-Caveat Lector-
Excerpt from Harold Pinter's remarks on the occasion of his
receiving an honorary degree at the University of Turin:
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 George W. 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. America is at this moment developing
advanced systems of "weapons of massdestruction" and is 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.
America believes that the 3,000 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 3,000 deaths in Afghanistan are never referred to.
* The hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children dead through American
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 200,000 deaths in East Timor in 1975 brought about by the
Indonesian government but inspired and supported by America are never
referred to.
* The 500,000 deaths in Guatemala, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua,
Uruguay, Argentina and Haiti, in actions supported and subsidised by
America, 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 misjudgment 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 also 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 America 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 America.
apparently a terrorist poison gas attack on the London Underground system
was recently prevented. But such an act may indeed take place. Thousands
of schoolchildren travel on the 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.
America and Britain are pursuing a course that can lead only to an
escalation of violence throughout the world and finally to catastrophe.
It is obvious, however, that America is bursting at the seams to attack
Iraq. I believe that it will do this not only to take control of Iraqi
oil, but also because the American 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 American power, Europe itself will deserve Alexander
Herzen's declaration - "We are not the doctors. We are the disease".
By Harold Pinter
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