Their Highbrow Hatred of Us - James Traub, NY Times Magazine [View All]

[Coastie for Truth]

When the British playwright Harold Pinter was interviewed after learning earlier this month that he won the Nobel Prize for literature, he said that he might well use his acceptance speech in December to "address the state of the world." This could prove to be quite a revelation for Pinter's American admirers, who tend to know much less about his politics than Europeans do. Still, they need only go to Pinter's own Web site to learn that the author of "The Birthday Party" and "The Homecoming" views the United States as a moral monster bent on world domination.

Pinter's consuming anti-Americanism may have had little or nothing to do with the judges' decision to award him the prize. Unlike Dario Fo, the 1997 recipient notorious for his denunciations of the U.S., Pinter has written works that will remain long after his polemics are forgotten. Even some conservatives have applauded the selection. But whatever the intention, the Swedes have given Pinter the most prestigious of platforms from which to broadcast his worldview - a view that has become common currency, albeit in somewhat less toxic form, in the highest reaches of European culture.

Pinter's politics are so extreme that they're almost impossible to parody. "Mr. Bush and his gang," he said in a speech as the war in Iraq approached, "are determined, quite simply, to control the world and the world's resources. And they don't give a damn how many people they murder on the way." Pinter sees the current president as only the most recent exponent of the American hegemonic impulse. The playwright was just as outraged by NATO's 1999 air war in Kosovo. Though the bombing was essentially a last resort in the face of Slobodan Milosevic's savage campaign of ethnic cleansing, Pinter described it as "a criminal act" - the U.N. Security Council hadn't approved - designed to consolidate "American domination of Europe." He complained, in fact, of "the demonization and the hysteria" that accompanied the NATO campaign against Milosevic and the Serbs.

These views are hardly unfamiliar in the United States; you can hear them on any major university campus. Among public intellectuals or literary figures, however, it is hard to think of anyone save Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal who would not choke on Pinter's bile. But the situation is very different throughout Europe, where the anti-American left is far more intellectually respectable. In the Anglophone world of letters, John le Carré holds opinions similar to Pinter's, as do the essayist Tariq Ali and the novelist Arundhati Roy. These last two publicly root for the Iraqi "resistance" against the infernal machinery of American empire. Roy has conceded that despots like Saddam Hussein "are a menace to their own people" but concludes that there isn't much that can be done about it save "strengthening the hand of civil society" - a comment apparently not intended as a joke.

Long and edited for brevity -- read more