Pinter to world: “Omidyar? Bezos? Gates, Page, Brin, Jobs? Murderers on jet skis.”

February 25th, 2010

Nobel Prize

Laureate Harold Pinter returns

today from beyond the grave to offer a master class

to Pam and Pierre Omidyar, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Nathan Myrhvold,

Page, Brin, Ballmer, Whitman, Jobs, Ellison, et. al. ad. naus.

about what a citizen of integrity is and why

they are perhaps a lot of  murdering

toffs on jet skis.

Pinter’s Nobel

was awarded as much
for his political activism
as his work in literature. In his last

talk with Charlie Rose, he offers an inescapably
elegant and rigorous explanation of our obligations
as citizens and human beings. He is speaking

primarily of war here, but substitute

“Haiti” for “Iraq” and the class

continues without a beat.

What difference a savage

death by omission

or commission?

_____________

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.

Bombs
not only kill people,
the destructive power of these
weapons is quite enormous. What it does
to peoples’ minds, to their sensibilities,
quite apart from what it does
to their bodies, is
never-ending.

This
is the great
abyss between
what our politicians
say and what actually
happens. I don’t think that
death is recognized by the leaders
of our free world. The word “death”
doesn’t apply. There’s no body count in
Iraq. Nobody knows how many people have
been killed. Even the American soldiers who have
been killed have been kept under wraps. As for the
mutilated, Americans I’m talking about for the
moment, they are mutilated for life — again,
countless thousands of people — not
referred to, ashamed, and they
cannot recognize the reality
of what war is, what
bombs are, what
missiles do.

How
many people
do you have to kill
before you qualify to be
described as a mass murderer and a
war criminal? 100,000? More than enough,
I would have thought. Therefore, it is
just and fair that Bush and Blair
be arraigned before the
International
Court of
Justice.

There
are two points:
one is the invasion of Iraq,
and the other is this general war
against terror. Neither can
ever be won.

They
will always
wage war. A country
like the United States is on
a permanent military footing. It is
the biggest, most powerful military force
the world has ever known. And it’s very very good
for business, for the armaments manufacturers
for example, this military industrial
complex, as Eisenhower himself
said many years
ago.

There is
something
in the core of the
United States presently that
leads to more than Iraq. It leads to
Guantanamo Bay. It leads to CIA detention
centers all over the world, unknown –
actually not even unknown, but
hardly even referred to. Not
acknowledged.

There’s
something called
the Military Commissions Act
of 2006 which technically means that
torture is legalized. The Constitution and the
Bill of Rights and human rights and
due process have been
betrayed.

I’m not
anti-American.
I’m anti-Bush, Cheney,
Rumsfeld, Blair, and all that lot.
I believe they should be brought up
before the International Court of Justice
and charged with mass murder. How many
people do you have to kill before you can be described
as a mass murderer? The United States and the United
Kingdom were responsible for the deaths of at least
100,000 people in Iraq before the insurgency
actually began. Now that whole thing has
spiraled and they’re still responsible
for the deaths of further
hundreds of thousands
of people.

_______________

I think it’s

not a a stretch to lay the

suffering and deaths of hundreds

of thousands at the spiffy gunwales of your

jet skis, billionaires.  Why don’t you strap a Haitian

child who died of diarrhea a few weeks ago into one of those buttery

seats on the G550, carry her around for a while as a reminder of this: For

years now privately, and for weeks here lately under the bright eyes of the internet,

I’ve been explaining to you an idea called EarthNationLive for creating a human

family with the internet you got so mad rich off of.  And I’ve been plastering

you with proofs about how that family could get medical aid, food and

water, and life-saving help to people suffering after disasters

within hours rather than the weeks it takes for the

Red Cross, UN, and governments to do that.

And that it would pay for

itself a thousand times

over.

But you’re busy.

You read these little rants,

probably mostly to see how you look in

your photo, and then you go back to billionairing.

This morning, why not take a few minutes to scroll down

through the blog and review some other photos: the ones of people

hacking at one another with knifes to get a bottle of water, of setting each

other on fire over a can of beans, of having limbs torn off with hacksaws

because a simple antibiotic was stuck on a circling US Navy vessel

offshore?  And then think of who you are to them, the hundreds

of thousands of dead, the thousands of amputees, the

forever traumatized.  You are their Cheney, Pierre.

You are their Rumsfeld, Pam.  Put on the

Bush regalia, Bezos, and keep it on.

If you can

pierce the logic of that,

contact me. Maybe we’ll add a

counter to the blog to register the

months and years that pass

in silence.