[casi] Pinter blasts 'Nazi America' and 'deluded idiot' Blair

["Dirk Adriaensens" <dirk.adriaensens@DELETETHISskynet.be>]

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Dear all,

Now here's Harold Pinter again. He's 72, and (once again) very clear in his opinions. No 
"half-hearted" statements. He's using language I understand.

Don't be offended. It wasn't me who wrote this article.

Greetings.

Dirk adriaensens.

www.irak.be

Pinter blasts 'Nazi America' and 'deluded idiot' Blair

Angelique Chrisafis and Imogen Tilden
Wednesday June 11, 2003
The Guardian

The playwright Harold Pinter last night likened George W Bush's administration to Adolf Hitler's 
Nazi Germany, saying the US was charging towards world domination while the American public and 
Britain's "mass-murdering" prime minister sat back and watched.

Pinter, 72, was at the National Theatre in London to read from War, a new collection of his 
anti-war poetry that had been published in the press in response to events in Iraq.

In conversation on stage with Michael Billington, the Guardian's theatre critic, Pinter said the US 
government was the most dangerous power that had ever existed.

The American detention centre in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where al-Qaida and Taliban suspects were 
being held, was a concentration camp.

The US population had to accept responsibility for allowing an unelected president to take power 
and the British were exhausted from protesting and being ignored by Tony Blair, a "deluded idiot" 
Pinter hoped would resign.

After a big operation for cancer, Pinter returned to public life last year to speak out against 
American belligerence. He called it a return from a "personal nightmare" to an "infinitely more 
pervasive public nightmare".

The playwright said: "The US is really beyond reason now. It is beyond our imagining to know what 
they are going to do next and what they are prepared to do. There is only one comparison: Nazi 
Germany.

"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."

Pinter blamed "millions of totally deluded American people" for not staging a mass revolt.

He said that because of propaganda and control of the media, millions of Americans believed that 
every word Mr Bush said was "accurate and moral".

The US population could not be let off scot-free for putting the country under the control of an 
"illegally elected president - in other words, a fake".

He asked: "What objections have there been in the US to Guantanamo Bay? At this very moment there 
are 700 people chained, padlocked, handcuffed, hooded and treated like animals. It is actually a 
concentration camp.

"I haven't heard anything about the US population saying: 'We can't do this, we are Americans.' 
Nobody gives a damn. And nor does Tony Blair." Pinter added: "Blair sees himself as a 
representative of moral rectitude. He is actually a mass murderer. But we forget that - we are as 
much victims of delusions as Americans are."

In a British society where people were increasingly encouraged not to use their brains, the only 
way to protest was by "thought, intelligence and solidarity".

· Michael Billington was last night voted theatre critic of the year in a survey of theatregoers 
for the website whatsonstage.com.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003



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