Peoples Geography — Reclaiming space

Creating people's geographies

Harold Pinter on the world’s Unpeople

Harold Pinter is a contemporary playwright, political activist and voice of conscience. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature a year and a half ago and his acceptance address ‘Art, Truth and Politics‘ is well worth a read.

The brief article below is a simpler piece yet powerful in its simplicity. It is the text of a speech given at Turin University upon being awarded an honorary doctorate in November 2002. In this address, he starts by affirming how his own recent brush with cancer has made him value life all the more. It has also compelled him to reflect upon what he calls the public nightmare of this Bushzarro era, with a trajectory that he predicts will only lead to catastrophe if left unchallenged. Only slightly truncated, it can be read in full here here and here.

Pinter does well to remind us not only of the folly of the programme of the neocons in which Bush is but one actor, but also to remind us of the value of human life—the equal value of human life cf. the corporate media’s undeclared coverage calculus that “one American life equals ten European lives, equals ten thousand African lives.”


The US is at this moment developing advanced systems of “weapons of mass destruction” and it prepared to use them where it sees fit. It has more of them than the rest of the world put together. It has walked away from international agreements on biological and chemical weapons, refusing to allow inspection of its own factories. The hypocrisy behind its public declarations and its own actions is almost a joke.


The three thousand deaths in Afghanistan are never referred to.











In Britain the public is now being warned to be “vigilant” in preparation for potential terrorist acts. The language is in itself preposterous.





Unless Europe finds the solidarity, intelligence, courage and will to challenge and resist US power Europe itself will deserve Alexander Herzen’s definition (as quoted in the Guardian newspaper in London recently) “We are not the doctors. We are the disease”.

Harold Pinter

The Assassinated Press

2 comments on “Harold Pinter on the world’s Unpeople

  1. Servant
    5 April, 2007

    How much does it cost to make the world safe for Zionism?

    That’s what this is all about isn’t it? Making the world safe for Zionism? What about the rest of us? Don’t we count?

    Because Israel lives inside a fortress, we do too?

    Where there be “terrorists” if we weren’t trying shove Israel up the world’s ass?

    Because Israel and the U.S. ignore UN agreements, we all have police with machine guns at the airports?

    Because Israel wants to starve Palestinians off their own land, the whole world has to get permission from the United States to get on an airplane?

    Because Israel wants to live behind a wall, we all have to go through metal detectors, turn on laptops, throw away bottles of lotion and tooth paste?

    Why do we have to go through x-ray machines that can see our naked bodies through our clothes? Will they take our naked pictures and store them in a database? How will we know?

    All to make the world safe for Israel?

    Because Israel cannot make a place for the people who were displaced by it’s creation, everyone else has to live in terror?

    Now we have facial recognition programs scanning people in stadiums comparing citizens to mug shots in an image database.

    We have ubiquitous cameras watch us all walk down the street.

    Let’s see

    How many billions have we spent?

    How many hundreds of thousands of lives have been destroyed?

    How many homes have been destroyed?

    How many hospitals? How many bridges?

    How many cluster bomb-lets are just waiting to fall out of fruit trees in Lebanon – like the sin fruit from the tree of knowledge?

    How many are little bomb-lets still waiting for lawn mowers to run over them?

    All to make the world safe for Zionists.

    How many people – men, women and children – are languishing in prison because Israel’s vision of freedom accommodates only Jews?

    We should send the bill for all these costs to Israel.

    Someone should add up all the costs and demand repayment of the what the world has suffered because someone thought Israel was a good idea.

    Think again. How much does it cost?

    Is it worth it?

  2. peoplesgeography
    5 April, 2007

    Well cataloged. The cost is definitely not worth it. The steep and ill-advised path to the abyss Israel has set upon and is dragging the whole world down is not happening uncontested. We will get off this horrific course.

    Ressentiment must have had a Presentiment about my forthcoming posts, right on this topic.

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Timely Reminders

-- Aldous Huxley


"It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there"