Harold Pinter

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Neil Shakespeare (artist, human) takes a few moments to observe Harold Pinter's speech to the Swedish Academy (a recording sent in by the ill Pinter as part of his acceptance of his Nobel prize). In his post Shakespeare links to By Neddie Jingo! who also then links to a posting of Pinter's speech posted on the Nobel Prize website here.

From the speech:

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'.

Pinter also states:

Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since 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.

In his speech Pinter includes a section from a Pablo Neruda poem entitled 'I'm Explaining a Few Things' which he ends at:

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!

The Neruda poem is not an abstraction from an armchair observer, or a Fighting Keyboarder, or even a lounge liberal: it is the voice of the witness.

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Go out to your streets: the ones you walk or drive. Imagine them running with blood. Try to reconcile that image with dry talk of legalities and parsing of language vis a vis chemicals vs. thermic devices. Hold a dead child in your arms and watch the jets fly overhead. Neocons have Straussian cant: those who oppose are not to be listened to but rather silenced.

Turning Iraq into a nightmare was not very difficult. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, America has stood alone at the top, looking for new enemies to destroy. We may have found one last one: the rest of the world.

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Harold Pinter image from here.

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