28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Obituary for Democracy, November 1, 2009
This review is from: Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers (Hardcover)
This is the second book that I have read this month which was recommended by Noam Chomsky. Field Notes on Democracy by Arundhati Roy is a shocking report of the hollowing-out of democratic values in India. It is brilliantly written, as was her novel, The God of Small Things. However, this book, unlike the novel, is as unlovely as torture, greed, pillage, waste and wholesale murder can be. It is a non-fiction account of how the world's largest democracy has had its concepts of social justice eroded by unbridled growth, corporate greed, destruction of the environment, and a government run by vested interests and touts. "Most chilling of all, writes Chomsky in his review, "is that much of this grim portrait is all too familiar to the West."Which, of course, brings me to the other book which I read following Chomsky's recommendation: Michael Hogan's Savage Capitalism and the Myth of Democracy. Here we see the same processes at work, not only in Latin America where Hogan lives and works, but also in the monolith to the north.
These two books are companion pieces of East and West, especially attractive to readers like me who appreciate reality being cogently and elegantly expressed by social activists and are not ideologues but thoughtful and compassionate human beings who sincerely work to make a difference in the area where they live: for Roy, India; for Hogan, Latin America. They both bring us news of a real world and the demise of democracy on the altar of progress. As Ed Abbey once wrote, "Unlimited growth has the etiology of the cancer cell. Its ultimate goal is the destruction of its host."
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Grasshoppers Refers To An Ill Wind Blowing This Way, September 12, 2010
This review is from: Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers (Hardcover)
The author points out that the current system of pretend to be democracies around the world have way too much representation with way too little democracy. These governments are need structual adjustments. Now for those not familiar with the draconian IMF/World Bank structural adjustments, forced upon governments in need of loans, they are designed to suck the life blood of society by extreme cuts to education, health care, infrastruture, local agriculture, local ANYTHING. Because in the international Help Business, local is a very bad four letter word, no matter how you choose to spell it: local is to be extermintated with extreme prejudice. So when the author writes that democracy is in need of structural adjustment, she means it in the normal way, not the Orwellian double-speak of the international instruments of international banks/transnational corporations. So, it is her play with words that cut deeply into the sinister character of the players in The New World Order, that are very soothing to my nature. The more deep and sharp the meaning, the more pleasure to my reading. And reading Arundhati Roy is, I assure you, extreme pleasure.
She says that today's democracies, under the current the stewardship, have fused with the free markets, into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of Maximizing Profit.
She refers to her India as the world's largest demon-crazy(as a Kashmiri protester once put it).
In today's privitized global march, freedom means choice, nothing to do with the human spirit, but alot to do wuth different brands of deoderant. Justice has to do with human rights(and of those, as they say, a few will do).
One of the means that this sinister plot is being staged worldwide, is with a dialogue of words that mask their intent, in truth they mean exactly the opposite of what they have traditionally meant. Sadly, this news-speak gattling gun of repeating mainstream news-speak opposites, soon become washed apposite. Suffice to say: those who cannot consume do not matter.
She notes that toay's corporate globalization demands an international confederation of loyal, corrupt, preferably authoritarian governments in poorer countries to push through unpopular reforms and quell the muntinies. It's called creating - a good investment climate. She also notes that history is now conforming more to an old Russian saying/The past is unpredictable. She writes about television anchors playing around with crucial facts, like young children in a sandbox.
The questions become difficult, as in/Are no elections better than meaningless elections? Or/Are intelligence agencies creating/infiltrating political parties? Or/Are there decoy politicians? Or/Have they created and destroyed political careers at will? Or/ Is there any connection between elections and democracy?
She is about the fighting back of the slow erosion of civil liberties, the day-to-day injustices. It means fighting to win back the hearts and minds of the people. It means keeping an eagle eye on public institutions and Demanding accountability. It means putting your ear to the ground and listening to the whisperings of the truly powerless. It means fighting displacement and dispossession and the relentless, everyday violence of abject poverty. Today's corporate globalization is being relentlessly and arbitrarily imposed on an essentially feudal society, tearing through its complex, tiered social fabric, ripping it apart culturally and economically.
The controlled corporate media purposely creates a schism between knowledge and information, between what we know and what were told, between what is unknown and what is asserted, between what is concealed and what is revealed, between fact and conjecture, between the real world and the virtual world, and so this has become a world of endless speculation and potential insanity. It's a poisonous brew that has been stirred to the most ugly, destructive political purpose.
She cuts right to the bone in her discussions on when genocide politics meets the free market, official recognition-or denial-of holocausts and genocides is a multinational business enterprise. It has rarely anything to do with historical fact or forensic evidence. Morality certainly does not enter the picture. It is an aggressive process of high-end bargaining that belongs more to the World Trade Organization than to the United Nations. The currency is geopolitics, the fluctuating markets for natural resources, that curious thing called futures trading, and plain old economic and military might. Or, as Robert McNamara might say/How much evil must we do in order to do good?
The poor, the so-called poor, have only one choice: to resist or to succumb. Perhaps they wonder how they can go on a hunger strike when they're already starving. How they can boycott foreign goods when they have no money to buy any goods. How can they refuse to pay taxes when they have no earnings? They know the new laws of the land criminalize the poor and conflate resistence with terrorism.
The author puts it all together in her field notes for us to use. Though she writes about India, her home country, she is talking symbolically about the world. But more importantly, she is writing about how to change its direction, away from a corporatized/privitized globaliztion.
We must find the courage to dream. To reclaim the romance. The romance in believing in dignity, in liberty, and in...
... justice for all. This is NOT negotiable.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED !!!!!!!!
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10 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A thought-provoking read, November 15, 2009
This review is from: Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers (Hardcover)
Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers is an anthology of essays in which author Arundhati Roy (winner of the 2002 Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Prize) seeks to answer the question "Is there life after democracy?" More specifically, she examines how Hindu nationalism and neo-liberal economic reforms in India, which arose during the early 1990s, are currently transforming India into a police state. From the deliberate and systematic marginalization of religious and ethnic minorities, to the increased power of predatory corporations that engineer the displacement of the poor on a gigantic scale, to the August 2008 uprising of the people of Kashmir against India's military occupation, to a scrutiny of the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, Field Notes on Democracy is sharply critical in its exposure of the weaknesses and corruption in India's current model of government. A thought-provoking read, Field Notes on Democracy warns against the abuses of wealth and power in India's current governmental system, and the threat of impending disaster. Highly recommended.
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