We should bomb BUSH at home
See thank you. I
I want to simply say that this is the most beautiful crowd that I've ever seen in my life
And to be sitting
At the same table with one of the greatest minds of our times professor Chomsky
It's really a wonderful honor
I promise you I'm not going to speak for very long
I've been asked to speak about how to confront Empire
It's a huge question and I have no easy answers
when we speak of
Confronting Empire we need to identify
What Empire means?
Does it mean the US government and its European satellites the World Bank the International?
Monetary Fund the World Trade
Organization and
multinational corporations
What does it mean more than that?
in many countries
Empire has sprouted other
subsidiary heads some dangerous
byproducts
nationalism
religious bigotry
fascism and
Of course
Terrorism all these march arm-in-arm with the project of corporate globalization
Let me illustrate what I mean
India the world's biggest democracy
Is currently at the forefront of the corporate
Globalization project its market of 1 billion people is being prized
Open by the WTO
corporatization and
Privatization are being welcomed by the Indian government and the Indian elite
But it is not a coincidence that the Prime Minister
The Home Minister the disinvestment minute Minister the man who?
And the deal in India with Enron the men who are selling the country's
Infrastructure to corporate multinationals the men who want to privatize water
electricity oil coal steel health
education and
Telecommunication are all members or admirers of the RSS
The RSS is a right-wing
ultra nationalist
Hindu guild which has openly
openly admired Hitler and his methods
the dismantling of
Democracy in India is proceeding with the speed and efficiency of a structural adjustment program
while the project of corporate
Globalisation rips through people's lives in India
Massive privatization and labor reforms are pushing people off their lands and out of their jobs
Hundreds of impoverished farmers are committing suicide
by consuming
pesticide
Reports of starvation deaths are coming in from all over the country
while the elite journeys to its imaginary destination
Somewhere near the top of the world the dispossessed are spiraling downwards into crime and chaos
this climate of
Frustration and national disillusionment is the perfect breeding ground
History tells us for fascism the two arms of the Indian government
Have evolved the perfect pincer action while one arm is busy selling India off in chunks
the other to divert attention is
orchestrating a howling baying chorus of Hindu nationalism and religious fascism
It is conducting nuclear tests
rewriting history books burning churches
demolishing mosques
censorship
surveillance the suspension of civil liberties and human rights the
definition of who is an Indian citizen and who is not
Particularly with regard to Muslim people is becoming common practice now
last march in the state of Gujarat
2,000 Muslims were butchered in a state-sponsored pogrom
Muslim women were specially targeted they were stripped and gang-raped before being burned alive
arsonists burned and looted shops
homes
textile mills and mosques more than
150,000 Muslims have been driven from their homes
The economic base of the Muslim community has been devastated
While Gujarat burned the Indian Prime Minister was on MTV
promoting his new poems
in January this year
The government that orchestrated the killing was voted back into office with the comfortable majority
Nobody has been punished for the genocide Narendra Modi architect of the Pope
Meanwhile the countries of the north harden their borders and stockpile weapons of mass destruction
After all, they have to make sure that it's only money goods
patents and
Services that are globalised not the free movement of people not a respect for human rights
not international treaties on racial discrimination
Not treatise on chemical and nuclear weapons or greenhouse gas emissions or climate change or
god forbid
justice
So this all this is Empire this loyal
Confederation this obscene
accumulation of power
This greatly increased distance between those who make the decisions and those who have to suffer them
our fight our goal our
Vision for another world must be to eliminate that distance
So, how how do we resist Empire
The good news is that we're not doing too badly
They have been major victories
Here in Latin America. You have had so many in Bolivia you had
Cochabamba
In Peru there was the uprising in arequipa in Venezuela president
In Venezuela President Hugo Chavez is holding on despite
Despite
despite the US government's best efforts and
The words gays is on the people of Argentina
Who are trying to refashion a country from the ashes of the havoc wrought by the IMF?
In India
the movement against corporate globalization is gathering momentum and is poised to become
The only real political force to counter religious fascism
And as for corporate
globalisation glitt'ring ambassador Enron Bechtel welcomed Arthur Andersen
Where were they last year? And where are they now?
And of course here in Brazil we must ask who is the president last year and who is it now
But still still many of us have dark moments of hopelessness and despair
Because we know that under the spreading canopy of the war against terrorism the men in suits are hard at work
While the bombs rained down on us and cruise missiles did across the skies
We know that contracts are being signed
Patents are being registered
Oil pipelines are being laid
Natural resources are being plundered
Water is being privatized and George Bush is planning to go to war against Iraq
If we look at this conflict as a straightforward
eyeball-to-eyeball
Confrontation between Empire and those of us who are resisting it it might seem that we are losing
But there's another way of looking at it
We all of us gathered here have in our own way laid siege to Empire
We may not have stopped stopped it in its tracks
Yet but we have stripped it down
We have made it drop
Its mass we have posted in the open it now stands before us
On the world stage in all its brutish
iniquities nakedness
Empire
Empire may well go to war but it's out in the open now too ugly to behold its own reflection
Too ugly even to rally its own people. It won't be long before the majority of American people become our allies
Only a few days ago in Washington a quarter of a million people marched against the war on Iraq
And each month each month the protest is gathering momentum
before September 11th 2001
America had a secret history
secret especially from its own people
But now America's secrets are history and its history is public knowledge. It's street talk
Today, we know that every argument that is being used to escalate the war against Iraq is a lie
the most ludicrous of them
The most ludicrous of them being the US government deep commitment to bring democracy to Iraq
Killing people to save them from dictatorships or ideological corruption is of course an old US government sport
Here in Latin America, you know that better than most
Nobody
Nobody doubts that Saddam Hussein is a ruthless dictator a murderer
Whose worst excesses were supported by the governments of the United States and Great Britain?
There's no doubt that Iraqis would be better off without him
But then the whole world would be better off without a certain. Mr. Bush
So should we bomb Bush out of the White House
If more than Clio is more than clear that bush
It's more than clear that bush is determined to go to war against Iraq
regardless of the facts and regardless of public opinion
In its recruitment drive for allies. The United States is prepared to invent fact
The Sharad with weapons inspectors with the US government's offensive
Insulting concession to some twisted form of international etiquette
It's like leaving the doggy door open for last-minute allies, or maybe the United Nations to crawl through
But for all intents and purposes the new war against Iraq has begun
So what can we do?
We can hone our memory we can learn from history
We can continue to build public opinion until it becomes a deafening roar
We can turn the war on Iraq
into a fishbowl of the US government's excessive
We can expose George Bush and Tony Blair and their allies for the Cowardly baby killers water
poisonous and pusillanimous long distance bombers that they are
We can we can reinvent civil disobedience in a million different ways in other words
In other words we can come up with a million ways of becoming a collective pain in the ass
When George Bush says you are either with us or with the terrorists we can say no
Thank you
We can let him know that the people of the world do not need to choose between a malevolent
Mickey Mouse and the mad mullah
Our strategy
Should not only be to confront Empire but to lay siege to it
to deprive it of oxygen to shame it to market with our art our
music our literature our stubbornness
Our joy our brilliance our sheer relentlessness and our ability to tell our own stories
stories that are different from the ones we are Breen being brainwashed to believe
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling
Their ideas
their version of history
There was their weapons their notion of inevitability
Remember this we be many and they BQ they need us more than we need them
Another world is not only possible
She's on her way and on a quiet day
If you listen, very carefully, you can hear her breathing
You
