Her speech was amazing. Look her up on YouTube to see it. This book was just ok. Read Noam Chomsky if you want to read about foreign policy.

Arundhati Roy is one of the most powerful, thoughtful spokespeople for those all over the world who are bearing the crushing costs of imperialism in the form of control of resources by corporations that are not accountable to the people and that have squandered resources, displaced millions of farmers and laborers, and irreparably destroyed rivers, soil, and local cultures. She is eloquent, convincing, succinct, and full of heart. Along with Vandana Shiva, she raises awareness of the plight of Indians as indicative of the plight of people everywhere whose lives are being diminished without recourse, even in so-called democracies.

As this is a collection of essays and lectures from various sources, there's somewhat of an overlap with facts sometimes, but this doesn't detract at all from the powerful message of this book. It reminds me why I could only read Noam Chomsky in small doses - the facts are all too depressing and make me feel helpless when compared with the juggernaut of the American Empire. Sadly, I don't think much has changed in the intervening years, making this book just as relevant now as when it was first published in 2004.

14 years on but the conversation hasn’t changed

In my journey through Roy’s nonfiction, the ‘War on Terror’ has escalated into the invasion of Iraq (2003-2004)…

Highlights:
--“Peace is War: The Collateral Damage of Breaking News”: explores the key role of the corporate media in controlling “democracy”. “Peace is War” is meant to convey that Western “peacetime” hides many wars (esp. imperialist) in the global community. Roy also considers the polarization of crisis reporting, where news consumers enter an issue backwards (starting with the current event without the context).
--A more-detailed examination of how “free” media (market = one-dollar-one-vote) creates nuanced propaganda to curtail democracy: Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies.
--The fabulous Vijay Prashad (The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World) on imperialist media’s “ideological censorship”: https://youtu.be/6jKcsHv3c74

--“Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy (Buy One, Get One Free)”: concludes with a useful question of “what is to be done?” regarding confronting empire:
1) There cannot be a conventional military challenge. (Especially considering the US military’s Madman strategy risking annihilation: The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner and Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance).
2) Terror attacks legitimize the empire’s military reach (and vice versa). Preventing terror cannot be seen as a straightforward rational strategy by empire, given this symbiosis: The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump.
3) Imperialist sanctions (i.e. economic terrorism) need to be resisted, while resistance should also create “people’s sanctions” to target the economic underbelly of empire. (This can be seen during anti-apartheid South Africa, and today’s BDS).
4) Corporate media needs to be replaced with alternative media. Of course, we now see the mess between liberal media elites and Trumpian “fake news”; liberals reliant on corporate funding cannot be progressive, leaving a black hole for reactionaries to misdirect.

--“When the Saints Go Marching Out: The Strange Fate of Martin, Mohandas, and Mandela”: Roy considers how liberal capitalism has co-opted the legacies of MLK/Gandhi/Mandela.
--Of the three, MLK moved away from liberal reformism when he tied racism with capitalism and militarism (imperialist war on Vietnam): The Radical King.
--Roy elaborates the imperialism/race/class/caste contradictions of Gandhi in: The Doctor and the Saint: The Ambedkar - Gandhi Debate
--Finally, Mandela is contrasted with Steve Biko. Privatization and structural adjustment were favored over land redistribution, while reparations were said to discourage foreign investment and thus avoided.
--Vijay Prashad considers the crucial global solidarity in anti-colonial/anti-racist movements (connecting US Civil Rights to global decolonization): https://youtu.be/IfQ-zFaAOFk?t=45

Political eye

Bringing world and Indian politics and corporations to light.

Also the impact on the lives of affected.

Arundhati Roy is really inspiring.

Arundhati Roy is truly a phenomenal writer with the ability to truly grip the reader in fascination and awe. Her writing style is crisp, brutal, raw, and relentless. She truly has a command over her writing and her narration of events. She forms her arguments and delivers strong evidence in support of them. She also has the ability to make her readers feel a multitude of contrasting emotions. Her writing is often like being on a roller-coaster. The only flaw in this book is that the essays selected contain a lot of repetition of ideas formed and presented in preceding chapters which can often feel redundant. Perhaps, those points can't be stressed enough.

“An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire" by Arundhati Roy

Phenomenal insight, like being hit with a ‘truth’ slap!

E.g.
"The Draft Is About White People
Sending Black People To Fight
Yellow People to Protect The Country
They Stole From The Red People"
Stokely Carmichael, at a massive anti-war demonstration in Manhattan, 15th April 1967, (page 142)
..
Also by Roy:
“Debating Imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it?”

“The US empire rests on a grisly foundation: the massacre of millions of indigenous people, the stealing of their lands and, following this, the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of black people from Africa to work that land. Thousands died on the seas while they were being shipped like caged cattle between continents.
'Stolen from Africa, brought to America' - Bob Marley's 'Buffalo Soldier' contains a whole universe of unspeakable sadness.”

“It's odd how those who dismiss the peace movement as Utopian proffer the most absurdly dreamy reasons for war.”

“The war against terror is not really about terror. It's about a superpower's self-destructive impulse toward supremacy, stranglehold, global hegemony.”

“Speaking for myself, I am no flag waver, no patriot, and I am fully aware that venality, brutality, and hypocrisy are imprinted on the leaden soul of every state. But when a country ceases to be merely a country and becomes an empire, then the scale of operations changes dramatically. So may I clarify that tonight I speak as a subject of the American empire? I speak as a slave who presumes to criticize her king.”

“It is a myth that the free market breaks down national barriers. The free market does not threaten national sovereignty, it undermines democracy. As the disparity between the rich and the poor grows, the fight to corner resources is intensifying. To push through their 'sweetheart deals', to corporatize the crops we grow, the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the dreams we dream, corporate globalization needs an international confederation of loyal, corrupt, authoritarian governments in poorer countries to push through unpopular reforms and quell the mutinies. Corporate globalization - or shall we call by its name? Imperialism - needs a press that pretends to be free. It needs courts that pretend to dispense justice.
Meanwhile, the countries of the north harden their borders and stockpile weapons of mass destruction. Afterall, they have to make sure that it is only money, goods, patents, and services that are globalized. Not a respect for human rights. Not international treaties on racial discrimination or 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 of another world must be to eliminate that distance. So how do we resist Empire?”

“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 Organisation (WTO), and multinational corporations? Or is it something more than that?”

“How has the United States survived its terrible past and emerged smelling so sweet? Not by owning up to it, not by making reparations, not by apologizing to black Americans or native Americans, and certainly not by changing its ways (it exports its cruelties now). Like most other countries, the United States has rewritten its history. But what sets the United States apart from other countries, and puts it ahead in the race, is that it has enlisted the services of the most powerful, most successful publicity firm in the world: Hollywood.”
― Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire

“Democracy is the Free World's whore, willing to dress up, dress down, willing to satisfy a whole range of tastes.”

“And now this talk of bringing the UN back into the picture.
But that old UN girl - it turns out that she just ain't what she was cracked up to be. She's been demoted (although she retains her high salary). Now she's the world's janitor. She's the Filipino cleaning lady, the Indian jamardini, the postal bride from Thailand, the Mexican household help, the Jamaican au pair. She's employed to clean other people's shit. She's used and abused at will.”

“When the sun sets on the American empire, as it will, as it must, Noam Chomsky's work will survive. It will point a cool incriminating finger at a merciless Machiavellian empire as cruel, self-righteous and hypocritical as the ones it has replaced. (The only difference is that it is armed with technology that can visit the kind of devastation on the world that history has never known, and the human race cannot begin to imagine.)”

“Democracy has become Empire's euphemism for neo-liberal capitalism.”

“Argentina & Iraq have been decimated by the same process with different weapons; an IMF cheque and cruise missiles.”

“Why should propaganda be the exclusive preserve of the Western media? Just because they do it better?”

“For the South African White minority, neo-liberalism is apartheid with a clean conscience, called Democracy.”

…

So how do we resist “Empire”? The good news is that we’re not doing too badly. There have been major victories. Here in Latin America you have had so many–in Bolivia, you have Cochabamba. In Peru, there was the uprising in Arequipa. In Venezuela, President Hugo Chávez is holding on, despite the US government’s best efforts. And the world’s gaze 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. As for corporate globalization’s glittering ambassadors–Enron, Bechtel, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen–where were they last year, and where are they now? And of course here in Brazil we must ask, Who was the president last year, and Who is it now?
Still, many of us have dark moments of hopelessness and despair. We know that under the spreading canopy of the War Against Terrorism, the men in suits are hard at work. While bombs rain down on us, and cruise missiles skid 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 is another way of looking at it. We, all of us gathered here, have, each in our own way, laid siege to Empire. We may not have stopped it in its tracks–yet–but we have stripped it down. We have made it drop its mask. We have forced it into the open. It now stands before us on the world’s stage in all its brutish, iniquitous nakedness.
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. In Washington this January, a quarter of a million people marched against the war on Iraq. Each month the protest is gathering momentum.
Before September 11, 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 being the US government’s deep commitment to bring democracy to Iraq. Killing people to save them from dictatorship or ideological corruption is, of course, an old US government sport. Here in Latin America, you know that better than most.
Nobody doubts that Saddam Hussein is a ruthless dictator, a murderer (whose worst excesses were supported by the governments of the United States and 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. In fact, he is far more dangerous than Saddam Hussein. So, should we bomb Bush out of the White House?
It’s more than clear that Bush is determined to go to war against Iraq, regardless of the facts–and regardless of international public opinion. In its recruitment drive for allies, the United States is prepared to invent facts. The charade with weapons inspectors is the US government’s offensive, insulting concession to some twisted form of international etiquette. It’s like leaving the “doggie 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.
What can we do? We can hone our memory, we can learn from our 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 excesses. We can expose George Bush and Tony Blair–and their allies–for the cowardly baby killers, water poisoners and pusillanimous long-distance bombers that they are. We can reinvent civil disobedience in a million different ways. In other words, we can come up with a million ways of becoming a collective pain in the ass. When George Bush says, “Either you are with us, or you are 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 Mullahs.
Our strategy should be not only to confront empire but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. 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’re being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling–their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

I love the passion and lyrical intensity of anything Arundhati Roy writes. This book is an important expose of the corruption and horrific nature of the Indian state (and all modern states) that will kill and destroy people, villages, regions in the thirst for development and profit. It's a hard book to read though as it is in some ways a long rant. I skimmed much of this book and was thankful to be able to take in some of the horror, outrage and rage.

The first two essays were the ones i loved the most from this book.
They had some truly extraordinary parts that will stay with me for a long time.

Fascinating food for thought...an eye-opening perspective into how empire is at work in the world, how the US and other nations participate, and hope for how we can re-imagine a just world. Roy is wonderfully creative in how she makes connections between everything from the rampant incarceration in the US, to religious violence in India, to the US occupation of Iraq. I learned a lot, and feel accompanied by Roy in the face of news sources that do not share the truth.

I’ve heard a few comparisons of this most recent election to the reelection of Bush in 2004. Given that I was six at the time, reading these essays have been an illuminating and at times prophetic education on the political culture of that time (all essays were written from 2002-2004).

Roy is a powerful example of a mind that can incisively metamorphosize anger and anguish into analysis and critique. She deserves her place among the great radical thinkers. Some essays were repetitive, though I fault the publisher more for this. As someone who needed the lesson, I was still sat.

Also it’s a good reminder not to view Bush with nostalgic benevolence just because of what we have on our plate today. Read for insight on the worlds biggest democracy (India) and the worlds most powerful democracy (US) and how absurd it is we call them democracies at all.