It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Americans still believe “big government” represents the biggest threat to the U.S. in the future, but the 57% saying so is down from percentages near 70% between 2013 and 2016. At the same time, 37% of Americans say “big business” is most threatening, essentially tying the high in Gallup’s trend. Just 5% of U.S. adults regard “big labor” as the greatest threat.
The current results are based on a Dec. 1-15 Gallup poll. Gallup first asked Americans to assess the threat posed by government, business and labor in 1965 and has done so periodically since.
Government has always been identified as the biggest threat, although the margins over business and labor were smaller in the earlier years of the trend than they have been since the 1980s. By then, concerns about government had risen to the majority level, dipping below 50% only once. The exception came in 2002 amid corporate accounting scandals that plagued Enron and other companies, when 38% chose big business and 47% big government.
In the 1960s, more Americans identified big labor rather than big business as the biggest threat — but in the 1970s and 1980s, the two were about even, each averaging around 20%. Since the 1990s, big government has typically been the clear majority response, with no more than 11% naming big labor and at least 21% naming big business as the biggest threat to the U.S.
Fewer Independents, Democrats See Government as Top Threat
Democrats’ and independents’ views of which entity poses the greatest threat have changed substantially over the past decade, with both groups showing double-digit increases in the percentages naming big business as the biggest threat and double-digit decreases for big government. Although down from 67% in 2016, a majority of independents (55%) still cite big government, compared with 40% naming big business (up from 26%). But Democrats’ top mention has switched from government (51%) to business (56%).
Republicans’ opinions have not changed meaningfully since 2016; they overwhelmingly identify big government (77%) as the biggest threat.
Throughout the past decade, no more than 7% of Americans in any party group have named big labor as the biggest threat.
One in Three See ‘Big Tech’ as Greatest Threat When Included
In 1965, Gallup could not have foreseen the influence that technology would come to have on U.S. society. This year, Gallup asked an alternative version of the question that included “big technology” as a fourth choice. This modified version of the trend question was asked in December among a nationally representative online sample using the Gallup Panel.
When included, big technology is viewed as the biggest threat by 32% of U.S. adults, ranking second to big government at 45% and ahead of big business at 20%, with only 3% choosing big labor.
With big technology included, six in 10 Republicans regard big government as the biggest threat, while 27% choose big technology. Big government also edges out big technology, 43% to 34%, among independents. Democrats divide fairly evenly in saying that big government (35%), big technology (34%) and big business (29%) represent the biggest threat to the U.S. in the future.
Bottom Line
As they have for six decades, Americans perceive big government as a bigger threat to the U.S. in the future than either big business or big labor. However, fewer identify big government as the top threat than did so in the 2010s; instead, a higher percentage say big business is, with the 37% doing so essentially matching the record high for that response. But when big technology is added as a choice, it eclipses big business for second place, although it still trails big government by a considerable margin.
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Big Data Is a Bad Idea: Why AI Factory Farms Will Not Save Rural America
AI data centers have been added to the limited menu for economic development in marginalized US communities, but people in those communities have good reason to oppose them. A sign on a rural Michigan road opposes a planned $7 billion data center on southeast Michigan farm land in Saline, Michigan on December 1, 2025. (Photo by Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
One word—plastics. That was the golden grail that Dustin Hoffman learned about from some well-wisher in the movie The Graduate. I remember watching the film as a farm kid and thinking about the updated version I was being told by my guidance counselors—one word: computers. We are now in the midst of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” and the latest mantra is: artificial intelligence. Such free advice, though, could really be a costly warning in disguise.
Granted, there is a lot of poverty in the “richest” nation on Earth, and marginalized US communities often have few choices for economic (mal) development. It becomes a twisted game of pick your own poison: supermax prison, toxic waste dump, ethanol facility, tar sands pipeline… Now, AI data centers have been added to the limited menu. Someone recently shared a map of looming AI data centers across the world. It reminded me of how a tumor spreads and Edward Abbey’s quote that “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
The fact that Big Data has targeted Rural America for its latest mastitis should be no surprise. We have lots of available land to grab, thanks to the legacy of settler colonialism and family-farm foreclosure. Back in August I remember driving past Beaver Dam, Wisconsin and watching bulldozers flattening over 800 acres along Hwy 151 and my first hunch was: data center. Sure enough, the secretive $1 billion deal with Meta was finally revealed in a November press release. Just north of Madison in the town of DeForest, Blackstone subsidiary QTS Realty Trust is aiming to build another $12 billion data center on close to 1,600 acres. And if we need to free up more land for AI, we quaint rural folks could just abandon growing real Xmas trees and force people to buy plastic ones instead, as one Fox News “expert” suggested over the holidays. Former President Joe Biden visited Mt. Pleasant, Wisconsin in May 2024 to promote Microsoft’s new $3.3 billion 300+ acre AI campus on the former site of flat screen maker, Foxconn, that welcomed President Donald Trump for its groundbreaking back in 2018. Foxconn abandoned that $10 billion project and its 13,000 job promise, after getting millions in state subsidies and local tax deferrals.
The Microsoft AI complex in Mt. Pleasant will also require over 8 million gallons of water per year from Lake Michigan. We still have some clean water, though that may not last long thanks to agrochemical monocultures, CAFO manure dumping, and PFAS-laden sludge spreading. And AI certainly is thirsty—the Alliance for the Great Lakes noted in its August 2025 report that a hyperscale AI data center needs up to 365 million gallons of water to keep itself cool—that is as much water as is needed by 12,000 people! A recent investigative report by Bloomberg News found that over two-thirds of the AI data centers built since 2022 are in parts of the country already facing water stress. And it is really hard to drink data.
But is all the AI hype just another bubble about to burst? Rural communities (and public taxpayers) have been offered many “amazing” schemes in the past that ended up being just a “bait and switch”—another hollow promise.
In the Midwest we also have potential access to vast electricity (fracked natural gas, wind and solar farms, methane digesters), and relatively under-stressed high voltage grids (unlike California or Texas), though the loss of “cheaper” imported Canadian hydropower with the latest trade war could be a serious challenge. In 2023 the US had over a $2 billion electricity trade deficit vis-a-vis Canada. According to a recent Clean Wisconsin report, just two of our proposed AI data centers will require 3.9 gigawatts—1.5 times the current power demand of all 4.3 million homes in the state.
But, no worry, there are dilapidated US nuclear reactors with massive waste dumps that could be put back online such as Palisades in Michigan, despite opposition from environmental activists and family farmers. The Trump administration also just announced a $1 billion low-interest loan to reanimate Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania for the sake of AI. Until all that happens, though, regular ratepayers can expect a huge hike in their energy bills as Big Data has the market clout to siphon off what it needs first, especially as it colludes with utility monopolies. Many people in Wisconsin are already paying for $1+ billion in stranded assets—mostly defunct coal plants, as well as nuclear waste storage facilities—while utility investors continue to receive guaranteed dividends of 9-10%.
But is all the AI hype just another bubble about to burst? Rural communities (and public taxpayers) have been offered many “amazing” schemes in the past that ended up being just a “bait and switch”—another hollow promise. If we subsidize a massive data center, will the projected “market” for increasing algorithms actually come? Many within the AI industry don’t think so, and are now invoking the lessons we should have learned from the Enron scandal decades ago or the even worse sequel in the subprime mortgage-fueled financial meltdown. Corporate cheerleaders can be quite clever when it comes to inflating prices (and stocks) for goods and services that may not even exist, while hiding their massive debt obligations in a whole cascading series of shadowy shell subsidiaries and dishonest accounting shenanigans.
Many industry insiders are ringing alarm bells. “These models are being hyped up, and we’re investing more than we should,” said Daron Acemoglu, who won the 2024 Nobel Economics Prize, quoted in a recent NPR story about the current AI boom or bubble. OpenAI says it will spend $1.4 trillion on data centers over the next eight years, while Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are going to throw in another $400 billion. Meanwhile, just 3% of people who use AI now pay for it, and many are frantically trying to figure out how to turn off AI mode on their internet searches and to reject AI eavesdropping on their Zoom calls. Where is the real revenue going to come from to pay for all this AI speculation? The same NPR story notes that such a flood of leveraged capital is equal to every iPhone user on Earth forking over $250 to “enjoy” the benefits of AI—and “that’s not going to happen,” adds Paul Kedrosky, a venture capitalist who is now a research fellow at MIT’s Institute for the Digital Economy. Morgan Stanley estimates AI companies will shell out $3 trillion by 2028 for this data center buildout—but less than 50% of that money will come from them. Hmmm...
Special purpose vehicle (SPV) may sound like a fancy name for a retrofitted tractor, but that is how Big Data is creating a Potemkin Village to hide their Ponzi Scheme. Here is one example from Richland Parish, Louisiana where Meta is now building its Hyperion Data Center—a massive $27 billion project. A Wall Street outfit, Blue Owl, borrows $27 billion, using Meta’s future rent payments for a data center to back up its loan. Meta’s 20% “mortgage” on the facility gives them 100% control of the purported data crunching from the facility. This debt never shows up on Meta’s books and remains hidden from carefree investors and shallow analysts, but, like other synthetic financial instruments such as the now infamous mortgage backed security (MBS), the reality only comes home to roost when the house of cards collapses and Meta has to eventually pay off Blue Owl.
In the meantime, as the Louisiana Illuminator reports, the residents of Richland Parish (where 25% live below the poverty level) are bearing the brunt of all the real costs of having an AI factory farm. Dozens of crashes involving construction vehicles; damage to local roads; and massive future energy demands (three times that required for the entire city of New Orleans), which will entail new natural gas power plants to be built (subsidized by existing ratepayers even as fossil fuel-induced climate change floods the Louisiana delta). Beyond the initial building flurry, AI data centers are ultimately job poor. It just doesn’t take that many people to tend computers once they are built. As Meta’s VP, Brad Smith, admitted, the 250,000 square foot Hyperion data center may need 1,500 workers to build but barely 50 to operate. Beyond all the ballyhoo, the main reason a particular community is chosen to “host” one seems to be based upon the bought duplicity of elected officials and the excessive generosity of local taxpayers. Not a good cost-benefit analysis—unless you are Big Data.
And then there are the questionable kickback schemes between the suppliers of the technology and those owning the data centers. If you are maker of computer chips, would you not be tempted to fork over capital to a major buyer of your own products to ensure future demand? Nvidia just announced a $100 billion stake in OpenAI to help bankroll the data centers. In turn OpenAI signed a $300 billion deal with Oracle to actually build the AI data centers that will require Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs). OpenAI also signed a separate $6+ billion deal with former BitCoin miner, CoreWeave, which rents out internet cloud access (using Nvidia’s chips once again). This type of incestuous circular financing should raise eyebrows to anyone who studies business ethics—and perhaps remind others of how a toilet operates.
What is all this AI doing? Promoters will point to many innovations—faster screening for cancer cells, closer connection to far-flung relatives, precision application of fertilizers and pesticides, elimination of drudgery in the workplace through automation. A bright future indeed—or perhaps not?
The real issue is whether or not AI data centers are economically viable, socially appropriate, environmentally sustainable, and actually serve the public interest.
In August 2025, ProPublica reported that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had lost 20% of its staff devoted to food safety thanks to DOGE cuts. Inspection of food import facilities is now at a historic low even as our dependence on the rest of the world to feed us grows. But not to worry, the FDA announced in May that AI was coming to the rescue thanks to a large language model (LLM)—dubbed Elsa—that would be deployed alongside what’s left of its human staff to expedite their oversight work. Hopefully, Elsa knows melamine when it sees it. AI chatbots are also growing in popularity and available 24-7 to “talk or advise” people on all sorts of pressing issues—how to win more friends, how to cheat on this exam, how to make up fake legal opinions, even encouraging a teenager to commit suicide and suggesting to someone else that they murder their own parents.
But there is an even dirtier AI underbelly. Some have dubbed these AI slop, AI smut, and AI stazi—three 21st-century horsemen of the digital apocalypse. What is this all about? Well, a lot of these accelerating AI algorithms are actually devoted to selling “products” that many people do not want and would find objectionable, as well as providing “services” that undermine our basic freedoms. Slop (Merriam Webster’s word of 2025) is used to describe when AI generates internet content that is only meant to make money through advertising. Right now there are thousands of wannabe internet “creatives” all over the globe, watching “how-to videos” to manufacture AI social media to grab the eyeballs of US consumers. That cute puppy video you see on Instagram or that shocking “news” story you read on Facebook is not by accident—the goal is to monetize clicks per thousand (cost per mille, or CPM) where advertisers pay for how much their ad is viewed online. This is also why online content is often overly long (where is the actual recipe in this cooking blog?), since that increases ad scrolling. The average US consumer is now subject to between 6,000 and 10,000 ads per day—70% of which are online. For more on AI slop, visit: https://www.visibrain.com/blog/ai-slop-social-media.
An even worse virtual commodity is AI smut—literally algorithms creating pornography. This perverted version of AI scraps the internet for images (high school yearbooks, red carpet fashion shows, popular music concerts, street cam footage, etc.) and then uses “face swap” programs to create personalized hardcore rubbish. There is little if any accountability for this theft of public images and violation of personal privacy—at best those involved are “shamed” into taking down their AI sites after being exposed due to fears of liability and prosecution for child abuse. But that has hardly stopped this seedy AI subsector. Can you imagine your face or image being put into such a lucrative sexploitative scenario without your permission? At this point, there are hardly any internet police walking the beat in the virtual AI world. We don’t even have the right to be forgotten on the internet.
Which brings us to AI stazi—the updated version of the Cold War-era East German secret police. University of Wisconsin Madison just announced the creation of a College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence (CAI), in part thanks to a $140 million donation from Cisco. Few Bucky Badger fans know that 30 years ago they were used as guinea pigs while cheering at Camp Randall Stadium to help create facial recognition technology through a UW-Madison grant from the Department of Defense Applied Research Agency (DARPA). Visitors to the UW campus today will no doubt “enjoy” the automated license plate readers (ALRPs) owned by Flock Safety. According to an August 2025 Wisconsin Examiner expose, there are hundreds of Flock cameras across the state in use by law enforcement agencies, including Wisconsin county sheriff departments with active 287(g) cooperation agreements with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. No warrant is needed for law enforcement agencies to browse the national Flock database. In fact, agents have used Flock to track peaceful protesters, spy on spouses, or just stalk people they don’t like. To see where Flock cameras are near you, visit: www.deflock.me. Of course, Flock Security has outsourced its AI programming to cheaper (and more secure?) Filipino contractors. Similar AI spying networks such as Pegasus have been widely exposed and have become “bread and butter” for authoritarian regimes from Israel to Saudi Arabia. China and Russia have their own versions (Skynet, SORM, etc.). Thanks to the cozy relationship between Trump and Peter Thiel, the US-based AI mercenary outfit, Palantir, is now being redeployed for domestic surveillance—first revealed by Edward Snowden back in 2017.
The latest executive bluster from Trump is that states’ rights are out the window when it comes to regulating AI data centers—such federal preemption of local democratic control is part of the larger neoliberal “race to the bottom” forced-trade agenda. But the cat is already out of the bag as dozens of communities have successfully blocked AI data center projects and others are poised to do the same based upon their winning strategies. Better yet, this is a bipartisan grassroots organizing issue!
What is the best way to keep out an AI factory farm? No non-disclosure agreements (NDAs)! These are massive development schemes that could not exist without the approval and support of elected officials, so any agreement should not be secret. They can hardly claim to be providing a public good if they are not subject to transparency and oversight. No sweetheart deals! Big Data is among the wealthiest sectors of our current economy and does not need or deserve subsidies, discounted electric rates, tax increment financing, property tax holidays, or other incentives. It is a classic move of crony capitalism to privatize the benefits and socialize the costs. No regulatory loopholes! Given their huge demands for land, water, and energy, Big Data should not be allowed to cut legal corners and needs to follow all the rules of any other normal enterprise—full liability coverage, no special economic zones, consideration of cumulative impacts, protections for ratepayers, no unregulated toxic pollution or illegal water transfer in violation of the Clean Water Act or the Great Lakes Compact, etc. How much water your data center demands is hardly a “trade secret.”
And most important, don’t let Big Data boosters belittle your legitimate concerns as “neo-Luddite!” Everyone uses technology—even the Amish. The real issue is whether or not AI data centers are economically viable, socially appropriate, environmentally sustainable, and actually serve the public interest. People have good reasons to be wary and oppose them on all those fronts.
Image by Joe Mabel/Wikimediacommons, licensed via CC BY 4.0
We live in an America where those who control the levers of power potentially have knowledge of almost everything about the ordinary citizen while they operate clandestinely with little or no public scrutiny. In contrast, they have access not only to information such as our social media, but also our voting records, our medical histories and our financial records. In the world of power holders, what C. Wright Mills calls the “Higher Immorality” — the institutionally grounded moral corruption of those in power – is not an aberration. Rather, it is inherent in the institutional structures of power. The Jeffrey Epstein scandal is a perfect example of how the norms of this corruption are shielded behind a false veil of competence and moral superiority.
That someone like Epstein, whose ties to presidents, big finance, high tech billionaires, elite academics and Hollywood celebrities shielded him from legal responsibility speaks to “the higher immorality.” So do the duplicities and lies that Epstein regularly deployed to make those connections. Consider the relationship between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein through the lens of this higher immorality. Donald and Jeffrey were pals. They partied together, traveled together, ogled girls and young women together. But Trump now labels public outrage over Epstein’s crimes a distraction. It’s all a charade, he says, pumped up by Democrats to make us forget Trump’s vast accomplishments. Some leftist critics might agree with Trump, in that Epstein talk is a distraction from Trump’s extra-legal wars against immigrants and Venezuela, his corrupt business deals with crypto-currency billionaires, weaponization of government against universities, law firms, and his political enemies, and his mindless destruction of federal support for science. But exposure of immorality in the ruling class is more than a distraction. It points to the fundamental illegitimacy of ruling class claims to superiority of mind and ability, what conservative thinkers like to call “virtue.”
In his classic work, The Power Elite, published almost seventy-five years ago, Mills described how attenuation of morality at the top was a key feature of America’s irresponsible system of concentrated power. Though Mills tried to distance himself from Marx, in fact he elaborated on Marx’s condemnation of ruling class moral hypocrisy. The old German knew that economic, political and moral critique were inseparable because the defects of class rule were inseparable. Marx was not distracted when he observed that the bourgeoisie scorned communism as a system of mass prostitution, the communal appropriation of women. He insisted the opposite was true. It was the high and mighty who regularly traded wives, purchased the sexual labor of prostitutes, gathered mistresses, and trafficked in opium. For Marx, ruling class immorality was no distraction. It was a defining feature of ruling class life. Moral abominations in the bedroom were of a piece with its callous indifference to brutalities of slavery, the factory floor, child labor, the whole crushing impoverishment of daily life for the mass of the population.
Mills’ concept of the “the higher immorality” recaptured Marx’s sense that the higher immorality was not a matter of bad men caught in bad behavior. It was a matter of “corrupting institutions,” a “structural immorality” of corporate and governmental institutions whose class-based positions of command were as insulated from public view as their bedrooms. As Mills’ put it, “Within the corporate worlds of business, war-making and politics, the private conscience is attenuated – and the higher immorality is institutionalized” (The Power Elite, p. 343). Living atop what Thorstein Veblen described as the sheltered institutions of absentee ownership and power, the ruling class can ignore limits and disciplines imposed by scarcities of material life. Rulers enjoy a freedom to play by rules of their own, or by no rules at all. Long before the Trump-Epstein link, there were John Kennedy’s call girls followed by the lies and fabrications of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, not to mention the lies and fabrications of Enron, Lehman Brothers, Bernie Madoff, and Sam-Bankman Fried.
But today this sense of entitled invisibility is even more dramatically at odds with life below. For that entitled invisibility is structurally reversed for the mass of the population. Our every decision and choice is subject through social media to private surveillance, capture and control by the corporate titans of high tech. Today’s contradictions of visibility and invisibility mark the acute polarities of differential freedom and power that are the hallmarks of American society. While everything we do on the internet and social media is recorded by corporations, the leaders of those corporations enjoy a higher immunity from surveillance and responsibility. Theirs is the power to know. For the rest of us there is the utter inescapability from being known.
At this point in his second term, Donald Trump has probably pardoned more fraudsters than all prior presidents combined. The list of people Trump pardoned, who were either convicted or plead guilty to fraud charges, is extensive. Clearly, fraud is something that is not a concern for the guy sitting in the White House.
The story of fraud in Medicaid and other government programs in Minnesota is also not really news. It was investigated years ago under Biden and has already resulted in more than 60 people pleading guilty or being convicted.
And Trump has been just fine with public sector fraud in the past. The largest single biggest rip-off in U.S. history occurred under the Paycheck Protection Program created during the pandemic in Trump’s first term. The Inspector General of the Small Business Administration (SBA) estimated that there may have been as much as $200 billion in fraudulent payments in the program, which was administered by the SBA.
Hannibal Ware, the Inspector General who uncovered the fraud, who is Black, was fired by Donald Trump at the start of his second term. Linda McMahon, the head of the SBA under Trump, who is white, was picked by Trump to head the Department of Education in his current term.
The reality is that there will always be some fraud in major government programs, just like there is fraud in the private sector. The old-timers here will remember Enron and Worldcom and more recently all the fraud in the financial industry that fueled the housing bubble, whose collapse gave us the Great Recession and financial crisis.
When there is big money to be stolen, people will be there to steal it, and that applies to both the public and private sector. We will likely have some great fraud stories when the AI bubble collapses. To paraphrase Warren Buffet’s great line: when the tide goes out, we find who was swimming naked.
The question that people need to be asking about the Minneapolis fraud is why the Trump administration is yelling about it now? There is an obvious answer: Jeffrey Epstein.
The files are proving to be an even bigger morass for Trump that anyone could have imagined. He clearly was closely tied to the child sex trafficker for decades. That would be a bad enough story in any case, but it is made worse by the fact that the Epstein child sex trafficking ring has been a major theme for the right-wing influencers for years.
They have been pushing stories that had Bill and Hillary Clinton and various other Democratic luminaries at the center of it. Now, it turns out that their hero was Epstein friend Number One. We may never know whether or not Trump did anything illegal in his associations with Epstein, but it’s clear his ties were long and extensive.
And the Justice Department effort to conceal the Trump-Epstein connection is drowning in incompetence, starting with Attorney General Bondi’s famous claim last February that she had the Epstein files sitting on her desk. Now that we know that there are more than a million documents in the Epstein files, Bondi’s claim doesn’t seem very credible.
Trump’s full-court press to block Congress from mandating the release of the file also didn’t help. Nor did the ridiculous and inconsistent efforts at redacting Trump’s name and face from the files.
So, when things are going bad, Trump goes for the racism card. And in this case, he even gets to pick on immigrant Blacks. From the Trump perspective, it doesn’t get better than that.
When people hear about Minnesota Medicaid or childcare fraud they should be thinking about the Epstein files. This is what the story is about. The fraud stories are old news and already well-reported and were being investigated by Biden’s Justice Department.
What needs to be reported now is why Trump is so desperate to push such blatant racism. It looks bad even from a Trumpian perspective.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
Dean Baker is the senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC.
Saturday, December 27, 2025
Arundhati Roy on New Memoir “Mother Mary Comes to Me,” Gaza & Authoritarianism from India to U.S.
In this holiday special, we speak to the acclaimed Indian writer Arundhati Roy on her new memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me. The book focuses on her mother Mary Roy and how Arundhati was shaped by her, both as a source of terror and of inspiration. We also talk to Arundhati about Gaza and the rise of authoritarianism from India to the United States.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: In this Democracy Now! special, we’re joined by one of the world’s most acclaimed writers, Arundhati Roy, author of many books, including the novels The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Roy has been a frequent guest on Democracy Now! for over two decades, talking about her novels, as well as her nonfiction work and her activism. She’s been a vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy, from the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq to the U.S. arming of Israel.
In India, she has been repeatedly targeted by authorities for criticizing Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his far-right ruling BJP party. In August, authorities in Indian-occupied Kashmir banned a list of books, including her collection of essays titled Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction.
Earlier this year, Arundhati Roy published her new memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me. The critically acclaimed book focuses on her mother, the celebrated educator Mary Roy, and how Arundhati was shaped by her, both as a source of terror and of inspiration. The Times writes, quote, “In this unsparing yet darkly funny memoir, the prizewinning novelist captures the fierce, asthmatic, impossible, inspirational woman who shaped her as a writer and an activist — and left her emotionally bruised for a lifetime,” unquote.
In September, Democracy Now!‘s Nermeen Shaikh and I spoke to Arundhati Roy. We began the interview by asking her about the title of her book, which is based on the lyrics of The Beatles’ song “Let It Be.”
ARUNDHATI ROY: The title, I think it chose me. You know, The Beatles play a big part in the book somehow, even though it was a little after my — I mean, I was a little late for them, but I loved that music, and it gave me the sort of steel in my spine and the smile on my face to leave home, which I did when I was 18, for a whole host of reasons. But I did listen to “She’s Leaving Home” on a loop, you know, weeks before I left. And, of course, it was interesting, because the book was launched in Cochin in St. Teresa’s Girls’ College, and the hall, by chance, was called Mother Mary Hall. Then my brother sang, “Let It Be.” And I said, “Well, there are three Mother Marys here: One is the Virgin Mary, one is Paul McCartney’s mother, and the third is ours. And they are all very different.”
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, your first book, God of Small Things, is also dedicated to your mother. You wrote, “She loved me enough to let me go,” which your brother joked was the only bit of real fiction in the book.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Yes. Well, when I wrote The God of Small Things, you know, I had, of course, left home and lived as a adult for many years. I mean, I put myself through architecture school, working and all that. And we never — I mean, there was years of estrangement. She never asked why I left or what happened or anything. She didn’t need to, because we both knew. And I was aware that the — you know, she was still the principal of a school she founded in this small town, and for her to have a daughter leaving would have been something —
AMY GOODMAN: At the age of 16.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Yes, and it was a very complicated thing, The God of Small Things, too, you know, coming out in that town. So, I said we settled on a lie, a good one, which I crafted, and I said she loved me enough to let me go, which my brother jokes was the only piece of real fiction in the book. But, yeah, it was just — you know, all my life, I had to sort of manage this relationship with a woman who was amazing and also very, very dark, you know? And so, as I said, in order for her to shine her light on her students and generations of them to challenge a law, which eventually she won, and Christian women won equal inheritance rights.
AMY GOODMAN: Just talk about that for a minute, and then we’ll go into the internal, deeper, darker place. But what she was to India and to women?
ARUNDHATI ROY: So, she — I mean, she came from a very small community of people who live in Kerala called the Syrian Christians, very — let’s say, very — I won’t say elite, but, you know, a very protected, yeah, somewhat elite, you know, land-owning, for the most part, people, very conservative, very parochial. And then she married, outside of the community, my father, and then got divorced and came back. And she had no money and nowhere to go, and she was living in a little cottage outside of Kerala, which belonged to her rather cruel father, who had died by then. And her mother and brother — we were little. I was 3, and my brother was 4. And her mother and brother came and tried to evict us by saying that, according to the Travancore Christian Succession Act, women could inherit a fourth of what a son could, or 5,000 rupees, which is, you know, at that time, a little bit of money, but whichever is less — in effect, couldn’t inherit.
So, she — you know, she nurtured this mortification, and she waited for — she started — you know, once she came out of this poverty, she started a little school, and it became a huge success. It is a huge success. And when she had the means, she challenged the law and said it was unconstitutional. And eventually, it was struck down by the Supreme Court, and women, Christian women, were given equal inheritance rights. So it was revolutionary, but so was her school — and so is her school, a really amazing place, you know? So, I was always able to see this public figure, who was extraordinary, and, you know, there was some other story going on in private.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: I mean, there’s several incidents in the book. We want — I’ll go back to the things that you said earlier about your decision to leave home when you did, but your mother’s extremely strong personality, her courage. She was a radical feminist, bold and uncompromising, in perhaps all aspects of her life. But you — so, first, if you could give us a couple of examples of that from the book? But then, you write that the way that your mother treated your brother has, quote, “queered and complicated” — this is you writing — “queered and complicated my view of feminism forever, filled it with caveats.” So, if you could explain that for us, a couple of examples, and then what happened?
ARUNDHATI ROY: So, I mean, you know, when people label her like a radical feminist or something, those labels don’t sit well with her or me, because she was so eccentric and so nonrighteous about what she did, and she was such a wild character. So, I wouldn’t, you know, use those words to describe her. But, yes, she was an iconic person in feminist circles, because — especially because of the case that she won, less so because of the school, because fewer people know about the school. But to me, it’s as revolutionary. And when she — we lived in this little town where there was so much conservativeness and all kinds of passive and active violence against women. And she would just go into courtrooms, to hospitals, to places where she had heard, you know, women had been beaten up or raped or whatever, and she would try and tell them, “Look, there’s an option. You don’t have to be like this.” You know, so, it was — it was a wonder to watch that.
But at the same time, she was my — I mean, she had left my father because he was addicted to alcohol. I didn’t know my father ever, and — until I was about 25. And she would — she’d be very — she was hard on both of us, but especially on my brother. And so, there’s a part in the book where my brother was a little older than me, so he suffered the pain of losing his father or of having this crazy, violent, single parent, you know? And from being a really wonderful, excellent student, he just began to drop in his grades. And we were sent away to another school, because her school did not have classes up to, you know, class six and seven and so on. So we were sent away.
And there’s an incident where one night our report cards came, and we were both awake, and she came and took him at night to her room. And I followed and looked through the keyhole, and I saw — I saw her just beating him ’til the thing broke, and sort of shout — shouting in a whisper, because the school was also — our home was also the hostel for little children, and saying, “No son of mine can come with a report that says average student.” And then, in the morning, he came back to bed, and we both knew — we were awake. But in the morning, she came and hugged me and said, “You have a brilliant report.” And I just felt like I just hated myself. And I felt like — even now, I feel, you know, that if ever I’m sort of celebrated, there’s someone quiet being beaten in the other room.
And that, from being a very personal thing, has also become a very political thing. And I know that as my book comes out, what is going on in Gaza, you know, children are being starved. Hospitals are being bombed. A whole genocide is taking place in public light. And we have to continue to do our work, always cognizant of the fact that it’s not just one thing that’s happening to you. You know, many things are happening, and the quiet person is being beaten. Yes.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: I mean, one could say that, in fact, you dedicated your life, as a result, to being with those who are being beaten, or at least standing in solidarity with them.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Yeah, I mean, “dedicated” sounds a little pious. But for me, I think what happens is that once you’ve — once you’ve been unsafe in that safest place — I suppose the safest place is the mother. And once that is unsafe, safety is very hard to find again, and you’re constantly — you’re constantly aware of the unsafe, you know, constantly aware of that other thing that’s happening, and unable to sort of settle into safety in some way.
AMY GOODMAN: And yet, the way you describe how she beat your brother and then congratulated you, it is not as if you were the favored child. I mean, after your mom passed away a few years ago, and you were so wrecked by it, your brother said to you, “She treated nobody as badly as she treated you.” Talk about your relationship with your mother.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, both of us believe that of each other. You know, I think that she treated him worse, and he thinks she treated me worse. But the relationship was — you know what? I think what happened was, to me, I could see it almost like a chemical experiment, you know, like a chemical reaction, because she had left her husband, and she was living in this conservative community. She was being humiliated. She was being evicted. She was being, you know, whispered about. And all the anger that accumulated, the only safe harbor she had to unload it on was me and my brother, you know? And it’s — so, it’s such a patriarchal community, so they used to call us, in Malayalam, ”adrasillatha pilleru,” meaning the children with no address, because we didn’t have a home as such, you know, a parental place. And with me, I mean, she — I think she — you know, I came along at a time when her relationship with her husband was already over, so she didn’t want another child. And, I mean, now as an adult, I can understand it. But —
AMY GOODMAN: And she made it clear to you.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Yeah. She kept saying, “I wish I had dumped you in an orphanage,” and all this.
AMY GOODMAN: Or that she had had an abortion.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Yes. And then she — and at the same time, she also reinforced me by — you know, because it was made clear to me that I’m on the edge of this community, not at the bottom, but on the edge, and its reassurances were not for me, the arranged weddings and the protections and the whatever. So, she knew that I had to — I had to go, like I could not be there, you know? And she — in some ways, she prepared me, but sometimes it was harsh. Like, she just kept telling me, “I’m going to die,” because she was a very, very severe asthmatic. And so, there was this constant thing of “Any moment, I’m going to die.” And I was like her spare lung. I was like breathing for her, you know, and saying, “I’ll breathe for you.” And then, as I grew up, that sort of dependency obviously began to change. And for her, it was a hostile thing, you know?
And so, of course, like, there’s a part in my book where I say she taught me how to write, then she raged against the author I became, and she taught me to be free, and then she raged against my freedom. But she did — she did put that steel in my spine, you know? And she did teach me something in harsh ways, which did help me survive, you know, on my own in a city. You know, from Kerala to Delhi, it’s like three days and two nights by train, and you don’t speak Hindi, and you don’t know what’s going on. But at the same time, there was that sense of I’m just looking for a better life. I’m not looking to suffer here. You know, I’m looking for some joy. I’m looking for some happiness. I’m looking for something great to happen, not as an ambitious, but, you know, surely things are going to be better. You know, that’s why I left. And I say that in the book, not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her.
To me, the book was a writing challenge, you know? Like, can I — can I share with people a person that you simply cannot make up your mind about, you know? Because there are so many wonderful things and then terrible things and then wonderful things, and it just keeps turning over and over. I keep saying she’s like an airport with no runways, like you can never land your plane. And also, there are so many people who are people of — you know, who have a calling, whether they are musicians or whether they are politicians or whether they are poets or, you know, so many people who — whose primary concern may not have been their own children, you know? But in my case, my mother’s calling was other people’s children, you know, which was what made it a bit complicated for us, why we had to call her Mrs. Roy, because, you know, we were just students in her school and so on. But yeah, it was — it was continuously that process of, you know, being gifted something, and then being shredded, and then — you know, but learning to hold on to those gifts, you know, and not let them smash along with the shredding.
AMY GOODMAN: You not only called her Mrs. Roy in public, because she didn’t want you to seem favored, and you felt that maybe she was harsher on you and your brother so that you wouldn’t seem favored, but you also called her Mrs. Roy privately.
ARUNDHATI ROY: But we didn’t have any private, you see, because what happened was that she started a school initially in the rented halls of Kottayam Rotary Club. We had to go with brooms every day and sweep up all the men’s cigarette stubs and wash all their glasses and put them away, put down these little tables. And that was the school. And then, when the school started doing better, she rented a little house nearby and started a hostel. So, there was no home as such. I never, actually, in my entire life with her, never lived in a home, because it was always the school. There was no private. I left home and, many years later, came back, and then she had built herself a home, which was not my home, you know? So there was no private. We did have to just — private was public. And all this anger and humiliation, therefore, happened in public. You know, that was the problem. It wasn’t behind closed doors.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, I mean, you said — and this is, of course, you say it in the book — that you left home not because you didn’t love your mother, but so that you could continue to love her. And I don’t know, the book itself, it seems — I mean, the writing of it — and again, this is my reading — the writing of it, the recounting of it, is a means of both relinquishing something of your relationship to her, while also maintaining the greatest intimacy with certain aspects of her, because this split — and it is a split, because it goes from one extreme to another — wouldn’t necessarily result in a book that is so close to her, not only in dialogue, but — I don’t know. There’s something in the book.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Emotionally.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Yeah.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, you know, it’s interesting, I think, that, you know, I was thinking — all of it happened instinctively, but the release of the book in Cochin, taking all my publishers from New York and London and everywhere who had come to Kerala to the school, there was my brother sharing the stage with me, even though, you know, we had very different — like, he has a different anger towards her. Mine is so ambiguous, and his is clearer, more settled in some ways. And I was thinking, “Why did I do it?” You know? And I think it was because it’s not just for me. All this was hidden in plain sight. Like, everybody knew what was going on. But it wasn’t spoken about. And somehow, it just felt like everybody just felt, “OK. It’s OK, you know? We can — we can all celebrate her, but we don’t have to pretend that what happened didn’t happen.”
And I actually called the teachers in the school before the book came out. I said, “You know, there’s a difference between hagiography and literature, coming soon to a theater near you.” It’s literature, and it isn’t going to diminish her or the school at all. But I just feel that the world also needs to know about this complex woman and the fact that you don’t have to be — I mean, there’s so much pressure on women to be perfect mothers, perfect daughters, perfectly obedient, perfectly nice, perfectly — you know, my mother was just unvarnishedly her. And that, I think, is a relief for many women, you know?
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about writing this book after your mother died. And you don’t like to use the word “abuse,” though clearly today it would be seen very much in those terms. Your brother would certainly use that term. And what you most learned about yourself and your relationship, as you talk about two women also, most of your life with your mother. She died at the age of —
ARUNDHATI ROY: Eighty-nine.
AMY GOODMAN: — 89, even though she was a severe asthmatic. Most of your life, the two of you were women.
ARUNDHATI ROY: I didn’t learn, honestly — I mean, like, I didn’t learn anything about myself or about this relationship in the process of writing the book, because I already knew. I had already lived through it, talked about it. From the time I was 3 years old, I had had to be this person who disassociated from myself. Like I think I said in some interview, one half of me was taking the hits and the love and the instructions, and one half was taking notes. And so, it’s not that I set out to learn something or that it was therapeutic for me to write this book. Nothing like that.
But it was — somehow, it was a challenge to the craft of writing, like, “Can I — can I do this? You know, can I try to share her with people in all her various aspects?” Because that was what she was, this incredibly unmediated person, you know? And I don’t use those words, only because they may be true or not true, but, you know, they quickly label someone and flatten everything into some sort of acceptable language, and then we all sort of try to fit into that language, whereas, for me, language is something very, very, very important, you know?
AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati Roy, author of the new memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me. Coming up, Arundhati will read from her book and talk about the rise of authoritarianism, from India to the United States, and more.
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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. In this holiday special, we’re continuing our conversation with Arundhati Roy, author of the new memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me. I interviewed her in September with Democracy Now!’s Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: I mean, you write in the first few pages of the book — and this captures a little bit of the ambivalence, as well as this conversation, I think — you write, quote, “Perhaps what I am about to write is a betrayal of my younger self by the person I have become. If so, it’s no small sin. But I’m in no position to be the judge of that.” So, did you mean — well, why don’t you just explain what precisely you meant by that, and, you know, what people can learn from it?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, what I meant was that, you know, to leave home at the age of 16, 17, 18 — I mean, it was like in stages, and 18 was the final goodbye, you know. But, obviously, you know, it wasn’t — I mean, obviously, at that time, I wasn’t the person who — the person that I am now, who hasn’t broken or ended up in prison or, you know, on drugs or something. And so, all those risks were there when I left, you know? And so, for me, perhaps there’s a sort of calmer person remembering that jagged younger person, you know. So, I don’t know whether I’m betraying that jagged younger person because I landed on my feet. And what would this book have been, had I not? You know?
AMY GOODMAN: I’d like you to read something from your book, Mother Mary Comes to Me. We’re talking to Arundhati Roy, the great writer, the activist. Her new book, Mother Mary Comes to Me, is just out. It is a memoir.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Often people ask me about — like you just did, you know, about the therapeutic process, or whether there was one while I was writing this. But for me, it was really, you know, all these things that were happening to me and the fact that we all live in this multilingual world. My father’s from Bengal. My mother’s from Kerala. I’m born in Shillong. I studied in Delhi, in Tamil Nadu for a while. So, language was like — how do you describe this multilingual world? Not for any reason of writing a great book, but just for speaking to yourself about what was happening to you, you know? So, I want to just read a little bit about my search for language, because, to me, that search was what resulted in everything I wrote, plus this book.
So, “All through school I did consistently badly in English language and literature. I never understood the rules. Mrs. Roy would slash through my essays and compositions, mark me three out of ten, and write comments like Horrible. Nonsense. And she was right — they were complete and utter rubbish. Even then I knew that the language I wrote in was not mine. And by mine I don’t mean mother tongue, and by language I don’t mean English, Hindi, or Malayalam. I mean a writer’s language. Language that I used, not language that used me. A language in which I could describe my multilingual world to myself. I knew even then that language was outside me, not inside me. It would not come to me on its own. I needed to hunt it down like prey. Disembowel it, eat it. And when I did, I knew that language, my language, would ease the way blood flowed through my body. It was out there somewhere, a live language-animal, a striped and spotted thing, grazing, waiting for me the predator. That was the law of my jungle. It wasn’t a nonviolent, vegetarian dream.”
NERMEEN SHAIKH: That’s beautiful. That’s beautiful. Now, a predator looking for a language-animal. But it’s not just one language you found, because the language in God of Small Things, the language in Ministry of Utmost Happiness and the language in Mother Mary Comes to Me, would you say — I mean, you can see something, but it’s not uniform.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Yes, it’s — you know, everything — for me, everything I choose to write, whether it was The God of Small Things, or whether it’s every single political essay, or whether “Walking with the Comrades,” or whether it was the essay on the dams, or Mother Mary Comes to Me, the first thing is to search for the language. You know, the first thing is to search for the language, the structure and how does — how do I — how do I create this universe, you know? So, that’s my enterprise when I write, you know?
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the difference between writing fiction and nonfiction. You had gotten away from fiction for a while. You were deeply involved in politics in Kashmir. And what it means to be an activist and to speak out in India? And then we want to take it to what it means to come here, to go from Modiland to Trumpland.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, you know, honestly, Amy, there is a part in this book where I make little jokes about the fact that people call me an activist, because I say this is what writers do. You know, this is what writers have done through the ages. But now we are being domesticated and made to live on best-seller lists and literature festivals, and therefore a writer that writes politically or writes about what’s going on in her world isn’t a writer, but a writer-activist, you know? But to me, that reduces the scope and the power of literature, you know?
So, for me, as I said, you know, everything that I do has to do with what is the most effective way of communicating what I want to communicate. Like, is it an essay? Is it a book of fiction? Nothing is less political than the other thing. And, you know, people often pit my nonfiction against my fiction. And my most beloved writer, John Berger, who wrote Ways of Seeing, of course, famously, which all of us grew up on, he once — I didn’t know him, and I saw this fax coming through in those days, the fax machine, and he said, “Your fiction and your nonfiction, they walk you through the world like your two legs.” You know? And I loved him for understanding that, to me, they were not — they were separate artistic enterprises, but they were not separate political enterprises. They were not separate silos. And I just — you know, for me, it was always just searching — and cinema. I mean, before that, I was working in film and architecture, too. You know, all these things, they are not separate for me. They are like layers and layers, which make me this sedimentary rock, you know?
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Just to go back to the book, this book, more specifically, you said, you know, that this is — that it may have been the question of whether it was a betrayal of your younger self or not. In part, it’s informed by the fact that you did not — you were able to write this book because you did not, though there was a risk, end up on drugs or broken, etc., after you left home when you were so young. That certainly didn’t happen. But you do have a certain — the impact of this childhood on your intimate relationships, as you recount them. You mentioned this in passing right now, that one of the lessons you learned — and you say it a couple of times in the book — one of the lessons you learned as a child was that the safest place can be the most dangerous. And as an adult, even when the safest place was the safest, you experienced it as dangerous, or made it so.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Yeah, that’s — that’s a very hard thing to cope with and deal with, because that was true for me. The safest place was the most dangerous. And then, you just — you just don’t trust safety. Even when it’s offered to you, you don’t trust it, you know? And I had — obviously, apart from everything else, there was massive financial insecurity, and I spent a great deal of my youth just thinking about money. I had no ambitions. I just was like, “How am I getting through this week, or how am I getting through the next week?” And then, you know — and then came a stage when I wrote The God of Small Things, and I had more money than I wanted or needed. And then I thought about money just the same amount, but in a different way, like “How do you share it? How do you deploy it politically?” and all of this.
And I naturally gravitate towards the unsafe, you know? Someone asked me, you know, “How do you keep this conversation going with your childhood?” And I said, “It’s because I was a very adult child, and maybe there’s something childish about me as an adult.” But that communication is always open, and you always got your eye on those who are unsafe, you know? And so, there’s one part of me that, I suppose, moves towards trying to make it less bad for them, or trying to — trying to use, especially, you know, the money that comes from being a writer whose books sell a lot, to help others do the work they really want to do, which nobody would fund or, you know, which are not sort of NGOized and foundationized and corporatized and, you know, sort of what we call ”paltu sher,” like making people into a tiger on a leash, pretend, pretend dangerous, you know? But…
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk — speaking of danger, although it’s not exactly in the same context, talk about what it has been like to write, to speak out, to be politically involved, as you’ve been for decades, under Narendra Modi. What is happening in India right now, the crackdown on dissent? And then we’ll talk about your views and observations about the United States.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, let’s say that what is happening in the United States today happened to us in 2014, you know. And I often say the attempted coup of January 6th over here succeeded in India, and the people in antlers and furs actually rule us. You know, it is so. And today, the problem is that it’s not just the regime, but that poison has actually seeped down into the population. And so, you have a situation where people are policing people. People are lynching people. Thousands of people can come out on the street with swords and call for the rape or the death of Muslims. And it’s all getting normalized, you know? You watch lynching, and it’s uploaded on YouTube.
And people who actually speak up are in jail. There’s a lot of that in this book. You know, a friend of mine who was put into prison for 10 years and then acquitted, he was almost completely paralyzed when he went in, a professor of literature — acquitted, saying that he should not have spent one day in prison. But 10 years he spent, came out, and six months later, he was dead, because his body just had lost its resilience, you know?
So, we’re in a — we’re in a nightmare that now is just normalized, and nobody even thinks of it as much of a nightmare, which is the most dangerous thing. You know, you have — if you have protests in the United States by so many people who are disturbed about Gaza, the police, you know, end it. But in India, once a friend of Palestine, there have been no protests. And there are — you know, 200 people show up. The police don’t stop it. The Hindu right wing comes out and stops it, you know. So, “How do you unpoison this river?” Is the question.
AMY GOODMAN: And explain Narendra Modi’s relationship with this Hindu right.
ARUNDHATI ROY: So, he belonged to an organization called the RSS, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which is now going to celebrate its 100th year this year. It is an organization that believed that India should be declared a Hindu nation, and Hindus should be its first citizens. And the political party that Modi is the head of, BJP, it’s just the front desk of the RSS, which has worked very, very hard, I have to say, in education and in culture, in agriculture, in — it has organization. It has hundreds of thousands of volunteers, they call themselves, you know? And it has penetrated every institution in India.
And so, when I say the same thing happened to us in 2014, it’s so unnerving, because you think, “Do they have a real, physical playbook, or is this just how this kind of fascism works?” You know, the attack on universities, the attack on intellectuals, the attack on citizenship, the attack on the economy, the changing of history, the reversing of any kind of moves on social justice. You know, it’s so similar, except that in India it’s, first of all, much more organized, because it’s a 100-year-old organization.
And second of all, although I know that, you know, Democracy Now! and so many other non-mainstream channels rage against the American mainstream, it’s nothing compared to what the media in India has done. You know, the media in India has been criminal. I mean, seriously, they should be tried in front of a war tribunal for the violence that they have endorsed, for the poison they have intravenously dripped into people, for the TV anchors behaving like captains of lynch mobs, for the fake news, for the absolutely unforgivable decades of support, where, you know, corporate news channels — so, the fascism is completely underwritten by Indian corporations, and has been, because they own all the media. You know, they own — like, some of them own 20 channels — 24-hour news channels, you know?
NERMEEN SHAIKH: You mentioned — and this is actually one of the most, at least on the global stage, one of the most dramatic reversals in India’s policy, which is no longer backing Palestine, which goes against, I mean, decades of India’s position. So, let’s just talk about, in fact, what’s happening in Palestine today, which you have also spoken out about and been deeply critical about Israel’s war on Gaza, deemed now by most international legal and human rights organizations to be genocide. So, if you could, I don’t know, just respond to what’s happening in Gaza, and the response, the split, what appears to be a split, among most countries in the Global South — that is, the Global South on one side — and the Global North, although now it seems there are at least some countries shifting their position?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Look at the psychology that is being forced upon us. We are, all of us, able to reach at night for an image of a child starving or a person being blown up in Gaza easier than reaching for a glass of water. And we are helpless. We are able to do nothing more than keep speaking about it.
And I’ve come to a stage where I feel humiliated to have to discuss it, because what is there to discuss? What is there to discuss when you’re murdering children, destroying hospitals, destroying universities, murdering journalists, and boasting about it, boasting about it? And everybody’s sort of ambiguous — I mean, what we are witnessing also is, I think, there are surveys that say that almost 90% of the population of the world wants this to stop, but there is no connection between democratically elected governments and the will of the people. It’s ended. So, the whole charade of Western liberal democracy is as much of a corpse under the rubble as the tens of thousands of Palestinians.
AMY GOODMAN: The trajectory you see? I remember you standing in the iconic church, Riverside Church, giving your speech against President George W. Bush invading Iraq, and what that means, and the level of global revulsion, the mass protest of millions, and yet still it happened. And where you see us today, and whether you hold out any hope?
ARUNDHATI ROY: One of my — oh, one of the books that you mentioned of mine, Azadi, it has been banned by the Indian government. And we are in this process of living through a time when everyone thinks we have free speech, but we are actually being policed in such crazy ways. You know, the internet is switched off by any government whenever they want to, and so on. But —
AMY GOODMAN: Wasn’t it just recently banned?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Yes, yes.
AMY GOODMAN:Azadi: Fascism, Fiction, and Freedom in the Time of the Virus.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Yes. But, you see, one of — one of my books of essays has been dedicated to those who have learned to divorce reason from hope. And we have to hope. We have to be unreasonable, and we have to hope, and we have to do what we have to do, you know? I can’t — I don’t want to — I don’t want to sound like some cute, you know, person saying, “Oh, everything will be all right.” But at the same time, I mean, the end of my talk about Alaa Abd El-Fattah in London a few months ago was that it can’t — it can’t continue like this. I mean, Israel, yes, it has devastated Gaza, but it has devastated itself, too. It is reviled in the eyes of the world for what it has done, you know? And it has also — I’m sure that all the young people that committed those horrible crimes, one day it will — it will destroy them, you know?
AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati Roy, author of her new memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me.Email
Arundhati Roy (born November 24, 1961) is an Indian novelist, activist and a world citizen. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her first novel The God of Small Things. Roy was born in Shillong, Meghalaya to a Keralite Syrian Christian mother and a Bengali Hindu father, a tea planter by profession. She spent her childhood in Aymanam, in Kerala, schooling in Corpus Christi. She left Kerala for Delhi at age 16, and embarked on a homeless lifestyle, staying in a small hut with a tin roof within the walls of Delhi's Feroz Shah Kotla and making a living selling empty bottles. She then proceeded to study architecture at the Delhi School of Architecture, where she met her first husband, the architect Gerard Da Cunha.The God of Small Things is the only novel written by Roy. Since winning the Booker Prize, she has concentrated her writing on political issues. These include the Narmada Dam project, India's Nuclear Weapons, corrupt power company Enron's activities in India. She is a figure-head of the anti-globalization/alter-globalization movement and a vehement critic of neo-imperialism.In response to India's testing of nuclear weapons in Pokhran, Rajasthan, Roy wrote The End of Imagination, a critique of the Indian government's nuclear policies. It was published in her collection The Cost of Living, in which she also crusaded against India's massive hydroelectric dam projects in the central and western states of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. She has since devoted herself solely to nonfiction and politics, publishing two more collections of essays as well as working for social causes.Roy was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in May 2004 for her work in social campaigns and advocacy of non-violence.In June 2005 she took part in the World Tribunal on Iraq. In January 2006 she was awarded the Sahitya Akademi award for her collection of essays, 'The Algebra of Infinite Justice', but declined to accept it.
