Nobel Laureate rips Bush, Blair
I doubt you will hear much of this speech in the US media. Harold Pinter, the English playwright who won the Nobel Prize for Literature declared Bush and Blair should be tried as war criminals. Pinter was hospitalized with cancer, but left his hospital bed to tape his speech for broadcast at the award ceremony given last night. The full text can be found here.
posted by torporindy at 12/08/2005
5 Comments:
Wasn't there some conspriacy discussion a while back that teh Nobel folks picked Pinter in part because of his anti-Bush stance?
Pinter alo said some very nice things about his wife, Antonia Fraser. Historians should be praised as often as possible, IMHO. (grin)
Ted Westhusing was a Professor of Philosophy at West Point Academy. He taught Ethics to the cadets.
To ensure that he wasn't just lecturing from the Ivory Tower, he decided to volunteer for a tour in Iraq, to help ground his subject.
Instead of putting Westhusing in charge of some activity involving elisted soldiers, he was assigned to a unit that oversaw commercial operators to whom the Pentagon had awarded contracts for reconstruction projects.
The amount of corruption in these outsourced contracts was so extensive that Westhusing became profoundly dispirited.
He felt sullied and dishonored by the scandalous combination of corruption and abuses that characterized the fiasco in Iraq.
Last June, Westhusing committed suicide.
His biographer likened his case to the Sophoclean tragedy of Ajax. In that play, Ajax is an honor-driven character who commits suicide early in the play. Then, for the rest of the play, the remaining cast of characters go about their 'business as usual' as the body of Ajax lies unattended on the the stage.
Iraq, like Ajax, symbolizes the death of honor as an American value.
The right said the same about Jimmy Carter's prize as well. Not that Carter was outspoken, but for the symbolism.
Moulton, thanks for that comment.
"Our civilization stands at the crossroads. Down one road is despondency and despair. Down the other road is total annihilation. I hope we'll take the right road." —Woody Allen
And now the US Congress has found it necessary to pass legislation expressly banning torture by CIA operatives and their outsourced subcontractors.
In the war on torture, terrorism, and suffering, this was a withering defeat for Cheney and the White House Vulcans, who insisted they needed unfettered license to engage in cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of those suspected of wishing harm to evil US hegemony.
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