In 1988, the English literary critic DJ Taylor wrote A Vain Conceit, in which he wondered why the English novel so often degenerated into “drawing-room twitter” and why the great themes of justice and injustice, wealth and poverty, war and peace were shunned by writers.
In the postmodern, celebrity-driven world of writing, prizes are allotted to stylists and those who compete for the emperor’s threads; the politically unsafe need not apply. John Keane, the chairperson of the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, once defended the absence of great contemporary political writers among the Orwell prize-winners not by lamenting the fact and asking why, but by attacking those who referred back to “an imaginary golden past”. He wrote that those who “hanker” after this illusory past fail to appreciate writers making sense of “the collapse of the old left-right divide”.
What collapse? The convergence of “liberal” and “conservative” parties in Western democracies, such as the American Democrats and the Republicans, represents a meeting of essentially like minds. Journalists work assiduously to promote a false division between the mainstream parties and to obfuscate the truth that the United Kingdom, for example, is now a single-ideology state with two competing, almost identical, pro-business factions. The real divisons between left and right are to be found outside Parliament and have never been greater. They reflect the unprecedented disparity between the poverty of the majority of humanity and the power and privilege of a corporate and militarist minority, headquartered in Washington, who seek to control the world’s resources.
One of the reasons these mighty pirates have such a free rein is that the Anglo-American intelligensia, notably writers — “the people with voice”, as Lord Macauley called them — are quiet or complicit or craven or twittering, and rich as a result. The exception is Harold Pinter. The other day, I sat down to compile a list of other writers remotely like him, those “with a voice” and an understanding of their wider responsibilites as writers. I scribbled a few names, all of them now engaged in intellectual and moral contortion, or they are asleep. The page was blank save for Pinter. Only he is the unquiet one, the untwitterer, the one with guts, who speaks out. Above all, he understands the problem. Listen to this:
“We are in a terrible dip at the moment, a kind of abyss, because the assumption is that politics are all over. That’s what the propaganda says. But I don’t believe the propaganda. I believe that politics, our political consciousness and our political intelligence, are not all over, because if they are, we are really doomed. I can’t, myself, live like this. I’ve been told so often that I live in a free country, I’m damn well going to be free. By which I mean I’m going to retain my independence of mind and spirit, and I think that is what is obligatory upon all of us. Most political systems talk in such vague language, and it’s our responsibility and our duty as citizens of our various countries to exercise acts of critical scrutiny upon that use of language. Of course, that means one does tend to become rather unpopular. But to hell with that.”
I first met Pinter when he was supporting the popularly elected govern-ment in Nicaragua in the 1980s. I had reported from Nicaragua, and made a film about the remarkable gains of the Sandinistas despite Ronald Reagan’s attempts to crush them by illegally sending CIA-trained proxies across the border from Honduras to slit the throats of midwives and other anti-Americans. United States foreign policy is, of course, even more rapacious under George W Bush: the smaller the country, the greater the threat. By that, I mean the threat of a good example to other small countries that might seek to alleviate the abject poverty of their people by rejecting US dominance.
What struck me about Pinter’s involvement was his understanding of this truth, which is generally a taboo in the US and the UK, and the eloquent “to hell with that” response in everything he said and wrote.
Almost single-handedly, it seemed, he restored “imperialism” to the political lexicon. Remember that no commentator used this word any more; to utter it in a public place was like shouting “fuck” in a convent. Now you can shout it everywhere and people will nod their agreement; the invasion in Iraq put paid to doubts, and Pinter was one of the first to alert us. He described, correctly, the crushing of Nicaragua, the blockade against Cuba and the wholesale killing of Iraqi and Yugoslav civilians as imperialist atrocities.
In illustrating the American crime committed against Nicaragua, when the US government dismissed an International Court of Justice ruling that it stop breaking the law in its murderous attacks, Pinter recalled that Washington seldom respected international law; and he was right. He wrote, “In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson said to the Greek ambassador to the US, ‘Fuck your Parliament and your Constitution. America is an elephant, Cyprus is a flea. Greece is a flea. If these two fellows keep itching the elephant, they may just get whacked by the elephant’s trunk, whacked for good.'” He meant that. Two years later, the colonels took over and the Greek people spent seven years in hell.
You have to hand it to Johnson. He sometimes told the truth, however brutal. Reagan told lies. His celebrated description of Nicaragua as a “totalitarian dungeon” was a lie from every conceivable angle. It was an assertion unsupported by facts; it had no basis in reality. But it’s a vivid, resonant phrase that persuaded the unthinking.
In his play Ashes to Ashes, Pinter uses the images of Nazism and the Holocaust, while interpreting them as a warning against similar “repressive, cynical and indifferent acts of murder” by the clients of arms-dealing imperialist states such as the US and the UK. “The word democracy begins to stink,” he said. “So, in Ashes to Ashes, I’m not simply talking about the Nazis, I’m talking about us and our conception of our past and our history, and what it does to us in the present.”
Pinter is not saying the democracies are totalitarian like Nazi Germany, not at all, but that totalitarian actions are taken by impeccably polite demo-crats and which are, in principle and effect, little different from those taken by fascists. The only difference is distance. Half a million people were murdered by US bombers sent secretly and illegally to skies above Cambodia by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, igniting an Asian holo-caust, which Pol Pot completed.
Critics have hated his political work, often attacking his plays mindlessly and patronising his outspokenness. He, in turn, has mocked their empty derision. He is a truth-teller. His understanding of political language follows George Orwell’s. He does not, as he would say, give a shit about the propriety of language, only its truest sense. That is why he has been so effective in denouncing the bloodbath in Iraq; and that is why, I suspect, the Nobel committee, in recognising his brilliance as a dramatist but also wanting to say something about the US menace, gave the prize to him.
Culture and ideas and words also constitute a world power, and they stand against the current menace — thanks in no small measure to Pinter. While other writers sleep or twitter, he is with the millions who are never still, and are stirring again. Indeed, he has a place of honour among them.
John Pilger’s Tell me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs (Vintage) has just been published