Democracy Now! Audio - Democracy Now! 2025-12-26 Friday

Episode Date: December 26, 2025

Democracy Now! Friday, December 26, 2025

From New York, this is Democracy Now. There's a part in my book where I say she taught me how to write and she raged against the author I became and she taught me to be free and then she raged against my freedom. In this holiday special, we speak to the acclaimed Indian writer Arundati Roy about her new memoir, Mother Mary comes to me. The book focuses on her mother, Mary Roy, and how Arundati was shaped by her, both as a source of terror and inspiration. We'll also talk to Arundati Roy about Gaza and the rise of authoritarianism from India to the United States. Then we remember Bill Moyers, the legendary PBS broadcaster, former White House aide, who died in June at the age of 91. The consensual seduction of the mainstream media by and with the government is one of the most dangerous toxins at work in America today. All that and more coming up.

This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. In this Democracy Now special, we're joined by one of the world's most acclaimed writers, Arindati Roy, author of many books, including the novels, The God of Small Things, and the Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Roy has been a frequent guest on Democracy Now for over two decades, talking about her novels as well as, well as, her nonfiction work and her activism. She's been a vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy from the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq to the U.S. arming of Israel. In India, she's been repeatedly targeted by authorities for criticizing Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his far-right ruling BJP Party. In August, authorities in Indian occupied Kashmir banned a list of books, including her collection of essays titled Azadi, Freedom, Fascism, Fiction.

Earlier this year, Arundati Roy published her new memoir, Mother Mary comes to me. The critically acclaimed book focuses on her mother, the celebrated educator Mary Roy, and how Arundati was shaped by her, both as a source of terror and of inspiration. The Times writes, quote, In this unsparing yet darkly funny memoir, the prize-winning novelist captures the fierce, asthmatic, impossible, inspirational woman who shaped her as a writer and an activist and left her emotionally bruised for a lifetime, unquote. In September, Democracy Now's Nirmine Sheikh and I spoke to Arundati Roy. We began the interview by asking her about the title of her book, which is based on the lyrics of the Beatles song, Let It Bees. The title, I think it chose me, you know, the Beatles play a big part in the book.

Somehow, even though it was a little after my, I mean, I was a little late for them, but I loved that music and it gave me the sort of steel in my spine and the smile on my face to leave home, which I did when I was 18 for a whole host of reasons. I did listen to, she's leaving home on a loop, you know, weeks before I left. And, of course, it was interesting because the book was launched in Cochin and St. Teresa's Girls' College. And the hall, by chance, was called Mother Mary Hall. Then my brother sang, let it be. And I said, well, there are three Mother Mary's here.

One is the Virgin Mary. One is Paul McCartney's mother. And the third is ours. And they are all very different, you know. So your first book, God of Small Things, is also dedicated to your mother. You wrote, she loved me enough to let me go, which your brother joked was the only bit of real fiction in the book. Yes. Well, when I wrote the God of Small Things, you know, I had, of course, left home and lived as an adult for many years.

I mean, I put myself through architecture, school, working, and all that. And we never, I mean, there was years of estrangement. She never asked why I left or what happened or anything she didn't need to because we both knew. And I was aware that, you know, she was still the principal of a school she founded in this small town. And for her to have a daughter leaving would have been something. at the age of 16. Yes, and it was a very complicated thing, the god of small things too, you know, coming out in that town.

So I said, we settled on a lie, a good one, which I crafted, and I said she loved me enough to let me go, which my brother's jokes was the only piece of real fiction in the book. But, yeah, it was just, you know, all my life, I had to sort of manage this relationship with a woman who was amazing, and also very, very dark, you know. And so as I said, in order for her to shine her light on her students and generations of them to challenge a law which eventually she won

and Christian women won equal inheritance rights. Just talk about that for a minute and then we'll go into the internal, deeper, darker place. But what she was to India and to women. So she, I mean, she came from a very small community of people who live in Kerala called the Syrian Christians. Very, let's say, very, I won't say elite, but, you know, a very protected, yeah, somewhat elite, you know, landowning, for the most part, people. Very conservative, very parochial. And then she married outside of the community, my father, and then got divorced and came back. and she had no money and nowhere to go

and she was living in a little cottage outside of Kerala which belonged to her rather cruel father who had died by then and her mother and brother, we were little, I was three and my brother was four, and her mother and brother came and tried to evict us by saying that according to the Travancourt Christian Succession Act women could inherit a fourth of what a son could or 5,000 rupees, which is, you know, at that time, a little bit of money, but whichever is

less, in effect, couldn't inherit. So she, you know, she nurtured this mortification and she waited for, she started, you know, once she came out of this poverty, she started a little school and it became a huge success. It is a huge success. And when she had the means, she challenged the law and said it was unconstitutional. And eventually it was struck down by the Supreme Court and Christian women were given equal inheritance rights. So it was revolutionary, but so was her school, and so is her school, a really amazing place.

So I was always able to see this public figure who was extraordinary and, you know, there was some other story going on in private. I mean, there are several incidents in the book. I'll go back to the things that you said earlier about your decision to leave home when you did. But your mother's extremely strong personality, her courage. She was a radical feminist, bold and uncompromising in perhaps all aspects of her life. So first, if you could give us a couple of examples of that from the book. But then you write that the way that your mother treated,

your brother, has, quote, queered and complicated, this is you writing, queered and complicated my view of feminism forever, filled it with caveats. So if you could explain that first, a couple of examples, and then what happened? So, I mean, you know, when people label her like a radical feminist or something, those labels don't sit well with her or me because she was so eccentric and so non-rubrish. tears about what she did, and she was such a wild character. So I wouldn't use those words to describe her, but yes, she was an iconic person in feminist circles, especially because of the case that she won, less so because of the school,

because fewer people know about the school, but to me it's as revolutionary. And when she, we lived in this little town where there was so much conservativeness and all kinds of passive and active violence against women. And she would just go into courtrooms, to hospitals, to places where she had heard, you know, women had been beaten up or raped or whatever. And she would try and tell them, look, there's an option you don't have to be like this, you know. So it was a wonder to watch that. But at the same time, she was my, I mean, she had left my father because he was addicted to alcohol. I didn't know my father ever until I was about 25.

And she would, she'd be very, she was hard on both of us, but especially on my brother. And so there's a part in the book where my brother was a little older than me, so he suffered the pain of losing his father or of having this crazy, violent single parent, you know. And from being a really wonderful, excellent student, he just began to drop in his grades. And we were sent away to another school because her school did not have classes up to, you know, class six and seven and so on. So we were sent away. And there's an incident where one night report cards came and we were both awake. And she came and took him at night to her room. And I followed and looked through the keyhole.

and I saw her just beating him till the thing broke and sort of shouting in a whisper because the school was also, our home was also the hostel for little children and saying no son of mine can come with a report that says average student. And then in the morning he came back to bed and we both knew we were awake,

but in the morning she came and hugged me and said you have a brilliant report. And I just felt like I just hated myself. And I felt like even now I feel, you know, that if ever I'm sort of celebrated, there's someone quiet being beaten in the other room. And that from being a very personal thing has also become a very political thing. And I know that as my book comes out, what is going on in Gaza, you know, children are being starved, hospitals are being bombed, a whole genocide. is taking place in public light. And we have to continue to do our work

always cognizant of the fact that it's not just one thing that's happening to you. You know, many things are happening and the quiet person is being beaten. Yes. I mean, one could say that in fact you've dedicated your life as a result to being with those who are being beaten

or at least standing in solidarity with them. Yeah, I mean, dedicated sounds a little pious, but for me, I think what happens is that once you've been unsafe in that safest place, I suppose the safest place is the mother, and once that is unsafe, safety is very hard to find again, and you're constantly aware of the unsafe, you're constantly aware of that other thing that's happening and unable to sort of, sort of, settle into safety in some way. And yet, the way you describe how she beat your brother and then congratulated you, it is not as if you were the favored child. I mean, after your mom passed away a few years ago and you were so wrecked by it, your brother said to you, she treated nobody as badly as she treated you. Talk about your relationship.

with your mother? Well, both of us believed that of each other. You know, I think that she treated him worse, and he thinks she treated me worse. But the relationship was, you know, I think what happened was, to me, I could see it almost like a chemical experiment, you know, like a chemical reaction because she had left her husband.

She was living in this conservative community. She was being humiliated. She was being evicted. she was being, you know, whispered about. And all the anger that accumulated, the only safe harbor she had to unload it on was me and my brother, you know. And so it's such a patriarchal community.

So they used to call us in Malayalam, address illata pilla, meaning the children with no address because we didn't have a home as such, you know, a parental place and with me I mean she I think she you know I came along at a time when she her relationship with her husband was already over so she she didn't want another child and I mean now as an adult I can understand it but and she made it clear yeah she kept saying I wish I dumped you in an orphan age and all this or that she had had an abortion yes and then she and then and at the same time she also reinforced me by, you know, because it was made clear to me that I'm on the

edge of this community, not at the bottom, but on the edge. And its reassurances were not for me, the arranged weddings and the protections and the whatever. So she knew that I had to, I had to go, like I could not be there, you know, and she, in some way she prepared me, but sometimes it was harsh. Like she just kept telling me I'm going to die because she was a very, very severe asthmatic. And so there was this constant thing of any moment I'm going to die. I was like her spare lung. I was like breathing for her, you know, and saying, I'll breathe for you. And then as I grew up, that sort of dependency obviously began to change. And for her it was a hostile thing, you know. And so, of course, like there's a part in my book where I say she taught me how to write

and she raged against the author I became and she taught me to be free and then she raged against my freedom. But she did put that steel in my spine, you know, and she did teach me something in harsh ways which did help me survive, you know, on my own. in a city, you know, from Kerala to Delhi, it's like three days and two nights by train and you don't speak Hindi and you don't know what's going on. But at the same time, there was that sense of, I'm just looking for a better life. I'm not looking to suffer here. You know, I'm looking for some joy.

I'm looking for some happiness. I'm looking for something great to happen, not as in ambitious, but, you know, surely things are going to be better, you know. That's why I left. And I say that in the book, not because I didn't love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her. To me, the book was a writing challenge, you know, like, can I share with people a person that you simply cannot make up your mind about, you know? Because there are so many wonderful things and then terrible things and then wonderful things and it just keeps turning over and over. I keep saying she's like an airport with no runways, like you could never land your plane.

And also, there are so many people who are people of, you know, who have a calling, whether they are musicians or whether they are politicians or whether they are poets or, you know, so many people who whose primary concern may not have been their own children, you know. but in my case my mother's calling was other people's children you know which was what made it a bit complicated for us why we had to call her mrs roy because you know we were just students in her school and so on but yeah it was it was it was continuously that process of you know being gifted something and then being shredded and then you know but but but learning to hold on to those gifts, you know, and not let them smash along with the shredding. You not only called her Mrs. Roy in public

because she didn't want you to seem favored, and you felt that maybe she was harsher on you and your brother so that you wouldn't seem favored, but you also called her Mrs. Roy privately. But we didn't have any private, you see, because what happened was that she started a school initially in the rented halls of the Quattem Rotary Club, We had to go with brooms every day and sweep up all the men's cigarette stubs

and wash all their glasses and put them away, put down these little tables, and that was the school. And then when the school started doing better, she rented a little house nearby and started a hostel. So there was no home as such. I never actually, in my entire life with her, never lived in a home because it was always the school. There was no private.

I left home and many years later came back and, and then she had built herself a home, which was not my home, you know. So there was no private. We did have to just, private was public. And all this anger and humiliation, therefore, happened in public. You know, that was the problem. It wasn't behind closed doors. So, I mean, you said, and this is, of course, you said in the book,

that you left home not because you didn't love your mother, but so that you could continue to love her. And I don't know, the book itself, it seems, I mean, the writing of it, and again, this is my reading, the writing of it, the recounting of it, is a means of both relinquishing something of your relationship to her, while also maintaining the greatest intimacy with certain aspects of her. Because this split, and it is a split, because it goes from one extreme to another, wouldn't necessarily result in a book that is so close to her. Not only in dialogue, but I don't know, there's something in the book.

Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting, I think, that, you know, I was thinking all of it happened instinctively, but the release of the book in Cochin, taking all my publishers from New York and London and everywhere who had come to Kerala to the school. there was my brother sharing the stage with me even though you know we had very different

like he has a different anger towards her mine is so ambiguous and his is clearer more settled in some ways and I was thinking why did I do it you know and I think it was because it's not just for me all this was hidden in plain sight like everybody knew what was going on

but it wasn't spoken about and somehow it just felt like everybody just felt okay it's okay you know we can we can all celebrate her but we don't have to pretend that what happened didn't happen and I actually called the teachers

in the school before the book came out I said you know there's a difference between hegeography and literature coming soon to a theater near you his literature and it isn't going to diminish her or the school at all but

I just feel that the world also needs to know about this complex woman and the fact that you don't have to be, I mean there's so much pressure on women to be perfect mothers, perfect daughters, perfectly obedient, perfectly nice, perfectly sick. You know my mother was just

unwarnishedly her and that I think is it relief for many women, you know? Talk about writing this book after your mother died. And you don't like to use the word abuse, though clearly today it would be seen very much in those terms. Your brother would certainly use that term. And what you most learned about yourself and your relationship

as you talk about two women also, most of your life with your mother, She died at the age of 89, even though she was a severe asthmatic. Most of your life, the two of you were women. I didn't learn, honestly, I mean, like, I didn't learn anything about myself or about this relationship in the process of writing the book. Because I already knew, I had already lived, they talked about it from the time I was three years old. I had had to be this person who disassociated from myself. Like I think I said in some interview, one half of me was taking the hits and the love and the instructions

and one half was taking notes. And so it's not that I set out to learn something or that it was therapeutic for me to write this book, nothing like that. But it was somehow, it was. a challenge to the craft of writing. Like, can I do this? Can I try to

share her with people in all her various aspects? Because that was what, she was an incredibly unmediated person, you know? And I don't use those words only because

they may be true or not true, but you know, they quickly label someone and flatten everything into into some sort of acceptable language. And then we all sort of try to fit into that language, whereas for me, language is something very, very, very important, you know. Arandati Roy, author of the new memoir, Mother Mary, comes to me. Coming up, Arndotti will read from her book

and talk about the rise of authoritarianism from India to the United States and more. out in the garden Stranger man Came riding by You're not a man Of no belong I've been hoping you to be because you wouldn't in part

on a single lady do a man on earth shall marry me This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org. I'm Amy Goodman. In this holiday special, we're continuing our conversation with Arendati Roy. author of the new memoir, Mother Mary, comes to me.

I interviewed her in September with Democracy Now's Nermin Sheikh. I mean, you write in the first few pages of the book, and this captures a little bit of the ambivalence as well as this conversation, I think. You write, quote, perhaps what I'm about to write is a betrayal of my younger self by the person I have become. If so, it's no small sin, but I'm in no position to be the judge of that. So did you mean, well, why don't you just explain what precisely you meant by that? And, you know, what people can learn from it?

Well, what I meant was that, you know, to leave home at the age of 16, 17, 18. I mean, it was like in stages and 18 was the final goodbye, you know. But obviously, you know, it wasn't, I mean, obviously at that time, I wasn't a person who, the person that I am now, who hasn't broken or ended up in prison or, you know, on drugs or something. And so all those risks were there when I left, you know. And so for me, perhaps there's a sort of calmer person remembering that jagged younger person, you know. So I don't know whether I'm betraying that jagged younger person because I landed on my. feet and what would this book have been had I not, you know?

I'd like you to read something from your book. Mother Mary comes to me. We're talking to Arandadi Roy, the great writer, the activist. Her new book, Mother Mary comes to me, is just out. It is a memoir. Often people ask me about, like you just did, you know, about the therapeutic process or whether there was one while I was writing this. But for me, it was really, you know, all these things that were happening to me and the fact that we all live in this multilingual world, my father's from Bengal, my mother's from Kerala, I'm born in Shilong, I studied in Delhi and Tamil not for a while.

So language was like, how do you describe this multilingual world? not for any reason of writing a great book, but just for speaking to yourself about what was happening to you, you know? So I want to just read a little bit about my search for language, because to me that search was what resulted in everything I wrote plus this book. So all through school, I did consistently badly in English. language and literature, I never understood the rules. Mrs. Roy would slash through my essays and compositions, mark me three out of ten, and write comments like horrible, nonsense. And she was right.

They were complete and utter rubbish. Even then, I knew that the language I wrote in was not mine. And by mine, I don't mean mother tongue, and by language I don't mean English, Hindi or Malayalam. I mean a writer's language, language that I used, not language that used me, a language in which I could describe my multilingual world to myself. I knew even then that language was outside me, not inside me. It would not come to me on its own. I needed to hunt it down like prey, disembowel it, eat it. And when I did, I knew that language, my language,

would ease the way blood flowed through my body. It was out there somewhere, a live language animal, a striped and spotted thing, grazing, waiting for me, the predator. That was the law of my jungle. It wasn't a non-violent vegetarian dream. That's beautiful. That's beautiful. Now, a predator looking for a language animal,

but it's not just one language you found, because the language in God of Small Things, the language in a ministry of utmost happiness and the language in Mother Mary comes to me. Would you say, I mean, you can see something, but it's not uniform. Yes, it's, you know, everything, for me, everything I choose to write,

whether it was the God of Small Things or whether it's every single political essay, or whether it was walking with the comrades, or whether it was the essay on the dams, or Mother Mary comes to me, The first thing is to search for the language, you know, the first thing is to search for the language, the structure, and how does, how do I create this universe? You know, so that's my enterprise when I write, you know. Talk about the difference between writing fiction and nonfiction. You had gotten away from fiction for a while.

you were deeply involved in politics in Kashmir and what it means to be an activist and to speak out in India. And then we want to take it to what it means to come here, to go from Modi land to Trump land. Well, you know, honestly, Amy, there is a part in this book where I make a little jokes about the fact that people call me an activist because I say, this is what writers do. You know, this is what writers have done through the ages, but now we are being domesticated and made to live on bestseller lists and literature festivals, and therefore a writer that writes politically or writes about what's going on in her world isn't a writer but a writer activist, you know, but to me that reduces the scope and the power of literature, you know. So for me, as I said, you know, everything that I do has to do with what is the most effective way of communicating what I want to communicate. Like, is it an essay? Is it a book of fiction? Nothing is less political than the other thing. And, you know, people often pit my nonfiction against my fiction. And this, my most beloved writer, John Berger, who wrote ways of seeing, of course, famously, which all of us grew up on, he once, I didn't know him, and I saw this facts coming

through in those days, the fax machine. And he said, your fiction and your nonfiction, they walk you through the world like your two legs. And I loved him for understanding that to me they were not, they were separate artistic enterprises, but they were not separate political enterprises. They were not separate silos and I just, you know, for me, it was always just searching and cinema. I mean, before that I was working in film and architecture too, you know, all these things, they are not separate for me. They are like layers and layers which made make me this sedimentary rock, you know. Just to go back to the book, this book more specifically, You said, you know, that this is, that it may have been the question of whether it was a betrayal of your younger self or not.

In part, it's informed by the fact that you did not, you were able to write this book because you did not, though there was a risk, end up on drugs or broken, etc. After you left home when you were so young, that certainly didn't happen. But you do have a certain, the impact of this childhood on your, intimate relationships. As you recount them, you mentioned this in passing right now, that one of the lessons you learned, and you say it a couple of times in the book, one of the lessons you learned as a child was that the safest place can be the most dangerous. And as an adult, even when the safest place was the safest, you experienced it as dangerous or made it so. Yeah. That's a very hard thing to cope with and deal with because that was true for me. The safest place was the most dangerous. And then you just don't trust safety. Even when it's offered to you, you don't trust it, you know. And I had obviously, apart from everything else, there was massive financial insecurity. And I spent a great deal of my youth. just thinking about money. I had no ambitions.

I just was like, how am I getting through this week or how am I getting through the next week? And then came a stage when I wrote The God of Small Things and I had more money than I wanted or needed. And then I thought about money just the same amount but in a different way. Like how do you share it? How do you deploy it politically and all of this?

And I naturally gravitate towards the unsafe, you know. Someone asked me, you know, how do you keep this conversation going with your childhood? And I said it's because I was a very adult child and maybe there's something childish about me as an adult. But that communication is always open and you always got your eye on those who are unsafe, you know. So there's one part of me that I suppose moves towards trying to make it less bad for them or trying to use especially, you know, the money that comes from being a writer whose book sell a lot to help others do the work they really want to do which nobody would fund or, you know, which are not sort of NGOized and foundationized.

and corporatized and, you know, sort of what we call pal-toucher, like making people into a tiger on a leash, pretend, pretend dangerous, you know, but. So talk, speaking of danger, although it's not exactly in the same context, talk about what it has been like to write, to speak out, to be politically involved, as you've been for decades, under Narendra Modi, what is happening in India right now, the crackdown on dissent, and then we'll talk about your views and observations about the United States. Well, let's say that what is happening in the United States today happened to us in 2014. You know, and I often say the attempted coup of January 6th over here succeeded in India

and the people in antlers and furs actually rule us, you know. It is so, and today the problem is that it's not just the regime, but that poison has actually seeped down into the population. And so you have a situation where people are policing, people, People are lynching people. Thousands of people can come out on the street with swords and call for the rape or the death of Muslims. And it's all getting normalized, you know. You watch lynching and it's uploaded on YouTube.

And people who actually speak up are in jail. There's a lot of that in this book, you know, a friend of mine who was put into prison for 10 years and then acquitted. He was almost completely paralyzed when he went. in a professor of literature, acquitted, saying that he should not have spent one day in prison, but 10 years he spent, came out, and six months later he was dead because his body just had lost its resilience, you know. So we're in a, we're in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, a, in a, in a, in a, in a, it's just normalized, and nobody even thinks of it as much of a nightmare, which is the most dangerous thing. You know, you have, if you have protests in the United

States by so many people who are disturbed about Gaza, the police, you know, end it. But in India, once a friend of Palestine, there have been no protests. And there are, you know, 200 people show up. The police don't stop it. The Hindu right wing comes out and stops it. You know, so how do you unpoisoned this river is the question. And explain Narendra Modi's relationship with this Hindu right? So he belonged to an organization called the RSS, the Rastya Swaam Sevak Sang, which is now going to celebrate its 100th year this year. It is an organization that believed that India should be declared a Hindu nation and Hindus should be its first citizens. And the political party that Modi is the head of BJP, it's just the front desk of the RSS, which has worked very, very hard, I have to say, in education, in culture, in agriculture, in, it has organizations, it has tens of thousands of volunteers, they call themselves, you know, and it is penetrated every institution in India.

And so when I say the same thing happened to us in 2014, it's so unnerving because you think, do they have a real physical playbook? Or is it just how this kind of fascism works? You know, the attack on universities, the attack on intellectuals, the attack on citizenship, the attack on the economy, the changing of history, the reversing of any kind of moves on social justice. You know, it's so. similar except that in India, it's first of all much more organized because it's a hundred year old organization. And second of all, although I know that, you know, democracy now and so many other non-mainstream channels rage against the American mainstream. It's nothing compared to what the media in India has done. You know, the media in India, you know, the media in India has been criminal. I mean, seriously, they should be tried in front of a war tribunal. For the violence that they have endorsed, for the poison they have intravenously

dripped into people, for the TV anchors behaving like captains of lynch mobs, for the fake news, for the absolutely unforgivable decades of support, where, you know, corporate news channels, so the fascism is completely underwritten by Indian corporations and has been, because they own all the media, you know, they own, like some of them own 20 channels, 24-hour news channels, you know. You mentioned, and this is actually one of the most, at least on the global stage, one of the most dramatic reversals in India's policy, which is no longer backing Palestine, which goes against, I mean, decades of India's position. So let's just talk about, in fact, what's happening in Palestine today, which you have also spoken out about and been deeply critical about Israel's war on Gaza,

deemed now by most international legal and human rights organizations to be genocide. So if you could, I don't know, just respond to what's happening in Gaza, And the response, the split, what appears to be a split, among most countries in the global south, that is the global south on one side, and the global north, although now it seems there are at least some countries shifting their position. Look at the psychology that is being forced upon us. We are all of us able to reach at night for an image of a child starving or a person being blown up in Gaza, easier than reaching for a glass of water. And we are helpless. We are able to do nothing more than keep speaking about it. And I've come to a stage where I feel humiliated to have to discuss it.

Because what is there to discuss? What is there to discuss? When you're murdering children, destroying hospitals, destroying universities, murdering journalists, and boasting about it, boasting about it. and everybody's sort of ambiguous, I mean, what we are witnessing also is, I think there are surveys that say that almost 90% of the population of the world wants this to stop. But there is no connection between democratically elected governments and the will of the people. It's ended.

So the whole charade of Western liberal democracy is as much of a cop. under the rubble as the tens of thousands of Palestinians? The trajectory you see. I remember you standing in the iconic church, Riverside Church, giving your speech against President George W. Bush invading Iraq. And what that means in the level of global revolution, the mass protest of millions, and yet still it happened. and where you see us today and whether you hold out any hope?

One of my, oh, one of the books that you mentioned of mine, Azzadi, it has been banned by the Indian government, and we are in this process of living through a time when everyone thinks we have free speech, but we are actually being policed in such crazy ways. You know, the internet is switched off by any. government whenever they want to and so on. Wasn't it just recently then?

Azadi, fascism, fiction, and freedom in the time of the virus. Yes. But you see, one of my books of essays has been dedicated to those who have learned to divorce reason from hope. And we have to hope. We have to be unreasonable and we have to hope and we have to do what we have to do. You know, I can't, I don't want to. I don't want to sound like some cute, you know, person saying, oh, everything will be all right.

But at the same time, I mean, the end of my talk about Allah Abdul-Fattah in London a few months ago was that it can't continue like this. I mean, Israel, yes, it has devastated Gaza, but it has devastated itself. too. It is reviled in the eyes of the world for what it has done, you know. And it has also, I'm sure that all the young people that committed those horrible crimes, one day it will destroy them. Arundati Roy, author of her new memoir, Mother Mary, comes to me. Coming up in this holiday special, we remember Bill Moyers, the legend. legendary PBS broadcaster and former White House aide who died in June at the age of 91. Oh, goodbye, my honey, I'm gone.

Goodbye, my honey, I'm gone. My boat bill is due and my whiskey bill is too long. Oh, good my, honey, I'm gone. Oh, good by, honey, I'm gone. This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now, Democracy Now. I'm Amy Goodman. We end this holiday special remembering the legendary journalist Bill Moyers, who died in June at the age of 91. In the 1960s, he was a founding organizer of the Peace Corps, served as press secretary for President Lyndon Johnson.

In 1971, Moyers began an award-winning career as a TV broadcaster that would last over 40 years. During that time, Bill Moyers received over 30 Emmys, countless other prizes, many for his programs on PBS, also a long-time champion of public television, independent media, his death coming while the Trump administration was stripping federal funding from PBS and NPR. In 2011, Democracy Now is Juan Gonzalez and I interviewed Bill Moyers. He outlined his critique of the corporate media. The consensual seduction of the mainstream media by and with the government is one of the most dangerous toxins at work in America today. They wouldn't see it this way, and there are exceptions, but the corruption of corporate media, corporate power, and government, is what makes so, vital what the two of you do. I'm serious about that. You don't have the scope of Meet the Press. I mean, look at Meet the Press. Who's been on Meet the Press more than any other figure in Washington in the last several years? Newt Gingrich. Newt Gingrich. Newt Gingrich, I later learned when I was

briefly at NBC as an analyst doing commentaries, controversial commentaries, actually came to the brass of NBC and GE. Luke Gingrich has had some nefarious relationship with General Electric, which is one of the huge government contractors, as well as the owner of Meet the Press. And it's just an example of what I'm talking about, the consensual seduction of the mainstream media with power, corporate power, government power, with exceptions, I repeat, is something that without the antidote of independence, reporting and analysis that you do and others, we would be in a dark, dark pit with no light shining on us. I want to go back since we're talking about broadcasting, right back to the Johnson era and then jump back to here, which is about the founding of public broadcasting and the corporation for public broadcasting, especially for young people, to understand why it began

and where it's gone. Well, there were three, believe it or not, I mean, nobody below 40 will believe it. this, you may not believe it, because both of you are much younger than I am. But when I was 20 years old, there were three networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC. And ABC was only half a network, no news division, all of that. And so we were dependent upon three corporate advertising-driven, commercial networks for our information. And to his credit, Lennon Johnson, who made his fortune, part of his fortune by controlling the three. He had one station in Austin that had a monopoly over broadcasting the product, the content of all three networks.

I mean, that's how he made his money, much of his money. But he really did believe. He was a teacher. He had taught poor Mexican students in the little town of Catula, Texas. He was a populist from a poor part of Central Texas. Yeah, but he went to South Texas. He came from Central Texas. went to South Texas to teach in this Mexican school.

And he really cared about poor and he cared about education. He felt there should be one channel that was free of commercials and free of commercial values. Because he knew what commercial values will do to people who are reporting the news, producing content, the desire to amuse and entertain will cause us to compromise the truth. So he, when the Carnegie Corporation and the Carnegie Commission, John Gardner had been head of the Carnegie Corporation, and they did a study of what to do about educational television in this country. The report was actually delivered to my desk when I was still at the White House. The Carnegie Commission became the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, and I wish we had it here because the speech Lyndon Johnson made when he signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 is a great tribute to a. network devoted to the life of the mind, the life of the spirit, and the diversity of American voices. He believed that only white male straight guys got on national television in those

days, and he was right. And he saw the value, the changing, the changes coming in America. And he believed there should be a public media that was devoted to the diversity, the pluralism of American life and to the highest expression of the creative and journalistic arts. And the actual act of the creating the cooperation for public television talked about serving underserved communities of America. And unfortunately, as you probably noticed, that there was a report done by fairness and accuracy and media, public interest group. Yeah, fairness and accuracy and reporting, right? Fair. And they show that even on public broadcasting today, in our mainstream broadcast, it's usually the official view of reality that's represented.

far more corporate spokesman than labor or working people spokesman, far more white male figures of authority than people of color and marginalized people. That's just a tendency of human beings that always has to be resisted. And public television, public radio belongs to the people. Go back and read a great document, the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. And when we stray from it, as we sometimes do, the public. has to rise up and say, we own you, we are your shareholders, come back to first principles, come back to first things.

So what has happened to public broadcasting right now, the onslaught, you talk about, you just wrote a piece about NPR and PBS, and you talk about, well, Nixon first tried to gut it, and then take it forward. Richard Nixon tried to just, he did succeed in fragmenting our authority, because he didn't like, I was on the air. Robert McNeil was on the air. We were doing journalists work, but he called us liberals because we were trying to get at the facts. He and Pat Buchanan, his communications director, succeeded in harming, injuring public broadcasting back in the 1970s. Thanks to a great Republican who was chairman of the public television station in Dallas, we beat him off. They

wanted to defund us completely, but they didn't. Then Luke Gingrich comes on. Robert Dole comes along with the right wing in the late 80s, and he tries to defund public broadcasting. Then comes Newt Gingrich in 1994, and then we had George W. Bush and his team who came after some of us on public broadcasting. Conservatives, on principle, don't believe that federal funds should be used to support the media. But then also they don't believe in allowing any alternative voices, any alternatives to the official reality to be heard. So they have always been against public broadcasting. And sometimes self-censorship occurs because you're looking over your shoulder and you think,

well, if I do this story or that story, it'll hurt public broadcasting. Public broadcasting has suffered often for my sins. Reporting stories, the officials don't report it. And today, only about seven, you know, a very small percentage of funding for NPR and PBS comes from the government. but that accounts for a concentration of pressure and self-censorship. And only when we get a trust fund, only when the public figures out how to support us independently of the federal treasury, where we flourish as an independent media. Are you hopeful these days despite what we've discussed about the state of the media?

We've obviously seen these enormous uprisings throughout the Arab world. On Democracy Now, we've covered the, really, the definitely, Democratic popular renaissance that's occurred throughout all of Latin America in recent years, that there are parts of the world where things are hopeful. But right here, at home in the United States, things don't always seem like the heading in a good direction. I think this country is in a very precarious state at the moment. I think, as I say, the escalating, accumulating power of organized wealth is snuffing out. Everything public, whether it's public broadcasting, public schools, public unions, public parks, public highways, everything public has been under assault since the late 1970s, the early years of the Reagan administration, because there is a philosophy that's been extant in America for a long time that anything public is less desirable than the public, than private.

So I, and I think we're at a very critical moment in the equilibrium. No society, no human being can survive without balance, without equilibrium. Nothing in excess, the ancient Greek said. And Madison, one of the great founders, one of the great framers of our Constitution, built equilibrium into our system. We don't have equilibrium now. The power of money trumps the power of democracy today. And I'm very worried about it.

I said to—and if we don't address this, if we don't get a handle on what we were talking about, money and politics, and find a way to thwart it, tame it, we're into—democracy should be a break on unbridled greed and power. Because capitalism, capital, lack of fire, can turn from a servant, a good servant, into an evil master. and democracy is the break on my passions and my appetites and your greed and your wealth. And we have to get that equally a bring back. I said to a friend of mine on Wall Street, how do you feel about the market? He said, well, I'm not, I'm optimistic.

And I said, why do you then look so worried? And he said, because I'm not sure my optimism is justified. And I feel that way. So I fall back on the balance wheel in the Italian political scientist Gramsky, who said that he practices the pessimism of the mind and the optimism of the will. By that he meant he sees the world as it is without rose-colored glasses, as I try to do as a journalist. I see what's there. That will make you pessimistic. But then you have to exercise your will optimistically, believing that each of us, singly and all of us collectively, can be an agent of change.

And I have to get up every morning and imagine a more confident future and then try to do something that day to help bring it about. The legendary Bill Moyers in 2011. He died in June at the age of 91. To see all our interviews with him, you can go to DemocracyNow.org. And that does it for our show. Special thanks to Mike Burke. I'm Mimi Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.