A vast, brutal, malignant machine

The following speech was presented by world renowned playwright HAROLD
PINTER at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki on April 18.

 I am deeply honoured to receive this degree from Aristotle University.
I have always felt a strong attachment to Greece and a great respect for
the Greek people.

You have asked me to say a few words and I intend to take the term “a
few words” literally.

The other day I came across a letter I wrote to a theatrical magazine
in 1958. It included the following sentences: “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?

There are certain facts which more or less everyone knows to be true
but which few people actually talk about, although there is, I believe,
a growing surge in the world, an oceanic nausea, if you like, to which
more and more people subscribe.

What is the relationship of military might to “market forces”?

The United States has made quite clear — many times — that it will
protect its own economic and strategic interests with the use of military
might at the drop of a hat, without compunction, whenever it feels like
it. And the government of Great Britain follows suit — with an eagerness
which can only merit our disgust.

I contend that the bombing of Serbia had nothing whatsoever to do with
“humanitarian intervention”. It was blatant assertion of US power. That
and the continuing bombing of Iraq are illegal, immoral, illegitimate acts,
against all understood criteria of international law, holding both international
law and the United Nations in contempt.

As for the sanctions upon Iraq and their toll of death — there are
really no words which can properly describe the cynicism, the indifference
and — as someone else has said — the casual sadism which inspires them.

The United States constantly refers to its belief in “civilised values”
and its concern for “human rights”. Its own penal system — 2 million people
in prison, mental deficients executed, children under 18 incarcerated in
adult prisons where they are systematically raped and assaulted, the use
of “restraint chairs” where the prisoner is padlocked and his legs secured
in metal shackles and where he is left for extended periods in his own
excrement, the use of the “stun gun” which emits an electrical shock of
roughly 50,000 volts and causes severe pain and instant incapacitation
— torture by remote control — and of course the employment of the death
penalty in 38 states — lethal injection, electrocution, the gas chamber,
hanging — take your pick — are facts which speak for themselves and render
the term “civilised values” laughable.

President Clinton said at the end of last year, “We Americans have given
freedom to the world”. There will undoubtedly be more of the same language
used this year, more “moral outrage”, more “humanitarian intervention”,
more lies, more bombs, more destruction, more grinding of millions of people
into dust — that kind of freedom.

There is also, in my view and in the view of many others, serious danger
of a nuclear catastrophe — stemming not from “rogue states” — as defined
by the United States — but from the United States itself.

We are confronted by a vast, brutal, malignant machine.

This machine must be recognised for what it is and resisted.

From GLW issue 409