Harold Pinter's Diatribe
Harold Pinter gave a recorded acceptance speech to the Royal Academy of Sweden yesterday, on the occasion of his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He spoke eloquently, as befits a great playwright, and it was interesting to see him set his teeth straight to the bone.
The subject of his disquisition was the United States, at whose door he laid a rather searing indictment.
It was witty.
It was trenchant.
It had the benefit of being true.
Those people who do not believe that we torture do not have any sense of our own history. During the Philippine Insurrection of 1900 we routinely used torture in order to extract information, and destroyed entire villages in exchange for the death of one American officer. Of course, we had an excuse of sorts - we had just taken over the islands from Spain, and what the Filipinos wanted (independence, freedom and self-determination) ran counter to what we decided that they wanted. So we took up the White Man's Burden.
We have fired on civilians, and visited an early version of "shock and awe" on civilian populations (Dresden, anyone? Anyone recall that?) while protesting our moral superiority. Allegations surfaced a while back that we killed civilians in Korea, and I should not have to remind people of My Lai.
Pinter also accused the US of supporting most, if not all, of the right-wing thugs that have terrorized parts of the planet since the 1950s. Again, history is instructive if you take the time to look:
Guatemala's military junta
Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi
Omar Trujillo
Augusto Pinochet
Manuel Noriega
Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti
Jonas Savimbi
... and so on.
Pinter also castigated PM Tony Blair of the UK. There is an impeachment movement underway in the UK already. It'll be interesting to see how Teflon Tony gets through this.
Bush, on the other hand, has 100 years for fine American tradition backing him up.
The subject of his disquisition was the United States, at whose door he laid a rather searing indictment.
It was witty.
It was trenchant.
It had the benefit of being true.
Those people who do not believe that we torture do not have any sense of our own history. During the Philippine Insurrection of 1900 we routinely used torture in order to extract information, and destroyed entire villages in exchange for the death of one American officer. Of course, we had an excuse of sorts - we had just taken over the islands from Spain, and what the Filipinos wanted (independence, freedom and self-determination) ran counter to what we decided that they wanted. So we took up the White Man's Burden.
We have fired on civilians, and visited an early version of "shock and awe" on civilian populations (Dresden, anyone? Anyone recall that?) while protesting our moral superiority. Allegations surfaced a while back that we killed civilians in Korea, and I should not have to remind people of My Lai.
Pinter also accused the US of supporting most, if not all, of the right-wing thugs that have terrorized parts of the planet since the 1950s. Again, history is instructive if you take the time to look:
Guatemala's military junta
Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi
Omar Trujillo
Augusto Pinochet
Manuel Noriega
Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti
Jonas Savimbi
... and so on.
Pinter also castigated PM Tony Blair of the UK. There is an impeachment movement underway in the UK already. It'll be interesting to see how Teflon Tony gets through this.
Bush, on the other hand, has 100 years for fine American tradition backing him up.
posted by Walt at 8:21 AM
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