From: "Margaret Trawick" <trawick-AT-clear.net.nz> Subject: Re: arundhati roy in the guardian Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2001 11:14:57 +1200 I sent this post yesterday but it bounced back because I had exceeded my daily limit of posts to this list. So I am sending it again (with some modifications) today. This is in response to Salil's defense of Union Carbide. *********** Salil - We may be talking past each other to some extent. I agree with most of what you have said. I don't agree with what you have said about Arundhati Roy. Your argument against her is ad hominem, and that is not helpful to anyone. As to whether the issue is of intention, or something else, I guess that is a matter of opinion. But to me, intention is not an issue at all, in the sense of being a matter of debate. Few would doubt that the attack on the WTC was intentional, and few would doubt that the UCC did not intend to kill all those people in Bhopal. To me the real issue is, to what extent are people responsible for the consequences of their actions, even if those consequences are "unintended"? We cannot foresee all the consequences of all the things we do. But we can calculate, with reasonable accuracy, the probability of certain consequences, and we can calculate whether, to quote the currently oft-quoted Madeleine Albright, "it was worth it." Union Carbide must have known (or should have known) that there was a significant probability of loss of life from a leaky chemical installation in a populated area. They must, or should, have known that local operators were susceptible to corruption. But to them (Union Carbide, as well as the local operators) the risk was sustainable. They could afford to pay a certain amount of money to compensate the victims, and carry on. The risk would not have been sustainable if they had been sued by the Indian Government for punitive damages - i.e., if they had been sued enough to make such risks not sustainable financially. The fact that some members of the Indian Government were equally selfish in their manipulation of this case does not absolve Union Carbide of its share of responsibility. The comparison that you (Salil) contest is the one made by Arundhati Roy between the Bhopal disaster and the WTC disaster. You think Union Carbide is not as bad as the people who destroyed the WTC. I am not saying that the people who drove the airplanes into the towers had their values straight. I am saying that they accepted responsibility for their actions by dying with their victims. They left behind a clear trail of evidence so that their identities were easily found. At least they did that much. In a way, they showed that they knew very well the sacred value of human life. Corporate capitalism treats human life as a cheap commodity. The Bhopal disaster and its sequelae illustrate this fact very well. If Union Carbide did not intentionally kill the people in Bhopal, it knowingly put those people's lives at risk. It gambled those people's lives, because *it* could afford to lose them. In the same way, countless human lives have been lost because of the negligence of corporate capitalists, and the governments allied with them. It is not that they necessarily always intentionally go out of their way to kill innocent people. It is that they do not care, one way or the other, how many lives are destroyed as a consequence of their actions. (As for Union Carbide, the fact that they sell their pesticides in India just increases their murderousness). To me, this not caring, this cold- blooded insentience to everything but profit, is as destructive as the cruellest of religions. MT --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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