The biggest bully in the west

This article by Harold Pinter, first appeared in the Guardian in December 1996

Republished Friday 26 December 2008 to mark his passing away on Wednesday 24 December 2008

Harold Pinter - English playwright, screenwriter - google image

"The general thrust these days is: "Oh come on, it's all in the past, nobody's interested any more, it didn't work, that's all, everyone knows what the Americans are like, but stop being naive, this is the world, there's nothing to be done about it and anyway, fuck it, who cares?" Sure, as they say, sure. But let me put it this way – the dead are still looking at us, steadily, waiting for us to acknowledge our part in their murder."

Map showing 115,273 targets of U.S. secret bombing of Cambodia between 1965-1973 - credit: google

Harold Pinter

Can it be true? Are the other "major powers" in the world finally moving towards a position where their contempt for the assertion of US power is actually being embodied in action? For the fourth year running the United Nations has voted for the motion condemning the US embargo of Cuba, this time by 137 votes (including Great Britain!) to three.

The countries against the motion were the US, Israel and Uzbekistan.

The European Union is taking the US to the World Trade Organisation panel, arguing that the Helms/Burton bill is illegal. Fourteen out of 15 members of the security council (including Great Britain!) voted against the US veto of Boutros Boutros-Ghali. The US was on its own.

How can any country stand out against such a consensus? How can any country, in the light of such blanket condemnation of its policies and actions, not pause to take a little thought, not subject itself to even the mildest and most tentative critical scrutiny? The answer is quite simple. If you believe you still call all the shots you just don't give a shit. You say, without beating about the bush: Yes, sure, I am biased and arrogant and in many respects ignorant, but so what? I possess the economic and military might to back me up to the hilt and I don't care who knows it. And when I say that I also occupy the moral high ground you'd better believe it.

The US is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be, but it's also very smart. As a salesman it's out on its own. And its most saleable commodity is self-love. It's a winner. The US has actually educated itself to be in love with itself. Listen to President Clinton – and before him, Bush and before him, Reagan and before him all the others – say on television the words: "The American People" as in the sentence, "I say to the American People it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American People and I ask the American People to trust their President in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American People." A nation weeps.

It's a pretty brilliant stratagem. 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 you don't know that. Nobody tells you. So the status quo remains where it is and Father Christmas remains American and America remains the Land of the Brave and the Home of the Free.

Except of course for the 1.5 million people in prison, the 50 million living under the poverty line, the adolescents and mentally deficient about to be gassed or injected or electrocuted in the 38 out of 52 states which carry the death penalty. They don't feel quite the same about this cushion of reassurance, but nobody listens to them anyway. As they are mostly poor and black they are essentially subversive. They are subversive because where they are resentful and critical and degraded and angry they threaten the stability of the state. The one thing they can have is God. If they want him. God belongs to every American. Successive American presidents have made this quite clear.

Sometimes you look back into recent history and you ask: did all that really happen? Were half a million "communists" massacred in Indonesia in 1965 (the rivers clogged with corpses)? Were 200,000 people killed in East Timor in 1975 by the Indonesian invaders? Have 300,000 people died in Central America since 1960? Has the persecution of the Kurdish people in Turkey reached levels which approach genocide? Are countless lraqi children dying every month for lack of food and medicine brought about by UN sanctions? Did the military coups in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Chile result in levels of repression and depth of suffering comparable to Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and the Khmer Rouge? And has the US to one degree or another inspired, engendered, subsidised and sustained all these states of affairs? The answer is yes. It has and it does. But you wouldn't know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the US throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless and fully documented but nobody talks about them. Nobody ever has. It's probably more than a newspaper or TV channel's life is worth to do so. And it must be said that as the absolute necessity of economic control is at the bottom of all this, any innocent bystander who raises his head must be kicked in the teeth. This is entirely logical. The market must and will overcome.

Perhaps the story that really takes the biscuit or beats the band or finally makes the cat laugh is the story of Haiti, a story virtually ignored by the world for decades. Haiti suffered under the grisly Duvalier dictatorships and their paramilitary force, the Tontons Macoutes, for 29 years. By 1986 popular feeling was so powerful that the Duvalier regime collapsed. Other military dictatorships followed but in 1990 the first democratic election in Haiti took place. President Aristide was elected with 67 per cent of the vote. His platform: "To bring the Haitian people from misery to dignity." Eight months later there was a coup d'etat. For three years the military again ruled. During this period 5,000 people were killed. The US was finally forced to act. It led a UN force to the island, to "restore democracy".

What it actually did was to restore the status quo, to give the generals various modes of asylum and protection and to effectively emasculate Aristide. His economic policies, for which the people had elected him, were discarded. The IMF and the World Bank moved in. They insisted on the application of a structural adjustment policy which threatens all hope of equitable development and progress in the country. People in Haiti refer to this plan as the "Death Plan". It will destroy the country's peasant economy. As a rider, the US army took from the Haitian army headquarters 160,000 pages of documents. The US government refuses to return these documents. Why? Guess. The documents show the extent of CIA involvement in the coup which overthrew Aristide in 1991.

Lastly, an elegy. Curtains are drawn, lights go out. It's as if it never happened. In Nicaragua in 1979, the Sandinistas triumphed in a remarkable popular revolution against the Somoza dictatorship. They went on to address their poverty-stricken country with unprecedented vigour and sense of purpose. They introduced a literacy campaign and health provision for all citizens which were unheard of in the region, if not throughout the whole continent. The Sandinistas had plenty of faults but they were thoughtful, intelligent, decent and without malice. They created an active, spontaneous, pluralistic society. The US destroyed, through all means at its disposal and at the cost of 30,000 dead, the whole damn thing. And they're proud of it.

The general thrust these days is: "Oh come on, it's all in the past, nobody's interested any more, it didn't work, that's all, everyone knows what the Americans are like, but stop being naive, this is the world, there's nothing to be done about it and anyway, fuck it, who cares?" Sure, as they say, sure. But let me put it this way – the dead are still looking at us, steadily, waiting for us to acknowledge our part in their murder.