|
Man of Peace: Harold Pinter, Winner of the Nobel
Prize for Literature
By John Pilger
10/17/05 "ICH" -- -- In 1988, the English literary critic and
novelist, D.J. Taylor wrote a seminal piece entitled 'When the
Pen Sleeps'. He expanded this into a book 'A Vain Conceit', in
which he wondered why the English novel so often denigrated into
'drawing room twitter' and why the great issues of the day were
shunned by writers, unlike their counterparts in, say, Latin
America, who felt a responsibility to take on politics: the
great themes of justice and injustice, wealth and poverty, war
and peace. The notion of the writer working in splendid
isolation was absurd. Where, he asked, were the George Orwells,
the Upton Sinclairs, the John Steinbecks of the modern age?
Twelve years on, Taylor was asking the same question: where was
the English Gore Vidal and John Gregory Dunne: 'intellectual
heavyweights briskly at large in the political amphitheatre,
while we end up with Lord [Jeffrey] Archer...'
In the post-modern, celebrity world of writing, prizes are
alloted to those who compete for the emperor's threads; the
politically unsfae need not apply. John Keanes, the chairman of
the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, once defended the
absence of great contemporary political writers among the Orwell
prize-winners not by lamenting the fact and asking why, but by
attacking those who referred back to 'an imaginary golden past'.
He wrote that those who 'hanker' after this illusory past fail
to appreciate writers making sense of 'the collapse of the old
left-right divide'.
What collapse? The convergence of 'liberal' and 'conservative'
parties in western democracies, like the American Democrats with
the Republicans, represents a meeting of essentially like minds.
Journalists work assiduously to promote a false division between
the mainstream parties and to obfuscate the truth that Britain,
for example, is now a single ideology state with two competing,
almost identical pro-business factions. The real divisons
between left and right are to be found outside Parliament and
have never been greater. They reflect the unprecedented
disparity between the poverty of the majority of humanity and
the power and privilege of a corporate and militarist minority,
headquartered in Washington, who seek to control the world's
resources.
One of the reasons these mighty pirates have such a free reign
is that the Anglo-American intelligensia, notably writers, 'the
people with voice' as Lord Macauley called them, are quiet or
complicit or craven or twittering, and rich as a result.
Thought-provokers pop up from time to time, but the English
establishment has always been brilliant at de-fanging and
absorbing them. Those who resist assimilation are mocked as
eccentrics until they conform to their stereotype and its
authorised views.
The exception is Harold Pinter. The other day, I sat down to
compile a list of other writers remotely like him, those 'with a
voice' and an understanding of their wider responsibilites as
writers. I scribbled a few names, all of them now engaged in
intellectual and moral contortion, or they are asleep. The page
was blank save for Pinter. Only he is the unquiet one, the
untwitterer, the one with guts, who speaks out. Above all, he
understands the problem. Listen to this:
"We are in a terrible dip at the moment, a kind of abyss,
because the assumption is that politics are all over. That's
what the propaganda says. But I don't believe the propaganda. I
believe that politics, our political consciousness and our
political intelligence are not all over, because if they are, we
are really doomed. I can't myself live like this. I've been told
so often that I live in a free country, I'm damn well going to
be free. By which I mean I'm going to retain my independence of
mind and spirit, and I think that's what's obligatory upon all
of us. Most political systems talk in such vague language, and
it's our responsibility and our duty as citizens of our various
countries to exercise acts of critical scruntiny upon that use
of language. Of course, that means that one does tend to become
rather unpopular. But to hell with that."
I first met Harold when he was supporting the popularly elected
government in Nicaragua in the 1980s. I had reported from
Nicarugua, and made a film about the remarkable gains of the
Sandinistas despite Ronald Regan's attempts to crush them by
illegally sending CIA-trained proxies across the border from
Honduras to slit the throats of midwives and other
anti-Americans. US foreign policy is, of course, even more
rapacious under Bush: the smaller the country, the greater the
threat. By that, I mean the threat of a good example to other
small countries which might seek to alleviate the abject poverty
of their people by rejecting American dominance. What struck me
about Harold's involvement was his understanding of this truth,
which is generally a taboo in the United States and Britain, and
the eloquent 'to hell with that' response in everything he said
and wrote.
Almost single-handedly, it seemed, he restored 'imperialism' to
the political lexicon. Remember that no commentator used this
word any more; to utter it in a public place was like shouting
'fuck' in a covent'. Now you can shout it everywhere and people
will nod their agreement; the invasion in Iraq put paid to
doubts, and Harold Pinter was one of the first to alert us. He
described, correctly, the crushing of Nicaragua, the blockage
against Cuba, the wholesale killing of Iraqi and Yugoslav
civilians as imperialist atrocities.
In illustrating the American crime committed against Nicaragua,
when the United States Government dismissed an International
Court of Justice ruling that it stop breaking the law in its
murderous attacks, Pinter recalled that Washington seldom
respected international law; and he was right. He wrote, 'In
1965, President Lyndon Johnson said to the Greek Ambassador to
the US, "Fuck your Parliament and your constitution. American is
an elephant, Cyprus is a flea. Greece is a flea. If these two
fellows keep itching the elephant, they may just get whacked by
the elephant's trunk, whacked for good..." He meant that. Two
years later, the Colonels took over and the Greek people spent
seven years in hell. You have to hand it to Johnson. He
sometimes told the truth however brutal. Regan tell lies. His
celebrated description of Nicuragua as a "totalitarian dungeon"
was a lie from every conceivable angle. It was an assertion
unsupported by facts; it had no basis in reality. But it's a
good vivid, resonant phrase which persuaded the unthinking...'
In his play 'Ashes to Ashes', Pinter uses the images of Nazism
and the Holocaust, while interpreting them as a warning against
similar ' repressive, cynical and indifferent acts of murder' by
the clients of arms-dealing imperialist states such as the
United States and Britain. 'The word democracy begins to stink',
he said. 'So in Ashes to Ashes, I'm not simply talking about the
Nazis; I'm talking about us, and our conception of our past and
our history, and what it does to us in the present.'
Pinter is not saying the democracies are totalitarian like Nazi
Germany, not at all, but that totalitarian actions are taken by
impeccably polite democrats and which, in principle and effect,
are little different from those taken by fascists. The only
difference is distance. Half a millions people were murdered by
American bombers sent secretly and illegally to skies above
Cambodia by Nixon and Kissinger, igniting an Asian holocaust,
which Pol Pot completed.
Critics have hated his political work, often attacking his plays
mindlessly and patronising his outspokenness. He, in turn, has
mocked their empty derision. He is a truth-teller. His
understanding of political language follows Orwell's. He does
not, as he would say, give a shit about the propriety of
language, only its truest sense. At the end of the cold was in
1989, he wrote, '...for the last forty years, our thought has
been trapped in hollow structures of language, a stale, dead but
immensely successful rhetoric. This has represented, in my view,
a defeat of the intelligence and of the will."
He never accepted this, of course: 'To hell with that!' Thanks
in no small measure to him, defeat is far from assured. On the
contrary, while other writers have slept or twittered, he has
been aware that people are never still, and indeed are stirring
again: Harold Pinter has a place of honour among them.
Translate
this page
(In accordance with Title 17
U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to
those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational purposes.
Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the
originator of this article nor is Information Clearing House
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.) |
