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Daily Telegraph
December 8, 2005
Pinter rails against US in Nobel prize speech By Nigel Reynolds, Arts
Correspondent
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.
Harold Pinter: Justification for war 'a tapestry of lies'
In a hoarse voice, he accused America of massacring innocent people all over
the world in the name of democracy.
He asked: "How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be
described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand?"
Though the Left-wing playwright's anti-Bush message is familiar in Britain,
it has been little heard in America and he will be hoping that his prize
will carry it there more forcefully.
Pinter said the justification for invading Iraq was based on "a tapestry of
lies" and went on: "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'."
He went on to accuse America of supporting "every Right wing military
dictatorship in the world" since the end of the Second World War.
He added: "It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a
lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain."
The playwright, who underwent treatment for cancer of the oesophagus in
2002, is now frail and has been in a London hospital for a week. He went
briefly to a television studio on Sunday to record the Nobel lecture.
Judy Daish, his agent, said yesterday that she did not know the nature of
his latest illness. But one friend said that the playwright was suffering
severe pain in his legs following a long course of drugs to deal with an
auto-immune disease.
The man of whom it was said that you either had to agree with or leave the
room, had a captive audience in Stockholm yesterday. He devoted more than
half his lecture to the sins of America.
Of his work as a writer, he said that most of his plays started with a
single line, word or image and grew in a way that he could not control.
He said: "I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor
can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That
is what they said. That is what they did.
"The author's position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the
characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they
are impossible to define. You certainly can't dictate to them."
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