The following is a piece I’ve choreographed, whose component quotations all derive from Pinter’s Art, Truth & Politics…

Power

The United States “now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries… We don’t quite know how they got there but they are there all right.” It “possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning…”.

“Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? … China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity - the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons - is at the heart of present American political philosophy.”

The Crux

“To maintain [this] power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.”

“You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis… It quite simply doesn’t give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant… As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love.”

Blood

The US and United Kingdom 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’”. The instigators of the invasion, “Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner… [for] [b]lood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you’re making a sincere speech on television.” The Iraqi dead “are of no moment. Their deaths don’t exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead.” The crimes of the USA and UK simply “never happened… Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”

Guantanamo

Look also at “Guantanamo Bay: hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what’s called the ‘international community’. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be ‘the leader of the free world’.”

“Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally - a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man’s land from which indeed they may never return. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing.”

Hope

Yet “I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.”

“If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man.”

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