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• War Talk
Arundhati Roy

South End Press, 2003 - 152 pages

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   highly recommended  highly recommended



Arundhati Roy is a great speaker and essayist but she needs to tone down the anti-Americanism:

I first want to start off this review by saying that "I love America." I don't love, or condone the malicious acts that iniquitous individuals in our government have committed in the past and are still committing today, but I love my country. I think sometimes individuals such as Arundhati seem to forget the good that has come out of America's struggle. Thomas Jefferson said, "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance." And there are many Americans that are vigilant today. Individuals such as Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy and Milton William Cooper have died for the cause of vigilant libertarianism, which I think many of us forget from time to time.
What gets me in angst is that individuals such as Arundhati pontificate about the evils in our government, but fail to separate the people from the government, and this failure has a tendency to lead people into contemplating the wrong conclusions.
A case in point: Arundhati wrote an introduction to Noam Chomsky's book "For Reason of State"(which is reprinted in this book) and in it she says, "How has the United States survived its terrible past and emerged smelling so sweet? Not by owning up to it [in reference to the American Indian Wars], not by making reparations, not by apologizing to black Americans or native Americans, and certainly not by changing its ways. Like most other countries, the United States has rewritten its history. But what sets the United States apart from other countries, and puts it way ahead in the race, is that it has enlisted the services of the most powerful, most successful publicity firm in the world: Hollywood."
Now here where her diatribe suffers a syllogistic dilemma; the United States is a country not a political institution. Governments are political institutions entrusted to run a country and (so-called) qualified individuals are placed in-charge of running these institutions in the interest of the people.
But we must remember that sometimes-corrupt individuals egregiously take advantage of governments. This is known as Machiavellianism.
So, to put it in layman's terms, the inquiry is, who are the people running the government? And what are their individual crimes? When making arguments such as this, one has to identify the perpetrators of the crimes in question.
Perpetrators: meaning the people who committed the criminal acts!
Arundhati Roy (like many others) commits a dubious deed. Which is, she doesn't name names. Accusations without naming the accused are vapid complaints.

{{{GIVE US THE NAMES OF THE PERPATRATORS IN QUESTION!}}}
That's all I'm trying to say.

Furthermore, insofar as her remark about the U.S. rewriting history, the U.S. has not rewritten history. U.S. history is in abundance; it's just based on a litany of interpretations and opinions that cause one to resort to syllogisms to delineate the axiomatic conclusions. There are no absolute truths in history, that's just a fact considering the world governments' conspiracies that are hidden from public scrutiny. But we can come to some semblance of the truth by going to the library and reading books or researching on-line.
Now, if she wanted to point out that the U.S. educational system is mendacious with its ad hominems she'd be totally correct. So, then why doesn't she identify the individuals who own and control the educational institutions in question? Always ask yourself these questions when reading books like this. Don't ever take anything anyone says at face value.
And about her Hollywood comment: institutionalized-Hollywood is part of the governmental conspiracy, not part of the American people. The people that control, abuse and manipulate the government are the ones who own Hollywood. So the government never enlisted Hollywood because institutionalized-Hollywood has always been apart of the conspiracy.

Here's another remark she makes without thinking it through. "Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons. They're usually fought for hegemony, for business. And of course, there's the business of war." If you read her entire account you'll see where she's going with this particular argument since she is referring to U.S. oil/war profiteering, but to say that wars are never fought altruistically is absurd, it depends on whose side you're on. There are noble causes, remember Nat Turner's "Great Slave Rebellion," Osceola and "the Seminole Wars", or "Shay's Rebellion." Yes, there are antagonist then there's the opposition who'll stand recalcitrant to antagonistic hegemony, (in other words, heroes who are ready to stand up against the opposition.)

Also, on page-50 she said, "To call someone anti-American, indeed to be anti-American (or for the matter anti-Indian, or anti-Timbuktuan) is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination. An inability to see the world in terms other than those that the establishment has set out for you: If you're not a Bushie, you're a Taliban. If you don't love us, you hate us. If you're not Good, you're Evil. If you're not with us, you're with the terrorist." She then said, "I too made the mistake of scoffing at this post-September 11th rhetoric, dismissing it as foolish and arrogant. I've realized that it's not foolish at all. It's actually a canny recruitment drive for a misconceived, dangerous war." Her statement rings so true, but if she really believes that then why does she speak in absolutes and generality instead of naming the accused.
This book has a lot of faults, which is why what I'm going to say is in incongruity. I enjoyed this book. Arundhati Roy is an extremely articulate speaker and writer who I think is sincere about being the voice of the downtrodden. I just think she should be more mindful of what she says and start charging individual perpetrators with war crimes instead of marginalizing an entire nation when discussing world affairs. Anyhow, I'm looking forward to more of her writing in the future because I believe she has a good heart and means well.







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Thought-provoking and disturbing

Whether or not you agree with Ms. Roy, reading her book will provoke you, and thus, to me, it is worth-while. It is particularly incendiary if you a regular American living a regular life. Ms. Roy spares few in allotting responsibility for the troubles of the world's poor and war-stricken. I did find her somewhat anti-American, but then, I'm biased.

Definitely take a look. Ms. Roy is extremely readable. I loved God of Small Things, and though I normally don't read political non-fiction, I thoroughly enjoyed this book.









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Urgent And Powerful

"War Talk" is an urgent message to the world from one of the great activists of our time, India's Arundhati Roy. In this powerful collection of essays, Roy reflects on the state of the world in the "War On Terror" era and on the disastrous measures undertaken by the Indian government in regards to Muslims and other minorities. This book is a journey through the world as Roy sees it, experiences it. She is of course famous for her novel "The God Of Small Things," and here she achieves the same kind of poetry and cultural insight, she forms images with words, feelings with phrases. Roy chronicles with chilling detail massacres carried out in India against Muslims by radical right-wing government forces and forces us to confront our own government's hijacking by radical religious elements. The great piece in the book is "Come September," a powerful speech Roy delivered in 2002 that is a perfect expression of the post-9/11 world. She reminds us that we are not alone in the world when it comes to being attacked by terrorists, and that we have exported violence ourselves. Roy points out that September 11 is also the anniversary of the U.S.-backed coup in Chile against the elected government of Salvador Allende. Allende was killed and the fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet took power and opened concentration camps and torture chambers through-out Chile. There is a beautiful style to the way Roy deconstructs language and terms, making us exam official doctrine for what it is. She writes a wonderful essay on Noam Chomsky which praises Chomsky's efforts and in a broader sense covers our need to analyze and question media. "War Talk" is a warning on a world being abused by neo-liberalism and radical capitalism which Roy believes will collapse in the same style as Soviet communism. In striking passages she imagines a world consumed in nuclear war, imagining a radioactive landscape where her loved ones and her favorite things have perished under a mushroom cloud, a warning to us all. One finds a sense of cultural unity here, when Roy describes the problems India faces we realize many are not so different from our own, human beings must fight the same evils wherever they surface. Those who want to read something with more depth and meaning should read Roy, her comments are well-researched and constructed, it's almost like the alternative to the kind of radical dribble we get from figures like Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly. Concerned citizens should read Roy and know the history of our world.


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Frank Commentary

This book exposes the truth about the injustices occuring in India without being clouded by passion. As always Ms. Roy gives the reader an honest account of what is actually transpiring. She gives the reader a portrait of the various people who are affected by these "social" projects without coming across as the evening news. This is definately a must read for anyone who believes in justice for everyone, not just the wealthy.


reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6



As the United States pushes for war on Iraq, Arundhati Roy, the internationally acclaimed author of The God of Small Things, addresses issues of democracy and dissent, racism and empire, and war and peace in this collection of new essays.

The eloquence, passion, and political insight of Roy's political essays have added legions of readers to those already familiar with her Booker Prize-winning novel. -Invited to lecture as part of the prestigious Lannan -Foundation series on the first anniversary of the unconscionable attacks of September 11, 2001, Roy challenged those who equate dissent with being "anti-American." Her previous essays on globalization and dissent have led many to see Roy as "India's most impassioned critic of globalization and American influence" (New York Times).

War Talk collects new essays by this prolific writer. Her work highlights the global rise of religious and racial violence. From the horrific pogroms against Muslims in Gujarat, India, to U.S. demands for a war on Iraq, Roy confronts the call to militarism. Desperately working against the backdrop of the nuclear recklessness between her homeland and Pakistan, she calls into question the equation of nation and ethnicity. And throughout her essays, Roy interrogates her own roles as "writer" and "activist."

"If [Roy] continues to upset the globalization applecart like a Tom Paine pamphleteer, she will either be greatly honored or thrown in jail," wrote Pawl Hawken in Wired Magazine. In fact she was jailed in March 2002, when -India's Supreme Court found Roy in contempt of the court after months of attempting to silence her criticism of the government.

Fully annotated versions of all Roy's most recent -essays, including her acclaimed Lannan Foundation -lecture from September 2002, are included in War Talk. Arundhati Roy is the winner of the Lannan Foundation's Prize for Cultural Freedom, 2002, and will be returning to the U.S. in association with the Lannan Foundation in 2003. Roy's most recent collection of essays, Power Politics, now in its second edition, sold over 25,000 copies in its first 12 months.




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