FOURTH NIGHT

HAROLD PINTER, the 2005 recipient of the Nobel Literature Prize, dedicated only a small portion of his December 8 acceptance speech to literature. Instead the bulk of his speech dealt with U.S. foreign policy since World War II and the way the United States disguises its crimes and hypnotizes the public through crafty rhetoric into believing it is a force for good. He felt it necessary to use his platform to scrutinize the U.S. because as he said, unlike the crimes of other recent powerful aggressors such as the Soviet Union, U.S. crimes have only been superficially recorded and acknowledged.

To the many Americans who believe that the Democrats represent the dissident left in the U.S., Pinter’s speech may sound semi-insane. Here is a man announcing before the Swedish Academy that the United States “supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War,” that the Iraq invasion was a “bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism” and that the “crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, [and] remorseless.”

Now one thing you realize once you move out of the United States is that such attitudes are not fringe beliefs. At least in Cyprus, few would contest the claim that the U.S. invaded Iraq to gain control over the oil reserves and to consolidate power in the region; and Cypriots—who have experienced their share of real security threats—find the notion that Iraq posed a threat to the superpower a comic piece of absurdity. In fact, it is so widely accepted that, beneath the missionary façade, the U.S. is purely in the business of empire-building and profiteering that it is as blasé to mention as a Bush joke.

Continue reading