December 26, 2008
Pinter's dead
Back when I was dabbling in the theater -- ah, college days! -- Harold Pinter was the playwright that appealed to the oh-so-serious types. "Pinteresque" was high praise to the ears of would-be masters of the script and stage.
Pinter died this week at the age of 78, cancer having ravaged his body, and aficionados of the arts are singing his praises as both a Nobel Prize-winning playwright and a political "activist."
As I never much cared for Pinter's plays, I'll say only that they were well written, but left me unmoved and decidedly un-entertained, and, ultimately, uninterested in sitting through another one.
But, as Pinter fancied himself a man of political action, and his fans are paying tribute to that aspect of his life, allow me to chime in.
Harold Pinter was a repellent man, an ungrateful grandson of refugees who chose to focus on the niggling faults of the West and indulge in the worst sort of reflexive (leftist) America-hating and conservative bashing.
The Independent (U.K.) notes in Pinter's obit:
Pinter was born into a Jewish family in the London borough of Hackney. His grandparents had fled persecution in Poland and Odessa. He was attracted to acting from an early age and his political activism was evident when in 1948 he refused, as a conscientious objector, to do National Service.
I can't abide pacifists, cowards one and all who survive only thanks to the courage and mettle of men willing to carry the cudgel and gun in defense of those unwilling to do the same for themselves. Pinter's family fled anti-semitism and found refuge and acceptance in England, the same England that shed the blood of its young men in the battle against Hitler's Third Reich. That Pinter would claim conscientious objector status a mere three years after the world learned of the Holocaust, a slaughter of Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals, Communists, cripples and anyone else deemed unworthy of life by the Nazis, is simply astonishing -- and deeply revealing.
Pacifism -- and pacifists like Pinter -- would have guaranteed the millennial fever dreams of Hitler's Thousand Year Reich and the extinction of Jews wherever Germany ruled, an empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1943, thanks to the separate peace negotiated with the pacifist-dominated government of a war-weary Britain.
World War II is the single best refutation of the pacifist creed, featuring an implacable and ruthless enemy, willing to design, build, staff and run factories of death, industrializing the wholesale slaughter of "enemies of the state," to the last man, woman and child. Such an enemy cannot be reasoned with, cannot be convinced to stop killing via the endless line of lambs willingly laying their necks on the chopping blocks.
Blood, steel, guts and guns stopped Hitler -- and will always be needed to stop men like him, and the evil regimes they lead.
The Independent moves on, and so do we.
Aside from being showered by establishment accolades, he was also a radical figure. He refused a knighthood from John Major in 1996, saying he was "unable to accept such an honour from a Conservative government".
His later plays, such as One for the Road, Ashes to Ashes and Party Time, evolved from the personal into the political, their subjects state-sponsored violence, torture and the abuse of power. In recent years, he became a vociferous campaigner, speaking out against human rights abuses, including the occupation of Iraq by Western armies. He joined other artists in sending a letter to Downing Street opposing the 2003 invasion.
So, a knighthood from a conservative government is something repellent, but such a recognition from a lefty-dominated Labour regime is less so? It's not as if Pinter swore off the idea of knighthoods entirely as a deeply undemocratic holdover from the monarchical Middle Ages; no, it's just that he didn't like the blokes trying to honor him.
And then there's his passion for criticizing "state-sponsored violence, torture and the abuse of power." I can't help but wonder if, before he started lambasting the West for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Pinter found time to speak out against the "state-sponsored violence, torture and the abuse of power" inflicted upon the Iraqi people by Saddam Hussein.
The Independent finishes up with a series of quotes from the playwright, intending to leave the reader with a feeling quite different from the one I experienced, especially when I read this:
"The crimes of the US throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody talks about them."
Really? Ignoring the lunacy of the charges against the United States, focus for a moment on the "nobody talks about them" bit.
"Nobody talks about them"? The left hasn't talked about anything other than American culpability for all the evil in the world for the last forty years! The eight years of the Bush Administration -- along with the eight years of the Reagan regime -- subjected us to a non-stop litany of leftist propaganda, unmitigated America-bashing swill. When was the last time Pinter or one of his fellow travelers suffered a human rights violation as a result of voicing deeply offensive and titanically stupid opinions about the so-called tyrannical Anglo-American alliance?
Whatever (hidden) talents Pinter may have possessed were lost amidst the eye-rolling, spittle-flecked diatribes he reserved for those Western regimes against whom he fulminated in complete safety. As with so many of his type, he was at heart a voluptuary of tyrants and an enemy of freedom.
Pinter is gone; may he soon be forgotten.
Posted by Mike Lief at December 26, 2008 07:07 AM
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Comments
I always looked at Pinter as an advocate for human rights. I saw a brilliant interview of Pinter conducted by Charlie Rose years ago.
Posted by: I Live Green at December 27, 2008 12:02 PM