If You Trust me (and yourself) Look Here!..(hint, about H. Pinter!).

[Peter Lemkin]

Harold Pinter died recently. He was a fantastic playwrite, but even more, he was one of the MOST articulate spokespersons for sanity/humanity/democracy/liberty/peace/justice....truth and the permanent end to Deep Politics. I had heard parts of his Nobel acceptance speech on audio and read parts of his speech online - but, just moments ago I had to change a fuse in my brain - it having been 'blown' by listening and watching a dying Harold Pinter speak one of the most eloquent and poignient talks I had the honor to hear in a very long time - too long to be honest. Do this: Turn off the lights. Light a candle. Meditate, Burn incense. Take a whiskey, wine, J or whatever.....wait....then sit quietly, make the image as large as your computer will allow. Sit in a comfortable place, lean back, relax, let your mind wander and then listen to this 30 minutes. Watch as video and maximize size and turn up the volume!

Those who are not deeply effected don't know me (or yourself). Those to whom are efected to moved to tears - are my true brothers and sisters. This is entitled: Art, Truth and Politics - it is, IMO, the maximum of all three.....

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/30/h...008_on_art

Presente! Harold Pinter! Presente!

The words alone don't do justice. Watch this as video...if your computer allows - a dying man speaking ultimate truth to ultimate power!...........no one can do more!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

AMY GOODMAN: Harold Pinter, the Nobel Prize-winning British playwright, screenwriter, poet, actor, political activist, died last week at the age of seventy-eight after a prolonged battle with cancer.


He’s considered one of the most influential and provocative dramatists of his generation, often compared to his friend and mentor, Samuel Beckett. Pinter’s well-known plays include The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming and Betrayal. The adjective “Pinteresque” is often used to describe situations marked by “halting dialogue, uncertainty of identity and an air of menace."


Born in 1930 into a Jewish family in London that had fled persecution in Poland and Odessa, Pinter began his career as a stage actor and wrote his first play, The Room, in 1957.


Pinter was also well known as a vociferous critic of British and American foreign policy and an activist against nuclear proliferation, political repression and censorship. As early as 1948, Harold Pinter resisted joining the British military national service and registered as a conscientious objector.


Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005. In his Nobel acceptance speech, titled “Art, Truth, and Politics,” he strongly denounced the United States, its actions in Iraq and its policy of backing groups like the Contras in Nicaragua.


Today, we bring you an excerpt of “Art, Truth, and Politics.” Harold Pinter gave the speech in December of 2005. He was too ill to go to Stockholm to receive the award, so it was videotaped, and this is what was broadcast around the world.

HAROLD PINTER: The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over forty years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.


The Sandinistas weren’t perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance, and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilized. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. 2,000 schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one-seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.


The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist-Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of healthcare and education and achieve social unity and national self-respect, neighboring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was, of course, at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador.


I spoke earlier about “a tapestry of lies” which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a “totalitarian dungeon.” This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government: two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954, and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships.


Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.


The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance, but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty-stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. “Democracy” had prevailed.


But this “policy” was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.


The United States supported, and in many cases engendered, every right-wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.


Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes, they did take place, and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it. It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.


I put to you that the United States is, without doubt, the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless, it may be, but it’s also very clever. As a salesman, it is out on its own, and its most saleable commodity is self-love. It’s a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, “the American people,” as in the sentence, “I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people, and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.” It’s a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words “American people” provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties, but it’s very comfortable. This does not apply, of course, to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the two million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the United States.


The United States no longer bothers about low-intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favor. It quite simply doesn’t give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead: the pathetic and supine Great Britain.


What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days—conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead?

Look at Guantanamo Bay: hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated, but hardly thought about, by what’s called the “international community.” This criminal outrage is being committed by a country which declares itself to be “the leader of the free world.” Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally, a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man’s land, from which indeed they may never return. At present, many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said, “To criticize our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You’re either with us or against us.” So Blair shuts up.


The invasion of Iraq was 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; a formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.

AMY GOODMAN: Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter, his acceptance speech in 2005. He died Christmas Eve at the age of seventy-eight.

[Peter Lemkin]

Nobel Lecture - Literature 2005
http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureat...ure-e.html

© THE NOBEL FOUNDATION 2005
General permission is granted for the publication in newspapers in any
language after December 7,
2005, 5:30 p.m. (Swedish time).
Harold Pinter – Nobel Lecture

Art, Truth & Politics

In 1958 I wrote the following:
'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal,
nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily
either true or false; it can be both true and false.'

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the
exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a
citizen I cannot. As a citizen I
must ask: What is true? What is false?

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search
for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what
drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you
stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding
with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to
the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real
truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in
dramatic art. There are
many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect
each other, ignore each other, tease each
other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a
moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I
ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is
what they said. That is what they
did.

Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given
word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of
two lines which came right out
of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me.

The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times . The first line of The
Homecoming is 'What have you done with the
scissors?' The first line of Old Times is 'Dark.'

In each case I had no further information.

In the first case someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and
was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably
stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn't give a
damn about
the scissors or about the questioner either, for that matter.

'Dark' I took to be a description of someone's hair, the hair of a woman,
and was the answer to a question. In each case I found myself compelled to
pursue the matter. This happened visually, a very slow fade, through shadow
into
light.

I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C. In the play
that became The Homecoming I saw a man enter a stark room and ask his
question of a younger man sitting on an ugly sofa reading a racing paper. I
somehow

suspected that A was a father and that B was his son, but I had no proof.
This was however confirmed a short time later when B (later to become
Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), 'Dad, do you mind if I change the
subject? I want to ask you something. The dinner we had before, what was
the name of it? What do you call it? Why don't you buy a dog?
You're a dog cook. Honest. You think you're cooking for a lot of dogs.' So
since B calls A 'Dad' it seemed to me
reasonable to assume that they were father and son. A was also clearly the
cook and his cooking did not seem to be held in high regard. Did this mean
that there was no mother? I didn't know. But, as I told myself at the time,
our
beginnings never know our ends.

'Dark.' A large window. Evening sky. A man, A (later to become Deeley), and
a woman, B (later to become Kate),
sitting with drinks. 'Fat or thin?' the man asks. Who are they talking
about? But I then see, standing at the window, a
woman, C (later to become Anna), in another condition of light, her back to
them, her hair dark.

It's a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that
moment have had no existence. What follows
is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an
unstoppable avalanche. The author's position is
an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the
characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they
are impossible to define. You certainly can't
dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with
them, cat and mouse, blind man's buff, hide and
seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your
hands, people with will and an individual
sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to
change, manipulate or distort.

So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a
trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at
any time.

But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop.
It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right
there, on the spot.

Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems.
Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost.
Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their
own air. The author cannot confine and
constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice. He
must be prepared to approach them from a variety of angles, from a full and
uninhibited range of
perspectives, take them by surprise, perhaps, occasionally, but
nevertheless give them the freedom to go which way
they will. This does not always work. And political satire, of course,
adheres to none of these precepts, in fact does
precisely the opposite, which is its proper function.

In my play The Birthday Party I think I allow a whole range of options to
operate in a dense forest of possibility before
finally focussing on an act of subjugation.

Mountain Language pretends to no such range of operation. It remains
brutal, short and ugly. But the soldiers in the play
do get some fun out of it. One sometimes forgets that
torturers become easily bored. They need a bit of a laugh to keep their
spirits up. This has been confirmed of course by
the events at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad. Mountain Language
lasts only 20 minutes, but it could go on for hour after hour, on and on
and on, the same pattern repeated over and over again, on and on, hour
after hour.

Ashes to Ashes , on the other hand, seems to me to be taking place under
water. A drowning woman, her hand reaching up through the waves, dropping
down out of sight, reaching for others, but finding nobody there, either
above or under the water, finding only shadows, reflections, floating; the
woman a lost figure in a drowning landscape, a woman unable to
escape the doom that seemed to belong only to others.

But as they died, she must die too.

Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of
this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available
to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of
that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in
ignorance,
that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their

own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon
which we feed.

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
Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New
York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. 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.

But before I come back to the present I would like to look at the recent
past, by which I mean United States foreign
policy since the end of the Second World War. I believe it is obligatory
upon us to subject this period to at least some
kind of even limited scrutiny, which is all that time will allow here.

Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern
Europe during the post-war period: the
systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression
of independent thought. All this has been fully
documented and verified.

But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only
been superficially recorded, let alone
documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all.
I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable
bearing on where the world
stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of
the Soviet Union, the United States'
actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had
carte blanche to do what it liked.

Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been
America's favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has
described as 'low intensity conflict'. Low
intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if
you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the
heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the
gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued – or beaten to death –
the same thing – and your own friends, the military and the great
corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before
the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in
US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.

The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer
it here as a potent example of America's view of its role in the world,
both then and now.

I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.

The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money
to the Contras in their campaign against
the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf
of Nicaragua but the most important
member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US
body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador
himself). Father
Metcalf said: 'Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of
Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural
centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked
the parish. They destroyed
everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped
nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They
behaved like
savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from
this shocking terrorist activity.'

Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational,
responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in
diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and
then spoke with some gravity. 'Father,' he said, 'let me tell you
something. In war, innocent people always suffer.' There was a frozen
silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.

Innocent people, indeed, always suffer.

Finally somebody said: 'But in this case “innocent people” were the victims
of a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one among many. If
Congress allows the
Contras more money further atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this
not the case? Is your government not
therefore guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the
citizens of a sovereign state?'

Seitz was imperturbable. 'I don't agree that the facts as presented support
your assertions,' he said.

As we were leaving the Embassy a US aide told me that he enjoyed my plays.
I did not reply.

I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following
statement: 'The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.'

The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for
over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led
by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular
revolution.

The Sandinistas weren't perfect. They possessed their fair
share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of
contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised.
They set out to establish a stable,
decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of
thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were
brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were
given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable
literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the
country to less than one seventh. Free education was
established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a
third. Polio was eradicated.

The United States denounced these achievements as
Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US
government, a dangerous example was being set. If
Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic
justice, if it was allowed to raise the
standards of health care and education and achieve social
unity and national self respect, neighbouring countries would ask the same
questions and do the same things. There was
of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in
El Salvador.

I spoke earlier about 'a tapestry of lies' which surrounds us. President
Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a
'totalitarian dungeon'. This was taken generally by the
media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair
comment. But there was in fact no record of death
squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture.
There was no record of systematic or
official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in
Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the
government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The
totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and
Guatemala. The United States had brought down the
democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954
and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive
military dictatorships.

Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were
viciously murdered at the Central American University in
San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment
trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop
Romero was assassinated while saying
mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were
they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was
possible and should be achieved. That belief
immediately qualified them as communists. They died
because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of
poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their
birthright.

The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took
some years and considerable
resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally
undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and
poverty stricken once again. The
casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were
over. Big business returned with a
vengeance. 'Democracy' had prevailed.

But this 'policy' was by no means restricted to Central America. It was
conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it
never happened.

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing
military dictatorship in the world after the
end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil,
Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines,
Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States
inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did
they take place? And are they in all
cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take
place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you
wouldn't know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it
wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of
the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but
very few
people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It
has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while
masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty,
highly successful act of
hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on
the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and
ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on
its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen
to all American presidents on
television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say
to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the
American people and I ask
the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to
take on behalf of the American people.'

It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually
employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a
truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie
back on the cushion. The
cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your
critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course
to the 40 million people living below the
poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag
of prisons, which extends across the US.

The United States no longer bothers about low intensity
conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It
puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn't
give a damn about the United
Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it
regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little
lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.

What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do
these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days –
conscience? A
conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared
responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo
Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with
no legal
representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally
illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance
of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about
by what's called the 'international
community'. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which
declares itself to be 'the leader of the free world'. Do we think about the
inhabitants of Guantanamo
Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally – a small
item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man's land from which
indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being
force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these
force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anaesthetic. Just a tube stuck up
your nose and into your throat. You vomit
blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign
Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British
Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States
has said: to criticise our conduct in
Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You're either with us or
against us. So Blair shuts up.

The invasion of Iraq was 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. A formidable assertion of military force
responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of
innocent people.

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts
of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and
call it 'bringing freedom and
democracy to the Middle East'.

How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a
mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I
would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned
before
the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has
been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal
Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter
politician finds himself in the dock Bush has
warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the
Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have
his address if they're interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.

Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well
away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American
bombs and missiles before the Iraq
insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don't exist.
They are blank. They are not even
recorded as being dead. 'We don't do body counts,' said the
American general Tommy Franks.

Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of
British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy.
'A grateful child,' said the
caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph,
on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family
had been blown up by a missile. He was the only
survivor. 'When do I get my arms back?' he asked. The story was dropped.
Well, Tony Blair wasn't holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other
mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It
dirties your shirt and tie when you're making a sincere speech on
television.

The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their
graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm's way. The
mutilated rot in their
beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both
rot, in different kinds of graves.

Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda, 'I'm
Explaining a Few Things':

And one morning all that was burning, one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth devouring human beings and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on, and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings came through the sky to kill
children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.

Jackals that the jackals would despise
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate.

Face to face with you I have seen the blood of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave of pride and knives.

Treacherous generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain:
from every house burning metal flows instead of flowers
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes and from every crime bullets
are born which will one day find
the bull's eye of your hearts.

And you will ask: why doesn't his poetry speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land.

Come and see the blood in the streets. Come and see
the blood in the streets. Come and see the blood in the streets!*

Let me make it quite clear that in quoting from Neruda's
poem I am in no way comparing Republican Spain to Saddam
Hussein's Iraq. I quote Neruda because nowhere in
contemporary poetry have I read such a powerful visceral description of the
bombing of civilians.

I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about
putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its
official declared policy is now defined as 'full spectrum
dominance'. That is not my term, it is theirs. 'Full spectrum dominance'
means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.

The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the
world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, of course.
We don't quite know how they got there but they are there all right.

The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads.
Two thousand are on hair trigger alert,
ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is
developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The
British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear
missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You?
Me? Joe
Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile
insanity – the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons – is at the
heart of present American
political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the
United States is on a permanent military footing and shows no sign of
relaxing it.

Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United
States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and
angered by their government's actions, but as things stand
they are not a coherent political force – yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty
and fear which we can see growing daily in the
United States is unlikely to diminish.

I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but
I would like to volunteer for the job
myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on
television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious,
winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile,
curiously attractive, a
man's man.

'God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden's God is
bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God was bad, except he didn't have one. He
was a barbarian. We are
not barbarians. We don't chop people's heads off. We believe in freedom. So
does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the
democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving
democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give
compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a
great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And
he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is
my moral authority. And don't you forget it.'

A writer's life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don't
have to weep about that. The writer makes his
choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are

open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own,
out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection
– unless you lie – in which case of course you have
constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a
politician.

I have referred to death quite a few times this evening. I
shall now quote a poem of my own called 'Death'.

Where was the dead body found? Who found the dead body?
Was the dead body dead when found? How was the dead body found?

Who was the dead body?

Who was the father or daughter or brother
Or uncle or sister or mother or son
Of the dead and abandoned body? Was the body dead when abandoned? Was the
body abandoned?
By whom had it been abandoned?

Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?

What made you declare the dead body dead? Did you declare the dead body
dead?
How well did you know the dead body?
How did you know the dead body was dead?

Did you wash the dead body Did you close both its eyes Did you bury the
body
Did you leave it abandoned
Did you kiss the dead body

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is
accurate. But move a millimetre and the image
changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections.
But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror
– for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching,
unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the
real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which
devolves upon us all. It is in
fact mandatory.

If such a determination is not embodied in our political
vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us – the
dignity of man.

* Extract from "I'm Explaining a Few Things" translated by Nathaniel Tarn,
from Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems

[Keith Millea]

Peter,
I was fortunate to watch both parts of the interview on Democracy Now.I have NO words that can give this man the respect he deserves as a writer,and teller of truth.This speech should be mandatory Prime Time viewing for every American,everyday.

Keith

[Peter Lemkin]

Peter,
I was fortunate to watch both parts of the interview on Democracy Now.I have NO words that can give this man the respect he deserves as a writer,and teller of truth.This speech should be mandatory Prime Time viewing for every American,everyday.

Keith

Thanks Keith! One can tell when someone is telling the truth and when one is 100% invested in what they are saying as the complete truth, as they understand it. I was absolutely unable to move or blink for the hour Pinter was speaking. The man [dying and knowing he was dying] was speaking hard truth to power without pulling any punches. What he had to say is, yes, something all students and all Citizens should hear, IMO. I'll bet less than 5% have - and that is being very optimistic.

[Keith Millea]

Well,being of the 5% I can tell you that after watching Pinters speech on Democracy Now.Then listening to the MSM reporting on the Israel-Palestinian conflict.The CNN reporter actually used the CRF for his source.I am no longer able to watch any other TV News Program but Democracy Now.BYE-BYE MSM.I won't be missing you...............

Keith