Harold Pinter takes it to Bush...and to a large extent Americans

To a certain extent some of what Pinter said in accepting his Nobel Prize yesterday is overwrought and a bit broad. Most of what he says about Bush is absolutely right, much of what he says about we, as Americans, is uncomfortably close to the truth. It may not be wholly correct on every particular, but far too much of its gist is correct. I'm putting two large chunks of his speech up because they are food for thought and so little heard in this country -- and if they are, those who say them are shouted down by the powers that be -- or the insipid minions they inspire.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.'

It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn't give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.

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The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading – as a last resort – all other justifications having failed to justify themselves – as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.

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'.

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? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they're interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.

Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don't exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. 'We don't do body counts,' said the American general Tommy Franks.

Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. 'A grateful child,' said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. 'When do I get my arms back?' he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn't holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you're making a sincere speech on television.

The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm's way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.

There is, in reality, no honest discourse on a broad scale in the United States. We have military bases all over the world. While going out of our way to ignore it, we are the greatest imperial power in the history of the world. While preaching the doctrine of "freedom" and "democracy" we use those words as weapons both intellectual and physical against states that either practice such concepts with different words, or more often, may have those same concepts but do not fall in line with our whims.

France has "freedom" and "democracy" on a level equal to ours -- yet how many Americans do not like the French because they criticize, however constructively, who we want to fucking bomb? Go back and trace our relationship with France over the last forty years, the dispute has always been about who wants to bomb who. Either we want to bomb someone (Libya, Iraq, etc.) or they do (Greenpeace). Our response, a national fit of immaturity (freedom fries, the latest boycott organized by National Fuckstick O'Reilly).

Venezuela has some semblance of both freedom and democracy, but their President is a blowhard that likes to point out the elephant in the room. Discovering that the elephant is us there is only one solution, support a coup against him. That failing, we essentially organize a "Hugo Chavez" is teh crazy compaign.

It goes on and on and on. And anyone who stops to question that machine, suggesting that everything the United States does in the world may not be the greatest thing ever, is castigated and marginalized.

Meanwhile, we spend half a trillion every year on bombs, guns, and associated killing machines...all in the name of "preserving our way of life". Nobody ever stops to posit...maybe if we spend only $250 Billion on such things we might be able to not only preserve, but quite possibly improve our way of life.

Hell, if we weren't spending $300 billion on creating a hodge-podge, perpetual civil war in Iraq, we might even be able to save an important American City assuming a bunch of Republicans could be motivated to save a city comprised of large numbers of African-Americans. But no, not only do we promise emptily and deliver shit, we forget them -- why we don't even collect the bodies of Americans anymore, we just let them rot or wash out to sea.

But you better say "Merry CHRISTMAS" asshole!

Because this is America, land of the allegedly free, home of the photo-opped brave, inventor of the TV Dinner, perfector of the microwave dinner and the bunker-buster bomb.