It seems it is necessary to get rid of Bush–from your novel. Nancy Huston’s Lignes de faille will need to have the parts about Bush and the war in Iraq excised from its English language edition to be published in the US. Huston has said that “contemporary America is reproducing the worst traits of Nazi Germany. I believe we are in a pretotalitarian state.” Her publishers here have said that, in differing from the French who find anti-Bush statements more palatable, they’re taking the “long view.”

Thanks, Liz Blum.

The article hit close to home because my novel, which is being brought out by Picador India, is under consideration in the US, and there are parts that deal with the pornography of war in Iraq. A man dying beside the Ganges reads the newspaper in the hospital and dreams of rats in distant Iraq. I’ll have to look at the MS more closely but I don’t recall Bush being described as a hero in those pages.

nancy-huston-george-bush

The photo above has the following caption:

Surekha Bhotmange, 45: raped, murdered
Priyanka Bhotmange, 17: raped, murdered
Roshan Bhotmange, 23: murdered
Sudhir Bhotmange, 21: murdered

Surekha and Priyanka were stripped, paraded naked, beaten with bicycle chains, axes and bullock-cart pokers. They were gang-raped until they died. Some raped them even after that.

Shivam Vij has sent this link to his Tehelka story about the horrifying treatment of Dalits in a Maharashtra village, a crime that “didn’t merit front page news in 21st-century-10-percent-growth-rate India.”

Here is Sankarshan Thakur’s edit on the crime.

dalits-bhotmange-shivam-vij-sankarshan-thakur-tehelka