Gunter Grass

De Ashville Global Report bericht: 'Gunter Grass, celebrated German novelist,
playwright, poet, essayist, sculptor and commentator,
is a living legend. When this Nobel Laureate speaks,
people listen.

His address in Berlin to the annual Congress of
International PEN, the worldwide organization of
writers, had been much anticipated, especially given
his long admonition to intellectuals to speak up on the political and moral issues of the day.

He himself has done so all his life, most famously
against the Nazi past and contemporary neo-Nazism and xenophobia.

Grass, at 78 still spry and energetic, quickly gets
into his topic, "The hubris of the world's only
superpower," and proceeds to offer a sweeping critique.

His words find resonance among the writers gathered,
including another Nobel Laureate, South African
novelist Nadine Gordimer.

"Armed force is used by this superpower to defeat the
terrorism it is itself responsible for," Grass says,
citing Osama bin Laden, the by-product of US support
for Afghan jihadists in the 1980s. "The war [on Iraq], deliberately started in blatant disdain of the laws of civilized societies, produces still more terror."

Yet George W. Bush is searching for new enemies and
targets.

"Dictatorships, and there are plenty to choose from,
are referred to as rogue states and threatened
vociferously with military strikes, including the
deployment of nuclear weapons. But it only further
stabilizes the fundamentalist power systems in those
countries.

"Whether the term 'axis of evil' is used to refer to
Iran or North Korea or Syria, politics could not be
more stupid and hence more dangerous. Yet the entire
world is watching and pretending to be powerless."

Grass quotes liberally from the blistering speech given
last year by British playwright Harold Pinter in
accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature: "The United
States supported and, in many cases, engendered every right-wing military dictatorship in the world after World War II - Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador and, of course, Chile...

"Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place in those countries... but you wouldn't know it. The crimes of the US have been systematic, constant, vicious, and remorseless but very few people have actually talked about them.' Lees verder:
http://agrnews.org/?section=news&news_section=6&#Nobel%20Laureate%20flays%20Bush