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Harold Pinter — Friend of the
Kurds, Citizen of the World
30.12.2008
By Amir Hassanpour
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December
30, 2008
It is gratifying to see the attention given to
Harold Pinter, prominent British playwright who
struggled for a better world and has just left us on
the brink of an economic and political disaster that
smacks of the 1930s. I do not intend to add to the
flood of obituaries coming from the media all over
the world. I offer, instead, reflections on how the
mainstream media present his politics. There is much
to reflect upon in the brilliant life of Pinter. I
will focus on his connection with the Kurds. A
Kurdish website has written: "Kurdistan Loses a
Friend."
Many obituaries mention Pinter's leftist politics
and cite his short 1988 play Mountain Language as
evidence of his "controversial" politics. This play
was inspired by his trip to Turkey, and his
opposition to the repression of authors,
journalists, and others, including the Kurdish
people, who were denied basic rights such as
speaking in their own language. Although the play
does not allude to any geographic location or
mention the Kurdish language,www.ekurd.net
it shows prison guards
banning the prisoners' use of their native language.
This was, in fact, happening in Turkey when Pinter
visited the country in 1985. In the wake of the
military coup of 1980, Kurdish political prisoners
were not allowed to talk to visiting family members
in their native tongue, and many visitors,
especially the elderly and those from rural areas,
were not familiar with the official state language,
i.e., Turkish. Pinter noted that the play was
inspired by the Kurdish experience but it was not
about that particular context. The suppression of
language rights was universal, he said. Actually,
when Pinter decided to finish the writing of
Mountain Language in 1988, Margaret Thatcher's
government had just banned the broadcasting of the
voice of Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein.
Kurdish intellectuals welcomed Mountain Language and
used it as a conduit for exposing the linguicidal
policies of Turkey. It is, thus, not difficult to
understand why mainstream media see the play as a
piece of leftist politics. This play is leftist in
part because many conservative and liberal
politicians in the West have defended Turkey's
anti-Kurdish politics while leftists have resisted
it. Much of the academe, including the majority of
linguists working on the Kurdish language, have not
raised their voice against the killing of the object
of their study.
The mainstream media persistently label Pinter's
politics as "controversial." Far from being an
innocent word, it carries, in this context, a
densely ideological load. When an idea is
interpreted as "controversial," it says more about
the politics of the interpreters than the targeted
idea. The purpose is to discredit the targeted idea
by suggesting that it is not acceptable to the
majority. But why should it be "controversial" to
oppose, as Pinter did, Turkey's policy of linguicide,
Israel's suppression of the Palestinian people, or
US and UK war crimes in Vietnam, Iraq, and
Afghanistan?
The obituaries emphasize, disapprovingly, that
Pinter radicalized rather than moderated as he
became older. They fail to mention, however, that
oppression, poverty, and war increased rather than
decreased in the last decades of his life and he
tried to reverse the trend. Pinter's Nobel Prize
reception speech showed the potential of a human
being to revolt against injustice in the midst of
timid intellectualism. From his wheelchair in the
hospital, he denounced the 2003 American and British
war against Iraq in transparent language: "We have
brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium,
innumerable acts of random murder, misery,
degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call
it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle
East'." He also noted that the US had supported
"every right-wing military dictatorship in the
world. . ." and its crimes "have been systematic,
constant, vicious, remorseless. . . ."
Pinter saw himself as "a citizen of the world." This
is one more reason why the obituaries identify his
politics as leftist. Conservatism and liberalism
celebrate the globalization of the capitalist market
but are not hospitable to the idea and practice of
global citizenship, even in the sense of equality of
all the inhabitants of the planet. Contrary to the
obituaries, Pinter was not alone and is by no means
the last member of the generation of intellectuals
opposed to war, poverty, and destruction. Even
during his lifetime,www.ekurd.net
there was a long list
from Jean-Paul Sartre to Noam Chomsky. Still, the
question remains: why the majority of Turkish
intellectuals do not follow their fellow-citizens
such as Ismail Besikci, Orhan Pamuk, or Yasar Kemal
who refuse to be bystanders and oppose the
suppression of the Kurdish people? Why Kurdish
nationalists applaud Mountain Language but are far
from appreciating Pinter's denunciation of the US
war on Iraq and the rest of the world? Why Pinter
opposed US-UK imperialist wars and Kurdish
nationalists continue to support it?
I do not find it difficult to make sense of these
contradictions. The struggles of the twentieth
century for building an alternative to the world
capitalist system failed, in spite of their initial
successes. Rather than implying the end of history,
these defeats call for a new era of history, new
struggles, and new efforts to build a new world. The
world has been, in the last three decades, in the
grip of nationalism and religion. Fascism and
neo-Nazism, which thrive under conditions of
economic crisis, are lurking in the corner. If, in
the 1930s, there were many social movements
including an international communist movement
struggling for a united front against fascism, today
there are only isolated, local, and spontaneous
protests. Not that there is no vision or potential
for internationalist politics any more. The people
of the world expressed their vision and will on
February 15, 2003 when millions poured into the
streets in opposition to the US-UK war on Iraq. Bush
and Blair had to take refuge into the seclusion of
the Azores islands in order to declare their war.
We have seen unceasing wars since the end of the
Cold War. Today, in addition to states as major
sources of organized violence, fundamentalist ethnic
and religious groups, both non-state and
state-sponsored, launch local, regional, and
international wars. Imperialism and fundamentalism
are devastating the lives of people throughout the
world. Having lived in the academic environment of
three continents since the 1960s, I am deeply
disturbed by the theoretical climate prevalent in
academia in the last two decades. The
poststructuralist frame of mind, which equates
universalism with totalitarianism, plays into the
hands of patriarchal,www.ekurd.net
tribal, religious,
ethnic, and nationalist particularisms. Cultural
relativism, a venue of struggle against eugenics and
fascism in the first half of the twentieth century,
turned, by the end of the century, into a weapon
against universal rights and internationalism.
Pinter was not persuaded by this trend of politics.
His 2005 Nobel Prize reception speech acted like the
Bertrand Russell tribunals of the 1960s, which tried
the US for committing war crimes and genocide in
Vietnam. Today, annual military spending is over a
trillion dollars, and old and new military blocs --
NATO, Russia, China, and India -- are taking shape,
threatening wars far more devastating than the two
world wars. A reversal of the tragic situation we
live in may be conceivable if Pinter's politics
turns mainstream and when conservative/liberal
politics becomes controversial in the eyes of the
majority of citizens.
Amir Hassanpour is Associate Professor at the
Department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations,
University of Toronto, where he teaches courses on
nationalism in the Middle East, mass media, social
movements and theory and method in Middle Eastern
studies. He studied literature and linguistics at
University of Tehran, and communications at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has
taught media studies at the University of Windsor
and Concordia University. He is author of
Nationalism and Language in Kurdistan, 1918-1985
(San Francisco, 1992), and has contributed articles
to academic journals and Encyclopedia of Television,
Encyclopaedia Iranica, Encyclopedia of Modern Asia,
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians,
Encyclopedia of Modern Middle East, Encyclopedia of
Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, Encyclopedia
of Women and Islamic Cultures, and Encyclopedia of
Diasporas.
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