Harold Pinter

In his recent Nobel Lecture, Harold Pinter said:

"The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."

For some reason, Pinter leaves out Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, South Africa and Columbia.

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He also said:

"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."

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I wonder if any response can be drafted that doesn't use the words "Anti-American," "liberal," "left-wing," "terrorism," "terrorists," "protect Americans," or "protect America."

That restriction would seem to rule out the president since those phrases compose his entire vocabulary.

War Without End: Part 3: The Cost

These two graphs represent how much we spend on the military each year. This first graph represents how much is spent using dollars that are not equal, for example, the buying power of one dollar in 1960 is not equal to the buying power of one dollar in 1990: you could buy a lot more with one dollar in 1960 than you could in 1990.

The graph below presents the same information but uses dollars that are equal, that is, amounts for each year have been adjusted to reflect the greater buying power of dollars from the past. This adjustment was made using the Consumer Price Index (http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl). It is important to note that the graphs have the same year scale on the x-axis but that the dollar scale on the y-axis is different for each graph, that is, even though the graphs are the same physical size, the second graph represents about twice as much money.

Military spending across time has been pretty constant, even though this period includes the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the dissolution of the USSR, and our current war on terror.