Globalization of Dissent

IN CONVERSATION WITH DAVID BARSAMIAN, MAY 2003.

In March 2002, a pogrom was carried out against the Muslim population of Gujarat. You’ve written an essay on this entitled ‘Democracy: Who Is She When She Is at Home’. What happened in Gujarat?

In February 2002, the BJP was gearing up for elections in Uttar Pradesh. They had trundled out their favourite campaign issue, the building of the Ram temple in Ayodhya. Communal tension was at a fever pitch. People were travelling to Ayodhya by train to participate in the building of the temple. At the time, Gujarat was the only major state in India to have a BJP government. It had for some time been the laboratory in which Hindu fascism had been conducting an elaborate experiment. In late February, a train carrying belligerent VHP and Bajrang Dal activists was stopped by a mob outside the Godhra station. A whole compartment of the train was set on fire and fifty-eight people were burnt alive.¹

Nobody really knew who was responsbile for the carnage. Within hours, a meticulously planned pogrom was unleashed against the Muslim community. About 2,000 Muslims were killed. One hundred and fifty thousand were driven from their homes. Women were publicly gang-raped. Parents were bludgeoned to death in front of their children. The leaders of the mob had computer-generated lists marking out Muslim-owned shops, homes and businesses, which were burned to the ground. Muslim places of worship were desecrated. The mob was equipped with trucks loaded with thousands of gas cylinders that had been hoarded weeks in advance. The police did not merely protect the mob, but provided covering fire. Within months, Gujarat’s chief minister, Narendra Modi, announced proudly that he wanted to have early elections. He believed that the pogrom would win him Hindu hearts.

Modi was right, wasn’t he?

Modi’s re-election is something that has shaken many of us to the core of our beings. It’s one thing to have a dictator who commits genocide. It’s another thing to have an elected government with officials who have been accused of actively abetting mass murder being re-elected. Because then, all of us must bear the shame of that. All of us must bear some responsibility for that.

But thinking deeply about it, I don’t see that it’s all that different from the American public electing president after president who has killed and massacred and bombed people all over the world. A child asked me quite recently, ‘Is Bush better or is Modi better?’ I said, ‘Why are you asking?’ He said, ‘Because Modi killed his own people, and Bush is killing other people.’ That’s how clear children can be. Eventually, after thinking about it, I said, ‘Well, the people they killed are all people.’ We have to think like that.

What happened in Gujarat has raised very serious questions. When you speak to somebody and tell them that 2,000 Muslims were massacred on the streets of Gujarat, and women were raped, and pregnant women had their stomachs slit open, normal people, or people who are outside that situation, recoil in horror. But people inside that situation say things like, ‘They deserved it.’ And how do you deal with that?

It isn’t a coincidence that the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat happened after September 11. Gujarat is also one place where the toxic waste of the World Trade Centre is being dumped right now.² This waste is being dumped in Gujarat and then taken off to Ludhiana and places like that to be recycled. I think it’s quite a metaphor. The demonization of Muslims has also been given legitimacy by the world’s superpower, by the emperor himself. We are at a stage where democracy—this corrupted, scandalous version of democracy—is the problem. So much of what politicians do is with an eye on elections. Wars are fought as election campaigns. In India, Muslims are killed as part of election campaigns. In 1984, after the massacre of Sikhs in Delhi, the Congress Party won, hands down. We must ask ourselves very serious questions about this particular brand of democracy.

What was the response of the political class in India and the media to Modi being re-elected?

The media in India can roughly be divided into the national English media and the local regional-language newspapers. Typically, their understandings of similar events are completely different. The local Gujarati press was vehemently anti-Muslim. It manipulated events and supported what was happening. But the English press was very outspoken and condemnatory of what Modi was doing in Gujarat.

It’s important to understand that the killing in Gujarat had a long run-up. The climate was created soon after the BJP came to power and India conducted nuclear tests. This whole business of unfettered Hindu nationalism, where else was it going to lead?

The national press supported that idea from the beginning. It supported the Kargil war uncritically. The English-language press in India supports the project of corporate globalization fully. It has no time for dispossession and drought and farmers’ debts, the ravages that the corporate globalization project is wreaking on the poor of India. So to suddenly turn around and condemn the riots is a typical middle-class response. Let’s support everything that leads to the conditions in which the massacre takes place, but when the killing starts, you recoil in middle-class horror and say, ‘Oh, that’s not very nice. Can’t we be more civilized?’

Once Modi won the elections, the English-language press began to whip itself and say, ‘We got it wrong. Maybe the secularists are taking too much of an anti-Hindu position,’ and rubbish like that. They began to negotiate with the fascists, basically. The Chamber of Indian Industry apologized to Modi for having said things about the fact that genocide was bad for business. They promised to re-invest in Gujarat. So as soon as he won this election, everybody was busy negotiating and retracting. I’ve lost track of the number of references I’ve seen in the media to ‘Modi magic’.

Armed police personnel patrol the streets of Ahmedabad, Gujarat during the organized violence against Muslims in 2002. Photo courtesy Anandabazar Picture Archives.

What was the response of the so-called intellectual class, academics and writers, to Gujarat and Modi’s re-election?

I think everybody felt whipped and beaten, because Modi was gloating. Everybody felt as if they had taken a pounding, which they had, to an extent. I think it threw the opposition—I don’t mean the Congress Party when I say the opposition, but the critics of this kind of politics—into disarray, because they felt that, and they were made to feel that, they had no place in modern India. These voices of sanity and reason felt that they had no place.

Academics have this problem. If you are an economist, you are only an economist. If you are a sociologist, you are only a sociologist. If you are a historian, you’re only a historian. And now, to understand what’s going on, you must cross disciplines and you must see the connections between the dispossession and the despair created by corporate globalization, flowing into the bitterness of Partition, flowing into the rhetoric of cultural nationalism. All these things come together to create this situation.

Gujarat is also, ironically, the home state of Mahatma Gandhi. In 1930, there was a very interesting event there. He led a Salt March to the coastal town of Dandi. Why don’t you recount that, so that people have another kind of historical perspective?

Whatever critique one may or may not have of him, Gandhi’s understanding of politics and public imagination is unsurpassed, I would say, by any politician in world history. He knew how to strike at the heart of empire. The Salt March—the Dandi march—when Indians marched to the sea to make salt, was a strike against the salt tax. It wasn’t just a symbolic weekend march, but struck at the heart of the economic policies of the colonial regime. What has happened in the evolution of non-violent resistance is that it’s become more and more symbolic, and less and less real. When a symbol unmoors itself from what it symbolizes, it loses meaning. It becomes ineffective.

Fifteen million people marched against the war in Iraq on 15 February 2003, in perhaps the biggest display of public morality ever seen. It was fantastic. But it was symbolic. Governments of today have learned to deal with that. They know to wait out a demonstration or a march. They know the day after tomorrow, opinions can change, or be manipulated into changing. Unless civil disobedience becomes real, not symbolic, there is very little hope for change.

That’s a very important lesson that we need to learn from the civil disobedience and the non-violent resistance of the Indian independence struggle. It was fine political theatre, but it was never, ever merely symbolic. It was always a real strike against the economics of imperialism. What was swadeshi about? It was saying, ‘Don’t buy British products.’ It was saying, ‘Make your own yarn. Make your own salt. We have to take apart the economic machinery of empire now and strike at it.’ These marches and songs and meetings of today—they are beautiful, but they are often mostly for us. If all our energies go into organizing these things, then we don’t do any real damage to the establishment, to the empire.

There’s a lot of talk in the United States now about empire. A new book by British historian Niall Ferguson, Empire, celebrates the many positive aspects of imperialism, particularly of British rule. The jewel in the crown of Britain, of course, was colonial India.³

It’s rather staggering that people like Ferguson are touting the benefits of imperialism. By the middle of the eighteenth century, just about the time that the British took it over, India accounted for nearly 25 per cent of the world’s global trade. When the British left in 1947, this figure had dwindled to around 4 to 5 per cent. Much scholarly research has demonstrated that during British rule, India’s economy underwent a process of peasantization, where urban areas were ruralized, essentially.

Recently, travelling to the west, it’s the first time it’s even occurred to me that people can actually justify imperialism. Let me say categorically that—politically, socially, economically—there is no justification for colonialism. Next, these people will be justifying genocide or slavery. Weren’t they the foundations of the American empire?

Do you think that the people of South Africa, or anywhere on the continent of Africa, or India, or Pakistan are longing to be kicked around all over again? Is Ferguson aware of how many million people died in India in the late nineteenth century because of the drought and the famine while food and raw materials were being exported to England? How dare they even talk like this? It’s grotesque that anybody can sit down and write a reasoned book on something like this. It is nothing short of grotesque.

Thomas Friedman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times, has written that ‘America is in an imperial role here, now. Our security and standing in the world ride on our getting Iraq right.’⁴

Well, it isn’t doing it right, is it? But the point is that the justification for going to war against Iraq has been forgotten. The weapons of mass destruction have not been found. You were told in the United States that Iraq was going to annihilate you, just as Cuba was, and Nicaragua was, and El Salvador was, and all the tiny little countries of the world were. After the war, you were told, America was going to be secure. But today, after the war, the terrorist alerts keep being set to purple, or whatever the highest register is. And now you’re saying, ‘Al-Qaeda is in Iran, or maybe it’s in Syria, or maybe it’s in North Korea.’

The point is that any kind of justification, any kind of nonsense works because there isn’t any real media left in the United States. It’s just a kind of propaganda machine that spews out whatever suits the occasion and banks on people’s short memory span.

When you spoke at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in late January 2003, you were certain that the United States was going to attack Iraq. In fact, you said, ‘It’s more than clear that Bush is determined to go to war against Iraq, regardless of the facts—and regardless of international public opinion.’⁵

I don’t think you needed to be a genius to be certain. There is a strategy at work which has nothing to do with the propaganda that’s being put out. And when you start to see the pattern, then you have a sense of what is going to happen. After the attack on Afghanistan, you started to see the preparations for the next war against Iraq. And now they are laying the basis for even more wars.

I find it shocking that people should think that world public opinion should have changed because the United States ‘won’ the war. Did anybody think it wasn’t going to? Here is a country that is so ruthless in what it is prepared to do that it’s going to win every war that it fights, except if its own people do something about it. There isn’t any country that can fight a conventional war against US forces and win.

Talk about how war is viewed as a product to be marketed and sold to the consumers, in this case the American public.

Referring to the timing of the Iraq war, a Bush administration spokesperson said, ‘From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.’⁶ They were asking themselves, what’s the best season to introduce this new product? When should you start the ad campaign? When should you actually launch it? Today, the crossover between Hollywood and the US military is getting more and more promiscuous.

War is also an economic necessity now. A significant section of the American economy depends on the sale of weapons. There has to be a turnover. You can’t have cruise missiles lying around on the factory floor. The economies of Europe and the United States depend on the sale and manufacture of weapons. This is a huge imperative to go to war. Apart from this, the United States needs millions of barrels of oil a day to keep its bloated economy chugging along. It needs Iraq. It needs Venezuela.

What accounts for the brazenness of the Bush administration? For example, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence, was talking about Syria, saying it was ‘behaving badly’, like the headmaster wagging his finger at the bad student.⁷ How is this attitude seen outside the United States?

I think, in two ways. On the one hand, it’s seen as a kind of uncouth stupidity. On the other hand, it’s seen as just the insulting language of power. You speak like that because you can.

In an interview you did in the Socialist Worker, you said, ‘The greatest threat to the world today is not Saddam Hussein, it’s George Bush (joined at the hip to his new foreign secretary, Tony Blair).’⁸ Talk about Tony Blair. Why has he attached himself to American power with such fervour and vigour?

That’s a much more intriguing question than why the Bush regime is so brazen. The combination of stupidity, brutality and power is an answer to the first question. But why is Blair behaving the way he is? I’ve been thinking about it, and my understanding is that what has happened is that the American empire has metamorphosed from the British empire. The British empire has morphed into the American empire. Tony Blair wants to be part of empire because that’s where he thinks he belongs. That’s where his past, his country’s past, has been, and it’s a way of staying in the imperial game.

I was reading an article in the New York Times the other day that was appropriately called something like ‘Feeding Frenzy in Iraq’.⁹ It said that countries ‘representing their corporate interests’ are bidding for subcontracts from Bechtel and Halliburton. Among the countries that are petitioning Bechtel and Halliburton, Bush administration officials said that Britain has the best case, because it ‘shed blood in Iraq’. I wondered what they meant by that, because the little British blood that was shed was basically shed by Americans. And since they hadn’t specified whose blood was shed, I presume they mean that the British shed Iraqi blood in Iraq. So their status as co-murderers means that they ought to be given privileged access to these subcontracts.

The article went on to say that Lady Symons, who is the deputy leader of the House of Lords, was travelling in the United States with four British captains of industry. They were making the case that they should be given preference not only because they were co-murderers but because Britain’s had a long and continuous relationship with Iraq since imperial days, right up to the time of the sanctions, which means that they were trading with Iraq, were doing business in Iraq, through Saddam Hussein’s worst periods.

The idea that you’re actually trying to petition for privilege because you were once the imperial master of Iraq is unthinkable for those of us who come from former colonies, because we think of imperialism as rape. So the way the logic seems to work is, first you rape, then you kill, and then you petition to rape the corpse. It’s like necrophilia. On what grounds are these arguments even being made? And made without irony?

What factor does racism play in this construction of imperial power?

Racism plays the same part today as it did in colonial times. There isn’t any difference. I mean, the only people who are going to argue for the good side to imperialism are white people, people who were once masters, or Uncle Toms. I don’t think you’re going to find that argument being made by people in India, or people in South Africa, people in former colonies. The only ones who want colonialism back in its new avatar of neoliberalism are the former white masters and their old cohorts—the ‘native elites’—their point men then and now.

The whole rhetoric of ‘We need to bring democracy to Iraq’ is absurd when you think of the fact that the United States supported Saddam Hussein and made sure that he ruled with an iron fist for all those years. Then they used the sanctions to break the back of civil society. Then they made Iraq disarm. Then they attacked Iraq. And now they’ve taken over all its assets.

The people who supported the military attack on Iraq may concede today, ‘Well, those reasons that we gave perhaps are not valid. We can’t find the plutonium and uranium and biological and chemical weapons. Let’s say we concede those points. But, after all, Miss Roy, we’ve got rid of a terrible dictator. Aren’t the Iraqi people better off now?’

If that were the case, then why are they busy supporting dictators now all over central Asia? Why are they supporting the Saudi regime?

We’re told that ‘Saddam Hussein is a monster who must be stopped now. And only the United States can stop him.’ It’s an effective technique, this use of the urgent morality of the present to obscure the diabolical sins of the past and the malevolent plans for the future. This present ‘urgency’ can always be used to justify your past sins and your future sins. It’s a non-argument.

Islam is being targeted and demonized in much of the media, and also among what I can only describe as mullahs and ayatollahs here in the United States, people like Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, who called Islam ‘a very evil and wicked religion.’ Jerry Falwell said Mohammed was a ‘terrorist’. Jerry Vines, who is a very prominent preacher, described Mohammed as a ‘demon-obsessed paedophile’.¹⁰

This seems to integrate with a lot of rhetoric coming from the Hindu nationalists in India, about Islam. Vajpayee said recently, ‘Wherever Muslims are, they do not want to live peacefully.’¹¹

The mullahs of the Islamic world and the mullahs of the Hindu world and the mullahs of the Christian world are all on the same side. And we are against them all. I can tell you that, insult for insult, you will find the mullahs in Pakistan or in Afghanistan or in Iran saying the same things about Christianity. And you will find the mullahs in India and the RSS people in the Hindu right-wing saying the same things about each other. I see Praveen Togadia of the VHP and Paul Wolfowitz and John Ashcroft and Osama bin Laden and George Bush as being on the same side. These are artificial differences that we waste our time on, trying to figure out who is insulting who. They are all on the same side. And we are against them all.

You’ve travelled to the United States on several occasions. You give talks and you meet and talk with lots of people. Why do you think Americans have been so susceptible to the Bush propaganda, specifically about Iraq being such an imminent threat to the national security of the United States, and that Iraq was responsible for September 11, and that Iraq is connected to Al-Qaeda, when there is simply no empirical evidence to support any of those assumptions?

I think, on one level, the fact is that the American media is just like a corporate boardroom bulletin. But on a deeper level, why are Americans such a frightened people? After all, many of us routinely live with terrorism. If Iraq or El Salvador or Cuba is going to destroy America, then what is the point of all these weapons, these 400 billion dollars spent every year on weapons, if you are that vulnerable in the end? It doesn’t add up.

It’s 400 billion dollars a year, not including the Iraq war, which is a supplemental expenditure.

So what is it that makes a country with all these bombs and missiles and weapons the most frightened country and the most frightened people on earth? Why is it that people in a country like India, which has nothing in comparison, are so much less scared? Why do we live easier lives, more relaxed lives?

People are so isolated, and so alone, and so suspicious, and so competitive with each other, and so sure that they are about to be conned by their neighbour, or by their mother, or by their sister, or their grandmother. What’s the use of having 50 per cent of the world’s wealth, or whatever it is that you have, if you’re going to live this pathetic, terrified life?

Michael Moore’s documentary Bowling for Columbine explores this to some degree.

What is wonderful about Bowling for Columbine is that it’s accessible to ordinary people. It broke through the skin of mainstream media.

The language of the Left must become more accessible, must reach more people. We must acknowledge that if we don’t reach people, it’s our failure. Every success of Fox News is a failure for us. Every success of major corporate propaganda is our failure. It’s not enough to moan about it. We have to do something about it. Reach ordinary people, break the stranglehold of mainstream propaganda. It’s not enough to be intellectually pristine and self-righteous.

There is a growing independent media movement in the United States, and it’s connected with movements and organizations, such as Sarai.net in New Delhi, and Independent Media Centres all over the world. There are a lot of young people getting involved in the media who are frustrated with the corporate pablum that they receive, and they’re doing something about it. You’re in touch with some of these activists in India.

The fact that hundreds of thousands of people in the United States were out on the streets, marching against the war, was partly because of that independent media. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to walk out on the street on a weekend. One of the things that needs to be done is for the alternative media to reach a stage where the corporate media becomes irrelevant. That has to be the goal. Not that you attack it, but that you make it irrelevant, that you contextualize it.

How do you develop the ability to discern fact from fiction in approaching news from mainstream outlets?

I think the only way to do it is to follow the money. Who owns which newspaper? Who owns the television network? What are their interests? Assume that corporate media has an agenda. And so the least you can do is to cross-check a particular story with other sources of information that are independent. If you can do that, you can see the discrepancies. Compare, for example, the way the US media and the British media covers the same war, the same event. How does this differ from how Al Jazeera covers it? It’s not as if these other media don’t have an agenda. But if you look at the two, at least your head is not being messed with completely.

In the United States, there are a number of very well funded right-wing think tanks. And these think tanks provide many of the voices that are heard and seen in the media. For example, one of the most prominent is the American Enterprise Institute. Someone there—the holder of the Freedom Chair, incidentally—Michael Ledeen, said this, reported on the National Review online: ‘Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small, crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.’¹²

What can one say to that?

How are voices like this given such prominence in the media, while voices like Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn or Edward Said or Angela Davis and others are completely marginalized?

But that’s the project, isn’t it? That’s the Project for the New American Century. Why are we asking these questions or feeling surprised? We know that. And the brazenness of it is perhaps not such a bad thing. I’m for the brazenness, because at least it clarifies what is going on. And you know, you have to believe that eventually all empires founder, and this one will.

Beyond the immediate excitement of being with people from many, many countries, what value is there in gatherings like the World Social Forum? Earlier you suggested that maybe we need to move beyond the marches and the typical demonstrations.

There’s a tremendous value in the World Social Forum, and it has been central to making us feel that there is another world. It’s not just possible. It is there. But I think it’s important that we don’t sap all our energies in organizing this event. It’s an act of celebration of solidarity, but it’s for us. It’s not a strike against them. If you want to send out one million emails and enjoy the World Social Forum, you can, but let’s reserve our energies for the real fight.

And that real fight is waiting to happen now. We need to clearly demarcate the battle lines. We cannot take on empire in its entirety. We have to dismantle its working parts and take them on one by one. We can’t use the undirected spray of machine-gun fire. We need the cold precision of an assassin’s bullet. I don’t mean this literally. I am talking about non-violent resistance. We need to pick our targets and hit them, one by one. It’s not possible to take on empire in some huge, epic sense. Because we simply don’t have the kind of power or reach or equipment to do that. We need to have an agenda, and we need to direct it.

At a press conference in New York, the day before your Riverside Church speech, you said, ‘We have to harm them.’¹³ In what way can we harm them? Do we stop buying their cars? Do we stop travelling on their planes?

First of all, we have to understand that we cannot be pure. You can’t say, ‘Arundhati, if you are against empire, then why are you flying to America?’ Because we can’t do it in any virginal, pristine way. All of us are muddy. All of us are soiled by empire and included in it in some way. We can only do our best. But certainly I believe that, for instance, a great starting point would be to target a few companies that have been given these reconstruction contracts in Iraq and shut them down, just to show ourselves that we can do it, if nothing else.

If Bechtel or Halliburton was trying to establish some business in India, you would think that Indians should boycott them.

Absolutely—but also target their offices around the world, their other privatization projects around the world, target the CEOs, the members of the board, the shareholders, the partners, and let them know we will not allow them to profit off the occupation of Iraq. We need to disrupt business as usual.

The US civil rights movement was ignited in 1955 by a bus boycott in the city of Montgomery, Alabama.

That’s the thing. We need to be very specific now about what we have to do. Because we know the score. Enough of being right. We need to win.

You felt that the massive demonstrations on February 15 made a very powerful moral statement.

I think so. I think there was a huge difference between the display of public morality on the streets of the world and the vacuous, cynical arguments in the UN Security Council. We know all that talk about morality by old imperialists was rubbish. The minute war was announced, these supposed opponents of the war rushed to say, ‘I hope you win it.’ But I also think that the demonstrations and the peace movement really stripped down empire, which was very important. It stripped off the mask. It made it very clear what was going on. And if you look at general public perception of what the US government is about, it’s very different today. Not enough people knew what the US government was up to all these years. People who studied it knew. Foreign policy scholars knew. Ex-CIA people knew. But now it’s street talk.

The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, which formally lays out the doctrine of preemption actually has the statement in it that the events of September 11 presented the United States with ‘vast, new opportunities’.¹⁴

It did. Which is why I keep saying Bush and bin Laden are comrades in arms. But contained within those ‘opportunities’ are the seeds of destruction. The fact is that here is an empire that, unlike other empires, has weapons that could destroy the world several times over and has people at the helm of power who will not hesitate to use them.

What was the position of the Indian government on the attack on Iraq?

It was pretty inexcusable. There was a very subdued response to it in India. Because you see, the right-wing Indian government is trying very hard to align itself with the Israel—US axis.

What do you mean by that?

Ariel Sharon is coming to India to visit quite soon. And the rhetoric against Muslims in the United States locks in with the fascist rhetoric against Muslims in India. Meanwhile India and Pakistan are behaving like the begums of Sheikh Bush, competing for his attention.

Explain what ‘begum’ means.

A begum is part of the sheikh’s harem.

How much of the traditional Orientalism that Edward Said has written about plays a factor in shaping and forming public opinion about the East, or ‘them’, or ‘those people over there’?

I think outright racism would be a more accurate explanation. We are all expendable, easily expendable. Orientalism is a more gentle art. Crude racism powers all this.

You spoke in New York at the Riverside Church on May 13, 2003. How did you prepare for that, knowing that that church was where Martin Luther King gave his April 4, 1967 speech opposing the Vietnam war?

It was important to me to come to the United States and speak in that church. Apart from what I said in the talk, which is available as a text, there was a lot unsaid which was very political. A black woman from India speaking about America to an American audience in an American church. It’s always historically been the other way around. It’s always been white people coming to black countries to tell us about ourselves. And if anybody from there comes here, it’s only to tell you about us and what a bad time we’re having. But here something else is happening. Here citizens of an empire want to know what other people think of what that empire is doing. Globalization of dissent begins like that. That process is very, very important.

You’ve used the phrase ‘the chequebook and the cruise missile’. What do you mean by this?

Once you understand the process of corporate globalization, you have to see that what happened in Argentina, the devastation of Argentina by the IMF, is part of the same machine that is destroying Iraq. Both are efforts to break open and to control markets. And so Argentina is destroyed by the chequebook and Iraq is destroyed by the cruise missile. If the chequebook won’t work, the cruise missile will. Hell hath no fury like a market scorned.

W.B. Yeats lamented in one of his most famous poems that ‘the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity’. I think when it comes to you, it’s the exact opposite. You have that passionate intensity, and the total conviction. Thank you very much.

You’re welcome, David. I am always happy to be flattered [laughs].

‘If the chequebook won’t work, the cruise missile will. Hell hath no fury like a market scorned.’

‘The system of electoral democracy as it stands today is premised on a religious acceptance of the nation state, but the system of corporate globalization is not. The system of corporate globalization is premised on the fact that liquid capital can move through poor countries at an enormous scale, dictating the agendas, dictating economic policy in those countries by insinuating itself into those economies. Capital requires the coercive powers of the nation state to contain the revolt in the servants’ quarters. But it ensures that individual countries cannot stand up to the project of corporate globalization alone.’