Hi. Harold Pinter's amazing acceptance speech is available at http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html
In this mailing I send you two brilliant writers on complementary topics while urging you to click on the above for an in-depth, invaluable exposure to a great, creative mind. Ed http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/08/international/europe/08pinter.html?th&emc=th Playwright Takes a Prize and a Jab at U.S. By SARAH LYALL NY Times: December 8, 2005 LONDON, Dec. 7 - The playwright Harold Pinter turned his Nobel Prize acceptance speech on Wednesday into a furious howl of outrage against American foreign policy, saying that the United States had not only lied to justify waging war against Iraq but had also "supported and in many cases engendered every right-wing military dictatorship" in the last 50 years. The playwright Harold Pinter, who has cancer, addressed the Swedish Academy by video from London. "The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them," Mr. Pinter said. "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." Sitting in a wheelchair, his lap covered by a blanket, his voice hoarse but unwavering, Mr. Pinter, 75, delivered his speech via a video recording that was played on Wednesday at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. Doctors told him several years ago that he had cancer of the esophagus and recently ordered him not to travel to Stockholm for the speech, his publisher said. The playwright, known in recent years as much for his fiery anti-Americanism as for his spare prose style and haunting, elliptical plays like "The Caretaker" and "The Homecoming," was awarded the $1.3 million Nobel literature prize in October. In its citation, the Swedish Academy made little mention of his political views, saying only that he is known as a "fighter for human rights" whose stands are often "seen as controversial." It mostly focused on his work, saying that Mr. Pinter "uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms." The literature prize has in recent years often gone to writers with left-wing ideologies. These include the European writers José Saramago of Portugal, Günter Grass of Germany and Dario Fo of Italy. When he won the award, Mr. Pinter said he did not know if the academy, whose deliberations and reasoning are kept secret, had taken his politics into account. He clearly welcomed the platform the award gave him to bring his views, long expressed in Britain, to a larger audience. Dressed in black, bristling with controlled fury, Mr. Pinter began by explaining the almost unconscious process he uses to write his plays. They start with an image, a word, a phrase, he said; the characters soon become "people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort." "So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction," he continued, "a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time." But while drama represents "the search for truth," Mr. Pinter said, politics works against truth, surrounding citizens with "a vast tapestry of lies" spun by politicians eager to cling to power. Mr. Pinter attacked American foreign policy since World War II, saying that while the crimes of the Soviet Union had been well documented, those of the United States had not. "I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road," he said. "Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be, but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self-love." He returned to the theme of language as an obscurer of reality, saying that American leaders use it to anesthetize the public. "It's a scintillating stratagem," Mr. Pinter said. "Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable." Accusing the United States of torturing terrorist suspects in Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, Mr. Pinter called the invasion of Iraq - for which he said Britain was also responsible - "a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law." He called for Prime Minister Tony Blair to be tried before an international criminal court. Mr. Pinter said it was the duty of the writer to hold an image up to scrutiny, and the duty of 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," he said. *** No wonder al-Jazeera was a target By Robert Fisk - 26 November 2005 http://www.selvesandothers.org/article12420.html On 4 April 2003, I was standing on the roof of al-Jazeera's office in Baghdad. The horizon was a towering epic of oil fires and burning buildings. Anti-aircraft guns in a public park close to the bureau were pumping shells into the sky and the howl of jets echoed across the city. I was about to start a two-way interview with al-Jazeera's head office in Qatar when an American rocket came racing up the Tigris river behind me. Its rail-train "swish" brought a cry from the Qatar technician who picked up the sound on his earphones. "Was that what I think it was?" he asked. I fear so, I replied, as the white-painted cruise missile zipped beneath one of the Tigris's bridges and disappeared upstream. After finishing my "stand-upper" - television demands rooftop scenes from Baghdad even to this day, when most of the reporters are confined to their offices and hotels by teams of hired mercenaries - I descended to the al-Jazeera newsroom where the Jordanian-Palestinian bureau chief, Tareq Ayoub, was trying to put together his next report. You, I told him, have the most dangerous television office in the history of the world. I remarked how easy a target his Baghdad office would make if the Americans wanted to destroy its coverage - seen across the Arab world - of civilian victims of the Anglo-American bombing of Iraq. "Don't worry, Robert," Tareq had replied. "We've given the Americans the exact location of our bureau so we won't get hit." Three days later, Tareq was dead. Al-Jazeera had indeed given their office's map co-ordinates to the Pentagon. In fact, the State Department's public affairs officer in Qatar - a man of Lebanese descent called Nabil Khoury - had pointedly gone to the station's management on 6 April to assure them their bureau would be spared. Then on 7 April, as Tareq Ayoub broadcast at 7.45am from the same spot on the roof on which I had been standing, an American jet flew across the Tigris and fired a single missile at al-Jazeera. Its explosion killed Tareq instantly. This was no errant attack. "The plane was so low, we thought it was going to land on the roof," Tareq's colleague Taiseer Alouni told me afterwards. And Taiseer should know. He had been Kabul correspondent for al-Jazeera in 2001 when a cruise missile smashed into his (mercifully empty) bureau. Al-Jazeera had been broadcasting bin Laden's threats and sermons from Afghanistan and no one doubted at the time that the attack - which the Americans claimed was a mistake - was deliberate. After the killing of Tareq Ayoub in Baghdad in 2003, the Pentagon's soulless letter of explanation expressed its sorrow for Ayoub's death but did not even bother to offer an explanation for the attack. Why should it? After all, on the very same day, an American Abrams M-1 A-1 tank fired a shell into the Palestine Hotel, killing three more journalists. Small arms fire, the Americans said, had been coming from the building. It was a lie. Nor was I surprised. Back in Belgrade in 1998, I had watched the Americans bomb Serbia's television headquarters, an act which, as I wrote next morning, allowed Nato to strike at targets for the words men and women said - rather than the deeds they committed. What precedent did this set for the future? I should have guessed. So what was so strange about George Bush's desire to bomb al-Jazeera in 2004? That Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara - the man who supposedly persuaded the American president to desist from this latest insanity - should now threaten the British press under the Official Secrets Act lest they divulge the entire can of worms is quite in keeping with the arrogance of power which we now associate with the Bush-Blair alliance. British ministers cravenly repeated America's lies when US aircraft killed the innocent in Baghdad in 2003 and they will happily cover up Bush's continued desire to bomb his supposed enemies, however innocent they may be. When al-Jazeera first broadcast across the Arab world, the Americans hailed its appearance as a symbol of freedom amid the dictatorships of the Middle East. The New York Times's messianic columnist Tom Friedman praised it as a beacon of freedom - always a dangerous precedent, coming from Friedman - while US officials held out the station's broadcasts as proof that Arabs wanted free speech. And there was some truth in this. When al-Jazeera broadcast a brilliant 16-part series on the Lebanese civil war - a subject scrupulously avoided by Beirut television stations - the crowded seafront Corniche in front of my Lebanese home became deserted. Arabs wanted to see and hear truths that had been denied them by their own leaders. But when the same al-Jazeera began broadcasting bin Laden's words, all the enthusiasm of Friedman and the State Department dried up. By 2003, US deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz - that paragon of democracy who asked why Turkish generals did not have "something to say" when the democratically elected Turkish parliament prohibited US troops from using their territory for the invasion of Iraq - was fraudulently claiming that al-Jazeera was "endangering the lives of American troops". His boss, Donald Rumsfeld, told an even bigger lie: that al-Jazeera was co-operating with Iraqi insurgents. I spent days investigating these claims. All turned out to be false. Tapes of guerrilla attacks on US forces were delivered anonymously to the station's offices, not filmed by al-Jazeera's crews. But the die was cast. Iraq's newly elected government proved its democratic credentials by throwing al-Jazeera out of the country - just as Saddam had threatened to do in early 2003. Of course, al-Jazeera is no golden child of journalism. Its discussion programmes are often weighed down with uncompromising Islamists, its dutiful presentation of bin Laden's tiresome sermons balanced by interviews with Western leaders far tougher than any questions put to al-Qa'ida's bearded leadership. But it is a free voice in the Middle East - and so was attacked by the Americans in Kabul and in Baghdad. And almost in Qatar. And thus British journalists must now be suppressed by Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara if they dare to reveal the latest revelation from the dark and bloody pit into which Messrs Blair and Bush have plunged us. *** Linclon Place www.lincolnplace.net CLERGY TO HOLD ECUMENICAL MASS AT LINCOLN PLACE TENT CITY TONIGHT IN VENICE AT 7PM Lincoln Place resident launches fast in hopes of restoring housing for locked-out tenants News in the ongoing battle between AIMCO, a billion dollar company, and the working families residing at Lincoln Place Who: Father Tomas from St. Clements Catholic Church with additional local clergy; Lincoln Place residents, including a resident and mother of two, Maria Louisa, who says she will fast until the locked-out residents are returned to their homes; and neighbors and community members representing a number of local organizations and community groups What: An ecumenical service performed by local clergy in support of evicted Lincoln Place residents who are trying to have the city enforce the agreement made with Lincoln Place owner AIMCO to keep them in their homes and save much-needed affordable housing When: 7 pm - Friday, December 9, 2005 Where: At the Lincoln Place Tent City - at Frederick and California Streets in Venice, adjoining Lincoln Place Apartments. This is just off Lincoln Blvd (between Rose Avenue and Venice Blvd) next to Ross Dress For Less. Why: Father Tomas and other local clergy will lead a service in support of evicted residents of Lincoln Place, some of whom are their congregants. They will be blessing Lincoln Place and it residents, who have maintained a vibrant and diverse community as they have fought to stay in their homes for 18 years. Maria Louisa requested that her priest, Father Tomas, lead the service when she began her fast on Wednesday. "I'm fasting to support our community at Lincoln Place so that the families can come back." Lincoln Place residents established a Tent City late on Tuesday, December 6th, after being locked out of their apartments. The Tent City has been maintained since then. The owner of the property, major apartment-owner AIMCO Venezia, LLC ("AIMCO"), locked 21 children and 65 adults out of their apartments at Lincoln Place in order to extract development concessions without community process and that are in violation of state and city environmental laws. Further, the evictions are in clear violation of the tenant protection conditions of the only approved development plan for the site, the Vesting Tentative Tract Map 51337 (the "VTT"). City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo has refused to issue an injunction against the evictions while a resolution is worked out. Mayor Villaraigosa, Councilmember Bill Rosendahl, and the local Grassroots Venice Neighborhood Council, have all pledged to deny giving any development concessions to AIMCO if they lock out tenants. At least 80 households have received an extension of their evictions to March 2006 due to disabilities or age factors. Lincoln Place Apartments (bordered by Palms, Lincoln, Lake, and Penmar in Venice), a 668 unit garden apartment complex built in 1950, was unanimously awarded Historic District designation by the California State Historic Resources Commission in August 2005. The decision was reaffirmed on November 4 when they rejected AIMCO's request for a redetermination. The 35-acre complex was designed by Ralph Vaughn, an important African-American architect, who had worked with Paul Williams, and was also one of the first African-American set designers working under Cedric Gibbons. For More Information contact: Clare Sassoon 310-403-0941 Judy Branfman 310-486-2595 Laura Silagi 310-490-2872 #### ------------------------ Yahoo! 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