is a weekend, anyway?

What to write? What to do next? I have some paperwork here to process for a client, and I guess I'll knock that out. Picking up Marc and Jurg to go to Space Center Houston at 11:00. New Vision coffee meeting tonight at 7:30. Fabulair all day tomorrow.

Okay, that errand is done. Now, I have a half hour to kill before leaving to pick up Marc and Jurg.

Amazingly, I have nearly every scrap of paper that was in my file box in the filing cabinet, behind tabs and labels. Only four or so more tabs to make up, and then the residue to put away. That feels pretty good, actually. Threw out a whole bunch more stuff.

Okay, and to frost the cake, I cleared out the "in" basket, and got all of THAT paperwork filed, ready to work on or tossed out.

Now, it's time to get ready to drive out to the Woodlands and have my meeting.

mcom's profile 

Mcom 

woke up this morning at 4:45 when I heard the door chime. Couldn't get back to sleep. Played with picture downloads for the phone, read the paper .. blah, blah.

I think I may have gotten myself into another situation like I had with G back when I was doing the show "And the World Goes 'Round." In fact, all signs are pointing that way. THAT was an ugly experience for me.

Four hours of sleep. I wonder if I can sneak in a little more.

Rainy Wednesday night. Just finished watching "Bend it Like Beckham," which Joel had rented from Netflix back in 1938, never returned, and pulled out of his bag the other night. I now have processed and returned ALL of those movies. Now, only a Chinese quasi-documentary on homosexuals in Mainland China to watch - it only has two stars, so it may not last very long.

Had a long, long meeting today in the Woodlands about a 3D optical imaging technology. Been in development for years, never been rolled out. Amazing. I listened for about two and a half hours, then gave the guy my opinion on how to structure the deal to raise investment funds, and then create .. well, I don't want to tip my hand. Anyway, the guy who brought me into the meeting was VERY impressed with me and my meeting skills. I have to quote a fee on Friday, and I have to cook up what I think it's worth before then.

Going back to the Woodlands tomorrow afternoon to work on the other project he wants me to pitch, and my own deal. I think that I can cut some pretty impressive deals working these two projects, and then springboard my way into Fabulair for 2005.

Joel has a new nickname - Mcom. Ask if you must know. He's outside talking to his best friend, with whom he hasn't spoken in months. The dogs are all tuckered out, the house is quite tidy - Ruby's in great shape, and I got the part I need to hook up my XM radio in my car for ten bucks on eBay today.

I didn't get home tonight until nearly 6:00, and I was worn out - an hour up, and hour back in the driving rain, three hours of meeting .. yeek.

I'm worn out from the stress. My brain is attacking me ongoingly, and I am about to scream. Yes, thank you [brain] for pointing out the things that are out of order in my life, and practically an emergency. Thanks [brain] for pointing out all the disaster contingencies.

Ugh.

I so need to see the chiropractor. No, not that one. My neck is a wreck.

Am I complaining enough? I guess so. I should peel out of this business attire and see about getting some sleep. Or something.

Wednesday. The day that the Dali Lama promises me my wish will come true.

I have a meeting at 2:00 with a venture capital guy to go over some business planning for some of his clients - this is fee-paid work, and I intend to come back with a check (or at least a promise of one.) I'm also pitching Fabulair to him (just verbally) today, with a promise of a full business plan by Monday, if he likes the concept.

Got the house tidied up this morning. Joel's not sleeping well again, so I think I'm going to have to put a bullet in his brain tonight to get him some more sleep. I'm greatly enjoying having him around - he's a good companion, and I'm getting more work done.

Fabulair is taking off - you can groan if you wish. We have enlarged the concept, and I've run the initial numbers - it should make a TON of money if we focus on limited service and limited human service delivery. I mean, an embarassing amount of money. No one in the world is trying to do what our business model seeks to do.

It's so dark outside. The sky was sunny and partly cloudy when I walked the mutts this morning, and now it's so dark I almost should turn on lights.

I have to get cleaned up in a short while for this meeting - he said it's a coat kind of a meeting. Yeep! Do I have a coat? Do I have something to wear with a coat? Do I have a clean shirt with which I can wear a tie? I don't know. This screws up my whole wardrobe selection for the day.

November 10, 2004
Larry Kramer: The tragedy of today's gays
Larry Kramer delivered a thought and action provoking speech this week in New York, presented by HIV Forum in conjunction with NYU's Office of LGBT Student Services, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, Callen-Lorde, and the Gill Foundation. With love and respect to RuPaul for sharing it, we are also to help ensure the message gets out. I think this has been the most difficult speech I have ever had to write and to deliver. It is a long speech. I pray you will bear with me until its end. It is an attempt to give you some idea of who and what we are up against. [more]
It is also an attempt to discuss our ability to deal with these. I recently learned about two dear friends, both exceptionally smart and talented and each in his own way a leader of our community. One, in his middle age, has sero-converted. The other, in his middle-age, has become hooked on crystal meth. Both of them are here with us tonight.

I love being gay. I love gay people. I think we're better than other people. I really do. I think we're smarter and more talented and more aware and I do, I do, I totally do. And I think we're more tuned in to what's happening, tuned into the moment, tuned into our emotions, and other people's emotions, and we're better friends. I really do think all these things.

To us it defies rational analysis that this incompetent dishonest man and his party should be re-elected. Or does it?

I hope we all realize that, as of November 2nd, gay rights are officially dead. And that from here on we are going to be led even closer to the guillotine. This past week almost 60 million of our so-called "fellow" Americans voted against us. Indeed 23% of self-identified gay people voted against us, too. That one I can't figure.

The absoluteness of what has happened is terrifying. On the gay marriage initiatives alone: 2.6 million against us in Michigan. 3.2 million in Ohio. 1.1 million in Oklahoma, 2.2 million in Georgia. 1.2 million in Kentucky. George Bush won his Presidency of our country by selling our futures. Almost 60 million people whom we live and work with every day think we are immoral. "Moral values" was top of many lists of why people supported George Bush. Not Iraq. Not the economy. Not terrorism. "Moral values." In case you need a translation that means us. It is hard to stand up to so much hate. Which of course is just the way they want it. Please know that a huge portion of the population of the United States hates us. I don't mean dislike. I mean hate. You may not choose to call it hate, but I do. Not only because they refuse us certain marital rights but because they have also elected a congress that is overflowing with men and women who refuse us just about every other right to exist as well. "Moral values" is really a misnomer; it means just the reverse. It means they think we are immoral. And that we're dangerous and contaminated. How do you like being called immoral by some 60 million people? This is not just anti-gay. This is what Doug Ireland calls "homo hate" on the grandest scale. How do we stand up to 60 million people who have found a voice and a President who declares he has a mandate?

The new Supreme Court, due any moment now, will erase us from the slate of everything possible in no time at all. Gay marriage? Forget it. Gay anything, forget it. Civil rights for gays? Equal protection for gays. Adoption rights? The only thing we are going to get from now on is years of increasing and escalating hate. Surely you must know this. Laws and regulations that now protect us will be repealed and rewritten. Please know all this. With the arrival of this second term of these hateful people we come even closer to our extinction. We should have seen it coming. We are all smart people. How could we not have been prepared?

They have not exactly been making a secret of their hate. This last campaign has seen examples of daily hate on TV and in the media that I do not believe the world has witnessed since Nazi Germany. I have been reading Ambassador Dodd's Diary; he was Roosevelt's ambassador to Germany in the 30's, and people are always popping in and out of his office proclaiming the most awful things out loud about Jews. It has been like that.

All Mary Cheyney is is a lesbian! Even her mother is hateful! That Cheney must be one fucked-up kid to stick around that family. I hope she doesn't want to teach school. One of the reelected Congress persons vows to make it illegal for lesbians to teach school.

I know many people look to me for answers. Perhaps that is why many of you are here. You want answers? We're living in pigshit and its up to each one of us to figure out how to get out of it. You must know that by now. Crystal meth is not an answer. You must know that by now. And quite frankly statistically it is only happening to so few of us that it is hard to get anyone worked up about that problem. Just as it hard to get worked up about a middle-aged man with brains who sero-converts. You want to kill yourself. Go kill yourself. I'm sorry. It takes hard work to behave like an adult. It takes discipline. You want it to be simple. It isn't simple. Yes it is. Grow up. Behave responsibly. Fight for your rights. Take care of yourself and each other. These are the answers. It takes courage to live. Are you living? Not so I can see it. Gay people are all but invisible to me now. I wish you weren't. But you are. And I look real hard.

No one likes to be told to grow up. It's insulting. But these are always the answers. They will always be the answers. The only answers. There will never be any other answers. Grow up. Behave responsibly. Fight for your rights. Take care of yourself and each other. Be proud of yourself. Be proud you are gay. I don't know why so many find all this so complicated. But then I am 69 years old and have less patience for the many problems I had myself when young. It is one of the privileges of getting old.

It is 25 years since 100,000 of us marched on Washington.

The AIDS service organizations are all about to collapse. No money. And the problem is too big to handle anymore. We have not slowed this thing down at all. $100 billion we're spending on Iraq. This is a conscious choice by our "leaders" and by a large portion of the population of this country. They have in their infinite and never-ending cruelty decided this was the most effective thing to do with 100 billion dollars that might also end AIDS, and a few other things like worldwide hunger. But the cabal doesn't care about these. People say: well we can't take care of the rest of the world. That is so stupid. The rest of the world is us. We are so intertwined geopolitically that we cannot separate ourselves off into parts, into sections. Those days are over. If they ever were here. We have everything required to save the world except the will to do it. In a recent New Yorker piece Michael Specter writes that because of AIDS Russia
is on its way to disappearing. Disappearing. Imagine that.

The immense knowledge we have learned about Aids has provided us with precious little more than that knowledge. HIV/AIDS is now the worst disaster in recorded human history. In parts of Africa 7,000 people are infecting each other each and every day. We who are here are idiots if we think this fact is not going to alter our lives mightily. If your company loses enough world markets, which it most certainly will, you are going to lose your job. You will not have health insurance, for a start. And for a finish. Economies are simply going to collapse. This is already happening.

In 1990, that is some nine years into what was happening, 46% of gay men in San Francisco were still fucking without condoms.

60% of the syphilis in America today is in gay men. Excuse me, men who have sex with men.

Palm Springs has the highest number of syphilis cases in California. Palm Springs?

I do not want to hear each week how many more of you are becoming hooked on meth.

HIV infections are up as much as 40%.

You cannot continue to allow yourselves and each other to act and live like this!

One of these days the miraculous drugs we have to keep us alive are going to stop working. Our systems cannot process these extreme chemotherapies indefinitely. That is what we are on. We are on daily chemotherapy. No one wants to call it that. We call it the cocktail. We are on chemotherapy! Chemotherapy either kills the disease or kills us! What are we going to do when they don't work any longer?

Some 70 million people so far are expected to die. "July 3, 1981, Rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals." When I first started yelling about whatever it was there were 41 cases. There are now over 70 million who have been infected with HIV. Somebody up there is really listening, don't you think? There is no way that all infected people can be saved. No one ever says that out loud. Have you noticed? Somehow in some dream world we are going to get treatment into 70 million people. It is never going to happen. It is too late. We told them. But they didn't do anything. Did you notice? Nobody every does anything. I hope it's finally dawning on you that maybe they didn't and don't want to. So, in case you haven't noticed, we have lost the war against AIDS. I thought I'd tell you that, too. I hope you might have noticed. I can't tell.

The President refuses to buy generic drugs for dying people. He is still saying he is waiting to hear if they are safe. These drugs have been approved. In some cases for several years. Does this sound like a President who wants to save anyone?

I do not understand why some of you believe that because we have drugs that deal with the virus more or less effectively that it is worth the gamble to have unprotected sex. These drugs are not easy to take. There are many side effects. Not life- but certainly comfort-threatening. I must allow at least one day out of every week or two to feel really shitty, to have no sleep, to be constipated, to have diarrhea, to require blood tests and monitoring at hospitals or in doctors' offices, and to have the shakes. The shakes, which come often, are not useful with a mouse or reading a newspaper or with a lover in your arms. And I don't enjoy eating anymore. Keeping on weight is a constant problem. I have dry mouth. I get up six or seven times a night to pee. Many of the meds we are now taking are new meds and were approved quickly and side effects have a sneaky way of showing up after FDA approval, not before. I recently discovered that I was taking an FDA approved dose of Viread that has turned out to be five times the amount I actually need. We are all probably taking too much or too little of every single one of our drugs. Doctors don't want to test for this; tests are not readily available. You have to do a lot of homework yourselves on these drugs. Is a fuck without a condom worth not being able to taste food? Obviously for too many of you it is.

My lover often sits on top of me to make me eat. The first time this happened I was in the hospital just after my liver transplant and I wouldn't eat and Dr. Fung said I had to eat, or else I would die, and I just couldn't eat (do you know how strange this is to someone who was always on a diet?). It was New Year's Eve. We were in beautiful downtown Pittsburgh. David had brought a hamper filled with my favorite dishes. And I could not eat anything. Furiously he crawled into bed with me, boots and all, and started to cry. "We haven't come this far for you to die because you won't eat," he screamed, tears streaming down his face. I will never forget that. I will never forget this man I love so much in bed with me with his snowy boots on starting slowly to spoon into me whatever he'd made and I trying so desperately hard to swallow it, looking at him, this man I love so much, doing this for me, both of us now bawling our eyes out and hugging each other in this strange bed in this strange town, wondering how we got here.

It's so wonderful being a gay person. I said that before. I'm going to say it again. I love being gay. And I love gay people. I think we're better than other people. I really do. I think we're smarter and more talented and more aware and I do, I do, I totally do. And I think we're more tuned in to what's happening, tuned into the moment, tuned into our emotions, and other people's emotions, and we're better friends. I really do think all of these things. And I try not to forget them.

Since the very first day of this plague we have been given, almost as if by some cosmic intentionality, American leaders who most assuredly wish us dead. There can no longer be any way to deny this fact. Each day brings more and more acts of hatred. Tell me it is not so. Tell me that the amount of good that is being attempted is not totally and intentionally overwhelmed by the evil. Point out to me how this is not so. I cannot see it. I have been unable to see it since July 3, 1981. I thought it was because it was a tricky virus. That is what we have been told. It's a very tricky virus. I hoped for a while. But we are being played for chumps and it has been so since July 3, 1981. And we never saw it.

We of course continue to be in our usual state of total denial and disarray. Whatever structure the gay world had, if we ever had one, is gone. Our organizations stink. Almost every single one of them. I cannot think of one single gay organization that despite the best will in the world is now anything but worthless to us. Oh maybe one or two. We have no power. Nobody listens to us. We have no access to power. The cabal disdains us totally. We are completely disposable. It is a horror show. There is not one single person in Washington who will get us or give us anything but shit and more shit. I'm sorry. This is where we are now. Nowhere. And you expect me to cry for you if you get hooked on meth or can't stop the circuit parties or the orgies. OK, I feel sorry for you. Does that change anything? I would say I feel sorry for myself, but I don't. I know I am fighting as hard as I can. I may not be getting anywhere but I am trying. It's exhausting and I have to do it every day, every single day, like taking my meds which if I stop I know my body will cease doing something or other. I have accidentally missed a few days of meds and boy do I know fast that was a mistake.

I fear for us as a people. Is that crazy? I am always being called crazy by somebody. I love being called crazy. That's a sign to me that I'm on the right track. Maybe it takes a crazy person to see into the future and see what's coming. Straight people say "my how much progress gay people are making. Isn't that Will and Grace wonderful." If it's so wonderful why am I scared to death? More and more I am filled with dread. That is my truth that I bring to you today. Larry is scared. Do you see what I see? I don't think so. Most gay people I see appear to me to act as if they're bored to death. Too much time on your hands, my mother would say. Hell, if you have time to get hooked on crystal and do your endless rounds of sex-seeking, you have too much time on your hands. Ah, you say, aren't we to have a little fun? Can't I get stoned and try barebacking one last time. Are you out of your fucking mind?! At this moment in our history, no, you cannot. Anyway, we had your fun and look what it got us into. And it is still getting us into. You kids want to die? Because that's what I sometimes think. Well, then, die.

You cannot continue to allow yourselves and each other to act and live like this!

And by the way, when are you going to realize that for the rest of your lives, probably for the rest of life on earth, you are never going to be able to have sex with another person without a condom! Never! Every time you even so much as consider this I want you to hear my voice screaming like crazy in your ears. Stop! Don't! Never! No way, JOse! Canadian scientists now warn that even partners who are both un-infected should practice safe sex. As I understand it, more and more new viruses and mutant viruses and partial viruses that are not understood are floating around. Are you ready for that one?

Does it ever occur to you how much you have been robbed by both your country and your behavior? America let the men who should have carved out a space for you in the social discourse, the development of your history and being, America let these men who should have been your role models die. So there is this big empty space in which you live. And you don't know where to go or how to fill it in. This is not my original thought but Michael Brown's of the NYU gay student organizations that helped to bring me here, who gave me this to think about. It is sad for a young gay person to feel this way.

I had people to follow and many of you have not. No baton was passed to you. In a way you must start everything over. You must invent a world from which you can move forward from. This is both an extraordinarily exciting challenge and a terrifying one, one that can just as easily leave you by the wayside as make a new man of you. I say man because it is gay men who appear to have the greatest difficulty, it seems to me, in moving forward, getting off their particular dime.

Many of you deny the horrors of what happened to your predecessors. That is something I do not understand. Every moral code I know of requires respect for the dead. I often hear that many of you don't want to know about them or admit to them. You disdain anyone older who was there.

This is denial of a most destructive nature. You cannot move forward without accepting your past. I am going to say that again. We cannot move forward without accepting and understanding our past. We were as varied as you are. We were no different, really. We were very different from those who preceded us. We were the first free gay generation and we were murdered because of our freedom. And yes you were robbed of this freedom that for obvious reasons could not be passed on to you as your heritage. So instead of being understanding of all this, you condemn your predecessors to non-existence and flounder into a future that you seem unable to fashion into anything you can hold on to that gives you emotional sustenance. You refuse to be part of any community. But if you don't have any community you have no political strength. You are too busy denying and disassociating to know that. You do not seem able, it seems to me, to fashion your future. To discover what you want. You don't even ask what you want. You don't even ask what you need. Your needs are as mighty as needs always have been, but you don't ask what they are, which amazes me. How can you not have curiosity about your future as a gay person? Don't you want to go anywhere? Do you want to stay where you are? That is too bad if you do because we are about to enter a place more monstrously worse. You can deny that, as you deny those of us who went before you, but just know that down this path of your numerous denials lies your own continued destruction, the continuing destruction of gay people as gay
people, which this cabal of haters I shall shortly describe, and its supporters, which are legion, are intent on accomplishing with increasingly ruthless vengeance. If you do not fight back you will be murdered in ways just as hideous as the ways in which we got murdered.

Every single president since 1981 has denied our existence and denied the existence of AIDS. And we let them get away with it. Oh a few thousand of us fought for the drugs that we got but many millions of us did nothing and of course an enormous number of them died. They died because they lost their health along their journey of non-involvement and their lack of responsibility to their brothers and sisters. Instead of learning from this lesson, you are repeating it. And you are acting like this with your health intact, many of you, which strikes me as even more perverse than what your dead predecessors did to destroy themselves.

Does it occur to you that we brought this plague of aids upon ourselves? I know I am getting into dangerous waters here but it is time. With the cabal breathing even more murderously down our backs it is time. And you are still doing it. You are still murdering each other. Please stop with all the generalizations and avoidance excuses gays have used since the beginning to ditch this responsibility for this fact. From the very first moment we were told in 1981 that the suspected cause was a virus, gay men have refused to accept our responsibility for choosing not to listen, and, starting in 1984, when we were told it definitely was a virus, this behavior turned murderous. Make whatever excuses you can to carry on living in your state of denial but this is the fact of the matter. I wish we could understand and take some responsibility for the fact that for some 30 years we have been murdering each other with great facility and that down deep inside of us, we knew what we were doing. Don't tell me you have never had sex without thinking down deep that there was more involved in what you were doing than just maintaining a hard-on.

I have recently gone through my diaries of the worst of the plague years. I saw day after day a notation of another friend's death. I listed all the ones I'd slept with. There were a couple hundred. Was it my sperm that killed them, that did the trick? It is no longer possible for me to avoid this question of myself. Have you ever wondered how many men you killed? I know I murdered some of them. I just know. You know how you sometimes know things? I know. Several hundred over a bunch of years, I have to have murdered some of them, planting in him the original seed. I have put this to several doctors. Mostly they refuse to discuss it, even if they are gay. Most doctors do not like to discuss sex or what we do or did. (I still have not heard a consensus on the true dangers of oral sex, for instance.) They play blind. God knows what they must be thinking when they examine us. Particularly if they aren't gay. One doctor answered me, it takes two to tango so you cannot take the responsibility alone. But in some cases it isn't so easy to answer so flippantly. The sweet young boy who didn't know anything and was in awe of me. I was the first man who fucked him. I think I murdered him. The old boyfriend who did not want to go to bed with me and I made him. The man I let fuck me because I was trying to make my then boyfriend, now lover, jealous. I know, by the way, that that other one is the one who infected me. You know how you sometime know things? I know he infected me. I tried to murder myself on that one.

Has it never, ever occurred to you that not using a condom is tantamount to murder? I cannot believe you have never considered this. It is such a simple and intelligent thought to have. And we all should have had it from day one. Why didn't we? That has been haunting me for a while, that question. Why didn't we? It is incredibly selfish not to have at least thought that question at that moment, all those moments when we were playing Russian roulette.

From here on I am going to get even more complicated. I want you to pay attention. This is the most important part of this speech.

Bill Moyers recently said this in a speech on October 20, 2004 at the Palace Hotel:

"For years now, the corporate, political, and religious right -- this is documented from 1971 on -- the religious and political right has been joined in an axis of influence whose purpose is to take back the gains of the democratic renewal in the 20th century and restore America to a rule of the elites that maintain their privilege and their power at the expense of everyone else. For years now, a small fraction of American households have been garnering an extreme concentration of wealth and income while large corporations and financial institutions have obtained unprecedented levels of economic and political power over daily life."

"Take note," Moyers continues. "The corporate, political, and religious conservatives are achieving a vast transformation of America that only they understand because they are its advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries. In creating the greatest inequality in America since 1929, they have saddled our nation, our States, and our cities and counties with structural defects that will last until our children's children are ready for retirement, and they are systematically stripping government of all its functions, except rewarding the rich and waging war."

In other words, our country has been taken away from us by a cabal that includes all the people who hate us.

These people make the rules. They are rarely elected officials. They may or may not know each other. They have several things in common. They are very rich or have strong connections to money or power. They are in agreement on what they do not want. They believe fervently in their God. And that they are doing all this for Him. And they stay in constant touch.

I hope you realize that all these people Bill Moyers is talking about hate us. Thriller writers write better histories of our times than actual historians.

Anyway, it is done. What Moyers is talking about. It's already happened. On a scale of such magnitude that it is difficult to see how we can ever take it back. It's all in place now, this cabal of power. It almost doesn't make any difference who is president.

You want to know why AIDS was allowed to happen. This is your answer. You want to know why gay people have no power and are unlikely to get any. This is your answer.

The top 1% of wealth holders control 39% of total household wealth.

The richest 5% of households own 2/3 of the value of all stock owned in the our country.

The the top 1% have as many after-tax dollars to spend as the bottom 100 million.

The richest 20% of households received almost 50% of the national income, while the bottom 20% received only 3%.

At a time when 265 people in the United States were billionaires, 32 million people were living beneath the official poverty line.

This inequality gap in the United States is the highest in the industrialized world.

"That drive," Moyers continues, "is succeeding with drastic consequences for an equitable access to public resources, the lifeblood of any democracy. From land, water, and natural resources, to media and the broadcast and digital spectrums, to scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs, and even to politics itself, a broad range of American democracy is undergoing a powerful shift in the direction of private control.

"We are experiencing a fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have shaped public responsibility for social harms arising from the excesses of private power."

In 1971, Lewis Powell, a Richmond lawyer who called himself a centrist, was secretly commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Congress to write a confidential plan on how to take back America for the survival of the free enterprise system. Not democracy. Free enterprise. Barry Goldwater had lost, Nixon was about to implode, Vietnam had sucked the nation's soul dry, the cabal saw their world unraveling. They saw the women's movement, black civil rights. student war protests, the cold war. They saw the world as they knew it coming to an end. (We are not the first to feel our world crumbling and becoming powerless.)

This is what Lewis Powell wrote: "Survival lies in organization, in careful long range planning, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing only available through joint effort and in the political power available only through united action."

This was the birth of what is now called the vast right wing conspiracy. It is known as the Powell Manifesto. You can google Lewis Powell (not the one who helped to assassinate Lincoln) and read it in its entirety.

Under the supervision of some of the richest families in America, that plan has been followed faithfully since 1971 and it has resulted in these past years of horror and the re-election of George Bush. Nine families and their foundations, all under the insistent goading of Joseph Coors, have financed much of this. The Bradley Foundation. The Smith Richardson Foundation. Four Scaife Family Foundations, The John M. Olin Foundation. The Castle Rock (or Coors) Foundation. Three Koch Family Foundations. The Earhart Foundation. The JM Foundation. The McKenna Foundation. From 1985 to 2001 alone they contributed $650 million to this conservative message campaign. They have helped to launch and gain financing for networks of newspapers and magazines. They have seen to it that hundreds of the most powerful think tanks have appeared, including the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, the American Enterprise, Cato, Manhattan, Hudson Institutes, and many more. There are now in place an ever growing number of well-funded student organizations at many colleges. There are legal advocacy foundations, such as the Center For Individual Rights and Judicial Watch. There are Leadership Institutes and Action Institutes and Institutes on Religion and Public Policy and Religion and Democracy. There is a heavily visible media participation: Fox Television and Pat Robertson and Oliver North and Radio America and the Washington Times and Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, to name but a very few, including the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.

For the preparation of this manifesto, Lewis Powell was rewarded by Richard Nixon with a seat on the Supreme Court, where among other things he voted against gays in Bowers v. Hardwick, and against Black people in Bakke v. University of California.

It is vital for us to realize that this plan was written in 1971. The people it was written for did not go off then to a disco, or to the Pines or into therapy, or into drugs. They took this plan and they have executed it religiously every day and night for the next thirty-five years initially with some 400 million dollars and always from then until now with unending hours of backbreaking, grinding, unglamorous work, of civic engagements county by county across the entire expanse of America. They took the richest and most liberal nation in the history of civilization and turned it hard right into a classist, racist, homophobic imperial army of pirates. 30% of America now self-identify as conservative or extremely
conservative. When Lewis Powell wrote his Manifesto that figure was less than 10%.

And on the morning of November 3rd we wrung our hands and wondered why. And we have a community that still cannot decide on what we want or what to do. We are completely inept at organizing ourselves and have a monstrously bad record of attempting unity.

The continuing existence of HIV is essential for the functioning of the totalitarianism under which gay people now live. It works out like this: HIV allows "them" to sell us as sick. And that kills off our usefulness, both in our own minds, their thinking we are sick, and in the eyes of the world, everyone thinking we are sick. All of this obliterates the consciousness of those who should help us and don't. This liquidates and incinerates our individuality and our spontaneity, our abilities to fight back, to hold our oppressors to task. They want to keep HIV going as long as they can! Why haven't we seen that? The signs have always been there! But like everything else we couldn't believe them. No one could be as cruel as that. They want to make us superfluous. Their media, their newspapers, their networks will see to it that our good qualities are invisible.

It should therefore come as no surprise that when HIV came along they, this cabal, facilitated its rapid deployment and continue to do so. Before even making the feeblest attempt to commence any miniscule response or inquiry into what their press was not reporting, which they most certainly knew about themselves, they waited until masses of us had all been exposed to the whatever it was. We on the other hand chose to not believe that the whatver it was was a virus until this was incontestably proved. But they knew what it was, or were willing to take the chance and hope that it was, and they just sat back and waited. Their wildest dreams then started to come true. The faggots were disappearing and they were doing it to themselves! I can locate no work of any urgency, or indeed much work at all on aids for most of the period between 1981-1984. Oh many claim it, as many claim seeing cases many years earlier, which I also doubt, but I cannot locate whatever these are claiming. In those four years almost every gay man who had fucked in America had been exposed to the virus.

And when they did start doing anything it was with such feebleness that it amounted to nothing for ten years. You can give me all kinds of reasons why it took so long but my research has convinced me that the actual scenario was completely intentional neglect. Oh perhaps not the doctors or the scientists. But they had no money. And they were not going to get any money. Or enough money. People upstairs were going to see to it that there would be no money. Let even more people get infected first. Blacks, junkies, prostitutes. Every color of skin but straight white. Every religion but Christian. Excuse me, white Christian. Then we'll throw them a few pennies to make it look like we're concerned.

The cabals Bill Moyers talked about have called all the shots in facilitating and accelerating the plague of aids. If scientists discovered something useful, it has rarely been available. I spoke earlier about the refusal of this president to allow already approved generic drugs out to a desperate Africa and elsewhere. Of that huge Congressional approval of many billions for HIV around the world that Bush brags about, something less that 2% has left Washington almost four years after its approval. Does this sound like a President and a government and a country that wants to help?

I guess I have suspected behavior like this all along. But I never knew it in quite the way that I have now come to see it thanks to Bill Moyers: intentionality is the only word to describe the genocidal treatment the world is drowning in. Much of the world, most assuredly including us, has been intentionally hung out to die. So far some 70 million of us. That is some manifesto Lewis Powell birthed. And all we have to do is keep fucking each other without condoms and the rest of their "moral issues" will be dead.

Do you seriously think they care about the continuing rise again of HIV infections? They are grateful for them. Do you think they care about a sudden plague of crystal? They thank us for our cooperation. And we thought for one brief second of time that we might even be allowed to marry the ones we love.

And while all this happened, even if we had enough suspicions to act, what did we do? We completely shrank from our duty of opposition. Those are Christopher Isherwood's words: "the duty of opposition." But he was flagellating himself with these words. He fears that should he have to live face to face with a war in his backyard that he "would shrink from the duty of opposition."

Marriage? Forget it. Non-discrimination laws? Forget them. Those that have been enacted will be rescinded or amended into toothlessness. Adoption? Equal rights? Forget everything. We are going to be erased into nothingness. They hate us so much and now they are in complete and utter power, the most dangerous situation in the world for the unwanteds to live under. And I no longer think it matters who is President. Clinton turned out to be as rotten for us as George Bush, either one.

Ok, keep putting your life in jeopardy. 110 of their drug companies certainly want you to do so. Keep dancing your asses off at circuit parties all over the world as you go down to the sea in ships that are made to intentionally capsize and take you down with them. Ok, keep being bored and crying for your poor selves. You ain't seen nothin' yet. With our complete cooperation they have already murdered several generations of us so far. They won't have to murder so many more of us to get their wish. Like Russia, we will disappear. That is what they want to do. Disappear us. And now they are able to officially do it. George Bush has his mandate. Can't you see all this! People high up there in their secret powwows don't want us here. Word has come down from on high: get rid of the faggots once and for all. You think the law will protect us? Think again. Wait until you see the new Supreme Court.

You are here as a gay person because of certain events and certain people who lived and suffered and died before you. You must learn about them and not continually deny their existence and importance in our history, the history of gay people in America. You must learn about them! They have made your life possible! What kind of person doesn't want to learn about themselves? I don't know why but you don't want to. Most of our fellow gays don't read books about us. Or come to plays about us. What do you want to do? I don't know. And for all I can tell in talking to many of you, you don't know either. And this is very frightening. A large uncongealed mass of potentially superior beings doesn't know what to do with themselves or bother to learn their history. So they dance. So they drug. So they go on to the internet to find more sex. These are useful lives being wasted. Why is that? Why is there no useful creativity going on? Why is there no mental agility visible, no audible questioning discussions ... almost anything of importance? Don't you long for some involvement in the humanity that you belong to, for your place in the scheme of things? You don't know how to make entrance on these playing fields, is that it? I don't know what is wrong with us. I wish you could tell me. What do you do with yourselves all week long, seven days and nights a week, that amounts to anything really important? I can't see many of you as doing anything important, to give your lives meaning. Oh I can see lots of frocks on the runway but I can't see bodies inside of them, bodies with brains and concerned with anything but pretty and orgasms. What do you do to make your world, our world, a better place? A world that needs every bit of help it can get, our world, not their world. You don't seem able to connect with anyone beyond the basest ways.

"Why can't we look at our bodies and see not just a sexual definition? Why can't we see in the body all that the body represents? Sexuality, yes. But also mortality, humanness, humaneness, innocence, purity, health, sickness, strength, consideration, responsibility, divinity. When did we rob our bodies of all the complexity they possess? Why do we refuse to see all that we are capable of? All the other things that make us full beings." That very beautiful paragraph was written by my friend, Jordan Roth, who is one day going to be a very fine writer if he just keeps at it.

Do you know you are taking the same crystal meth as Hitler? The stuff that was being used well into 1997, the government outlawed one of the ingredients and so the orignal process was resurrected, the one as used by the Nazis. It was first synthesized by the Germans in the early part of the 20th century. Hitler was a crystal addict. The new version is much more potent than the stuff you were taking before 1997, which is the main reason why it is so hard to break an addiction. Dr. Howard Grossman told me this bit of history. Maybe I shouldn't have told you about the Hitler part. To the more twisted among you it may be a turn-on.

I love being gay. I love gay people. I think we're better than other people. I really do. I think we're smarter and more talented and more aware and I do, I do, I totally do. I really do think all of these things. And I try very hard to remember all this.

But I am finding that I am not so proud of being gay anymore. It's come over me slowly. As much as I love being gay and I love gay people I'm not proud of us right now. It's disappeared. I almost could say we've disappeared. But since you are here I can't quite say that. But that's how I feel.

I do not see us, don't you see? I do not see us! They are killing us. They are eradicating us from this earth. Little by little by little we are disappearing. I do not see us and I am beginning to see us less and less.

I have recently come to believe that gay men and women are tragic people. We are so wonderful but we are also so fucked up. So blind. So ignorant in ways to look after ourselves. So uninterested in the Outside World that is subsuming us when we thought we were making them pretty and giving them songs to sing. So without agendas to utilize our wonderful-ness. We know who the enemy is and we just stand here letting them shoot us over and over again. We stand there and let them do it! All of the brains and abilities we have among us are useless. The smartest among us, our famous ones, our rich ones, seem to allow this most of all. The ones who should help us and speak up for us refuse that responsibility. We have enough rich gay men and lesbians to finance a takeover of the world but their brains and their money and their skills are not available to to help us. To lead us. To inspire us. To finance us. To be like Lewis Powell's Nine Families. That, too is tragic. To have so much money and to not to use it for brothers and sisters, for family, for our continuation here on earth. Why is that? Rockefeller tithed himself from his very first dollar, to go to his church for his salvation. Please, can we get word to every rich gay person to show up to help save us. We need our Nine Families desperately.

Public service: how many religions demand this of their members? How much public service in behalf of your brothers and sisters, your family, have you performed recently? Don't tell me you don't know what to do. If you can find another ass to fuck, and you seem endlessly inventive at accomplishing this, then you should be able to locate a more useful and responsible outlet.

For a few brief years we had some noble moments, of togetherness and anger and progress. Not many of us, mind you. If you are still alive, you know who you were and where you were during those worst years of our mass murder. You know what you did and what you didn't. And I know too. I know that most of you, should you still be alive, didn't do a goddamned thing. In fact, you were ashamed of us, many of you were. I remember that as well as I remember those who died. "Friends" crossing the street to avoid me because I was advising cooling it. I was actually told to not come back to Fire Island Pines. Lots of people come up to me now on the street and say, thank you for what you did for us. I do not consider that a compliment. My response quite often's been a curt Fuck You, why aren't you doing it too! I don't do anything that anyone else couldn't do. I just do it, and some 10 or 15,000 other people did it too then. And the rest of you sat on your asses. And, those of you who are still alive, know who you were and how little you did.

Yes for one brief moment in time we got angry. Correction, a few of us got angry. Of all our many many millions of gay people in this country, about 10,000 of us or so got angry enough to accomplish something. We got drugs. We got AIDS care. We got enough so we could continue fucking again. That in the end is what it amounted to. As soon as we got the drugs, you went right back to what got us into such trouble in the first place. What is wrong with us? The cabal can't believe their good fortune.

How many gay people in America in those years of AIDS? Ten million? Twenty million? Thirty million? How many of us are there now? We don't even know how many of us there are! Or how many we lost! And every time some statistical number is released by some faceless organization or government office, I always wonder: how the fuck do they know how many of us there are when we don't even know how many of us there are? And none of our so-called gay organizations ever bothers to find out. It would be nice to know, helpful to know. Don't you think?

You know, it isn't meant to be easy, life. I don't know why it isn't meant to be easy, but it just isn't, so we might as well get used to it and try to find things that give us a certain sense of pride. We must create ourselves as something we can live with. It takes energy, yes. Why are we so crippled intellectually? Oh, we study sexuality and gender stuff until it comes out of every university's asshole but we don't study history, who we were and where we came from and our roots, the wellsprings of our historical existence. We do not honor our dead as we do not honor ourselves. We continue without surcease to be and remain, endlessly, day after day, helpless victims. "In my country when they raise the bus fares, we burn the buses," a Brazilian journalist said to me as she watched a
sparsely attended ACT-UP demonstration.

There is never one single hour that a disenfranchised minority does not have to fight to breathe and stay alive. The hate out there will never lessen. It only grows and grows, this hate. Most of you refuse to face this. I hate you for your doing that. I really do. I have no more patience for this kind of weakness. I know this is uncharitable of me. I don't care. I am too tired of fighting with so few troops. You are now dancing your own dance of death, you know. And I hate you for this, too. Grow up, I beg you. Oh, grow up.

Time goes by so fast. We are allotted so precious little of it on this earth. How sad that you use it so stupidly. Every minute that goes by is gone forever. You who have been given a new lease on life, the very gift of life itself, piss it away. It is so incomprehensible to me who has come so close to death a couple times. I find your inactivity and ingratitude and lack of imagination on how to act in emergencies incongruous, incomprehensible, insulting. And unacceptable. I could never understand during all those years of AIDS why every single person facing death would not fight to save his own life. And I cannot understand now how, life having been given back to us again, again you treat your life with such
contempt.

Yes, all that I have spoken of tonight is the stuff of tragedy.

I wish we could truly look upon each other as brothers and sisters. It sounds corny I am told when I keep using terms like this. How can we be related I am asked dismissively. You do not know or want to know that we have been on this earth as long as anyone else and that we have as many available heroes and heroines as anyone else. Your family has been here a very long time and has an ancient and distinguished lineage. You must learn that Abraham Lincoln was gay and George Washington and Meriwether Lewis and so many others we are only just beginning to uncover. But they will not let gay history be taught in schools and universities. And we seem unable to teach ourselves. My own college, Yale, with $1 million of my own brother's money to do just this, will not teach what I call gay history, unencumbered with the prissy incomprehensible gobbledygook of gender studies and queer theory. Abraham Lincoln did not talk that language.

We richly deserve the government we have received. We do not even know who we are. And our enemies participate in their convictions every day of their lives. We only show up when we want to, which is not very often. But then perhaps you do not love being gay. Or think we are better than other people, and smarter and more talented and more tuned into what is happening, and are better friends.

I leave the hardest topic we must face till last.

How do we fight as a united front when they don't approve of our "behavior" and when our behavior is inseparable from our beings? How do we fight as a united front when some of us won't or are unable to change certain behaviors that many of us have difficulty in supporting and defending ourselves? We've been so concerned about showing the world a united front. We feel the need to say that everything gay people do is good and it simply isn't so. We must have an honest discussion amongst ourselves about what's good and what isn't. This is of course the problem that has finally brought us down because we have refused to deal with it, and perhaps is one reason today's youngsters have difficulty in acknowledging our past. It is the unfaced devil in our closet, if you
will, that we have refused to deal with and which, now, now that they have achieved their position of imperial power, will be used to hang us once and for all. To be crude about it, how do we market and sell our wishes and our needs as they have been able to package and sell their wants and needs so successfully for thirty-five years? How do we frame this issue? How do we claim the God that they have subsumed into their own ownership? It is inhuman to think that the only way we can get through to some safe other side is by policing each other and in so doing destroy whatever hope we have of getting along? If they have been able to convince this country that the Republicans are the party of the people, surely so many sons and daughters can be smart enough to find a way to sell our parents permission to co-exist.

I do not know how to answer any of this. And I don't think anyone among us does either. To talk out loud about what our bodies have done and continue to do is asking for trouble from others of us. How do we admit our past, own it, and evolve from it and move on? For we must do this.

I know some of you will immediately jump up to act. I caution rushing off to form anything quite so fast until we decide how we want to deal with what I have raised tonight. I know many of you are prepared to tough it out and say to them, "fuck you, I am what I am." And point out quite rightly that they have simply pushed us too far and, no matter what we have done and continue to do we simply cannot allow them to treat us this way any longer. We are human beings as much as they are, and their God is the same as our God and He simply cannot be allowed to be as punishing as they are requiring Him to be."

But this is perhaps too honest and reasonable to say to those who are not either. Reasoning like this has not worked for us in the past. But I sense that ignoring this question of responsibility for much that has murdered us will only please them more.

These are the problems we must confront as we go forward. If you are going to fight in a united way, which I am convinced is now the only way that can save us, we must find a platform that all of us can support without divisiveness and shame and guilt and all the other hateful weapons they will club us with.

And if we do want to go out and fight again in a united way we must ask ourselves: are we able to replicate the kind of devotion and commitment and backbreaking thankless work and tactics that continues to bring them year after year into such positions of unlimited power. Thirty-five years of that? For thirty-five years the cabal I have spoken of has worked every single day and night to bring them their success. Quite frankly they deserve their victory and we deserve our loss.

I would like to quote this from a Baptist minister, Tom Ehrich, in Durham. By chance, I found it on a Christian website at 3:00 this afternoon. "It would be helpful if we started in silence and just listened to each other's voices. Whether we can muster such maturity amid toxic political attitudes remains to be seen. If we are to have a meaningful national discussion of moral issues, we will need to start with the sexual issues, not because they are the most important but because they are the fire engulfing the tower. Let's get it all on the table...

"And let's do so openly and boldly, without the code language that we often use in moral debates, without our usual cherry-picking of Scriptures, without our usual blistering indignation, without the bullying that elevates one's viewpoint into divine certainty."

So we are being invited to this table whether we want to or not. We must be prepared.

I love being gay. I love gay people. I think we're better than other people. I really do. I think we're smarter and more talented and better friends. I do, I do, I totally do. I really do think all of these things.

And I passionately and desperately want all my brothers and sisters to stay alive and well and on this earth as long as they want theirs to.

Can we all help each other to reach this goal?

TIDE? OR IVORY SNOW? - Arundhati Roy

Public Power in the Age of Empire

I've been asked to speak about "Public Power in the Age of Empire."
I'm not used to doing as I'm told, but by happy coincidence, it's
exactly what I'd like to speak about tonight.

When language has been butchered and bled of meaning, how do we
understand "public power"? When freedom means occupation, when
democracy means neo-liberal capitalism, when reform means repression,
when words like "empowerment" and "peacekeeping" make your blood run
cold - why, then, "public power" could mean whatever you want it to
mean. A biceps building machine, or a Community Power Shower. So,
I'll just have to define "public power" as I go along, in my own
self-serving sort of way.

In India, the word public is now a Hindi word. It means people. In
Hindi, we have sarkar and public, the government and the people.
Inherent in this use is the underlying assumption that the government
is quite separate from "the people." This distinction has to do with
the fact that India's freedom struggle, though magnificent, was by no
means revolutionary. The Indian elite stepped easily and elegantly
into the shoes of the British imperialists. A deeply impoverished,
essentially feudal society became a modern, independent nation state.
Even today, fifty seven years on to the day, the truly vanquished
still look upon the government as mai-baap, the parent and provider.
The somewhat more radical, those who still have fire in their
bellies, see it as chor, the thief, the snatcher-away of all things.

Either way, for most Indians, sarkar is very separate from public.
However, as you make your way up India's social ladder, the
distinction between sarkar and public gets blurred. The Indian elite,
like the elite anywhere in the world, finds it hard to separate
itself from the state. It sees like the state, it thinks like the
state, it speaks like the state.


In the United States, on the other hand, the blurring of the
distinction between sarkar and public has penetrated far deeper into
society. This could be a sign of a robust democracy, but
unfortunately, it's a little more complicated and less pretty than
that. Among other things, it has to do with the elaborate web of
paranoia generated by the U.S. sarkar and spun out by the corporate
media and Hollywood. Ordinary Americans have been manipulated into
imagining they are a people under siege whose sole refuge and
protector is their government. If it isn't the Communists, it's
al-Qaeda. If it isn't Cuba. it's Nicaragua. As a result, this, the
most powerful nation in the world - with its unmatchable arsenal of
weapons, its history of having waged and sponsored endless wars, and
the only nation in history to have actually used nuclear bombs - is
peopled by a terrified citizenry, jumping at shadows. A people bonded
to the state not by social services, or public health care, or
employment guarantees, but by fear.

This synthetically manufactured fear is used to gain public sanction
for further acts of aggression. And so it goes, building into a
spiral of self-fulfilling hysteria, now formally calibrated by the
U.S government's Amazing Technicolored Terror Alerts: fuchsia,
turquoise, salmon pink.

To outside observers, this merging of sarkar and public in the United
States sometimes makes it hard to separate the actions of the U.S.
government from the American people. It is this confusion that fuels
anti-Americanism in the world. Anti-Americanism is then seized upon
and amplified by the U.S. government and its faithful media outlets.
You know the routine: "Why do they hate us? They hate our freedoms" .
. etc. . . . etc. This enhances the sense of isolation among
American people and makes the embrace between sarkar and public even
more intimate. Like Red Riding Hood looking for a cuddle in the
wolf's bed.


Using the threat of an external enemy to rally people behind you is a
tired old horse, which politicians have ridden into power for
centuries. But could it be that ordinary people are fed up of that
poor old horse and are looking for something different? There's an
old Hindi film song that goes yeh public hai, yeh sab jaanti hai (the
public, she knows it all). Wouldn't it be lovely if the song were
right and the politicians wrong?


Before Washington's illegal invasion of Iraq, a Gallup International
poll showed that in no European country was the support for a
unilateral war higher than 11 percent. On February 15, 2003, weeks
before the invasion, more than ten million people marched against the
war on different continents, including North America. And yet the
governments of many supposedly democratic countries still went to
war.

The question is: is "democracy" still democratic?

Are democratic governments accountable to the people who elected
them? And, critically, is the public in democratic countries
responsible for the actions of its sarkar?

If you think about it, the logic that underlies the war on terrorism
and the logic that underlies terrorism is exactly the same. Both make
ordinary citizens pay for the actions of their government. Al-Qaeda
made the people of the United States pay with their lives for the
actions of their government in Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and
Afghanistan. The U.S government has made the people of Afghanistan
pay in their thousands for the actions of the Taliban and the people
of Iraq pay in their hundreds of thousands for the actions of Saddam
Hussein.

The crucial difference is that nobody really elected al-Qaeda, the
Taliban, or Saddam Hussein. But the president of the United States
was elected (well ... in a manner of speaking).

The prime ministers of Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom were
elected. Could it then be argued that citizens of these countries are
more responsible for the actions of their government than Iraqis are
for the actions of Saddam Hussein or Afghans for the Taliban?

Whose God decides which is a "just war" and which isn't? George Bush
senior once said: "I will never apologize for the United States. I
don't care what the facts are." When the president of the most
powerful country in the world doesn't need to care what the facts
are, then we can at least be sure we have entered the Age of Empire.

So what does public power mean in the Age of Empire? Does it mean
anything at all? Does it actually exist?

In these allegedly democratic times, conventional political thought
holds that public power is exercised through the ballot. Scores of
countries in the world will go to the polls this year. Most (not all)
of them will get the governments they vote for. But will they get the
governments they want?

In India this year, we voted the Hindu nationalists out of office.
But even as we celebrated, we knew that on nuclear bombs,
neo-liberalism, privatization, censorship, big dams - on every major
issue other than overt Hindu nationalism - the Congress and the BJP
have no major ideological differences. We know that it is the
fifty-year legacy of the Congress Party that prepared the ground
culturally and politically for the far right. It was also the
Congress Party that first opened India's markets to corporate
globalization.

In its election campaign, the Congress Party indicated that it was
prepared to rethink some of its earlier economic policies. Millions
of India's poorest people came out in strength to vote in the
elections. The spectacle of the great Indian democracy was telecast
live - the poor farmers, the old and infirm, the veiled women with
their beautiful silver jewelry, making quaint journeys to election
booths on elephants and camels and bullock carts. Contrary to the
predictions of all India's experts and pollsters, Congress won more
votes than any other party. India's communist parties won the largest
share of the vote in their history. India's poor had clearly voted
against neo-liberalism's economic "reforms" and growing fascism. As
soon as the votes were counted, the corporate media dispatched them
like badly paid extras on a film set. Television channels featured
split screens. Half the screen showed the chaos outside the home of
Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the Congress Party, as the coalition
government was cobbled together.


The other half showed frenzied stockbrokers outside the Bombay Stock
Exchange, panicking at the thought that the Congress Party might
actually honor its promises and implement its electoral mandate. We
saw the Sensex stock index move up and down and sideways. The media,
whose own publicly listed stocks were plummeting, reported the stock
market crash as though Pakistan had launched ICBMs on New Delhi.

Even before the new government was formally sworn in, senior Congress
politicians made public statements reassuring investors and the media
that privatization of public utilities would continue. Meanwhile the
BJP, now in opposition, has cynically, and comically, begun to oppose
foreign direct investment and the further opening of Indian markets.

This is the spurious, evolving dialectic of electoral democracy.

As for the Indian poor, once they've provided the votes, they are
expected to bugger off home. Policy will be decided despite them.

And what of the U.S. elections? Do U.S. voters have a real choice?

It's true that if John Kerry becomes president, some of the oil
tycoons and Christian fundamentalists in the White House will change.
Few will be sorry to see the back of Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld
or John Ashcroft and their blatant thuggery. But the real concern is
that in the new administration their policies will continue. That we
will have Bushism without Bush.

Those positions of real power - the bankers, the CEOs - are not
vulnerable to the vote (. . . and in any case, they fund both sides).

Unfortunately the importance of the U.S elections has deteriorated
into a sort of personality contest. A squabble over who would do a
better job of overseeing empire. John Kerry believes in the idea of
empire as fervently as George Bush does.

The U.S. political system has been carefully crafted to ensure that
no one who questions the natural goodness of the
military-industrial-corporate power structure will be allowed through
the portals of power.

Given this, it's no surprise that in this election you have two Yale
University graduates, both members of Skull and Bones, the same
secret society, both millionaires, both playing at soldier-soldier,
both talking up war, and arguing almost childishly about who will
lead the war on terror more effectively.

Like President Bill Clinton before him, Kerry will continue the
expansion of U.S. economic and military penetration into the world.
He says he would have voted to authorize Bush to go to war in Iraq
even if he had known that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. He
promises to commit more troops to Iraq. He said recently that he
supports Bush's policies toward Israel and Ariel Sharon 100 percent.
He says he'll retain 98% of Bush's tax cuts.

So, underneath the shrill exchange of insults, there is almost
absolute consensus. It looks as though even if Americans vote for
Kerry, they'll still get Bush. President John Kerbush or President
George Berry.

It's not a real choice. It's an apparent choice. Like choosing a
brand of detergent. Whether you buy Ivory Snow or Tide, they're both
owned by Proctor & Gamble.

This doesn't mean that one takes a position that is without nuance,
that the Congress and the BJP, New Labor and the Tories, the
Democrats and Republicans are the same. Of course, they're not.
Neither are Tide and Ivory Snow. Tide has oxy-boosting and Ivory Snow
is a gentle cleanser.

In India, there is a difference between an overtly fascist party (the
BJP) and a party that slyly pits one community against another
(Congress), and sows the seeds of communalism that are then so ably
harvested by the BJP.

There are differences in the I.Q.s and levels of ruthlessness between
this year's U.S. presidential candidates. The anti-war movement in
the United States has done a phenomenal job of exposing the lies and
venality that led to the invasion of Iraq, despite the propaganda and
intimidation it faced.

This was a service not just to people here, but to the whole world.
But now, if the anti-war movement openly campaigns for Kerry, the
rest of the world will think that it approves of his policies of
"sensitive" imperialism. Is U.S. imperialism preferable if it is
supported by the United Nations and European countries? Is it
preferable if UN asks Indian and Pakistani soldiers to do the killing
and dying in Iraq instead of U.S. soldiers? Is the only change that
Iraqis can hope for that French, German, and Russian companies will
share in the spoils of the occupation of their country?

Is this actually better or worse for those of us who live in subject
nations? Is it better for the world to have a smarter emperor in
power or a stupider one? Is that our only choice?

I'm sorry, I know that these are uncomfortable, even brutal
questions, but they must be asked.

The fact is that electoral democracy has become a process of cynical
manipulation. It offers us a very reduced political space today. To
believe that this space constitutes real choice would be naïve.

The crisis in modern democracy is a profound one.

On the global stage, beyond the jurisdiction of sovereign
governments, international instruments of trade and finance oversee a
complex system of multilateral laws and agreements that have
entrenched a system of appropriation that puts colonialism to shame.
This system allows the unrestricted entry and exit of massive amounts
of speculative capital - hot money - into and out of third world
countries, which then effectively dictates their economic policy.
Using the threat of capital flight as a lever, international capital
insinuates itself deeper and deeper into these economies. Giant
transnational corporations are taking control of their essential
infrastructure and natural resources, their minerals, their water,
their electricity. The World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund, and other financial institutions like
the Asian Development Bank, virtually write economic policy and
parliamentary legislation. With a deadly combination of arrogance and
ruthlessness, they take their sledgehammers to fragile,
interdependent, historically complex societies, and devastate them.

All this goes under the fluttering banner of "reform."

As a consequence of this reform, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America,
thousands of small enterprises and industries have closed down,
millions of workers and farmers have lost their jobs and land.

The Spectator newspaper in London assures us that "[w]e live in the
happiest, healthiest and most peaceful era in human history."
Billions wonder: who's "we"? Where does he live? What's his Christian
name?

The thing to understand is that modern democracy is safely premised
on an almost religious acceptance of the nation state. But corporate
globalization is not. Liquid capital is not. So, even though capital
needs the coercive powers of the nation state to put down revolts in
the servants' quarters, this set up ensures that no individual nation
can oppose corporate globalization on its own.

Radical change cannot and will not be negotiated by governments; it
can only be enforced by people. By the public. A public who can link
hands across national borders.

So when we speak of "Public Power in the Age of Empire," I hope it's
not presumptuous to assume that the only thing that is worth
discussing seriously is the power of a dissenting public. A public
which disagrees with the very concept of empire. A public which has
set itself against incumbent power - international, national,
regional, or provincial governments and institutions that support and
service empire.

What are the avenues of protest available to people who wish to
resist empire? By resist I don't mean only to express dissent, but to
effectively force change. Empire has a range of calling cards. It
uses different weapons to break open different markets. You know the
check book and the cruise missile

For poor people in many countries, Empire does not always appear in
the form of cruise missiles and tanks, as it has in Iraq or
Afghanistan or Vietnam. It appears in their lives in very local
avatars - losing their jobs, being sent unpayable electricity bills,
having their water supply cut, being evicted from their homes and
uprooted from their land. All this overseen by the repressive
machinery of the state, the police, the army, the judiciary. It is a
process of relentless impoverishment with which the poor are
historically familiar. What Empire does is to further entrench and
exacerbate already existing inequalities.

Even until quite recently, it was sometimes difficult for people to
see themselves as victims of the conquests of Empire. But now local
struggles have begun to see their role with increasing clarity.
However grand it might sound, the fact is, they are confronting
Empire in their own, very different ways. Differently in Iraq, in
South Africa, in India, in Argentina, and differently, for that
matter, on the streets of Europe and the United States.

Mass resistance movements, individual activists, journalists,
artists, and film makers have come together to strip Empire of its
sheen. They have connected the dots, turned cash-flow charts and
boardroom speeches into real stories about real people and real
despair. They have shown how the neo-liberal project has cost people
their homes, their land, their jobs, their liberty, their dignity.
They have made the intangible tangible. The once seemingly
in-CORP-o-real enemy is now CORP-o-real.

This is a huge victory. It was forged by the coming together of
disparate political groups, with a variety of strategies. But they
all recognized that the target of their anger, their activism, and
their doggedness is the same. This was the beginning of real
globalization. The globalization of dissent.

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of mass resistance movements in
third world countries today. The landless peoples' movement in
Brazil, the anti-dam movement in India, the Zapatistas in Mexico, the
Anti-Privatization Forum in South Africa, and hundreds of others, are
fighting their own sovereign governments, which have become agents of
the neo-liberal project. Most of these are radical struggles,
fighting to change the structure and chosen model of "development" of
their own societies.

Then there are those fighting formal and brutal neocolonial
occupations in contested territories whose boundaries and fault lines
were often arbitrarily drawn last century by the imperialist powers.
In Palestine, Tibet, Chechnya, Kashmir, and several states in India's
northeast provinces, people are waging struggles for
self-determination.

Several of these struggles might have been radical, even
revolutionary when they began, but often the brutality of the
repression they face pushes them into conservative, even
retrogressive spaces in which they use the same violent strategies
and the same language of religious and cultural nationalism used by
the states they seek to replace.

Many of the foot soldiers in these struggles will find, like those
who fought apartheid in South Africa, that once they overcome overt
occupation, they will be left with another battle on their hands - a
battle against covert economic colonialism.

Meanwhile, as the rift between rich and poor is being driven deeper
and the battle to control the world's resources intensifies. Economic
colonialism through formal military aggression is staging a comeback.

Iraq today is a tragic illustration of this process. An illegal
invasion. A brutal occupation in the name of liberation. The
rewriting of laws that allow the shameless appropriation of the
country's wealth and resources by corporations allied to the
occupation, and now the charade of a local "Iraqi government."

For these reasons, it is absurd to condemn the resistance to the U.S.
occupation in Iraq, as being masterminded by terrorists or insurgents
or supporters of Saddam Hussein. After all if the United States were
invaded and occupied, would everybody who fought to liberate it be a
terrorist or an insurgent or a Bushite?

The Iraqi resistance is fighting on the frontlines of the battle
against Empire. And therefore that battle is our battle.

Like most resistance movements, it combines a motley range of
assorted factions. Former Baathists, liberals, Islamists, fed-up
collaborationists, communists, etc. Of course, it is riddled with
opportunism, local rivalry, demagoguery, and criminality. But if we
are only going to support pristine movements, then no resistance will
be worthy of our purity.

This is not to say that we shouldn't ever criticize resistance
movements. Many of them suffer from a lack of democracy, from the
iconization of their "leaders," a lack of transparency, a lack of
vision and direction. But most of all they suffer from vilification,
repression, and lack of resources.

Before we prescribe how a pristine Iraqi resistance must conduct
their secular, feminist, democratic, nonviolent battle, we should
shore up our end of the resistance by forcing the U.S. and its allies
government to withdraw from Iraq.

The first militant confrontation in the United States between the
global justice movement and the neo-liberal junta took place famously
at the WTO conference in Seattle in December 1999. To many mass
movements in developing countries that had long been fighting lonely,
isolated battles, Seattle was the first delightful sign that their
anger and their vision of another kind of world was shared by people
in the imperialist countries.

In January 2001, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 20,000 activists, students,
film makers - some of the best minds in the world - came together to
share their experiences and exchange ideas about confronting Empire.
That was the birth of the now historic World Social Forum. It was the
first, formal coming together of an exciting, anarchic,
unindoctrinated, energetic, new kind of "Public Power." The rallying
cry of the WSF is "Another World is Possible." It has become a
platform where hundreds of conversations, debates, and seminars have
helped to hone and refine a vision of what kind of world it should
be.

By January 2004, when the fourth WSF was held in Mumbai, India, it
attracted 200,000 delegates. I have never been part of a more
electrifying gathering. It was a sign of the social forum's success
that the mainstream media in India ignored it completely. But now,
the WSF is threatened by its own success. The safe, open, festive
atmosphere of the forum has allowed politicians and nongovernmental
organizations that are imbricated in the political and economic
systems that the forum opposes to participate and make themselves
heard.

Another danger is that the WSF, which has played such a vital role in
the movement for global justice, runs the risk of becoming an end
unto itself. Just organizing it every year consumes the energies of
some of the best activists. If conversations about resistance replace
real civil disobedience, then the WSF could become an asset to those
whom it was created to oppose. The forum must be held and must grow,
but we have to find ways to channel our conversations there back into
concrete action.

As resistance movements have begun to reach out across national
borders and pose a real threat, governments have developed their own
strategies of how to deal with them. They range from cooptation to
repression.

I'm going to speak about three of the contemporary dangers that
confront resistance movements: the difficult meeting point between
mass movements and the mass media, the hazards of the NGO-ization of
resistance, and the confrontation between resistance movements and
increasingly repressive states.

The place in which the mass media meets mass movements is a
complicated one.

Governments have learned that a crisis-driven media cannot afford to
hang about in the same place for too long. Like business houses need
a cash turnover, the media need crises turnover. Whole countries
become old news. They cease to exist, and the darkness becomes deeper
than before the light was briefly shone on them. We saw it happen in
Afghanistan when the Soviets withdrew. And now, after Operation
Enduring Freedom put the CIA's Hamid Karzai in place, Afghanistan has
been thrown to its warlords once more.

Another CIA operative, Iyad Allawi, has been installed in Iraq, so
perhaps it's time for the media to move on from there, too.

While governments hone the art of waiting out crisis, resistance
movements are increasingly being ensnared in a vortex of crisis
production, seeking to find ways of manufacturing them in easily
consumable, spectator-friendly formats.

Every self-respecting peoples' movement, every "issue" is expected to
have its own hot air balloon in the sky advertising its brand and
purpose.

For this reason, starvation deaths are more effective advertisements
for impoverishment than millions of malnourished people, who don't
quite make the cut. Dams are not newsworthy until the devastation
they wreak makes good television. (And by then, it's too late).

Standing in the rising water of a reservoir for days on end, watching
your home and belongings float away to protest against a big dam used
to be an effective strategy, but isn't any more. The media is dead
bored of that one. So the hundreds of thousands of people being
displaced by dams are expected to either conjure new tricks or give
up the struggle.

Colorful demonstrations and weekend marches are vital but alone are
not powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when
soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto
ships and aircrafts, when people boycott the economic outposts of
Empire that are strung across the globe.

If we want to reclaim the space for civil disobedience, we will have
to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of crisis reportage and its
fear of the mundane. We have to use our experience, our imagination,
and our art to interrogate the instruments of that state that ensure
that "normality" remains what it is: cruel, unjust, unacceptable. We
have to expose the policies and processes that make ordinary things -
food, water, shelter and dignity - such a distant dream for ordinary
people. Real pre-emptive strike is to understand that wars are the
end result of flawed and unjust peace.

As far as mass resistance movements are concerned, the fact is that
no amount of media coverage can make up for mass strength on the
ground. There is no option, really, to old-fashioned, back-breaking
political mobilization.

Corporate globalization has increased the distance between those who
make decisions and those who have to suffer the effects of those
decisions. Forums like the WSF enable local resistance movements to
reduce that distance and to link up with their counterparts in rich
countries. That alliance is an important and formidable one. For
example, when India's first private dam, the Maheshwar Dam, was being
built, alliances between the Narmada Bachao Andolan (the NBA), the
German organization Urgewald, the Berne Declaration in Switzerland,
and the International Rivers Network in Berkeley worked together to
push a series of international banks and corporations out of the
project. This would not have been possible had there not been a rock
solid resistance movement on the ground. The voice of that local
movement was amplified by supporters on the global stage,
embarrassing and forcing investors to withdraw.

An infinite number of similar, alliances, targeting specific projects
and specific corporations would help to make another world possible.
We should begin with the corporations who did business with Saddam
Hussein and now profit from the devastation and occupation of Iraq.

A second hazard facing mass movements is the NGO-ization of
resistance. It will be easy to twist what I'm about to say into an
indictment of all NGOs. That would be a falsehood. In the murky
waters of fake NGOs set up or to siphon off grant money or as tax
dodges (in states like Bihar, they are given as dowry), of course
there are NGOs doing valuable work. But it's important to consider
the NGO phenomenon in a broader political context.

In India, for instance, the funded NGO boom began in the late 1980s
and 1990s. It coincided with the opening of India's markets to
neo-liberalism. At the time, the Indian state, in keeping with the
requirements of structural adjustment, was withdrawing funding from
rural development, agriculture, energy, transport, and public health.
As the state abdicated its traditional role, NGOs moved in to work in
these very areas. The difference, of course, is that the funds
available to them are a minuscule fraction of the actual cut in
public spending. Most large funded NGOs are financed and patronized
by aid and development agencies, which are in turn funded by Western
governments, the World Bank, the UN, and some multinational
corporations. Though they may not be the very same agencies, they are
certainly part of the same loose, political formation that oversees
the neo-liberal project and demands the slash in government spending
in the first place.

Why should these agencies fund NGOs? Could it be just old-fashioned
missionary zeal? Guilt? It's a little more than that. NGOs give the
impression that they are filling the vacuum created by a retreating
state. And they are, but in a materially inconsequential way. Their
real contribution is that they defuse political anger and dole out as
aid or benevolence what people ought to have by right.

They alter the public psyche. They turn people into dependent victims
and blunt the edges of political resistance. NGOs form a sort of
buffer between the sarkar and public. Between Empire and its
subjects. They have become the arbitrators, the interpreters, the
facilitators.

In the long run, NGOs are accountable to their funders, not to the
people they work among. They're what botanists would call an
indicator species. It's almost as though the greater the devastation
caused by neo-liberalism, the greater the outbreak of NGOs. Nothing
illustrates this more poignantly than the phenomenon of the U.S.
preparing to invade a country and simultaneously readying NGOs to go
in and clean up the devastation.

In order make sure their funding is not jeopardized and that the
governments of the countries they work in will allow them to
function, NGOs have to present their work in a shallow framework more
or less shorn of a political or historical context. At any rate, an
inconvenient historical or political context.

Apolitical (and therefore, actually, extremely political) distress
reports from poor countries and war zones eventually make the (dark)
people of those (dark) countries seem like pathological victims.
Another malnourished Indian, another starving Ethiopian, another
Afghan refugee camp, another maimed Sudanese . . . in need of the
white man's help. They unwittingly reinforce racist stereotypes and
re-affirm the achievements, the comforts, and the compassion (the
tough love) of Western civilization. They're the secular missionaries
of the modern world.

Eventually - on a smaller scale but more insidiously - the capital
available to NGOs plays the same role in alternative politics as the
speculative capital that flows in and out of the economies of poor
countries. It begins to dictate the agenda. It turns confrontation
into negotiation. It depoliticizes resistance. It interferes with
local peoples' movements that have traditionally been self-reliant.
NGOs have funds that can employ local people who might otherwise be
activists in resistance movements, but now can feel they are doing
some immediate, creative good (and earning a living while they're at
it). Real political resistance offers no such short cuts.

The NGO-ization of politics threatens to turn resistance into a
well-mannered, reasonable, salaried, 9-to-5 job. With a few perks
thrown in. Real resistance has real consequences. And no salary.

This brings us to a third danger I want to speak about tonight: the
deadly nature of the actual confrontation between resistance
movements and increasingly repressive states. Between public power
and the agents of Empire.

Whenever civil resistance has shown the slightest signs of evolving
from symbolic action into anything remotely threatening, the crack
down is merciless. We've seen what happened in the demonstrations in
Seattle, in Miami, in Göthenberg, in Genoa.

In the United States, you have the USA PATRIOT Act, which has become
a blueprint for antiterrorism laws passed by governments across the
world. Freedoms are being curbed in the name of protecting freedom.
And once we surrender our freedoms, to win them back will take a
revolution.

Some governments have vast experience in the business of curbing
freedoms and still smelling sweet. The government of India, an old
hand at the game, lights the path.

Over the years the Indian government has passed a plethora of laws
that allow it to call almost anyone a terrorist, an insurgent, a
militant. We have the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, the Public
Security Act, the Special Areas Security Act, the Gangster Act, the
Terrorist and Disruptive Areas Act (which has formally lapsed but
under which people are still facing trial), and, most recently, POTA
(the Prevention of Terrorism Act), the broad-spectrum antibiotic for
the disease of dissent.

There are other steps that are being taken, such as court judgments
that in effect curtail free speech, the right of government workers
to go on strike, the right to life and livelihood. Courts have begun
to micro-manage our lives in India. And criticizing the courts is a
criminal offense.

But coming back to the counter-terrorism initiatives, over the last
decade, the number of people who have been killed by the police and
security forces runs into the tens of thousands. In the state of
Andhra Pradesh (the pin-up girl of corporate globalization in India),
an average of about 200 "extremists" are killed in what are called
"encounters" every year. The Bombay police boast of how many
"gangsters" they have killed in "shoot outs." In Kashmir, in a
situation that almost amounts to war, an estimated 80,000 people have
been killed since 1989. Thousands have simply "disappeared." In the
northeastern provinces, the situation is similar.

In recent years, the Indian police have opened fire on unarmed
people, mostly Dalit and Adivasi. Their preferred method is to kill
them and then call them terrorists. India is not alone, though. We
have seen similar thing happen in countries such Bolivia, Chile, and
South Africa. In the era of neo-liberalism, poverty is a crime and
protesting against it is more and more being defined as terrorism.

In India, POTA (the Prevention of Terrorism Act) is often called the
Production of Terrorism Act. It's a versatile, hold-all law that
could apply to anyone from an al-Qaeda operative to a disgruntled bus
conductor. As with all anti-terrorism laws, the genius of POTA is
that it can be whatever the government wants. After the 2002
state-assisted pogrom in Gujarat, in which an estimated 2,000 Muslims
were savagely killed by Hindu mobs and 150,000 driven from their
homes, 287 people have been accused under POTA. Of these, 286 are
Muslim and one is a Sikh.

POTA allows confessions extracted in police custody to be admitted as
judicial evidence. In effect, torture tends to replace investigation.
The South Asia Human Rights Documentation Center reports that India
has the highest number of torture and custodial deaths in the world.
Government records show that there were 1,307 deaths in judicial
custody in 2002 alone.

A few months ago, I was a member of a peoples' tribunal on POTA. Over
a period of two days, we listened to harrowing testimonies of what is
happening in our wonderful democracy. It's everything - from people
being forced to drink urine, to being stripped, humiliated, given
electric shocks, burned with cigarette butts, having iron rods put up
their anuses, to being beaten and kicked to death.

The new government has promised to repeal POTA. I'd be surprised if
that happens before similar legislation under a different name is put
in place. If its not POTA it'll be MOTA or something.

When every avenue of non-violent dissent is closed down, and everyone
who protests against the violation of their human rights is called a
terrorist, should we really be surprised if vast parts of the country
are overrun by those who believe in armed struggle and are more or
less beyond the control of the state: in Kashmir, the north eastern
provinces, large parts of Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, and
Andhra Pradesh. Ordinary people in these regions are trapped between
the violence of the militants and the state.

In Kashmir, the Indian army estimates that 3,000 to 4,000 militants
are operating at any given time. To control them, the Indian
government deploys about 500,000 soldiers. Clearly, it isn't just the
militants the army seeks to control, but a whole population of
humiliated, unhappy people who see the Indian army as an occupation
force.

The Armed Forces Special Powers Act allows not just officers, but
even junior commissioned officers and non-commissioned officers of
the army, to use force and even kill any person on suspicion of
disturbing public order. It was first imposed on a few districts in
the state of Manipur in 1958. Today, it applies to virtually all of
the north east and Kashmir. The documentation of instances of
torture, disappearances, custodial deaths, rape, and summary
execution by security forces is enough to turn your stomach.

In Andhra Pradesh, in India's heartland, the militant
Marxist-Leninist Peoples' War Group - which for years been engaged in
a violent armed struggle and has been the principal target of many of
the Andhra police's fake "encounters" - held its first public meeting
in years on July 28, 2004, in the town of Warangal.

It was attended by about hundreds of thousands of people. Under POTA,
all of them are considered terrorists. Are they all going to be
detained in some Indian equivalent of Guantánamo Bay?

The whole of the north east and the Kashmir valley is in ferment.
What will the government do with these millions of people?

There is no discussion taking place in the world today that is more
crucial than the debate about strategies of resistance. And the
choice of strategy is not entirely in the hands of the public. It is
also in the hands of sarkar.

After all, when the U.S. invades and occupies Iraq in the way it has
done, with such overwhelming military force, can the resistance be
expected to be a conventional military one? (Of course, even if it
were conventional, it would still be called terrorist.) In a strange
sense, the U.S. government's arsenal of weapons and unrivalled air
and fire power makes terrorism an all-but-inescapable response. What
people lack in wealth and power, they will make up with stealth and
strategy.

In this restive, despairing time, if governments do not do all they
can to honor nonviolent resistance, then by default they privilege
those who turn to violence. No government's condemnation of terrorism
is credible if it cannot show itself to be open to change by to
nonviolent dissent.

But instead nonviolent resistance movements are being crushed. Any
kind of mass political mobilization or organization is being bought
off, or broken, or simply ignored.

Meanwhile, governments and the corporate media, and let's not forget
the film industry, lavish their time, attention, technology,
research, and admiration on war and terrorism. Violence has been
deified.

The message this sends is disturbing and dangerous: If you seek to
air a public grievance, violence is more effective than nonviolence.

As the rift between the rich and poor grows, as the need to
appropriate and control the world's resources to feed the great
capitalist machine becomes more urgent, the unrest will only
escalate.

For those of us who are on the wrong side of Empire, the humiliation
is becoming unbearable.

Each of the Iraqi children killed by the United States was our child.
Each of the prisoners tortured in Abu Ghraib was our comrade. Each of
their screams was ours. When they were humiliated, we were
humiliated. The U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq - mostly volunteers in
a poverty draft from small towns and poor urban neighborhoods - are
victims just as much as the Iraqis of the same horrendous process,
which asks them to die for a victory that will never be theirs.

The mandarins of the corporate world, the CEOs, the bankers, the
politicians, the judges and generals look down on us from on high and
shake their heads sternly. "There's no Alternative," they say. And
let slip the dogs of war.

Then, from the ruins of Afghanistan, from the rubble of Iraq and
Chechnya, from the streets of occupied Palestine and the mountains of
Kashmir, from the hills and plains of Colombia and the forests of
Andhra Pradesh and Assam comes the chilling reply: "There's no
alternative but terrorism." Terrorism. Armed struggle. Insurgency.
Call it what you want.

Terrorism is vicious, ugly, and dehumanizing for its perpetrators, as
well as its victims. But so is war. You could say that terrorism is
the privatization of war. Terrorists are the free marketers of war.
They are people who don't believe that the state has a monopoly on
the legitimate use of violence.

Human society is journeying to a terrible place.

Of course, there is an alternative to terrorism. It's called justice.

It's time to recognize that no amount of nuclear weapons or
full-spectrum dominance or daisy cutters or spurious governing
councils and loya jirgas can buy peace at the cost of justice.

The urge for hegemony and preponderance by some will be matched with
greater intensity by the longing for dignity and justice by others.

Exactly what form that battle takes, whether its beautiful or
bloodthirsty, depends on us.