Responses to Arundhati Roy

From:  The Department of Short Takes

A friend who searched the Web for international responses to Arundhati
Roy's first piece in the Guardian came up with these. Like Barbara Lee, Roy
ought to be publically acknowledged for standing virtually alone as a
principled, dissenting female voice.  



>US critics under fire 
>Guardian  - Monday October 1, 2001 
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>Arundhati Roy (The algebra of infinite justice, September 29) is childish
in her rebuke to the US people: "America is at war against people it
doesn't know, because they don't appear much on TV." As for her laundry
list of US terror campaigns against the poorest souls on earth - has she
asked why Saddam doesn't inject money into his own economy to help the
dying multitudes of children instead of funding God knows what else? 
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>But what strikes me most is how she fails to balance her diatribe: Osama
bin Laden is certainly guilty of something, otherwise he wouldn't "be on
TV". And he's not some poor, displaced orphan but an upper middle-class
Saudi with an exquisite existential chip on his shoulder - a
psychotherapist's dream study. 
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>I wonder where Arundhati Roy is now? About to meet the literati for brunch
in a little place in Hampstead? Or would she feel more politically and
socially superior, as she seems to want us to believe, in a burqa in Kabul
about to be hanged in a packed sports stadium for wearing it a centimetre
too short? I'm one of those "fuzzy" Americans. I'll cling to Disneyland,
thanks very much. 
>Karen Fielding
>London 
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>. I read Arundhati Roy with growing relief that someone was expressing so
clearly and eloquently the thoughts that have been floating around my mind.
I particularly appreciated her clear exposition of the complexities of the
historical relationship between the CIA, the mojahedin and Russia. We need
to have the courage to face that we are not "all that purports to be
beautiful and civilised", but much more complicated than that. 
>Lesley Sanderson
>Nottingham 
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>. It can be disturbing when someone we thought we were justified in hating
behaves admirably. Arundhati Roy seems confused that America, her great
foe, has not carpet-bombed Afghanistan off the map. Indeed, America's
impressive show of restraint has so put her out that she can't even
acknowledge it exists, but talks as if Bush were about to inaugurate
another Vietnam. US foreign policy has a sordid history, but should be
judged according to what it is now. At present the US government should be
commended for not lashing out in the face of provocation that it must find
almost unbearable. That would surely be the way to encourage it to continue
on the right path.
>Mark Martin
>London 
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>. Arundhati Roy is to be congratulated on producing one of the most
balanced, informed and intelligent analyses of the September 11 attacks
yet. If ever there is a time for the intelligentsia to speak truthfully of
history, and of the wilfully ignorant self-destructive nature of global
capitalism, it is now.
>Marian Gladstone
>Leicester 
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>. Arundhati Roy writes: "The world will probably never know what motivated
those particular hijackers." Wrong. The documents found in one of the mass
murderers' cases makes the motivation quite clear. And it is not the
generalised "anger" Roy attributes to the wretched of the earth, but an
almost inconceivable self-righteousness. "I pray to you God to forgive me
all my sins, to allow me to glorify you in every possible way." A hideous
blasphemy of a prayer before the holocaust of thousands of souls of all
faiths. 
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>The anti-deity of the hijackers is a god of very small minds. Roy should
stick to writing about the small things she knows about.
>Prof Dennis Brown
>University of Hertfordshire 
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