"The war in Iraq was just the latest example, he said, also citing the
U.S.-backed Contra rebels in Nicaragua and U.S. intervention in Greece,
Indonesia, Guatemala, Haiti and Chile, among many examples. Hundreds of
thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. But you
wouldn't know it. It never happened. Even while it was happening it
wasn't happening. It didn't matter. There was no interest," he said."

Pinter's Nobel speech condemns U.S. policy
Last Updated Wed, 07 Dec 2005 18:45:56 EST
http://www.cbc.ca/story/arts/national/2005/12/07/Arts/pinter_051207.html
CBC Arts

Ailing playwright Harold Pinter used his Nobel Lecture on Wednesday to
deliver a fierce attack on U.S. foreign policy.

Pinter, 75, who has been battling cancer for years, was forbidden by
doctors from going to Stockholm to receive his Nobel Prize. Instead he
delivered his address through a video recording, in which he was seated
in a wheelchair with his legs under a red blanket.
Harold Pinter makes a speech broadcast from England to Swedish
spectators and media at the Swedish Royal Academy in Stockholm, Sweden,
Dec. 7, 2005. (AP photo)

   * RELATED STORY: Pinter hospitalized days before Nobel Prize
ceremony

In a speech peppered with the potent silences that are often called
"Pinteresque," he accused the U.S. and its ally Britain of trading in
death and employing "language to keep thought at bay."

His lecture, entitled Art, Truth and Politics, emphasized the
importance of truth in art before decrying its perceived absence in
politics.

In a voice that was sometimes hoarse with illness, he said politicians
feel it is "essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live
in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives."

President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair came in
for the harshest criticism, but Pinter expanded the criticism to "the
majority of politicians" who weave "a vast tapestry of lies" to keep
themselves in power.

Pinter said that since the Second World War, history has been littered
with examples of Washington exercising "a clinical manipulation of
power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good."

The war in Iraq was just the latest example, he said, also citing the
U.S.-backed Contra rebels in Nicaragua and U.S. intervention in Greece,
Indonesia, Guatemala, Haiti and Chile, among many examples.

"Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries.
But you wouldn't know it. It never happened. Even while it was
happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. There was no
interest," he said.

He concluded by calling for an "unflinching, unswerving and fierce
intellectual determination as citizens to define the real truth of our
lives and our societies.

"If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision, we
have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us: the dignity of
man."

Even while discussing his plays, he made digs at the U.S., saying of
his own use of humour that "torturers become easily bored; they need a
bit of a laugh to keep their spirits up."

Pinter gave insight into the genesis of his plays, saying the first
seed was often a single line like the opening of The Homecoming: "What
have you done with the scissors?"

The next stage of his creative process is to imagine characters, at
first called A, B and C, who would later become people with names, made
of "flesh and blood," he said.

Pinter's publisher will be in Stockholm Saturday to collect his prize,
valued at 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.4 million).

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