LONDON -- They gave British playwright Harold Pinter the Nobel Prize for Literature recently, and the committee that awarded it made particular note of his lifelong opposition to "oppression." So Pinter, 75 and ailing, sent his acceptance speech to Stockholm by pretaped video link, and at its heart, as everybody expected, was yet another anti-American rant.
It was probably Pinter's last public attack on the United States, and it was to be savored, in a perverse sort of way, because such performances, a staple of global political theater for the past 50 years, are coming to an end. They were fueled by impotent rage at the often selfish and sometimes brutal ways in which the U.S. has wielded its great power, but that, too, is coming to a end. Soon the music will change -- although Americans may like the new tune even less.
After some preliminary remarks about writing plays, Pinter's acceptance speech attacked America not just for the invasion of Iraq, the misdeed of the moment, but for every sin it has committed since World War II: "The United State supported, and in many cases engendered, every rightwing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador and, of course, Chile. . . . Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. . . . and they are attributable to U.S. foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it.