2005 Harold Pinter was too weakened by the oesophageal cancer that would kill him three years later to accept in person his Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. In a departure from tradition, he prepared a video to be shown at the ceremony at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on 7 December.
The award was made eighteen months after the invasion of Iraq by coalition forces. The event had provoked the largest street protest ever witnessed in London, on 15 February 2003 (the event is commemorated in one of the novels of the period, Ian McEwan’s Saturday).
It was widely suspected that the award to Pinter was double-edged. He was Britain’s greatest living playwright. But he had also taken a public stance against the Iraq war and for the Palestinian people’s struggle – formally linked with Iraq in the 15 February demonstration.
If there were a political motive, Pinter rose to it in his video address. His theme was that current political administrations – notably those of Bush and Blair – used language ‘to keep thought at bay’. It was the responsibility of the writer to protect language from this political degradation, to keep words open as a channel for honest thought.
Pinter’s linguistic plea made less impact than his furious j’accuse against the warmongering leaders of the so-called ‘Free World’.
We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it ‘bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East’.
How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice.
They weren’t.