The author of these words has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature:
There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.
In December 2002—before the invasion of Iraq—he introduced Noam Chomsky at St. Paul’s Cathedral with these words:
Noam Chomsky is the leading critical voice against the criminal regime now running the United States, a regime which is in fact a dangerous monster out of control. But he will not be bullied. He will not be intimidated. He is a fearless, formidable, totally independent voice. He does something which is really quite simple but highly unusual. He tells the truth.
Who is he? He’s Harold Pinter, who epitomizes those of today’s Western intellectuals whose moral relativism would have blinded them, in the 1930s, to the evils of Naziism and, during the early years of the Cold War, to the evils of Communism.
Shame on the Nobel Prize Committee. The Islamists must think that the West is committing civilizational suicide. Showering honors on someone like Pinter makes me think so, too.
Here’s how The Times reacted to Pinter’s selection:
The Nobel Prize . . . for Literature . . . to Harold Pinter . . . Hmmm . . . there are two possibilities. First, the Nobel committee may have ruled that 2005 was the ideal moment to honour a man who wrote his signature works in the late 1950s. To be fair, Pinter produced notable plays in the succeeding decades. But he made his name, and gave birth to the adjective Pinteresque, with the stripped dialogue, edgy mistrust and air of tangible but mysterious threat of his early works.Then there is another possibility: that Pinter is just about the biggest and sharpest stick with which the Nobel committee can poke America in the eye. His recent output has consisted almost entirely of rabid antiwar, anti-American and expletive-filled rants against the Iraq conflict. He did not like those in Afghanistan or Kosovo either. In his anger, which only occasionally verges on the coherent, Pinter is as spare with logic as he once was with language.
[...] What else might have gone into its thinking? Well, perhaps there’s the fact that Pinter is — even among serious literature writers — fiercely opposed to the bulk of current American life, including our foreign policy. He has called Tony Blair a “deluded idiot” and President Bush a “mass murderer.” He regards the liberation of Iraq from Saddam’s tyranny as, “A bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law.” His worldview seems consistent with that of the man he hails as a true hero: Noam Chomsky. [...]
Great quotation highlighting the moral bankruptcy of the Nobel’s latest anti-American victor. The only problem is that the Nobel’s cachet hangs on long after any quality or decency has vanished.
The Norwegian Nobel Committees and the Swedish Academy of Sciences, long ago, like their governments, became socialist. In the hard sciences, American scholarship receives an impartial recognition, but in the social sciences—such as ‘Peace’ or ‘Literature,’ excepting Economics (which actually is awarded by the Swedish Central Bank)—every recent prize has been given to accomplish two goals: To polish their communalism philosophy, and to publish Scandavia’s anti-American (anti-individualism) credentials.
A Peace Prize for a thug like Arafat says it all.
BTW - moral relativism IS suicidal, but then, moral absolutism is fratricidal.
Although I find Pinter to be hysterically anti-American, I can agree with what the committee saw in his work. Pinter’s early work is outstanding, his later stuff less so, but still compelling.
I would much rather the Prize went to someone like Pinter, who is unquestionably one of the leading dramatisits of the day, than to someone who is simply a proxy for the committee’s political/moral beliefs, as was last year’s winner.
And if the committe members were really out to stick it to the US, they could have chosen Gore Vidal (one of my favorite authors).