Hans Rustad Harold Pinter har lovt å bruke Nobel-talen til å belyse tingenes tilstand. Det kan bli pinlig for Nobel-komiteen. Hva vil publikum si når de hører hans rabiate utfall mot Bush og Blair?
Folk flest er ikke klar over hvor ytterliggående han er. Når de får høre det, vil de kanskje lure på hvordan en slik mann kan få Nobelprisen.
Pinter’s politics are so extreme that they’re almost impossible to parody. «Mr. Bush and his gang,» he said in a speech as the war in Iraq approached, «are determined, quite simply, to control the world and the world’s resources. And they don’t give a damn how many people they murder on the way.» Pinter sees the current president as only the most recent exponent of the American hegemonic impulse. The playwright was just as outraged by NATO’s 1999 air war in Kosovo. Though the bombing was essentially a last resort in the face of Slobodan Milosevic’s savage campaign of ethnic cleansing, Pinter described it as «a criminal act» – the U.N. Security Council hadn’t approved – designed to consolidate «American domination of Europe.» He complained, in fact, of «the demonization and the hysteria» that accompanied the NATO campaign against Milosevic and the Serbs.
Det er mange på campuser i USA som mener det samme, men du finner ikke så mange intellektuelle som deler disse synspunktene, skriver James Trabu. I Europa derimot… Her vekker ikke slike ekstreme standpunkter så stor oppsikt.
These views are hardly unfamiliar in the United States; you can hear them on any major university campus. Among public intellectuals or literary figures, however, it is hard to think of anyone save Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal who would not choke on Pinter’s bile. But the situation is very different throughout Europe, where the anti-American left is far more intellectually respectable. In the Anglophone world of letters, John le Carré holds opinions similar to Pinter’s, as do the essayist Tariq Ali and the novelist Arundhati Roy. These last two publicly root for the Iraqi «resistance» against the infernal machinery of American empire. Roy has conceded that despots like Saddam Hussein «are a menace to their own people» but concludes that there isn’t much that can be done about it save «strengthening the hand of civil society» – a comment apparently not intended as a joke.
La oss kort nevne at Tariq Ali var foreleser under en konferanse i Sandefjord i høst, under tittelen «Det skjedde igår, det skjer idag.» Ingen standpunkter på venstresiden er for ekstreme til å diskvalifisere i Europa, heller ikke fra den fremste litterære utmerkelsen. Tvertom virket det som om Akademien berømmet Pinters galematias.
