Sometimes you look back into recent history and you ask: did all that really happen? Were half a million "communists" massacred in Indonesia in 1965 (the rivers clogged with corpses)?
No
Were 200,000 people killed in East Timor in 1975 by the Indonesian invaders?No, around 18000 civilians were killed. This is horrible but vastly less than those killed in places like Bosnia where he supported the genocide.
Have 300,000 people died in Central America since 1960?No. Given the population of central America that would be an absurdly low figure even it the region were like Switzerland.
Has the persecution of the Kurdish people in Turkey reached levels which approach genocide?No.
Are countless lraqi children dying every month for lack of food and medicine brought about by UN sanctions?
No they were dying because Saddam's regime whim he was an apologist for sold all the food and medicine to build palaces.
Did the military coups in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Chile result in levels of repression and depth of suffering comparable to Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and the Khmer Rouge?No. Millions of people died in Germany, Cambodia and Russia compared to a few thousand in the Latin American dictatorships. Disgusting as they were the Juntas were less murderous than a certain other Latin American regime that Pinter also supports. It is a form of genocide denial to place the crimes of Nazi Germany on a level with those of Pinochet's Chile.
Whilst the regimes that Pinter condemned were frequently murderous and despicable that was not why he condemned them as can be shown by his wholehearted enthusiasm for far more murderous regimes who happen to be anti-American. His only motivation was an intense xenophobic hatred of the United States.
No doubt he was a great playwright and those who knew him as a person have my sincere sympathies but he should not be portrayed as some kind of moral inspiration which he clearly was not.
3 comments:
May be so, Ross.
He waqs a fucking crap writer and playwright, I have no idea how on earth people were taken in. His plays were disfunctional rubbish, with people talking crap and not listening to each other. No wonder there were long pauses while the actors tried to recall who they were supposed to be and what the fuck they were supposed to be doing. Utter rubbish. I hope the cancer was fucking painful.
"whim"? "For whom", surely.
Apart from that, the article appears to be a long list of dumb questions, all of which you have answered correctly.
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