* * * * * totaltruthsciences * * * * *

Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter and Journalist Naomi Klein Expose the US Tortures and War Crimes

Naomi Klein’s article in the UK Guardian after Harold Pinte

The Nobel lecture © The Nobel Foundation 2005

Art, truth and politics 

This is the text of the lecture to be given by Harold

Pinter when he receives the 2005 Nobel prize for

literature on Saturday. Forbidden by doctors from

going to Stockholm to receive the £720,000 prize, the

ailing playwright and poet has delivered his speech by

video 

The Guardian

Wednesday December 7, 2005 

In 1958 I wrote the following:

'There are no hard distinctions between what is real

and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what

is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or

false; it can be both true and false.'

I believe that these assertions still make sense and

do still apply to the exploration of reality through

art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I

cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is

false?

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite

find it but the search for it is compulsive. The

search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The

search is your task. More often than not you stumble

upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just

glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to

correspond to the truth, often without realising that

you have done so. But the real truth is that there

never is any such thing as one truth to be found in

dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge

each other, recoil from each other, reflect each

other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind

to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth

of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your

fingers and is lost.

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.

Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or

an image. The given word is often shortly followed by

the image. I shall give two examples of two lines

which came right out of the blue into my head,

followed by an image, followed by me.

The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times. The first

line of The Homecoming is 'What have you done with the

scissors?' The first line of Old Times is 'Dark.'

In each case I had no further information.

In the first case someone was obviously looking for a

pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts

of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them.

But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn't

give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner

either, for that matter.

'Dark' I took to be a description of someone's hair,

the hair of a woman, and was the answer to a question.

In each case I found myself compelled to pursue the

matter. This happened visually, a very slow fade,

through shadow into light.

I always start a play by calling the characters A, B

and C.

In the play that became The Homecoming I saw a man

enter a stark room and ask his question of a younger

man sitting on an ugly sofa reading a racing paper. I

somehow suspected that A was a father and that B was

his son, but I had no proof. This was however

confirmed a short time later when B (later to become

Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), 'Dad, do you

mind if I change the subject? I want to ask you

something. The dinner we had before, what was the name

of it? What do you call it? Why don't you buy a dog?

You're a dog cook. Honest. You think you're cooking

for a lot of dogs.' So since B calls A 'Dad' it seemed

to me reasonable to assume that they were father and

son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did

not seem to be held in high regard. Did this mean that

there was no mother? I didn't know. But, as I told

myself at the time, our beginnings never know our

ends.

'Dark.' A large window. Evening sky. A man, A (later

to become Deeley), and a woman, B (later to become

Kate), sitting with drinks. 'Fat or thin?' the man

asks. Who are they talking about? But I then see,

standing at the window, a woman, C (later to become

Anna), in another condition of light, her back to

them, her hair dark.

It's a strange moment, the moment of creating

characters who up to that moment have had no

existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even

hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an

unstoppable avalanche. 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. To a certain extent you play a

never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind

man's buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that

you have people of flesh and blood on your hands,

people with will and an individual sensibility of

their own, made out of component parts you are unable

to change, manipulate or distort.

So language in art remains a highly ambiguous

transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool

which might give way under you, the author, at any

time.

But as I have said, the search for the truth can never

stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed.

It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.

Political theatre presents an entirely different set

of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all

cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be

allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot

confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or

disposition or prejudice. He must be prepared to

approach them from a variety of angles, from a full

and uninhibited range of perspectives, take them by

surprise, perhaps, occasionally, but nevertheless give

them the freedom to go which way they will. This does

not always work. And political satire, of course,

adheres to none of these precepts, in fact does

precisely the opposite, which is its proper function.

In my play The Birthday Party I think I allow a whole

range of options to operate in a dense forest of

possibility before finally focussing on an act of

subjugation.

Mountain Language pretends to no such range of

operation. It remains brutal, short and ugly. But the

soldiers in the play do get some fun out of it. One

sometimes forgets that torturers become easily bored.

They need a bit of a laugh to keep their spirits up.

This has been confirmed of course by the events at Abu

Ghraib in Baghdad. Mountain Language lasts only 20

minutes, but it could go on for hour after hour, on

and on and on, the same pattern repeated over and over

again, on and on, hour after hour.

Ashes to Ashes, on the other hand, seems to me to be

taking place under water. A drowning woman, her hand

reaching up through the waves, dropping down out of

sight, reaching for others, but finding nobody there,

either above or under the water, finding only shadows,

reflections, floating; the woman a lost figure in a

drowning landscape, a woman unable to escape the doom

that seemed to belong only to others.

But as they died, she must die too.

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.

As every single person here knows, the justification

for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein

possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass

destruction, some of which could be fired in 45

minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were

assured that was true. It was not true. We were told

that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared

responsibility for the atrocity in New York of

September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was

true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq

threatened the security of the world. We were assured

it was true. It was not true.

The truth is something entirely different. The truth

is to do with how the United States understands its

role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.

But before I come back to the present I would like to

look at the recent past, by which I mean United States

foreign policy since the end of the Second World War.

I believe it is obligatory upon us to subject this

period to at least some kind of even limited scrutiny,

which is all that time will allow here.

Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and

throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period:

the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities,

the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All

this has been fully documented and verified.

But my contention here is that the US crimes in the

same period have only been superficially recorded, let

alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone

recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be

addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing

on where the world stands now. Although constrained,

to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet

Union, the United States' actions throughout the world

made it clear that it had concluded it had carte

blanche to do what it liked.

Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact

been America's favoured method. In the main, it has

preferred what it has described as 'low intensity

conflict'. Low intensity conflict means that thousands

of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on

them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the

heart of the country, that you establish a malignant

growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace

has been subdued - or beaten to death - the same thing

- and your own friends, the military and the great

corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before

the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This

was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to

which I refer.

The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant

case. I choose to offer it here as a potent example of

America's view of its role in the world, both then and

now.

I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London

in the late 1980s.

The United States Congress was about to decide whether

to give more money to the Contras in their campaign

against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a

delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the

most important member of this delegation was a Father

John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond

Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later

ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: 'Sir, I am

in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My

parishioners built a school, a health centre, a

cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months

ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed

everything: the school, the health centre, the

cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers,

slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They

behaved like savages. Please demand that the US

government withdraw its support from this shocking

terrorist activity.'

Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a

rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He

was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He

listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity.

'Father,' he said, 'let me tell you something. In war,

innocent people always suffer.' There was a frozen

silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.

Innocent people, indeed, always suffer.

Finally somebody said: 'But in this case "innocent

people" were the victims of a gruesome atrocity

subsidised by your government, one among many. If

Congress allows the Contras more money further

atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this not

the case? Is your government not therefore guilty of

supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the

citizens of a sovereign state?'

Seitz was imperturbable. 'I don't agree that the facts

as presented support your assertions,' he said.

As we were leaving the Embassy a US aide told me that

he enjoyed my plays. I did not reply.

I should remind you that at the time President Reagan

made the following statement: 'The Contras are the

moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.'

The United States supported the brutal Somoza

dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The

Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew

this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular

revolution.

The Sandinistas weren't perfect. They possessed their

fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy

contained a number of contradictory elements. But they

were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out

to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society.

The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands

of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from

the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to

land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite

remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the

country to less than one seventh. Free education was

established and a free health service. Infant

mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was

eradicated.

The United States denounced these achievements as

Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US

government, a dangerous example was being set. If

Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of

social and economic justice, if it was allowed to

raise the standards of health care and education and

achieve social unity and national self respect,

neighbouring countries would ask the same questions

and do the same things. There was of course at the

time fierce resistance to the status quo in El

Salvador.

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.