FOLLOWING his demise on Christmas Eve, after a long and painful battle with cancer of the oesophagus, Harold Pinter has widely been eulogized as the most influential English-language dramatist of his generation. Nor was his impact restricted to the Anglosphere. In The Washington Post last Saturday, the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman recalled how “something in my life and work changed forever” after he saw his first Pinter play in Chile in the early 1960s.

 

Dorfman concludes his tribute by saying that “[Pinter] will continue to help me and countless others make sense of the glories and miseries of our time”. That’s a service Pinter performed not only as a playwright but as a poet and polemicist. One text that is likely to long be remembered alongside his best plays is the 2005 Nobel lecture he was too unwell to deliver in person, so he sent it to Stockholm in the shape of a video recording.

 

After discussing his art, he devoted the second half of the lecture to a methodical evisceration of US foreign policy. “The majority of politicians,” he said, “….are interested not in truth but in power…. To maintain that power, it is essential that people remain in ignorance… What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.” He was referring not just to Iraq but also to the recent past, during which “the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities [and] the ruthless suppression of independent thought” in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were well documented, whereas “US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognized as crimes at all”.

 

He noted that America’s preferred method of exercizing control had usually been “low intensity conflict”, which “means that thousands of people die, but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them…. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom.” That’s a tremendously resonant metaphor for people in any number of third World countries.

 

Pinter went on to excoriate George Bush and Tony Blair, condemning them as mass murderers and war criminals for their role in Iraq. His lecture ought to be required reading for the self-proclaimed harbingers of “change we can believe in”. They cannot, after all, hope to improve America’s image in the world if they have only a vague idea of how grotesque it appears from the outside. Not everyone shares Pinter’s views, of course – arguably vindicating the playwright’s view of Uncle Sam as an excellent salesman. But it’s equally pertinent that some Americans recognized the reality behind the posturing decades ago, and Pinter in some ways appears to echo Martin Luther King, who back in 1967 proclaimed his nation’s government to be “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”.

 

That description has been more or less accurate ever since, but the Bush administration evidently decided low intensity conflict was no longer enough. In three weeks it will cede the entire mess to the Obama administration and walk away. No one will be taken to task for their crimes and misdemeanours. Bush will not end up in the dock. Dick Cheney will not be waterboarded. Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz will not spend the rest of their lives behind bars. Perhaps none of that would matter all that much if Barack Obama were to initiate not only a sharp course correction with the intention of remedying as quickly as possible the worst excesses of the Bush administration, but also a redressal of various woes that have festered for much longer.

 

That would involve a great deal more than pulling out of Iraq in due course, shutting down the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay after a couple of years, and pretending that a troop surge will produce a miracle in Afghanistan. Obama and his aides claimed during the campaign that one of their aims was to end the mindset that leads to war. That’s an extremely laudable objective, but it can be achieved only by acknowledging that American interests (which anyhow are often exclusively those of the government, the Pentagon and/or the corporate elite) must always be balanced against those of other nations. By understanding that other peoples, too, have their hopes and dreams, which may in many cases be a variance with the American dream. By appreciating that the myths about compatibility between the free market and social justice cannot universally be cultivated.

 

Obama may well construe his primary tasks to be domestic, and he wouldn’t be wrong, in view of the economic catastrophe wrought by greed and propelled by deregulation. He also has much to contend with on the international front and it’s unlikely that relations with Cuba will be very high on his agenda. Yet Cuba, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of its revolution on January 1, represents a case in which nearly five decades worth of errors can relatively simply be relegated to the past.

 

At the United Nations, the General Assembly votes overwhelmingly every year in favour of lifting the embargo that the US imposed against Cuba in 1962. Only Israel and a few dots in the Pacific Ocean side with the US. Yet ideological bloody-mindedness and intimidation by the Miami mafia keep the US from implementing the international will. It would be courageous of Obama to dramatically alter this pattern, without demanding regime change in Havana. By and large, Cubans relish the gains of the revolution but are fed up of economic deprivation. The future of the island’s political structure should be left to Cubans, but why punish them for having a soft spot for a system that guarantees universal education and healthcare at a fraction of the per capita cost incurred in capitalist countries. In fact, would it be too much to hope that the US could actually learn something from Cuba in these spheres?

 

The Palestinian question, meanwhile, cries out for immediate action in the wake of Israel’s assault against Gaza, which has in a few days consumed more lives than Hamas rockets could in a generation. Harold Pinter composed the following verses in February 2003, in anticipation of the tragedy that was about to unfold in Iraq, but they sound as if they could have been written yesterday:

 

“There are no more words to be said/ All we have left are the bombs/ Which burst out of our head/ All that is left are the bombs/ Which suck out the last of our blood/ All we have left are the bombs/ Which polish the skulls of the dead.”

 

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