# Harold Pinter and politics

Harold Pinter and politics concerns the political views, civic engagement, and political activism of British playwright Harold Pinter (1930–2008), the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature.

## Early political views

In 1948–49, when he was 18, Pinter opposed the politics of the Cold War, leading to his decision to become a conscientious objector and to refuse to comply with National Service. But he was not a pacifist. He told Billington and others that, if he had been old enough at the time, he would have fought against the Nazis in World War II (Harold Pinter 21–24, 92, & 286). He seemed to express ambivalence about "politicians" in his 1966 Paris Review interview conducted by Lawrence M. Bensky. Yet, he had actually been an early member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the United Kingdom and also had supported the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (1959–1994), participating in British artists' refusal to permit professional productions of their work in South Africa, by signing the "Public Declaration of Playwrights Against Apartheid" in 1963 (Hadley) and in subsequent related campaigns (Mbeki; Reddy).

## Later civic activities and political activism

In the 1979 general election, Pinter voted for the Conservatives, led by Margaret Thatcher, "as a protest against a strike at the National Theatre that was dogging a production he was directing." He later said of this that it was "the most shameful act of my life". In his last twenty-five years, Pinter increasingly focused his essays, speeches, interviews, literary readings, and other public appearances directly on contemporary political issues. Pinter strongly opposed the 1991 Gulf War, the 1999 NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War, the United States' 2001 War in Afghanistan, and the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. His political statements have elicited some strong public criticism and even, at times, provoked ridicule and personal attacks. David Edgar (writing in the Guardian) defended Pinter against what he terms Pinter's "being berated by the belligerati" like Hari and others, who, unlike his supporters such as Edgar, Sir Tom Stoppard, David Hare, and Václav Havel, felt that Pinter did not "deserve" to win the Nobel Prize.
In accepting an honorary degree at the University of Turin (27 November 2002), he stated: "I believe that [the United States] will [attack Iraq] not only to take control of Iraqi oil, but also because the American administration is now a bloodthirsty wild animal. Bombs are its only vocabulary." Distinguishing between "the American administration" and American citizens, he added the following qualification: "Many Americans, we know, are horrified by the posture of their government but seem to be helpless" (Various Voices [2005] 243). He was very active in the antiwar movement in the United Kingdom, speaking at rallies held by the Stop the War Coalition (StWC).
In his various public speeches and other appearances, describing former President of the United States George W. Bush as a "mass murderer" and former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Tony Blair as both "mass-murdering" and a "deluded idiot", Pinter specified that, along with other past U.S. officials, under the Geneva Conventions, they are "war criminals". He compared the Bush administration with Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, in its striving to attain "world domination" through "Full spectrum dominance": "Nazi Germany wanted total domination of Europe and they nearly did it. The US wants total domination of the world and is about to consolidate that. … In a policy document, the US has used the term 'full-spectrum domination', that means control of land, sea, air and space, and that is exactly what's intended and what the US wants to fulfil. They are quite blatant about it." Referring to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, in a public reading presented in 2003, Pinter "blamed 'millions of totally deluded American people' for not staging a mass revolt" and "said that because of propaganda and control of the media, millions of Americans believed that every word Mr Bush said was 'accurate and moral'."

## Official political statements

On his official website, Pinter published his remarks to the mass peace protest demonstration held in London on 15 February 2003: "The United States is a monster out of control. Unless we challenge it with absolute determination American barbarism will destroy the world. The country is run by a bunch of criminal lunatics, with Blair as their hired Christian thug. The planned attack on Iraq is an act of premeditated mass murder" ("Speech at Hyde Park"). Those remarks anticipated his observation in his 2005 Nobel Lecture, "Art, Truth and Politics" that whereas Bush, like "all American presidents" had hypnotically enlisted " 'the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.' "; nevertheless, "Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government's actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force—yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish" (21).
In accepting the Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry, on 18 March 2005, wondering "What would Wilfred Owen make of the invasion of Iraq? A bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the conception of international law?", Pinter concluded: "I believe Wilfred Owen would share our contempt, our revulsion, our nausea and our shame at both the language and the actions of the American and British governments" (Various Voices [2005] 247–48). The following year, in March 2006, upon accepting the Europe Theatre Prize, in Turin, Pinter exhorted the mostly European audience "to resist the power of the United States," stating, "I'd like to see Europe echo the example of Latin America in withstanding the economic and political intimidation of the United States. This is a serious responsibility for Europe and all of its citizens."
Pinter was active in International PEN, serving as a vice president, along with American playwright Arthur Miller. In 1985, Pinter and Miller went to Turkey, on a mission co-sponsored by International PEN and a Helsinki Watch committee to investigate and protest against the torture of imprisoned writers. There he met victims of political oppression and their families. At an American embassy dinner in Ankara, held in Miller's honour, at which Pinter was also an invited guest, speaking on behalf of those imprisoned Turkish writers, Pinter confronted the ambassador with (in Pinter's words) "the reality ... of electric current on your genitals": Pinter's outspokenness apparently angered their host, who asked Pinter to leave, and, in solidarity, Miller left the embassy with him. Recounting this episode for a tribute to Miller on his 80th birthday, Pinter concluded: "Being thrown out of the US embassy in Ankara with Arthur Miller—a voluntary exile—was one of the proudest moments in my life" ("Arthur Miller's Socks," Various Voices [2005] 56–57). Pinter's experiences in Turkey and his knowledge of the Turkish suppression of the Kurdish language "inspired" his 1988 play Mountain Language. He was also an active member of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, an organisation describing itself as one which "campaigns in the UK against the US blockade of Cuba and for the Cuban peoples' right to self-determination and sovereignty".
Although conceding that the former Serb leader was "ruthless and savage", in 2001 Pinter joined the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milošević (ICDSM), which appealed for the former Serbian leader to be given a fair trial and for his freedom, signing a related "Artists' Appeal for Milošević" in 2004.

## Political activism in his final years

In the last few years of his life, Pinter continued to contribute letters to the editor, essays, speeches, and poetry strongly expressing his artistic and political viewpoints, which were frequently published initially in British periodicals, both in print and electronic media, and distributed and re-distributed extensively over the internet and throughout the blogosphere. These were distributed more widely after his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005; his subsequent publications and related news accounts cite his status as a Nobel Laureate. Later he continued to sign petitions on behalf of artistic and political causes that he supported. He signed the mission statement of Jews for Justice for Palestinians in 2005 and its full-page advertisement, "What Is Israel Doing? A Call by Jews in Britain", published in The Times on 6 July 2006. He also co-signed an open letter about events in the Middle East dated 19 July 2006, distributed to the press on 21 July 2006, and posted on the website of Noam Chomsky. On 5 February 2007 The Independent reported that, along with historian Eric Hobsbawm, human rights lawyer Geoffrey Bindman, fashion designer Nicole Farhi, film director Mike Leigh, and actors Stephen Fry and Zoë Wanamaker, among others, Harold Pinter launched the organization Independent Jewish Voices in the United Kingdom "to represent British Jews ... in response to a perceived pro-Israeli bias in existing Jewish bodies in the UK", and, according to Hobsbawm, "as a counter-balance to the uncritical support for Israeli policies by established bodies such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews" (Hodgson; IJV Declaration). In March 2007 American television interviewer and journalist Charlie Rose conducted "A Conversation with Harold Pinter" on Charlie Rose, filmed at the Old Vic, in London, and broadcast on television in the United States on PBS. They discussed highlights of his career and the politics of his life and work. They debated his ongoing opposition to the Iraq War, with Rose challenging some of Pinter's views about the United States. They also discussed some of his other public protests and positions in public controversies, such as that involving the New York Theatre Workshop's cancellation of their production of My Name Is Rachel Corrie, which Pinter viewed as an act of cowardice amounting to self-censorship. In mid-June 2008, opposing "a police ban on the George Bush Not Welcome Here" demonstration organized by the Stop the War Coalition (StWC), "Pinter commented, 'The ban on the Stop The War Coalition march in protest at the visit of President Bush to this country [England] is a totalitarian act. In what is supposed to be a free country the Coalition has every right to express its views peacefully and openly. This ban is outrageous and makes the term "democracy" laughable'."

## Retrospective perspective on political aspects of his early works

David Edgar's argument in "Pinter's Weasels" that "The idea that he was a dissenting figure only in later life ignores the politics of his early work," echoes Pinter's own retrospective perspective on it. In "A Play and Its Politics", an interview conducted by Nicholas Hern in February 1985 and published in the Methuen and Grove Press editions of One for the Road, Pinter described his earlier plays retrospectively from the perspective of the politics of power and the dynamics of oppression. He also expressed such a perspective on his work when he participated in "Meet the Author" with Ramona Koval, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, in Edinburgh, Scotland, on the evening of 25 August 2006. It was his first public appearance in Britain since he had won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature and his near-death experience in hospital in the first week of December 2005, which had prevented him from going to Stockholm to give his Nobel Lecture in person. Pinter described how he felt while almost dying (as if he were "drowning"). After reading an interrogation scene from The Birthday Party, he explained that he "wanted to say that Goldberg and McCann represented the forces in society who wanted to snuff out dissent, to stifle Stanley's voice, to silence him," and that in 1958 "One thing [the critics who almost unanimously hated the play] got wrong ... was the whole history of stifling, suffocating and destroying dissent. Not too long before, the Gestapo had represented order, discipline, family life, obligation—and anyone who disagreed with that was in trouble."
In both his writing and his public speaking, McDowell observes,
      In [March 2006], when he was presented with the European [sic] Theatre Prize in Turin, Pinter said he intended to spend the rest of his life railing against the United States. Surely, asked chair Ramona Koval, [at the Edinburgh Book Festival that August], he was doomed to fail?

## "Politics" at HaroldPinter.org

In 2000 Harold Pinter launched his official website, which includes a section specifically devoted to his interest and activities in "Politics" with a hyperlinked subsection listing the political organisations and causes that he supported during his lifetime. The site includes some hyperlinks to another section, containing Pinter's politically charged poetry. Prior to his death, these parts of his official website were occasionally updated periodically by his various personal assistants.
The Harold Pinter Community Discussion Forum at HaroldPinter.org contains threads pertaining to Pinter and politics. Leading up to and after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, these threads became more frequent and at times more heated in nature, particular in reference to Pinter's opposition to that Iraq War, his other political activism and statements relating to it, and his winning of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature.

## Approval of the election of U.S. President Barack Obama

In the final months of his life, Pinter demonstrated his enthusiastic approval of the election of Barack Obama as U.S. President.