Man of Peace: Harold Pinter, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

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Man of Peace: Harold Pinter, Winner of the Nobel Prize for

Literature

Sat, 15 Oct 2005 13:13:49 +0100

 

 

 

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/101405D.shtml

 

 

Man of Peace: Harold Pinter, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

By John Pilger

t r u t h o u t | Perspective

 

Friday 14 October 2005

 

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 prsuaded 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.

 

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