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"When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror – for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us."
Harold Pinter, Nobel Lecture
December 7, 2005

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This isn't the real America
Jimmy Carter, Los Angeles Times
14 november 2005

Noam Chomsky, Imperial ambitions
Conversations with Noam Chomsky on the post-9/11 world
Hamish Hamilton 2005

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Art, Truth & Politics
Harold Pinter - Nobel Lecture
December 7, 2005

http://nobelprize.org/
literature/laureates/2005/
pinter-lecture-e.html

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Read more about Lars Gullin vs. Gerry Mulligan (No 1), Michelle Wie's professional debut (No 3), a "footnote" from the Skandia affair (No 4), the Tsunami debate (No 5).

  
Hard Rain    No 6    December 7, 2005
The dignity of man
Nobel Peace prize winner Jimmy Carter's well formulated article coincides with the critical writings of Noam Chomsky over several decades. And now these truths have got another solid expression in Harold Pinter's flaming Nobel lecture.
 
Former president Jimmy Carter has expressed his great concern over the fact that the U.S. has "repudiated the Geneva accords and espoused the use of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay". The U.S. furthermore has become a "leading" country in global nuclear proliferation, contrary to almost all nuclear arms agreements.

Carter is exceptionally severe when he writes about endangered American values. He scorns the U.S. proclamation of a "policy of preemptive war, an unabridged right to attack other nations unilaterally to change an unsavory regime or for other purposes. When there are serious differences with other nations, we brand them as international pariahs and refuse to permit direct discussions to resolve disputes". Carter is probably thinking of the attitude towards Cuba and North Korea.

Nobel Peace prize winner Jimmy Carter's well formulated article coincides with the critical writings of Noam Chomsky over several decades. And now these truths have got another solid expression in Harold Pinter's flaming Nobel lecture. In a quite extraordinary way the "gun powder manufacturer" Alfred Nobel has given us a platform to expose the situation in the world unforeseen in the scared media environment of today.

The permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Horace Engdahl declared that "it is an inherent author's right to make statements about the world. If somebody feels offended I would say one should remember that we are being served a far more black and white picture of realities every day in the media". 		  In the interviews Noam Chomsky is asked about the attack on Iraq, a country that didn't threaten the U.S. (Imperial ambitions, p. 73). "Why hasn't there been any discussion about the U.S. government waging an illegal war of aggression? And why aren't people talking about impeaching President Bush?"

Chomsky points to the "subtle and complex communitarian interpretation" (of the UN Charter), under which "the United States was using force with authorization of the Security Council even though the Security Council denied it." He finds the arguments childishly ridiculous.

Harold Pinter takes no roundabout way. He penetrates the "tapestry of lies" with a burner. "The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law."

For Pinter there is only one way, and that is "unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies". There is no other way to restore "the dignity of man".