Overview

by Erik Schiller

In 2005, British playwright Harold Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Pinter was hospitalized at the time, so couldn’t attend the ceremonies in Stockholm, but he made a prerecorded video of his acceptance speech, “Art, Truth, and Politics” which can be viewed here.

Sitting in a wheelchair, his distinctively deep voice hoarse but powerful, Pinter began by musing on the strange nature of truth in art, “You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavor. The search is your task. ” After citing some examples of this “elusive” quality in his own work, he then moves on to the problem of truth in politics. He argues that, while the discovery of the “Truth” through dramatic language is crucial but always slightly out of reach, in politics, the objective is always to obscure truth. As an example, he presents the case of the US Invasion of Iraq which had happened two years earlier. “The justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction…. We were assured that was true. It was not true.” Pinter then begins to take us back further in time, stating that he would like to look at recent history, “by which I mean United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War”:

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 recognized as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now…

What he said next sparked controversy on both sides of the Atlantic. “The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War.” He lists the following countries: “Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile.”

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes, they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

A year later, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? by Caryl Churchill had its professional premier. Churchill and Pinter were contemporaries, both born before the end of Word War II, and both had grown up, come of age, and embarked on long, celebrated careers as playwrights throughout the post-War period. One could argue that they are second only to Samuel Beckett in their importance and influence as innovators of dramatic form.

Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? covers the same historical ground as Pinter’s speech, and one is tempted to conclude that Pinter inspired Churchill’s work. But it is just as easy to imagine the two playwrights, absorbed in the same news cycle, watching as the occupation of Iraq ground on, casualties mounting, were provoked into asking the same questions, each deploying their own unique sensibilities to engage in the task of illuminating truth that had been concealed by the speeches of politicians.

Spoilers Ahead!