Art, Truth and Politics

[dutchdemocrat]

Art, Truth and Politics


The following are excerpted passages from Harold Pinter's Nobel speech, delivered on Tuesday, Dec. 7. available in full here.

The majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.
*
Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.

But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now.
*
Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America's favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as 'low intensity conflict'. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued – or beaten to death – the same thing – and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed...

The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a potent example of America's view of its role in the world, both then and now.

I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s. The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: 'Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.'

Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. 'Father,' he said, 'let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.' There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch...

I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following statement: 'The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.'
*
The Sandinistas weren't perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.

The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighbouring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador.

I spoke earlier about 'a tapestry of lies' which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a 'totalitarian dungeon'. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships.

Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.
*
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.

What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days – conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what's called the 'international community'. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be 'the leader of the free world'.

[Cats Against Frist]

1. Truth is an illusion

Those who hold power, make truth. It can be as authoritarian and brutal, from the left, as it can be from the right. There are grey areas ONLY, and they can only be navigated by those who are willing to expand their minds outside of the normal kinds of constructs, and consensus build, in such a way that a balance is acheived.

I am a liberal -- but, tentatively. I am a postmodernist, meaning that even though I prefer liberal views, I'm not going to make any absolute claims to them. We all read the Suskind quote, about "history's actors," yeah?

"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"

This quote has 28,000 hits on Google. The reason for this is that NEVER -- at least in many lifetimes -- have the orchestrators of power dropped the mask, so completely, as to give us a good look into REALITY.

The REALITY-BASED community is not a set of liberal or conservative constructs. Understanding reality is to understand the arbitrary nature of contextual epistemologies. REALITY means that truth is constantly shifting, that truths are binary, and, that old Orwellian notion of Freedom equals slavery, peace equals war, love equals hate, etc.

An artist must understand these things. I don't trust artists who are overly Marxist, or who seem to have it all "figured" out, in terms of aligning with an authoritarian position. There are too many ways to drum out the diversity and beauty, in this world, and the easiest way to do it, is when people are trying to social engineer away the painful, in this world. I still haven't figured out what that article has to do with art, but I thought I'd throw in my 22 cents.

[dutchdemocrat]

2. hmm...

I suspect that 'art' is in the fact that he's a playwright and received the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is an artist. He does lead with discussion on his craft.

The playwright Harold Pinter turned his Nobel Prize acceptance speech Wednesday into a furious protest of American foreign policy, saying that the U.S. not only lied to justify waging war against Iraq but also "supported and in many cases engendered every right-wing military dictatorship" in the past 50 years.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0512080219dec08,1,86162.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed

Although the speech obviously was a physical strain to deliver, it was impressively structured. It began with Pinter talking about his art - something he rarely does in public. In particular, he drew a clear distinction between the necessary ambivalence of art and the duty of the citizen to ask: "What is true? What is false?" Pinter even gave fascinating examples of the way in which his plays start with a line, a word or an image and then proceed on their journey into the unknown.

Warming to his theme, Pinter argued that while language is, for the dramatist, an ambiguous transaction, it is something that politicians distort for the sake of power. And, in making his point, Pinter deployed a variety of tactics: the charged pause, the tug at the glasses, the unremitting stare at the camera. I am told by Michael Kustow, who co-produced the lecture, that after a time he stopped giving Pinter any instructions. He simply allowed him to rely on his actor's instinct for knowing how to reinforce a line or heighten suspense.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1661911,00.html

[Cats Against Frist]

3. Ahh...I clicked on the link in your OP, and read the excerpt there

not realizing that wasn't the whole speech. Anyway, Pinter and I agree that people in power manipulate language. I might read the whole thing, in a bit.

[dutchdemocrat]

4. I have the video and text up here in Flash and WMV

I have the video up (I converted the RealMedia file) into Flash 8 and downloadable as a WMV file from here

http://www.chris-floyd.com/pinter/

It's a tribute page of sorts. Please spread the word. It's important that people see this video or read the speech and they are both on this page.

http://www.chris-floyd.com/pinter/

Cheers

DD.