Harold Pinter may have formally given up his playwrighting pen, but he has not abandoned his political passion. In his video-taped acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, reprinted in today’s Guardian, he begins with a brief discussion on his craft and how his plays and characters come to be, but then launches in a far more incendiary attack on politicians, and how they conspire to keep people in total ignorance of the truth in order to maintain their power.
He says: “As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with al-Qaida and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11 2001. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true. The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.”
What follows is an excoriating and chastening account of American foreign policy interventions since the second world war that, he says, have made it clear that the US “had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.” He comments, “It quite simply doesn’t give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent…. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.”
He cites the invasion of Iraq again, as a “bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading – as a last resort, all other justifications having failed to justify themselves – as liberation.”
Since America has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice, but Britain has, he suggests that Blair be arraigned before it as a war criminal.
Pinter’s plays speak volumes between the lines – but bluntly stating his position as he does here, he speaks even more loudly with them. His speech is not just a major contribution to revealing the lies we’re living under, but also an important new part towards understanding the man.
Hi Mark,
Looking at Pinter's piece from the other side of the political fence, I was amazed at how stale and predictable it was. Is it really enough to launch yet another attack on wicked Uncle Sam? HP would have us believe he's saying something new and courageous, but the artistic "community" has actually been reciting the same lines for years, with a little help from Noam Chomsky. It's the conventional wisdom, as you know. I also find it really puzzling that Pinter et al decry the simplistic fundamentaism of American conservatives, and then indulge in exactly the same kind of dumbed-down sloganeering. I'd be curious to hear a reasoned critique of a sophisticated American conservative - Irving Kristol, say, or Norman Podhoretz. But maybe that would be too much hard work -after all, rednecks are much easier targets. American conservatism is a much more complex and interesting phenomenon than the literati imagine.
The Left should consider the possibility that when it buys into P's Manichean worldview, it's really choosing to wallow in irrelevancy. Which is good for the Right, but maybe not so good for the workers, and definitely bad for democracy.
United States today, and for a long time now, has being an amusement park, celebraiting marrily, marrily, marrily, life is but a dream and "SS The Perfect America" is sinking fast.