Arundhati Roy got me like...

After reading Capitalism: A Ghost Story a year or two ago (so good, but could've been 5 times longer!), I finally got my hands on The Chequebook and the Cruise Missile (via Lana in England -- thanks!) and it's so on point as usual. It's 14 years old but still on point. I could quote the whole book. Some choice passages I want to highlight...

On the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat:
"The English-language press in India supports the project of corporate globalisation fully. It has no time for dispossession and drought and farmers' debts, the ravages that the corporate globalisation project is wreaking on the poor of India. So to suddenly turn around and condemn the riots is a typical middle-class response. Let's support everything that leads to the conditions in which the massacre takes place, but when the killing starts, you recoil in middle-class horror, and say, 'Oh, that's not very nice. Can't we be more civilised?'"

On America: 
"Because what is corporate globalisation? It isn't as if the entire world is intermeshed with each other. [...] It's more like America is the hub of this huge cultural and economic airline system. It's the nodal point. Everyone has to be connected through America, and to some extent Europe."

On what I'm calling Joseph Conrad Syndrome (also suffered by the likes of Sofia Coppola in Lost in Translation):
"Look at, say, the case of Vietnam now. To the world today, thanks to Hollywood and thanks to the US mass media, the war in Indochina was an American war. Indochina was the lush backdrop against which America tested its technology, examined its guilt, worried about its conscience, dealt or did not deal with its guilt. And the 'gooks' were just the other guys who died. They were just stage props. It doesn't matter what the story was. It mattered who was telling it. And America was telling it."

On resistance:
"When a symbol unmoors itself from what it symbolises, it loses meaning. It becomes ineffective.
        Fifteen million people marched against the war in Iraq on February 15, 2003, in perhaps the biggest display of public morality ever seen. It was fantastic. But it was symbolic. Governments of today have learned to deal with that. They know to wait out a demonstration or a march. They know the day after tomorrow, opinions can change, or be manipulated into changing. Unless civil disobedience becomes real, not symbolic, there is very little hope for change.
        That's a very important lesson that we need to learn from the civil disobedience and the nonviolent resistance of the Indian independence struggle. It was fine political theatre, but it was never, ever merely symbolic. It was always a real strike against the economics of imperialism. [...] These marches and songs and meetings of today –– they are beautiful, but they are often mostly for us. If all our energies go into organising these things, then we don't do any real damage to the establishment, to the empire."