Harold Pinter

Vanochtend bericht de Britse Telegraph: 'Age and sickness have not wearied him. Harold Pinter used the platform of his Nobel prize for literature yesterday to call for the prosecution of George W Bush and Tony Blair for the invasion of Iraq. He called it "a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism".Too unwell to travel to Stockholm to give the winner's traditional lecture in person, the 75-year-old playwright delivered his attack on American and British foreign policy to members of the Swedish Academy via a big screen in a pre-recorded 45-minute talk.'
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/12/08/npinter08.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/12/08/ixnewstop.html Vanochtend kreeg ik zijn hele toespraak gemaild en die zult u niet snel in de massamedia afgedrukt zien. Het gaat over de vernietiging van de taal en daarmee de mens. We leven steeds meer onder een verstikkend tapijt van politieke leugens: 'the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed... I spoke earlier about 'a tapestry of lies' which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a 'totalitarian dungeon'. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships... It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis. I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to> take on behalf of the American people.' It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.' De hele toespraak kunt u vinden onder teksten/toespraak pinter http://webdisk.planet.nl/houck006/default.aspx