Johann Hari

I’ve been e-mailed an article from the World Socialist Website that claims to be a comment on my recent Harold Pinter column. You can read it at http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/dec2005/pint-d29.shtml

I say it merely “claims to be” a comment, because the writer – somebody called Paul Bond – simply invents a straw man position that bears very little relation to what I actually wrote, and proceeds to attack it.

For example, Bond writes, “Hari explicitly attacked Pinter for his record of political opposition to the escalation of imperialist carnage in the Middle East and the Balkans. He criticised Pinter’s opposition to the imperialist show-trial of Slobodan Milosevic, for example, seeing it as impermissible to attack US and British imperialist intervention in the region.”

Here's three errors in just two sentences. Firstly, there is no mention of the Middle East – none – in my article on Pinter. Look at it at http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=741 and see if you can spot a single one.

Secondly, nowhere do I say or imply it is “impermissible” to attack the Kosovo war (never mind Middle East policy generally, as he says later in the article); anybody who knows anything about me will know I am a militant defender of free speech.

Third, my article provides evidence that the Milosevic trial is not a “show-trial” or anything like it. The director of Human Rights Watch – in the article Bond has apparently read – says, “This is not victors’ justice – this is justice for the victims of horrific crimes. Slobodan Milosvic was at the top of the chain of command of military and security forces that wrought mayhem in Kosovo in early 1999.” All the major human rights groups regard the trial as legitimate. Indeed, it is so far from being a show-trial that it looks like Milosevic will be acquitted on the most serious charge he faces, genocide. Bond knows this – but rather than engage with the argument, he chooses instead to ignore Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International etc and hurl Serb propaganda smears instead.

Bond refuses to tell his readers that Pinter is a member of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic, a campaigning group set up by racist Serb ultra-nationalists who want Milosevic to be freed on the grounds that he was “a pillar of peace in the region”. Since that was the biggest slice of my criticism of Pinter, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Bond is trying to mislead his readers. (Revealingly, he doesn’t put a link to my article – if his readers followed it, they’d see he was arguing against a fake position).

He then tries to debunk what I said about Pinter’s plays, again by inventing a position and ascribing it to me: “Hari’s intention becomes clear when he compares Pinter to Beckett. Beckett’s work is underpinned by “an elaborate existentialist philosophy,” whereas with Pinter, according to Hari, “if you turn on the light and switch off the atmospherics, you find...nothing, except a few commonplace insights.”
To supposedly illustrate this, he points to what Pinter has called “the most important line I’ve ever written.”

“In The Birthday Party, when Stan is being taken away, Petey cries out, “Stan, don’t let them tell you what to do.” Pinter has said that he has lived that line “all my damn life. Never more than now.””

“For Hari, this is “depressingly revealing”; the line is an “unobjectionable platitude” and Pinter’s point is “banal.” This comes from a man who believes it impermissible to denounce the British and US governments for their actions in the Balkans and Iraq. For a man who makes a living from parroting precisely the sort of propaganda Pinter has resisted to describe this comment as banal is merely impudent.”

When have I ever said it is “impermissible to denounce the British and US governments for their actions in the Balkans and Iraq?” Loads of the people I praise all the time - from George Monbiot to Peter Tatchell to Hugo Chavez - do exactly that. It's a demonstrable lie. And as for the idea I’m a propagandist for Bush and Blair… yeah, they love propagandists who accuse them of being “complicit in massive human rights abuses” and “destroying the very basis for human existence, our ecosystem” and more.

Bond then adds, “Hari is unable to reconcile Pinter’s early resistance to fascists in London with his subsequent critical independence.”

No, I’m unable to reconcile fighting against fascists in your teens with lining up – on an official committee! – with fascists and ethnic cleansers fifty years later to get their Fuhrer released.

Bond then gushes about Pinter, “That he has been able to maintain this critical independence throughout a 50-year career marks him as quite extraordinary.” Oh yeah? Tell that to the ethnic Albanians as they browse the website of the International Committee to Defend Milosevic. And before you say Milosevic's ethnic cleansing was the rest of the NATO bombing campaign, remember: most of the charges he is facing - based on Amnetsy reports - are from the mid-90s in Bosnia-Herzogovina, long before a single NATO bomb fell. Yet the closest Pinter has ever come to condemning this man is to say, “I am not saying he is not guilty of crimes…. But what is going on down there is a civil war. Actually.” He then proceeded to call the groups fighting on behalf of Milosevic’s victims “the real criminals” and joined a committee of Serbian fascists who were personal friends with the tyrant.

Bond later says, “For Hari, one of the greatest crimes committed by the Swedish Academy is to award the Nobel Prize to a man who wrote these lines about the Gulf War:
We blew the shit right back up their own ass
And out their fucking ears.
It works.
We blew the shit out of them,
They suffocated in their own shit!
We blew them into fucking shit.
They are eating it.
Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth.'
Hari sees nothing here beyond the scatology. He certainly cannot acknowledge Pinter’s searing anger and rage at the barbaric crimes committed by US and British imperialism, because that would involve having a critical attitude towards those crimes.”

Sigh. It’s a crap poem. I don’t know anybody who likes poetry who would deny it. Of course I can see Pinter is angry, just as he was filled with rage against the trade unions in the 1970s, leading him to vote for Margaret Thatcher (another fact Bond omits). Rage is politically neutral, and it certainly doesn’t confer artistic merit. If there is a case to be made against US and UK foreign policy – and regular readers will know that I am opposed to at least 70 percent of what these governments do – then it should be made well, not in doggerel.

Bond concludes: “Most of Pinter’s early contemporaries made their peace with the establishment long ago. As Hari has demonstrated, many younger hacks have never had a disagreement with it. Pinter’s resolute commitment to his art and its independence provides a valuable model for anyone serious about the development and defence of artistic expression.”

Oh, Paul, go and read what I say about global warming, or asylum seekers, or the arms trade, or prisons, or taxation policies, or the IMF. I have plenty of problems with “the establishment”. Can’t any mature person see that it is possible to believe it is simply wrong to join the Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic (or indeed to leave him in power while he commits ethnic cleansing and acts of genocide two days' drive from Auschwitz) and be on the left? Can’t you dispute what I actually said like an adult, rather than squabble with a phantasm of your own creation?

POSTSCRIPT: I am happy to post a link to any reply Paul Bond might write. I hope he will be decent enough to link to my original article and to this reply.