On Harold Pinter
To remember Pinter’s “contributions to the arts” is a bit like hearing Hitler has died and responding “Ah, the man was very good to animals and loved his dog”. I think it is a breathtaking measure of modern Britain’s social decadence as it implies being an apologist for well documented mass murderous evil can be counter balanced by a talent for deft word construction.
Most of the obituaries say Pinter was a “tireless and outspoken political advocate” and leave it at that… well so was Joseph Goebbels and he too had a way with words.
…To think a man’s art somehow outweighs his support for a mass murdering ethno-fascist monster… To think something as trivial as a few plays gives such a person a free pass… that is moral decadence.
When Leni Riefenstahl died, many obits praised her ground breaking cinematography, but very few (as in none I ever read) glossed over her Nazi past and ‘unfortunate’ beliefs. Yet Pinter supported the people who gave us the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ but is described as “an impassioned political advocate”. Well as I said before, so was Joseph Goebbels, yet one rarely reads a description without a negative judgement attached.
…I am just doing my little bit to help make sure [Pinter] is not just remembered for “literary merits” but for the fact he wanted to free Slobodan Milosevic whilst people were still being found in the mass graves in the former Yugoslavia that his buddy was responsible for filling.
-Perry de Havilland, in the comments to this post
Filed under: Life
Thanks so much for posting that. Hadn’t paid attention to Pinter for years, probably since reading him in college, and I didn’t know that.
hmmm, just a slightly unbalanced obituary I think.
Sure Pinter was out to lunch on Milosevic. But he also fundamentally mis trusted any form of government. Comparing his overall contributions to Hitler seems unbalanced — for instance he long opposed US rightist policy and militarism in Central America and laterally in Iraq. The comparison to Riefenstahl is bogus — she compromised her artistic integrity to glorify the Nazis and so she could never be trusted as an artist again. Pinter to the best of my knowledge never wrote plays to glorify Milosevic and Serbian nationalism. I suspect his misdirected support here was more a statement of opposition against Bush/Clinton/Blair. Mind you — he did vote for Thatcher … another indication of his political confusion maybe. He also had serious personal failiings — w ith his first family.
Still think comparison to Hitler is unfair … he didnt set out to be a politician but rather, an artist and I think that is where the focus of the measure of his work should be. And for that there can be no doubt, he was a master of his craft and he brought a grat deal of new excitement, invention and authenticity to the stage.