Mr. Pinter attacked American foreign policy since World War II, saying that while the crimes of the Soviet Union had been well documented, those of the United States had not. "I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road," he said. "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."
December 7, 2005
"The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them."
Harold Pinter on the occasion of accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature. Pinter, we're told, was "[d]ressed in black, bristling with controlled fury."
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19 comments:
Another America hater.
No one can win the Nobel Prize for Literature or the Nobel Peace Prize unless they have an insane hatred for America,
So the Nobel peace prize and the literature prize are now largely just the "Fuck America" prizes?
Maybe we should discuss the history of Mother England with Mr Pinter. Or, if we're in our torturous criminal mood, let's make him sit through one of his own plays a few times.
Oh well. Too bad the brave artists of the world who feel the need to unburden themselves like someone with dysentery at every opportunity have little to say about actual tyranny in the world today.
The saddest part about this is that I actually know quite a few New York Times readers who will read this, nodding their heads solemnly in assent.
Ann, didn't you once say in a podcast that you thought of Pinter's work as representative of your childhood idea of what adults read? Would Mr Pinter had the intelligence and morality and sanity of a children's story.
"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."
Complaining that language keeps thought at bay... What would he have us do instead I wonder?
The full-text hasn't appeared online anywhere that I can find.
Could you imagine winning one of the most prestigious prizes in the world, one that puts you in the company of the 20th century's greatest writers, and using what scant time you have on the podium to lambast America. This is one of your defining moments as an author.
There's a reason why the crimes of the Soviet Union were so well documented (and I sense a tinge of regret in that sentence coming from your less-that-humble playwright) previous Nobel Laureate Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about them. Of course, first he spent eight years in the middle of Siberia during the peak of his life slaving in the gulags and living off gruel for the offense of having made an offhand deragatory remark about the Great Leader in a letter as he fought for the country. Somehow, I think if Mr. Pintar sat down and attempted to write the Bush Archipelago, he'd have a slightly more difficult filling out the 3 volumes- even in his most fertile of moods, an hour long play seems too much to ask from the poor man. Even worse, it would be done in a sparse style intended to be ironic and nihilistic, but instead was drab, boring, and largely unreadable. All while managing to defend the vestigial tail of the Stalinist system, Cuba, and the greatest single mass-murderer in the post Cold-War period, Slobodan Milosevic.
During the Spanish Civil War thousands of members of the political left went to fight the fascists in Spain. Where are the heirs of these fighting liberals? Where are today's Robert Jordans ("For Whom the Bell Tolls"), ready to battle Islamic fascists?
All I see now on the political left are characters like Pinter.
I generally dislike it when people use forums such as the Nobel Prize acceptance speech, or an Academy Awards acceptance speech, to say something irresponsibly provocative.
Leaving aside the Pinter's questionable timing and lack of tact . . . can you really blame somebody for criticising the U.S. for propping up military dictatorships? Or, even worse, overthrowing democratically elected leaders?
I can easily do so, Terrence, when said figure sits on the Cuba Solidarity Campiagn and the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic, one gets the suspicion that he is not overly concerned with destroying the pillars of unelected tyrrany.
I think that even funnier is this quote from Wikipedia:
He frequently writes political letters to British newspapers.
He's the UK equivalent of the angry guy that has to be reminded by the producer of the Rush Limbaugh Show that, sorry sir, you can only call in once per month. I'm really angry about this, so I'm going to mail a Letter to the Editor for the Guardian, and maybe if it's really good, they'll give me a funny little illustration or a featured spot or something. Or what the heck!- it doesn't even have to be good, I'm Harold F'n Pintar!
P.S. I think word verification is trying to tell me something: fukxu
"...but very few people have actually talked about them."
What planet does Pinter live on where this is true?
I guess you gotta be really smart to stereotype 300 million people.
"...but very few people have actually talked about them."
Consider this the flip side of the Pauline Kael quote. She said, "I don't know how Richard Nixon could have won, I don't know anybody who voted for him."
Pinter's version is something like this: "I don't know why people don't talk about the crimes of the United States. Everyone I know talks about them all the time."
A bit histrionic perhaps. But Pinter is an acclaimed dramatist after all.
Nonetheless, his sobering point about the schizophrenic (and all too venal) nature of American foreign policy since WWII is undeniable (and worthy of far more debate).
Terrence said...
. . . can you really blame somebody for criticising the U.S. for propping up military dictatorships? Or, even worse, overthrowing democratically elected leaders?
I would imagine all major nations, and all military powers, have propped up dictatorships or overthrown elected leaders. We are guilty of nothing that other nations have not done. Yes we have done our share.
But there is a difference. All men (and nations) sin. But some nations try to repent in some fashion, and some don't. The United States has in many cases tried to right its wrongs, or adjust it course. Further, we have the mechanism for such action by virtue of our being a democracy.
We also have to take note of the good done in the world by the United States, which far outstrips that of any other nation. Nearly every great comfort (and your ability to have your words read by strangers as well) has its root in the United States, a unique nation made of people of the entire world. Our involvement in World War 2 alone likely stopped decades worth of future misery and death.
While it's impossible to peg, can you imagine the likely misery in the world if America stopped giving financial aid, stopped composing, stopped singing, stopped writing, stopped practicing law or creating new technology, stopped growing food, stopped blathering on about human rights, stopped allowing blacks on the bus, stopped knocking off Serbian strong men, stopped giving relief supplies, stopped giving charity via its churches, and so on. You cannot even price tag that invisible number.
All have sinned and come short of the glory of God, but some strive to reach that glory and spread it to their fellows.
It is a pathetic rant by a pathetic leftist. As usual, hold the US to a standard of perfection, focus on those relatively small errors, and then not assume any guilt for the really grievous errors of the past true leftists like the Gulag, Mao's slaughterhouse or the Khmer Rouge. *Sigh*
American Football
You're not gone yet, Harold?
The entire speech appears to be here. With regards to America v. Western Europe, Henry, I do think this list pretty much is exclusively American:
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.
From Faulkner's speech on the Nobel Prize, 55 years ago:
"I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."
terrence and mbrlr dare to suggest that Pinter's criticism may have merit.
the general response: "we're not as bad as those others that Pinter didn't criticize!"
the litany of debacles that we have supported since WWII is extremely sobering:
Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile.
people are always talking about these? really? in my experience most americans are pretty ignorant of modern american history, pop culture aside.
you can nitpick with pinter, his status as an artist, or whatever, but the reminders are valid. to pretend they are just the standard issue sins of (democratic) empire does not dismiss it. to pretend its irrelevant, when we're in the midst of a new escapade that strongly reminiscent of this ignoble pattern, is exactly the kind of blindness that pinter is talking about.
pinter, somewhat like orwell and ibsen, threw his life into capturing that same genteel suppression of individual freedom, and of the unspoken violence behind the scenes. something tells me he's far from a coward, and doesn't mind being a target for the right.
[word verification: fistqo]
All Pinter means by "right-wing dictatorship" is "third-world government friendly to the US", so his claim that we support such things is circular.
During the Cold War we generally supported the lesser evil, and not just a little bit lesser, either: The left's uncritical adoration of folks like Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, and so on is well-known, and none of the regimes Pinter accuses us of supporting were ever in the same league as those guys. Not even close. Let's not forget that point: The US opposed all of the most evil regimes of the 20th century, and Pinter supported all of them except Hitler (and he missed supporting Hitler only because he wasn't writing during the Non-Aggression Pact era).
Pinter's position has always been that a genocidal regime is better than a merely lousy one. Furthermore, in every case where we don't support a brutal regime (e.g. Cuba), the Pinters of the world howl at us for being unsupportive meanies. If we'd treated Pinochet as a pariah, he'd be a darling of the left. If we treated Castro the way Pinter wants us to, Pinter would suddenly develop an intense interest in Castro's human rights violations.
As for the degree and worth of our support for these "right-wing dictatorships", you have to remember that left-wingers tend to exaggerate hysterically and make stuff up. When you have more facts than the lefties give you, the "obvious connections" they so often rely on turn out not to be very obvious at all, to anybody who isn't committed to believing in them in the first place.
Remember, Pinter's not just saying we've done bad things: That's trivially obvious; governments are imperfectly virtous at best. He is saying we're the greatest evil on Earth. He is saying that everything about us, and everything we do, is necessarily evil.
That has nothing to do with facts or logic. It's superstition, and it's preposterous. He's "criticizing" us the way David Duke "criticizes" black people.
And what's this about "genteel suppression of individual freedom", anselm? What are you referring to, exactly?
By the way, Pinter's in no danger of being attacked by anybody. He can afford guards. In fact, he's one of the most privileged people on the planet, and he's surrounded by adoring sycophants who'd never dream of contradicting a single word he says. He's about as "brave" as Mick Jagger croaking out "Satisfaction" for the 1,200th time.
But by "attack" you mean "disagree", I suspect, rather than "assault". Well, in a free society, you have to learn to live with that. People are allowed to disagree with Harold Pinter. So sorry.
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