Possibly of interest??
>
>
The Silence of Writers
On Nobel Prize Winner Harold Pinter

>
100 Days of Denial
School Resegregation
Indonesia 1965
Africa's Exploitation
Interview
>
>
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>       by John Pilger
>       October 16, 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 
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.

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