Good on Pinter.

At a rather more journalistic level, I wrote a short editorial for
Thylazine at http://www.thylazine.org/specialissue4/thyla4a.html if
anyone is interested -

Best

A

>X-RAL-MFrom: <[log in to unmask]>
>X-RAL-Connect: <anchor-post-39.mail.demon.net [194.217.242.80]>
>Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 16:16:41 +0000
>Reply-To: cris cheek <[log in to unmask]>
>Sender: british & irish poets <[log in to unmask]>
>From: cris cheek <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: forwarded Harold Pinter speech
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>Pinter's position is pretty well known. But I thought some list-members
>might have an interest in the following:
>
>>  Harold Pinter's speech on receiving an Honorary Doctorate from the
>>University
>>  of Turin.
>
>"I am deeply honoured to receive this degree from such a great university.
>
>Earlier this year I had a major operation for cancer. The operation and its
>after-effects were something of a nightmare. I felt I was a man unable to
>swim bobbing about under water in a deep dark endless ocean. But I did not
>drown and I am very glad to be alive. However, I found that to emerge from a
>personal nightmare was to enter an infinitely more pervasive public
>nightmare - the nightmare of American hysteria, ignorance, arrogance,
>stupidity and belligerence; the most powerful nation the world has ever
>known effectively waging war against the rest of the world. "If you are not
>with us you are against us" President Bush has said. He has also said "We
>will not allow the world's worst weapons to remain in the hands of the
>world's worst leaders". Quite right. Look in the mirror chum. That's you.
>
>The US is at this moment developing advanced systems of "weapons of mass
>destruction" and it prepared to use them where it sees fit. It has more of
>them than the rest of the world put together. It has walked away from
>international agreements on biological and chemical weapons, refusing to
>allow inspection of its own factories. The hypocrisy behind its public
>declarations and its own actions is almost a joke.
>
>The United States believes that the three thousand deaths in New York are
>the only deaths that count, the only deaths that matter. They are American
>deaths. Other deaths are unreal, abstract, of no consequence.
>
>The three thousand deaths in Afghanistan are never referred to.
>
>The hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children dead through US and British
>sanctions which have deprived them of essential medicines are never referred
>to.
>
>The effect of depleted uranium, used by America in the Gulf War, is never
>referred to. Radiation levels in Iraq are appallingly high. Babies are born
>with no brain, no eyes, no genitals. Where they do have ears, mouths or
>rectums, all that issues from these orifices is blood.
>
>The two hundred thousand deaths in East Timor in 1975 brought about by the
>Indonesian government but inspired and supported by the United States are
>never referred to.
>
>The half a million deaths in Guatemala, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua,
>Uruguay, Argentina and Haiti, in actions supported and subsidised by the
>United States are never referred to.
>
>The millions of deaths in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia are no longer referred
>to.
>
>The desperate plight of the Palestinian people, the central factor in world
>unrest, is hardly referred to.
>
>But what a misjudgement of the present and what a misreading of history this
>is.
>
>People do not forget. They do not forget the death of their fellows, they do
>not forget torture and mutilation, they do not forget injustice, they do not
>forget oppression, they do not forget the terrorism of mighty powers. They
>not only don't forget. They strike back.
>
>The atrocity in New York was predictable and inevitable. It was an act of
>retaliation against constant and systematic manifestations of state
>terrorism on the part of the United States over many years, in all parts of
>the world.
>
>In Britain the public is now being warned to be "vigilant" in preparation
>for potential terrorist acts. The language is in itself preposterous.
>
>How will - or can - public vigilance be embodied? Wearing a scarf over your
>mouth to keep out poison gas? However, terrorist attacks are quite likely,
>the inevitable result of our Prime Minister's contemptible and shameful
>subservience to the United States. Apparently a terrorist poison gas attack
>on the London Underground system was recently prevented. But such an act may
>indeed take place. Thousands of school children travel on the London
>Underground every day. If there is a poison gas attack from which they die,
>the responsibility will rest entirely on the shoulders of our Prime
>Minister. Needless to say, the Prime Minister does not travel on the
>underground himself.
>
>The planned war against Iraq is in fact a plan for premeditated murder of
>thousands of civilians in order, apparently, to rescue them from their
>dictator.
>
>The United States and Britain are pursuing a course which can lead only to
>an escalation of violence throughout the world and finally to catastrophe.
>
>It is obvious, however, that the United States is bursting at the seams to
>attack Iraq. I believe that it will do this - not just to take control of
>Iraqi oil - but because the US administration is now a bloodthirsty wild
>animal. Bombs are its only vocabulary. Many Americans, we know, are
>horrified by the posture of their government but seem to be helpless.
>
>Unless Europe finds the solidarity, intelligence, courage and will to
>challenge and resist US power Europe itself will deserve Alexander Herzen's
>definition (as quoted in the Guardian newspaper in London recently) "We are
>not the doctors. We are the disease".
>
>Harold Pinter

--



Alison Croggon
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