ABSTRACT
In a brief but powerful speech that Arundhati Roy delivered at the closing rally of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, on January
27 2003, the defiant anti-war activist, award-winning novelist, and the
recipient of the 2002 Lannan Foundation Prize for Cultural Freedom
outlined the vicious circularity of the violence that US imperialism
unleashes upon the world. Identifying the empire as the scattered con-
stellation of the US government, its European allies, the World Bank,
the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization
(WTO), and multinational corporations, she then declared that this 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.’’1 One of
the principal examples that Roy provides to illustrate her argument is her
own country, India, where she reports that the government is divided into
two arms:
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, and demolishing mosques. Censorship, surveillance, the suspension of civil liberties and human rights, the
questioning of who is an Indian citizen and who is not, particularly
with regard to religious minorities, are all becoming common practice
The deadly combination that Roy identifies as the high mark of globaliza-
tion – economic buccaneering (overnight robbery of national wealth on the
high economic seas of transnational commerce) on one hand and cultural tribalism on the other – is evident all over the globe. As part of this schi-
zophrenic scene, Roy describes what she calls ‘‘a state-sponsored pogrom’’ in
which thousands of Muslims, women in particular, were gang-raped and
slaughtered by Hindu fundamentalists. ‘‘More than a hundred and fifty
thousand Muslims,’’ Roy reports, ‘‘have been driven from their homes. The
economic basis of the Muslim community has been devastated.’’ What have
Indian authorities done in response? ‘‘Narendra Modi, architect of the
pogrom, proud member of the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh = ‘‘a right-wing Hindu cultural guild with a clearly articulated anti-Muslim stand
and a nationalistic notion of hindutva . . . the ideological backbone of BJP, the Hindu nationalist party’’] has embarked on his second term as the Chief
Minister of Gujarat.’’ And then comes Roy’s principal point: ‘‘If he [Nar-
endra Modi] were Saddam Hussein, of course each atrocity would have
been on CNN. But since he’s not – and since the Indian ‘‘market’’ is open to
global investors – the massacre is not even an embarrassing incon-
The point of Roy’s argument, pointedly observed, is that if the market
to globalized capital is wide open and lucrative, the presiding imperial
hubris could not care less if consumers are eating each other alive, so far as
it can make a lucrative business out of the spectacle. Add those countless
Muslims murdered by Hindu fundamentalist thugs in India to countless
more murdered by the Jewish state in Palestine and the even more
countless massacred by the Christian empire and its allies in Afghanistan
and Iraq, and then bring Arundhati Roy’s voice of moral outrage closer to the mournful testimony of Judith Butler and ask with her ‘‘what are
the cultural barriers against which we struggle when we try to find out
about the losses that we are asked not to mourn, when we attempt to
name, and so to bring under the rubric of the ‘human’ those whom the
United States and its allies have killed?’’4 We can of course, as Judith Butler
knows only too well, easily name the nameless, for they all have a name.
His name is Muhammad al-Durrah (1988-2000), cold-bloodedly murdered
by the Israeli sharpshooters on September 30 2000 in the Gaza Strip at the beginning of the al-Aqsa Intifada. Her name is Abeer Qassim Hamza
al-Janabi (1991-2006), the 14-year-old Iraqi girl from the village of Mah-
moudiyah near Baghdad who on or about March 12 2006 was gang-raped
by the US serviceman, Pfc. Steven D. Green and his company, before
they burned and murdered her ravaged body along with her father Qassim Hamza Raheem, 45, her mother Fakhriya Taha Muhasen, 34,
and her seven-year-old sister, Hadeel Qassim Hamza. They are not
nameless. Like all other humans, they have a name. CNN anchorpersons
may not know how to pronounce them. Fox News propaganda officers
may not care to consider them human. The New York Times might be
complicitous in giving its reporter Judith Miller wide-opened columns to
help the Bush administration to cheat and lie its way to bombing Abeer
Qassim Hamza al-Janabi’s entire country to rubble. But they all have proper names.
