Harold Pinter, a writer of conscience

On the occasion of the death of the British author Harold Pinter, I invite visitors to this site to take a moment to watch a true writer of conscience give his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for literature. Such writers are increasingly rare, and one of the few remaining has just left us.

In his speech, Pinter reminds Americans that, with its 702 military installations in 134 countries, the U.S., which is now on a permanent military footing, maintains as its core policy the threat of nuclear annihilation. Moreover, it does this while selling its countless crimes in the post-war period as democracy promotion and effectively--that is, successfully--brainwashing its population on a massive scale.

In light of this, to have confidence in a Clinton-Obama foreign policy today would require one to forget or actively not to care that, since W.W. II, the U.S. has supported and in some cases engendered right-wing military dictatorships that have provoked the violent deaths of millions of innocent people in Indonesia, Greece, Brazil, Vietnam, Paraguay, Uruguay, El Salvador, Guatemala, the Philippines, Haiti, Turkey, Iran, and Chile, among other places, and to imagine, like the completely useless idiots that most Americans are when it comes to assessing the state of the world, that the administration heading to Washington D.C. repudiates this long history of deception and violence and in no way intends to extend its tyranny into the future.