RIP Harold Pinter  

British playwright (and stern critic of the oil war in Iraq) has passed away - the Rude Pundit has a nice memoriam for him - In Brief: Pinter in Memoriam. The post quoted below may be the only expletive free piece of prose the Pundit has ever typed, but if you don't mind a lot of swearing, he has some entertaining posts on the Gaza situation and some end of year haiku.

The Rude Pundit's favorite moment in a Harold Pinter play comes at the end of Act 1 in No Man's Land, a 1975 work. Without explaining the plot, it's still an almost unbearably chilling scene, the perfect example of the playwright's "menace" on stage. It's this simple: one character, who is a thuggish bodyguard, tells an old man, who is a stranger in the house where he sits, "Listen. You know what it's like when you're in a room with the light on and then suddenly the light goes out? I'll show you. It's like this..." And then he turns out the light. Since it's the end of the act, that means the lights go out in the theatre. So you are left, like the character, thinking about how it feels to be suddenly plunged into darkness.

The British Pinter, in his subtle, devastating works, illuminated a world where people were engaged in verbal (and sometimes physical) combat in order to cling to or assert power. Often, that power came from the outside to disrupt or even colonize a living space. In his most famous work, The Homecoming, a house of men ends up figuratively and literally on its knees to the woman who has come from America. In The Birthday Party, two men torture another man into a catatonic state before taking him away to an unknown fate. We do not know what the victim has done to bring the men to his boarding house.

For more on Pinter beyond the stage, read English PEN's note of mourning for the dead writer, who was also Vice-President of the organization and a tireless fighter for free speech rights around the world. And, of course, there's his 2005 Nobel Prize lecture, where he reached into America's pants and yanked off its balls. Finally, if you want to see the man in action as an actor, check out his performance in Samuel Beckett's Catastrophe, directed by David Mamet.

Harold Pinter knew that those with power will use that power. And while his life was devoted to fighting back, his work demonstrated again and again that ultimately, power corrupts and poisons even the most seemingly best-intentioned people. In the famous pauses he wrote into the dialogue of his plays, the silences were often filled with the internal choice of the characters to fight or submit. Unfortunately, the end result, as Pinter saw it, was usually the same.

Also deceased is the rather less virtuous Samuel Huntington, whose promotion of ethnic division and warfare to a legion of mindless neoconservatives has left the world a more dangerous (and damaged) place - Samuel Huntington, seer of 21st-century cultural conflicts. Good riddance.

The Clash of Civilizations was a hard-headed look at what political scientists had traditionally dismissed as a soft subject: culture. Originating as a 1993 article in the policy journal Foreign Affairs, and published three years later as a book, it argued that the key sources of post-Cold War conflicts would not be national or ideological but cultural. It was Huntington's riposte to those who thought the fall of communism meant the universal triumph of Western values. The West's arrogance about the universality of its own culture would blind it to the ascent of "challenger civilisations", particularly Islam and China.

Shot through with cautions about Western decline, the book counsels Europe and the US to unite: "The prudent course of the West is not to attempt to stop the shift in power, but to learn to navigate the shallows, to endure the miseries, moderate its ventures, and safeguard its culture." Exporting American pop culture and trainers was easy; exporting values of freedom and democracy far harder.

"Somewhere in the Middle East," Huntington wrote, "a half-dozen young men could well be dressed in jeans, drinking Coke, listening to rap, and between their bows to Mecca, putting together a bomb to blow up an American airliner."

After the attacks on the US of September 11, 2001, Huntington was hailed as a seer. The Clash of Civilizations was translated into 33 languages and seized on by Western and Muslim hawks, who read in it the historical inevitability of conflict between Islam and the West. When a pirated translation appeared in Iran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards ordered half the 1000-copy print run. Huntington's critics attacked it as a crude Manichean world view, penned by an old Cold Warrior in need of new enemies.