Harold Pinter on “The Tapestry of Lies” and “Totalitarian Dungeons” which Surround Us | Global Research

Harold Pinter on “The Tapestry of Lies” and “Totalitarian Dungeons” which Surround Us | Global Research

 “There comes a time when silence is betrayal” – Martin Luther King, Jr

 British
playwright Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. For
me, his acceptance speech, delivered three years before he died in
2008, was an important glimpse into – and sort of a summary of — the
innumerable documentable US war crimes that were facilitated by the
multinational corporations, national security apparatus and military
leaders that shaped American foreign policy since World War II. True
patriots, if they really love their nations, must be honest about the
dishonorable, dark side of their nation that the rest of the world,
especially Pinter, sees so clearly.

In
re-reading Pinter’s powerful speech, and in light of the recent
celebration of Martin Luther King (and his courageous “Beyond Vietnam”
speech, delivered on April 4, 1967), I present an extended excerpt from
Pinter’s acceptance speech below. Pinter’s speech was videotaped and can
be viewed at: http://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=620.

Copies of the video of King’s speech (which was recorded by
television networks at the time) have apparently been destroyed as
subversive, but the audio recording exists and can be heard at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSIAHeQ01Wc.

King’s 1967 Beyond Vietnam speech, delivered almost five decades
before Pintner’s speech, accurately indicted American foreign policy as
powerfully as the 2005 speech that follows here: