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        '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. I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?' —Harold Pinter
 

Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter

        The way in which monolithic socialist structures have been demolished during the last 20 years in USSR and Eastern Europe, clearly shows how Karl Marx stands invalidated by Madame Time. What of the future? No one can predict the ultimate impact of the immense, fascinating, yet mysterious and unmeasured growths which have been bursting forth amidst the ruins of the familiar socio-economic political structures we have known in Eastern Europe and Russia during the last 60 years. One thing is clear. America under Bush today is behaving like Kaiser in Germany in 1914 or Hitler in Nazi Germany in 1934. All these great revolutions have clearly shown that the great and sacred underlying principles which often evoke mass enthusiasm, contain within them the germs of tyranny; for animated conviction leads to fanaticism and fanaticism to intolerance and oppression. And so, new ideals, however specious their object, unless guarded and defined, may involve new tyrannies. It therefore becomes the task of independent men and women round the world who love freedom to resist doctrines which encroach on human liberty. This transcendental point has been magnificently and eloquently brought out by Harold Pinter, the famous British playwright, poet, actor, director and political activist who was awarded Nobel Prize for literature in 2005. In its citation, the Academy stated that “Harold Pinter is generally regarded as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century.” As his doctors would not permit him to go to Stockholm to receive the coveted prize, his Nobel Prize acceptance speech was relayed by video under the title Art, Truth and Politics on 7 December 005.

        Harold Pinter is best known for his plays The Birthday Party (1957), The caretaker (1959), The Homecoming (1964) and Betrayal (1978) and for his screenplay adaptations of novels by others, such as The Servant (1963) and The French Lieutenant's Woman (1980).

        Pinter was born in Hackney in London in 1930 to working class, native English-Jewish parents of Eastern-European ancestry. Three of Pinter's grandparents were from Poland and one from Odessa, making them Ashkenazic rather than Sephardic Jews. Pinter was educated at Hackney Downs Grammar School. When he was 10 years old, he was exposed to the horrors of war. His family had to evacuate from London to Cornwall and Reading in 1940-41 after The Nazi Blitz which had a profound influence on him. He has recorded how he was facing 'the life-and-death intensity of daily experience.' He frequently wrote and published poetry as a teenager (and has continued to do so throughout his career). He played Romeo and Macbeth in 1947 and 1948, while still a student at Hackney Downs Grammar School in productions directed by his English tutor, mentor, and friend Joseph Brearley (13-14).

        Pinter is the author of twenty-nine plays, fifteen dramatic sketches, and over twenty screenplays and filmscripts for cinema and television and co-author of two works for stage and radio. Along with the 1967 Tony Award for Best Play for The Home Coming and several other American awards and award nominations, he and his plays have received many awards in the UK and elsewhere throughout the world. In a review published in 1958, borrowing from the subtitle of A Lunatic View, a play by David Campton, theater critic Irving Wardle called Pinter's early plays 'Comedy of menace' a label that people have applied repeatedly to his work, at times pigeonholing and attempting to tame it through a 'Comedy of manners'. Pinter was greatly influenced by Samuel Beckett (1906 - 1989), the great Irish dramatist, novelist and poet.

        Pinter began to direct more frequently during the 1970s, becoming an associate director of the National Theatre in 1973, and he has directed almost fifty productions of his own and others' plays for stage, film, and television. After 1985, his plays became shorter and overtly political, serving as critiques of oppression, torture and other abuses of human rights. In an interview in 1985, called 'A Play and Its Politics,' with Nicholas Hern, published in the Grove Press edition of One for the Road, Pinter declared that whereas his earlier plays had presented only 'metaphors' about power and powerlessness, the later ones presented the 'realities' of power and its abuse. Merging the personal and the political once again, Pinter wrote the poems 'Death' (1997) (which he read in his 2005 Nobel Lecture) and 'The Disappeared' (1998).

        In July and August of 2001, a Harold Pinter Festival celebrating his work was held at Lincoln Centre in New York, in which he participated in as both a director and an actor. After 2001, Pinter became increasingly politically 'engaged' as 'citizen Pinter,' Pinter has continued to write and present politically-charged poetry, dramatic works, essays and speeches. In 2005, in a public interview broadcast over the BBC radio, he said that he would dedicate himself to his political activism and writing of poetry. He said, 'I'm using a lot of energy more specifically about political states of affairs, which I think are very, very worrying as things stand.'

        As a bold and fearless political activist, Pinter has made a name for himself in the world of non-conformist politics. He was an early member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the United Kingdom.He has been active in International PEN, serving as a vice-President along with American playwright Arthur Miller.

        He strongly opposed the 1991 Gulf War, the 1999 NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War, the 2001 United States war in Afghanistan, and the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. He has been very active in the current anti-war movement in the United Kingdom, speaking at rallies held by the Stop the War Coalition. He has called the President of the United States, George W. Bush, a 'mass murderer' and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Tony Blair, both 'mass-murdering' and a 'deluded idiot'; he alleges that they, along with past US officials, are 'war criminals.'

        Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize acceptance Speech in December 2005 will rank among the greatest orations in World History. He spoke like Socrates; he spoke like Plato; he spoke like Aristotle; he spoke like William Tell; he spoke like Thomas More; he spoke like Winston Churchill. Even as Churchill exposed the horrors of Nazi Germany, Harold Pinter has exposed the brutalities of Bush and the bestialities of Blair. Let me quote his electric words: 'Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that 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'.

        'As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true. The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.'

        'Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified'.

        'But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now'.

        'The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.'

        'Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. 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.'