April 2, 2007

• Why George Bush is Insane

  Why George Bush is Insane

  by Harold Pinter; March 30, 2007

  (NOTE:  Harold Pinter is a British playwright, born in 1930 and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 2005.  He's still alive.  This was originally published in 2002.  Change the word "Iraq" to "Iran" near the end of the article, and it's just as relevant today as it was then.)

  Earlier this year I had a major operation for cancer. The operation and its
  after-effects were something of a nightmare. I felt I was a man unable to swim
  bobbing about under water in a deep dark endless ocean. But I did not drown and
  I am very glad to be alive.

   

  However, I found that to emerge from a personal nightmare was to enter an
  infinitely more pervasive public nightmare - the nightmare of American hysteria,
  ignorance, arrogance, stupidity and belligerence; the most powerful nation the
  world has ever known effectively waging war against the rest of the world. "If
  you are not with us you are against us" President Bush has said. He has also
  said "We will not allow the world's worst weapons to remain in the hands of the
  world's worst leaders". Quite right. Look in the mirror chum. That's you.

   

  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 United States believes that the three thousand deaths in New York are
  the only deaths that count, the only deaths that matter. They are American
  deaths. Other deaths are unreal, abstract, of no consequence.

   

  The three thousand deaths in Afghanistan are never referred to.

   

  The hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children dead through US and British
  sanctions which have deprived them of essential medicines are never referred
  to.

   

  The effect of depleted uranium, used by America in the Gulf War, is never
  referred to. Radiation levels in Iraq are appallingly high. Babies are born with
  no brain, no eyes, no genitals. Where they do have ears, mouths or rectums, all
  that issues from these orifices is blood.

   

  The two hundred thousand deaths in East Timor in 1975 brought about by the
  Indonesian government but inspired and supported by the United States are never
  referred to.

   

  The half a million deaths in Guatemala, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua,
  Uruguay, Argentina and Haiti, in actions supported and subsidised by the United
  States are never referred to.

   

  The millions of deaths in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia are no longer referred
  to.

   

  The desperate plight of the Palestinian people, the central factor in world
  unrest, is hardly referred to.

   

  But what a misjudgement of the present and what a misreading of history
  this is.

   

  People do not forget. They do not forget the death of their fellows, they
  do not forget torture and mutilation, they do not forget injustice, they do not
  forget oppression, they do not forget the terrorism of mighty powers. They not
  only don't forget. They strike back.

   

  The atrocity in New York was predictable and inevitable. It was an act of
  retaliation against constant and systematic manifestations of state terrorism on
  the part of the United States over many years, in all parts of the world.

   

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

   

  How will - or can - public vigilance be embodied? Wearing a scarf over your
  mouth to keep out poison gas? However, terrorist attacks are quite likely, the
  inevitable result of our Prime Minister's contemptible and shameful subservience
  to the United States. Apparently, a terrorist poison gas attack on the London
  Underground system was recently prevented. But such an act may indeed take
  place. Thousands of school children travel on the London Underground every day.
  If there is a poison gas attack from which they die, the responsibility will
  rest entirely on the shoulders of our Prime Minister. Needless to say, the Prime
  Minister does not travel on the underground himself.

   

  The planned war against Iraq is in fact a plan for premeditated murder of
  thousands of civilians in order, apparently, to rescue them from their
  dictator.

   

  The United States and Britain are pursuing a course which can lead only to
  an escalation of violence throughout the world and finally to catastrophe.

   

  It is obvious, however, that the United States is bursting at the seams to
  attack Iraq. I believe that it will do this - not just to take control of Iraqi
  oil - but because the US administration is now a bloodthirsty wild animal. Bombs
  are its only vocabulary. Many Americans, we know, are horrified by the posture
  of their government but seem to be helpless.

   

  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

  • 6:58 am
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