Via Reuters:

Ailing British playwright Harold Pinter used his Nobel prize lecture on Wednesday to deliver a fierce attack on U.S. foreign policy and urge the unflinching pursuit of truth to restore “the dignity of man”.

Forbidden by doctors from going to Stockholm to receive the 10 million crown literature prize, 75-year-old Pinter, who has been battling cancer for years, sent a video recording showing him in a wheelchair with his legs under a red blanket.

His frailty and hoarse voice added to the drama of a speech peppered with the potent silences of his plays like “The Birthday Party” and “The Caretaker”, which gave rise to the term “Pinteresque”. Behind him in the studio was a photo of the London-born playwright in more robust times.

Already a fierce critic of the U.S.-led war in Iraq, Pinter said post-World War Two history was full of examples of Washington exercising “a clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good”.

Citing examples from U.S.-backed Contra rebels in Nicaragua to the occupation of Iraq and detention of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, Pinter said the United States and its ally Britain — “its own bleating little lamb” — had traded in death and “employed language to keep thought at bay”…

…Relentless in his criticism of the United States, President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Pinter expanded the criticism to “the majority of politicians” who weave “a vast tapestry of lies” to keep themselves in power.

He concluded by calling for an “unflinching, unswerving and fierce intellectual determination as 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.”

BBC coverage of Pinter’s rant here.

Pinter’s website.

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