Harold Pinter and politics concerns the political views, civic engagement, and political activism of British playwright Harold Pinter (1930–2008), the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature.

Early political views In 1948–49, when he was 18, Pinter opposed the politics of the Cold War, leading to his decision to become a conscientious objector and to refuse to comply with National Service. But he was not a pacifist. He told Billington and others that, if he had been old enough at the time, he would have fought against the Nazis in World War II (Harold Pinter 21–24, 92, & 286). He seemed to express ambivalence about "politicians" in his 1966 Paris Review interview conducted by Lawrence M. Bensky. Yet, he had actually been an early member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the United Kingdom and also had supported the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (1959–1994), participating in British artists' refusal to permit professional productions of their work in South Africa, by signing the "Public Declaration of Playwrights Against Apartheid" in 1963 (Hadley) and in subsequent related campaigns (Mbeki; Reddy).Discussion of Pinter's "political awareness" pertaining to his political development as a playwright and as a citizen appears in Billington, Harold Pinter 234, 286–305 (Chap. 15: "Public Affairs"), 400–3, 412, 416–17, 423, & 433–41 (a sec. on Pinter's Nobel Lecture, "Art, Truth & Politics", rpt. therein); Merritt, Pinter in Play xi–xii, xiv, 171–209 (Chap. 8: "Cultural Politics," espec. "Pinter and Politics"), 275; and Grimes; in sources that they cite; and in sources published in 1990 and afterward listed in the Swedish Academy's "Bio-bibliography".

Later civic activities and political activism In the 1979 general election, Pinter voted for the Conservatives, led by Margaret Thatcher, "as a protest against a strike at the National Theatre that was dogging a production he was directing." He later said of this that it was "the most shameful act of my life". In his last twenty-five years, Pinter increasingly focused his essays, speeches, interviews, literary readings, and other public appearances directly on contemporary political issues. Pinter strongly opposed the 1991 Gulf War, the 1999 NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War, the United States' 2001 War in Afghanistan, and the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. His political statements have elicited some strong public criticism and even, at times, provoked ridicule and personal attacks.See, e.g., responses to Pinter's winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in contemporaneous articles by Hari, Hitchens, and Pryce-Jones; cf. Allen-Mills, N. Cohen, and Kamm. David Edgar (writing in the Guardian) defended Pinter against what he terms Pinter's "being berated by the belligerati" like Hari and others, who, unlike his supporters such as Edgar, Sir Tom Stoppard, David Hare, and Václav Havel, felt that Pinter did not "deserve" to win the Nobel Prize.See the text of Havel's and others' comments, excerpted and quoted in " 'A Colossal Figure' ", after his essay "Pinter: Torture and Misery in the Name of Freedom" , adapted from his 2005 acceptance speech for the Wilfred Owen Award for poetry, rpt. in Independent, Independent News & Media, 16 October 2005, Web, 24 June 2009.

In accepting an honorary degree at the University of Turin (27 November 2002), he stated: "I believe that [the United States] will [attack Iraq] not only to take control of Iraqi oil, but also because the American administration is now a bloodthirsty wild animal. Bombs are its only vocabulary." Distinguishing between "the American administration" and American citizens, he added the following qualification: "Many Americans, we know, are horrified by the posture of their government but seem to be helpless" (Various Voices 243). He was very active in the antiwar movement in the United Kingdom, speaking at rallies held by the Stop the War Coalition (StWC).An edited version of Pinter's Turin speech was published as an article with the explosive headline "The American administration is a bloodthirsty wild animal", featuring Pinter's words from the speech without the internal quotation marks, in the Telegraph on 11 December 2002. Other versions of this speech are reprinted online with more generic headlines as "Harold Pinter Gives Honorary Doctorate Speech at Turin University—27 November 2002," in The Artists Network of Refuse & Resist!, for example, and in print as "University of Turin Speech," in Various Voices (2005) 241–43.

In his various public speeches and other appearances, describing former President of the United States George W. Bush as a "mass murderer" and former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Tony Blair as both "mass-murdering" and a "deluded idiot", Pinter specified that, along with other past U.S. officials, under the Geneva Conventions, they are "war criminals".Rpt. in Pinter, War (n. pag.); qtd. in Chrisafis and Tilden. He compared the Bush administration with Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, in its striving to attain "world domination" through "Full spectrum dominance": "Nazi Germany wanted total domination of Europe and they nearly did it. The US wants total domination of the world and is about to consolidate that. … In a policy document, the US has used the term 'full-spectrum domination', that means control of land, sea, air and space, and that is exactly what's intended and what the US wants to fulfil. They are quite blatant about it."Qtd. in Chrisafis and Tilden. Referring to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, in a public reading presented in 2003, Pinter "blamed 'millions of totally deluded American people' for not staging a mass revolt" and "said that because of propaganda and control of the media, millions of Americans believed that every word Mr Bush said was 'accurate and moral'."

Official political statements

On his official website, Pinter published his remarks to the mass peace protest demonstration held in London on 15 February 2003: "The United States is a monster out of control. Unless we challenge it with absolute determination American barbarism will destroy the world. The country is run by a bunch of criminal lunatics, with Blair as their hired Christian thug. The planned attack on Iraq is an act of premeditated mass murder" ("Speech at Hyde Park"). Those remarks anticipated his observation in his 2005 Nobel Lecture, "Art, Truth and Politics" that whereas Bush, like "all American presidents" had hypnotically enlisted " 'the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.' "; nevertheless, "Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government's actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force—yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish" (21).

In accepting the Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry, on 18 March 2005, wondering "What would Wilfred Owen make of the invasion of Iraq? A bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the conception of international law?", Pinter concluded: "I believe Wilfred Owen would share our contempt, our revulsion, our nausea and our shame at both the language and the actions of the American and British governments" (Various Voices 247–48). The following year, in March 2006, upon accepting the Europe Theatre Prize, in Turin, Pinter exhorted the mostly European audience "to resist the power of the United States," stating, "I'd like to see Europe echo the example of Latin America in withstanding the economic and political intimidation of the United States. This is a serious responsibility for Europe and all of its citizens."Qtd. in Anderson and Billington, Harold Pinter 428.

Pinter was active in International PEN, serving as a vice president, along with American playwright Arthur Miller. In 1985, Pinter and Miller went to Turkey, on a mission co-sponsored by International PEN and a Helsinki Watch committee to investigate and protest against the torture of imprisoned writers. There he met victims of political oppression and their families. At an American embassy dinner in Ankara, held in Miller's honour, at which Pinter was also an invited guest, speaking on behalf of those imprisoned Turkish writers, Pinter confronted the ambassador with (in Pinter's words) "the reality ... of electric current on your genitals": Pinter's outspokenness apparently angered their host, who asked Pinter to leave, and, in solidarity, Miller left the embassy with him. Recounting this episode for a tribute to Miller on his 80th birthday, Pinter concluded: "Being thrown out of the US embassy in Ankara with Arthur Miller—a voluntary exile—was one of the proudest moments in my life" ("Arthur Miller's Socks," Various Voices 56–57). Pinter's experiences in Turkey and his knowledge of the Turkish suppression of the Kurdish language "inspired" his 1988 play Mountain Language.See Billington, Harold Pinter 309–10; and Gussow, Conversations with Pinter 67–68. He was also an active member of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, an organisation describing itself as one which "campaigns in the UK against the US blockade of Cuba and for the Cuban peoples' right to self-determination and sovereignty"."Our Aims" , official website, Cuba Solidarity Campaign, Firmly in the Castro camp, Pinter was also an active member of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign (CSC), a radical organization committed to portraying Cuba, against all evidence, as a democratic country. Proclaiming itself a champion of the "defense of Cuba and its peoples' right to self-determination and national sovereignty", the group campaigns for the repeal of the U.S. embargo. In this, CSC fully represents Pinter’s view. In 1996, for instance, Pinter sought to excuse the brutality of the Cuban government and its persecution of political dissidents as the ineluctable coefficient of an American-made "siege situation". Later, in March of 2005, Pinter joined the Marxist and Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchu in signing an appeal on behalf of the Castro regime. Among the document’s more remarkable evasions was the following endorsement of the Cuban police state: "There has not been a single case of disappearance, torture or extra judicial execution [in Cuba] since 1959".Web, 13 June 2009.

Although conceding that the former Serb leader was "ruthless and savage", in 2001 Pinter joined the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milošević (ICDSM),Fiachra Gibbons "Free Milosevic, says Pinter", The Guardian, 26 July 2001 which appealed for the former Serbian leader to be given a fair trial and for his freedom, signing a related "Artists' Appeal for Milošević" in 2004.ICDSM continued its presence on the Web even after Milošević's death in 2006, still featuring the slogan "Free Slobodan Milošević!!!" on its official website.<http://www.icdsm.com/> Pinter's support of the appeal and his signing the petition received some condemnation in the public media; e.g., see Hari.Signatures, ICDSM, Web, 13 June 2009. Mr. Pinter was the tenth person to sign this petition, whose content is accessible from the ICDSM website.

Political activism in his final years