Pinter’s Exposure Of
US State TerrorismBy Gideon Polya
19 December, 2005
Countercurrents.orgThe 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to the great British playwright Harold Pinter (The Caretaker, The Homecoming, Old Times, No Man’s Land and Betrayal). In his video-taped Nobel Prize acceptance speech on 8 December 2005 (he did not attend in person due to poor health), Harold Pinter excoriated George Bush and Tony Blair, accusing them of war crimes in Iraq. After detailing the horrendous cost of violent US interventions in Central and South America, Harold Pinter described the invasion of Iraq as “an act of blatant state terrorism” and called for the arraignment of Bush and Blair before the International Criminal Court, declaring: “How many people do you have to kill before you qualify as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought” (see: http://www.countercurrents.org/arts-pinter081205.htm).
Others have come to the same conclusion. Thus a World Tribunal on Iraq, headed as spokesperson by brilliant writer Arundhati Roy, charged the US-led Coalition with war crimes over Iraq (see: http://www.worldtribunal.org/main/?b=91). In October 2004 I wrote to the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court charging the Australian Government and its Coalition allies with war crimes over the illegal invasion of Iraq and the horrendous post-invasion mass mortality (see: http://www.newscentralasia.com/
modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1019).Niall Ferguson, Professor of History at Harvard University, has attacked Harold Pinter over his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Professor Ferguson does not deny mass mortality associated with US involvements in Central and South America but disputes US responsibility for the post-coup crimes of US-supported military dictatorships. Further, Professor Ferguson disputes Harold Pinter’s assessment that while horrendous Soviet crimes against humanity are well known to everyone, US crimes are generally unrecognized. Ferguson cites immense communist crimes, namely post-war Stalin purges (5 million), Mao Zedong regime deaths according to Jung Chang and Jon Halliday (up to 70 million), North Korean deaths from state violence or famine (about 1.6 million) and victims of the Khmer Rouge in US-devastated Cambodia (1.5-2.0 million).
Professor Ferguson has summarized the core of his argument as follows: “Nobody pretends that the US came through the Cold War with clean hands. But to pretend that its crimes were equivalent to those of its communist opponents -- and that they have been wilfully hushed up -- is fatally to blur the distinction between truth and falsehood. That may be permissible on stage. I am afraid it is quite routine in diplomacy. But it is unacceptable in serious historical discussion” (see: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common
/story_page/0,5744,17533119%255E5001986,00.html).However Harold Pinter’s analysis is correct.
Professor Ferguson’s arguments are NOT sustained by the quantitative evidence. As argued briefly below, Harold Pinter is CORRECT in the thrust of his assessment – if anything, he has UNDERSTATED the mortality associated with what he describes as US “state terrorism”.
A senior biological scientist, I have just completed a lengthy and very detailed analysis of global avoidable mortality (excess mortality) over the last 55 years. Avoidable mortality is defined as the difference between the ACTUAL deaths in a country and the deaths EXPECTED for a peaceful, decently run country with the same demographics. Avoidable mortality thus encompasses both VIOLENT deaths (e.g. from bombs and bullets) and NON-VIOLENT deaths (e.g. from deprivation- and malnourishment-related disease). Using UN Population Division demographic data (see: http://globalavoidablemortality.blogspot.com/) it was possible to estimate the post-1950 avoidable mortality for every country in the world. The results are horrendous.
The post-1950 avoidable mortality has totaled 1.3 billion for the world, 1.2 billion for the non-European world and 0.6 billion for the Muslim world – a Muslim Holocaust 100 times greater than the World War 2 Jewish Holocaust (6 million victims) or the contemporaneous (but “forgotten”) man-made Bengal Famine in British-ruled India (4 million victims) that has been substantially deleted from British history and from general public perception. These horrendous figures are consonant with independent estimates of the post-1950 under-5 infant mortality in the world (0.88 million), the non-European world (0.85 billion) and in the Muslim world (about 0.4 billion).First World countries (mainly the US, the UK, France, Portugal, Belgium, the Netherlands and Russia) have had a major complicity in the post-1950 global avoidable mortality holocaust, variously through involvements such as explicit colonial occupation, neo-colonial control, malignant interference, corrupt client or successor regimes, militarization, debt, economic exclusion, economic constraint, war and civil war. The effects of occupation do not cease after the last foreign troops have left. Accordingly, one can estimate the relative mortality impacts of complicit First World colonial powers from the “total post-1950 avoidable mortality” in non-Axis countries militarily occupied for some period of the post-war era by these powers, namely by the UK (727 million), France (142 million), the US (82 million), the Netherlands (72 million), Russia (37 million), Belgium (36 million) and Portugal (23 million).
Of course, the above figures do not take into account US hegemony without actual physical occupation in a swathe of countries in Central and South America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. A more exacting measure of “direct responsibility” is seen from the “avoidable mortality” associated with periods of actual violent occupation e.g. the Russian war in Afghanistan (1979-1989, 2.6 million) and US wars in Korea (1950-1953, 0.8 million), Indo-China (1957-1975, 13.1 million), Iraq (1990-present, 2.3 million) and Afghanistan (2001-present, 1.6 million).
Although 30 million may have died due to the Great Leap Forward, China under communism recovered remarkably after the war against the invading Japanese and the post-war civil war. Contrary to the pejorative implications of Professor Ferguson, the “post-1950 avoidable mortality”/2005 population ratio was 155.7 million/1,322.3 million (11.8%) for communist China as compared to an appalling 351.9 million/1,096.9 million (32.1%) for democratic India. Further, communist Cuba has remarkably good under-5 infant mortality outcomes that are much better than those of all “free” Latin American and Caribbean countries except for French Guiana. It can accordingly be estimated that US hegemony has robbed some 36 million under-5 year old Latin American infants of the “right to life”.Professor Ferguson is WRONG in contradicting Harold Pinter’s CORRECT assertion of the deliberate hushing up of US crimes. The above estimates of “avoidable mortality” will in general NOT be found in mainstream English-language media – nor will corresponding estimates of “under-5 infant mortality”. The NON-REPORTAGE by mainstream media of huge avoidable mortality associated with the occupation of the Palestinian territories, Iraq and Afghanistan amounts to egregious lying by omission and holocaust denial. Nevertheless such data is available in Alternative Media (e.g. see: http://members.optusnet.com.au/~gpolya/links.html), from the UN and UNICEF (see: http://globalavoidablemortality.blogspot.com/ and http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/index.html) and can be readily found by simple Google Searching for keys terms such as “avoidable mortality”, “excess mortality”, “under-5 infant mortality”, “passive genocide”, “US state terrorism” and “UK-US state terrorism”.
As a responsible citizen committed to peace and humanity, I recently reported the following key mortality statistics to an Australian Senate Committee investigating legislative responses to overseas terrorist atrocities (see submission #112: http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/
legcon_ctte/terrorism/index.htm): the post-invasion avoidable mortality (excess mortality) in the Occupied Palestinian, Iraqi and Afghan Territories now totals about 0.3, 0.5 and 1.6 million, respectively, while the corresponding under-5 infant mortality now totals 0.2, 0.3 and 1.4 million, respectively. Most of these deaths were non-violent – thus Iraq Body Count (see: http://www.iraqbodycount.org/) currently estimates that 27,000-31,000 Iraqis have been killed violently post-invasion (out of 0.5 million post-invasion avoidable deaths).
Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter is dead right about the war criminal culpability of the US-led Coalition. Thus the Geneva Conventions (1949) demand that the occupiers of a country do everything in their power to preserve the health and life of subject civilians (see Articles 55 and 56: http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/92.htm). However, according to UNICEF (12 December 2005; see: http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/index.html), in 2004 the under-5 infant mortality was 122,000 in Occupied Iraq, 359,000 in Occupied Afghanistan and 1,000 in the occupying country Australia (noting that in 2004 the populations of these countries were 28.1 million, 28.6 million and 19.9 million, respectively).Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity – we are obliged to inform others about horrendous mass mortality. Outstanding playwright Harold Pinter in his Nobel Prize acceptance address (8 December 2005; see http://www.countercurrents.org/arts-pinter081205.htm) stated our obligation to seek the truth in the following powerful terms: “ 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. If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us – the dignity of man.”
