Posted on 06/10/2003 9:21:14 PM PDT by chance33_98
Pinter blasts 'Nazi America' and 'deluded idiot' Blair
Angelique Chrisafis and Imogen Tilden
Wednesday June 11, 2003 The Guardian
The playwright Harold Pinter last night likened George W Bush's administration to Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, saying the US was charging towards world domination while the American public and Britain's "mass-murdering" prime minister sat back and watched. Pinter, 72, was at the National Theatre in London to read from War, a new collection of his anti-war poetry that had been published in the press in response to events in Iraq.
In conversation on stage with Michael Billington, the Guardian's theatre critic, Pinter said the US government was the most dangerous power that had ever existed.
The American detention centre in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where al-Qaida and Taliban suspects were being held, was a concentration camp.
The US population had to accept responsibility for allowing an unelected president to take power and the British were exhausted from protesting and being ignored by Tony Blair, a "deluded idiot" Pinter hoped would resign.
After a big operation for cancer, Pinter returned to public life last year to speak out against American belligerence. He called it a return from a "personal nightmare" to an "infinitely more pervasive public nightmare".
The playwright said: "The US is really beyond reason now. It is beyond our imagining to know what they are going to do next and what they are prepared to do. There is only one comparison: Nazi Germany.
"Nazi Germany wanted total domination of Europe and they nearly did it. The US wants total domination of the world and is about to consolidate that.
"In a policy document, the US has used the term 'full-spectrum domination', that means control of land, sea, air and space, and that is exactly what's intended and what the US wants to fulfil. They are quite blatant about it."
Pinter blamed "millions of totally deluded American people" for not staging a mass revolt.
He said that because of propaganda and control of the media, millions of Americans believed that every word Mr Bush said was "accurate and moral".
The US population could not be let off scot-free for putting the country under the control of an "illegally elected president - in other words, a fake".
He asked: "What objections have there been in the US to Guantanamo Bay? At this very moment there are 700 people chained, padlocked, handcuffed, hooded and treated like animals. It is actually a concentration camp.
"I haven't heard anything about the US population saying: 'We can't do this, we are Americans.' Nobody gives a damn. And nor does Tony Blair." Pinter added: "Blair sees himself as a representative of moral rectitude. He is actually a mass murderer. But we forget that - we are as much victims of delusions as Americans are."
In a British society where people were increasingly encouraged not to use their brains, the only way to protest was by "thought, intelligence and solidarity".
· Michael Billington was last night voted theatre critic of the year in a survey of theatregoers for the website whatsonstage.com.
You bastards!
Half Pint actually has a point here, besides the one on his head. The US has been deadly to the totalitarian ilk of Hitler and the Communists, and now we're taking on the Left's other dear friends, the Islamofascists.
And his son is a soap opera actor. Harold must be driven to drink over that.
This is not hyperbole for Pinter. It is an everyday chat at the level of rhetoric he is accustomed to. He's been been spewing this kind of vitriol for decades.
The good news is that anyone pays attention to him, except maybe the theater crowd. And one shouldn't expect a brigade from Broadway and Picadilly Circus to rise up against the 3rd Infantry any time soon.
Big operation? (Odd usage note of the day.)
You mean, the device whereby the audience is fooled into thinking the actor onstage has forgotten his lines?
May I make a modest proposal?
Yes, I hope we are the most dangerous power that ever existed, meaning dangerous in the same sense as used in the following passage from LOTR/The Two Towers/Chapter V (The White Rider); (conversation following the reunion of Gandfalf, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli, in Fangorn forest).
‘Perhaps he (Fangorn/Treebeard) also thought you were Saruman,’ said Gimli. ‘But you speak of him as if he was a friend. I thought Fangorn was dangerous.’
‘Dangerous!’ cried Gandalf. ‘And so am I, very dangerous: more dangerous than anything you will ever meet, unless you are brought alive before the seat of the Dark Lord. And Aragorn is dangerous, and Legolas is dangerous. You are beset with dangers, Gimli son of Gloin; for you are dangerous yourself, in your own fashion. - - - and Fangorn himself, he is perilous too; yet he is wise and kindly nonetheless.’
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