A citizen among us

Rousseau once noted how "we have physicists, geometricians, chemists, astronomers, musicians and painters in plenty, but we no longer have a citizen among us." The shortage remains to this day. While 'Legal correspondents' are examining the merits of the case for Pinochet's extradition, 'foreign affairs correspondents' examining the impact on Chile and 'home affairs correspondents' examining the political repercussions at home, there are no citizens to report the issue that truly matters: that Pinochet's coup was one small example of the consistent Western policy of installing and supporting dictators to protect Western business interests from independent nationalism, a policy that continues to this very day.

Specialisation, then, is one of the great allies of oppression and deception. As long as we are willing to perceive, or deem ourselves responsible for, only one small part of the world, the suffering of the world as a whole can be overlooked, or declared "none of my business": "I'm an oil executive, it's not my job to protect the environment"; "I'm an arms manufacturer, it's not my job to stop people killing each other": "I'm a global warming scientist, it's not my job to comment on political issues."

Fortunately for us, Harold Pinter is not a specialist, he is a citizen, because he sums up US foreign policy thus: "Kiss my ass or I'll kick your head in." It's difficult to disagree with this concise analysis, although accuracy demands that it should also read: "And then I'll kick your family's heads in."

Throughout his career. Pinter has used violent language and sadistic imagery to give us a flavour of the violence and sadism of the real world. In his most controversial poem, "American Football (A Reflection on the gulf War)" - rejected by liberal newspapers like The Guardian and The Independent - Pinter has a psychotic American military voice rejoicing at the success of 'Operation Desert Storm' and its high-tech killing machines:

"Hallelujah!
It works
We blew the shit out of' them.

We blew the shit right back up their own ass
And out their fucking ears.

It works.
We blew the shit out of them.
They suffocated in their own shit!...."

And what impulses of mercy might we, the victors, feel
Now towards the men, women and children we have bulldozed
alive, cluster bombed, napalmed and irradiated?

"Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth."

If you put this poem, and particularly this last line, into the head of someone brought up on John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Harrison Ford, et al., it has an interesting effect, creating a kind of effervescent fizz in the pit of the stomach. The poem is obscene, but not because it contains rude language. It is obscene because the contrast between how we fundamentally see ourselves - how we see Western civilisation - and Pinter's version of what we are, is just too violent, much as the carcass of a lamb might seem obscene pictured alongside a wide-eyed shot of the real thing in a summer meadow.

As this collection of prose, poetry and political pieces makes clear, Pinter is our Tolstoy. To read Tolstoy is to read an individual apparently hell-bent on dislocating every last cultured nose raised up to him in admiration: intellectuals, artists, aristocracy, royalty, clergy, the military, business, everyone - all out of a determination to relieve the suffering of others.

Similarly, while Pinter has been declared the "greatest living playwright", and is widely admired in 'cultured' circles, he is nevertheless willing to pour vitriol on the lifestyle of the dinner-party set in plays like "Party Time" and, here, in the essay "Caribbean Cold War", in which, with excruciating detail, he contrasts the delicacies of a World Bank dinner:

"The entrée was duck with lime sauce served with artichoke bottoms filled with baby carrots. A hearts of palm salad was offered accompanied by sage cheese soufflés filled with a port wine dressing. Dessert was a German chocolate turnip sauced with raspberry coulis, ice cream bon-bons and flaming coffee royale"

with the life of a Bolivian woman:

"We get up at 4 a,m. and at 11 at night we are still working. I have vomited blood for weeks at a time and still had to keep working"

The juxtaposition is demonic: for a moment there is a sense that there really are demons in the world.

Pinter also likes to write open letters to Tony Blair:

"The US has supported, subsidised and, in a number of cases, engendered every right-wing military dictatorship in the world since 1945... The deaths really do mount up: 170,000 in Guatemala, 200,000 in East Timor, 80,000 in El Salvador, 30,000 in Nicaragua, 500,000 in Indonesia - and that's just to be going on with. They are, every single one of them, attributable to your ally's foreign policy ... Anyway, this is your ally with whom you are locked in a moral embrace ... "

As any number of dissidents know, this kind of statement can be tantamount to professional suicide, Pinter received no reply from the PM to his 'off message', 'old fashioned', 'old Labour' thoughts. No surprise, given that, as Pinter says in his essay "It Never Happened":

"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, this is the world, there's nothing to be done about it and anyway, fuck it, who cares?"

The reality being, of course, that no one was ever interested:

"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, clinical, remorseless and fully documented but nobody talks about them. Nobody ever has."

Also included in this selection are rare interviews which reveal Pinter's response to this overwhelming indifference and clues to his own motivation:

"I believe that politics, our political consciousness and our political intelligence are not all over, because if they are, we are really doomed. I can't myself live like this."

The crucial thing, he argues, is to plunge into the inky darkness of political language and recover the ugly truths hidden therein. There are costs, but well...

"Of course, this means that one does tend to become rather unpopular. But to hell with that."