John Pilger on Harold Pinter and today's writers: by Howard

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John Pilger on Harold Pinter and today's writers:

POSTED BY: HOWARD
UPDATED: Tuesday, October 18, 2005 15:23
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Tuesday, October 18, 2005 5:47 AM

The following article by John Pilger raises the issue of the political cowardice of today's writers. As a point I have mentioned to John Pilger in a letter to him of my own experience as a writer. That a key obstacle today for writers is literary agents. In history the Agent was once an advocate for the writer but today agents are servants to the studios/publishers.

The Silence of Writers
On Nobel Prize Winner Harold Pinter
by John Pilger
October 16, 2005

In 1988, the English literary critic and novelist, D.J. Taylor wrote a seminal piece entitled 'When the Pen Sleeps'. He expanded this into a book 'A Vain Conceit', in which he wondered why the English novel so often denigrated into 'drawing room twitter' and why the great issues of the day were shunned by writers, unlike their counterparts in, say, Latin America, who felt a responsibility to take on politics: the great themes of justice and injustice, wealth and poverty, war and peace. The notion of the writer working in splendid isolation was absurd. Where, he asked, were the George Orwells, the Upton Sinclairs, the John Steinbecks of the modern age?

Twelve years on, Taylor was asking the same question: where was the English Gore Vidal and John Gregory Dunne: 'intellectual heavyweights briskly at large in the political amphitheatre, while we end up with Lord [Jeffrey] Archer...'

In the post-modern, celebrity world of writing, prizes are alloted to those who compete for the emperor's threads; the politically unsfae need not apply. John Keanes, the chairman of the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, once defended the absence of great contemporary political writers among the Orwell prize-winners not by lamenting the fact and asking why, but by attacking those who referred back to 'an imaginary golden past'. He wrote that those who 'hanker' after this illusory past fail to appreciate writers making sense of 'the collapse of the old left-right divide'.

What collapse? The convergence of 'liberal' and 'conservative' parties in western democracies, like the American Democrats with the Republicans, represents a meeting of essentially like minds. Journalists work assiduously to promote a false division between the mainstream parties and to obfuscate the truth that Britain, for example, is now a single ideology state with two competing, almost identical pro-business factions. The real divisons between left and right are to be found outside Parliament and have never been greater. They reflect the unprecedented disparity between the poverty of the majority of humanity and the power and privilege of a corporate and militarist minority, headquartered in Washington, who seek to control the world's resources.

One of the reasons these mighty pirates have such a free reign is that the Anglo-American intelligensia, notably writers, 'the people with voice' as Lord Macauley called them, are quiet or complicit or craven or twittering, and rich as a result. Thought-provokers pop up from time to time, but the English establishment has always been brilliant at de-fanging and absorbing them. Those who resist assimilation are mocked as eccentrics until they conform to their stereotype and its authorised views.

The exception is Harold Pinter. The other day, I sat down to compile a list of other writers remotely like him, those 'with a voice' and an understanding of their wider responsibilites as writers. I scribbled a few names, all of them now engaged in intellectual and moral contortion, or they are asleep. The page was blank save for Pinter. Only he is the unquiet one, the untwitterer, the one with guts, who speaks out. Above all, he understands the problem. Listen to this:

"We are in a terrible dip at the moment, a kind of abyss, because the assumption is that politics are all over. That's what the propaganda says. But I don't believe the propaganda. I believe that politics, our political consciousness and our political intelligence are not all over, because if they are, we are really doomed. I can't myself live like this. I've been told so often that I live in a free country, I'm damn well going to be free. By which I mean I'm going to retain my independence of mind and spirit, and I think that's what's obligatory upon all of us. Most political systems talk in such vague language, and it's our responsibility and our duty as citizens of our various countries to exercise acts of critical scruntiny upon that use of language. Of course, that means that one does tend to become rather unpopular. But to hell with that."

I first met Harold when he was supporting the popularly elected government in Nicaragua in the 1980s. I had reported from Nicarugua, and made a film about the remarkable gains of the Sandinistas despite Ronald Regan's attempts to crush them by illegally sending CIA-trained proxies across the border from Honduras to slit the throats of midwives and other anti-Americans. US foreign policy is, of course, even more rapacious under Bush: the smaller the country, the greater the threat. By that, I mean the threat of a good example to other small countries which might seek to alleviate the abject poverty of their people by rejecting American dominance.

What struck me about Harold's involvement was his understanding of this truth, which is generally a taboo in the United States and Britain, and the eloquent 'to hell with that' response in everything he said and wrote.
Almost single-handedly, it seemed, he restored 'imperialism' to the political lexicon. Remember that no commentator used this word any more; to utter it in a public place was like shouting 'fuck' in a covent'. Now you can shout it everywhere and people will nod their agreement; the invasion in Iraq put paid to doubts, and Harold Pinter was one of the first to alert us. He described, correctly, the crushing of Nicaragua, the blockage against Cuba, the wholesale killing of Iraqi and Yugoslav civilians as imperialist atrocities.

In illustrating the American crime committed against Nicaragua, when the United States Government dismissed an International Court of Justice ruling that it stop breaking the law in its murderous attacks, Pinter recalled that Washington seldom respected international law; and he was right. He wrote, 'In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson said to the Greek Ambassador to the US, "Fuck your Parliament and your constitution. American is an elephant, Cyprus is a flea. Greece is a flea. If these two fellows keep itching the elephant, they may just get whacked by the elephant's trunk, whacked for good..." He meant that. Two years later, the Colonels took over and the Greek people spent seven years in hell. You have to hand it to Johnson. He sometimes told the truth however brutal. Reagan tell lies. His celebrated description of Nicuragua as a "totalitarian dungeon" was a lie from every conceivable angle. It was an assertion unsupported by facts; it had no basis in reality. ! But it's a good vivid, resonant phrase which persuaded the unthinking...'

In his play 'Ashes to Ashes', Pinter uses the images of Nazism and the Holocaust, while interpreting them as a warning against similar ' repressive, cynical and indifferent acts of murder' by the clients of arms-dealing imperialist states such as the United States and Britain. 'The word democracy begins to stink', he said. 'So in Ashes to Ashes, I'm not simply talking about the Nazis; I'm talking about us, and our conception of our past and our history, and what it does to us in the present.'

Pinter is not saying the democracies are totalitarian like Nazi Germany, not at all, but that totalitarian actions are taken by impeccably polite democrats and which, in principle and effect, are little different from those taken by fascists. The only difference is distance. Half a million people were murdered by American bombers sent secretly and illegally to skies above Cambodia by Nixon and Kissinger, igniting an Asian holocaust, which Pol Pot completed.

(note from Howard: In fact 600,000 Cambodians killed directly by US military / 400,000 more died from starvation caused by the destruction from the US bombing and CIA ground war.)

Critics have hated his political work, often attacking his plays mindlessly and patronising his outspokenness. He, in turn, has mocked their empty derision. He is a truth-teller. His understanding of political language follows Orwell's. He does not, as he would say, give a shit about the propriety of language, only its truest sense. At the end of the cold was in 1989, he wrote, '...for the last forty years, our thought has been trapped in hollow structures of language, a stale, dead but immensely successful rhetoric. This has represented, in my view, a defeat of the intelligence and of the will."

He never accepted this, of course: 'To hell with that!' Thanks in no small measure to him, defeat is far from assured. On the contrary, while other writers have slept or twittered, he has been aware that people are never still, and indeed are stirring again: Harold Pinter has a place of honour among them.

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Tuesday, October 18, 2005 9:27 AM

HERO

After all, the author of the article means to say, a work is only socially signifigant if it attacks western values, Christianity, or American policy. Since the collapse of communism the liberal intellectual community has been saddled with the mandate to liberate the damned fool masses from the chains of their own inferior intellect.

Fortunately they are the arbiters of their own good taste and quality worksmanship, because if left to the free market to judge the quality of their contribution to intellectual discourse, they'd all be left starving in Stockholm's cold streets for want of a real job.

H

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Tuesday, October 18, 2005 12:51 PM

HOWARD

Okay, here we go again, some very poorly
educated person thinking that somehow the
Soviet Union was the benchmark of The Left.
Let me educate you on some hard truths:

1. American Imperialism pre-dates the
existence of the Soviet Union.
Throughout the Cold War the non-socialist
Soviet Union exploited its fake socialist
image for street-cred in The Third World.
While in the USA same policy was used to
discredit socialism or any Left leanings
with the same false notion that the Soviet
Union was socialist.
2. There was NO socialism or anarchism or
any genuine left expression permitted
in the Soviet Union beyond the Spring
of 1921. The Kronstadt sailors and their
families were massacred by the Red Army
not for being White Capitalists but for
demanding that socialism and the promises
of the revolution be put into practise.
3. Following the sabotage of a Left Revolution
by a group of elitist avant garde who set
up a regime that was essentially a right-wing
authoritarian dictatorship which later
morphed into Stalin's industrial
totalitarianism; there was a bitter civil
war known as the unknown revolution. This was
not Red v White that was another front but
the Bolsheviks effort to kill of all of the
most dedicated and most authentic socialists
revolutionaries. Under Lenin there were more
Social-Revolutionists and Anarchists in
torture cells than they were capitalist
Whites. In fact one the Tsar's worst ultra
reactionary general who was responsible
for the pogroms was eventually invited to
join the Red Tsars regime.
4. In other countries such as Spain the Left
Revolutionary tradition was anarchist from
Bakunin and Kropotkin NOT Marx and pre-dated
the Soviet Union and did not endorse either
Lenin and Stalin or the Soviet Union.
After a achieving a successful anarchist
revolution in 1936 in Barcelona after 50
years of struggle it was the agents of
Stalin who in 1937 destroyed that revolution
preferring that Franco's Fascists than to
allow a genuine non-Soviet controlled,
anti-Soviet revolutionary Left to exist.
5. While the Soviet Union had its roots in
Marx it is unfair to blame Marx for it as
the blame should be with Lenin and co.
Marx had been dead for decades before Lenin
took power.
In the 1850's Karl Marx wrote commentaries
for The New York Tribune newspaper. One such
article was his condemnation of the death
penalty. Marx said and always held the
position that any society that uses the
death penalty "is not a civilize society".
On this point alone the Soviet Union cannot
be described as Marxists or any other regime
that held itself together with the death
penalty and called itself Marxists is clearly
as much a betrayal of Marx as Wall Street and
the USA is a betrayal of Adam Smith.
6. Your notion of John Pilger is pure ignorance.
It was John Pilger who made the most in-depth
documentary account of Pol Pot and his
crimes. Both Harold Pinter and John Pilger
campaigned for the rights of authors, artists
and other dissidents behind the Iron Curtain
during the Cold War.
It makes perfect sense that most of Pilger's
work is about Western crimes against
humanity as that is the society we live in.
We have a duty to bring our system to account
and journalists of the courage of Pilger
provide an oasis of truth in the face of the
tsunami of ass-licking B.S. that pours out
of the corporate mass-media.

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Tuesday, October 18, 2005 2:13 PM

SEVENPERCENT

Quote:
Originally posted by Hero:
After all, the author of the article means to say, a work is only socially signifigant if it attacks western values, Christianity, or American policy. Since the collapse of communism the liberal intellectual community has been saddled with the mandate to liberate the damned fool masses from the chains of their own inferior intellect.

Fortunately they are the arbiters of their own good taste and quality worksmanship, because if left to the free market to judge the quality of their contribution to intellectual discourse, they'd all be left starving in Stockholm's cold streets for want of a real job.

H

Ladies and gentlemen, a miracle has happened on this site! Come one, come all, and watch 7% actually agree with and defend Hero!!!! It's a banner day (someone call Chrisisall)!

Well, not completely. But close enough.

Personally, as someone with an M.A. in English lit, I think Pinter's overrated. To call him the only critical voice in modern political writing just because he's anti-establishment smacks of sheer ridiculousness. And no one will be able to judge the contributions of this generation's political writers for several more years to come, so to say that no one is out there now writing like a Hemingway is incorrect (there are very, very few writers whose works become forces immediately upon completion, and even Ernest wasn't one of them. He had a tremendous surge post-shotgun, himseslf). Good writing does not immediately have a critical or popular impact (See: Firefly).

And stop calling people you don't know on this site ignorant. I got on Eyetooth for calling you an uninformed idiot, I'm not going to let you call Hero one. He is, in fact, a lawyer, and contrary to how I feel about him personally (I still think you're an ass - but I'd have a beer with you, still), he's an educated man. Make your points without trolling.

------------------------------------------
He looked bigger when I couldn't see him.

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Tuesday, October 18, 2005 3:23 PM

HOWARD

I did not post the article to suggest that
Pinter is the greatest writer of the age.
Though one should consider the context. In
the UK he has done many non-fiction things
on TV and radio. His verbal and narrative
skills also manifests there too.

It wasn't about literary per se but about
writers speaking up and speaking out in
society against power and the powerful.

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