Niall Ferguson pretty much blows Harold Pinter, the recent Nobel Prize for Literature winner, and his wacko anti-American screed out of the water with this piece in The Australian. Here's a peek:
As for the allegation of a conspiracy to hush up American complicity in Cold War human rights violations, he really has to be kidding. You no longer need to rely on articles by Seymour Hersh to know about this stuff. There are easily accessible websites where you can download any number of declassified documents about all the dreaded dictatorships the CIA backed. On the basis of these and other sources, there have been at least five detailed monographs published in the past 10 years on Guatemala alone. Some cover-up.
I'd say that Pinter should stick more to literature and fiction than trying to venture into the world that survives on facts and facts along. Thankfully we have folks like Professor Ferguson defending the hinterland known as History from the barbarians at the outer wall.
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.
So stick to plays, Harold, and stop torturing history. Even if there was a Nobel prize for it, you wouldn't stand a chance. Because in my profession, unlike yours -- and unlike Condi's, too -- there really are "hard distinctions between what is true and what is false".
1 comment:
in fact, ferguson's critique of pinter's speech is seriously, even libelously flawed. please read what pinter actually says and then reconsider ferguson and his methods. below is the response I sent to the LA Times and the daily telegraph.
Monday, December 12, 2005
Re: Niall Ferguson - The play's his thing, not history 12/12/05
I've spent the past couple hours writing a response to an op-ed piece that appears in today's LA Times. I usually try to avoid responding to this sort of thing, but maybe that's a mistake, maybe I should express my own opinions more publically. I don't know, I suppose it doesn't really hurt, although there must be other things for me to do with my morning. anyway, the piece in question is Niall Ferguson's criticism of Harold Pinter's Nobel acceptance speech. you can read it here, just in case that link doesn't work, do a search for "Niall Ferguson, The play's his thing, not history". please read pinter's speech, or watch the video version, it's available at http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture.html. I'll paste my response below.
I am torn between exasperation and amusement after reading Niall Ferguson’s
self righteous counter-rant regarding Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance
speech. Professor Ferguson, amazingly misses the irony of his own
misrepresentation of Pinter’s points, as he zealously strives to refute
them.
He begins with an out of context quote, which is admittedly
confusing to a reader unfamiliar with the original. He then attributes to
Pinter a viewpoint that is simply inaccurate. Ferguson states,
“In the lofty realm of dramatic art, Pinter asserted, there can be
nothing so clear cut as truth. It is, however, a very different matter when it
comes to U.S. foreign policy. There, the distinction between true and false is
as clear as that between day and night. It's simple. Everything the United
States says is false, and everything its critics say is true.”
I’ve reread the speech repeatedly and cannot find anything to support the above
interpretation of Pinter’s remarks. What I do find Pinter saying, are the following:
“Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find
it but the search for it is compulsive.”
“… the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.”
“Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.”
Pinter does speak of the continuing pattern of duplicity he perceives in the actions of the United States government since the end of the Second World War. Nowhere however does he state, as Ferguson asserts that, “Everything the United States says is false, and everything its critics say is true.” Perhaps, to give the professor the benefit of the doubt, he meant this as a transparent exaggeration, but that is precisely the kind of misleading statement he seems to be criticizing Pinter for throughout the rest of his comment. The difference however being that Ferguson invented the exaggeration he attributes to Pinter.
Ferguson focuses throughout the remainder of his critique, of Pinter’s speech, on analyzing the accuracy of five of the Nobelist’s charges. He seems to allow that the US did, as Pinter says, play a role in Cold War era crimes and human rights violations, but he takes hearty exception to Pinter’s assertion that “this violence is comparable in scale with that perpetrated by communist regimes at the same time.” Well, I’ve now gone back over and over Pinter’s speech, and I just can’t find where in it, he makes that assertion. It seems to me that Ferguson must be either, a not very attentive reader, or somebody so bent on making a point that he is unhesitatingly willing to intentionally mislead his audience. The irony of this would be amusing were it not so discouraging, given Pinter’s plea for our “unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies.” Which plea is in fact, the seemingly overriding theme in Pinter’s speech.
Rather than arguing that the violent crimes of the United States are “comparable in scale with [those] perpetrated by communist regimes,” Pinter in fact, does something very different. He acknowledges the horrible nature of the actions of Cold War Communist Regimes, but points out that the United States was also guilty of atrocity, but not held significantly, or perhaps appropriately, accountable. Well, I don’t want to paraphrase, here are his words:
"Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.
"But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now."
By ignoring this essential theme of Pinter’s speech, I believe
Ferguson does a great disservice to his readers. By focusing on fabricated
and falsely attributed statements, Ferguson does a great disservice not only to
his readers, but also to Pinter.
Ferguson washes over Pinter’s comments on the circumstances that led up to the second US invasion of Iraq. Those circumstances are at the heart of Pinter’s speech. The Cold War crimes simply provide historical precedent and perspective. Pinter, in his speech, strives to convey the point that the United States has a history of perfidious subterfuge in its foreign policy, but he does this as a basis for the expression of his fear that, having gone unchecked in the past, the US actions, today and over the course of the past several years, have become more blatant, reckless and arrogant. Ok, I don’t want to put my own interpretive words in anybody’s mouth, here is exactly what he says,
“The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn't give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.”
This worries Pinter and I think is a point well worthy of consideration by us all. Unfortunately it is a point that is missed or neglected by Ferguson. I really want to give Ferguson the benefit of the doubt and interpret his critique as being the result of an advanced case of myopia brought about by academic seclusion. I want to believe that Ferguson is simply so immersed in his own interpretations of 20th century history that he didn’t attend to the more current themes in Pinter’s speech. Unfortunately, living in an era when one must always question the credibility of that which he reads and the integrity and motivation of the writer, of said reading material, I fear that perhaps Ferguson is striving to distract us from Pinter’s intent. And that, I believe, works counter to the dissemination of truth, and counter to the needs of society.
One of the wonderful things about the Nobel Prize is that the rewarding of the prize affords its recipient an opportunity to sound off about whatever topic seems of most concern. I think it’s significant to consider that Mr. Pinter chose the topic he did, and I think it’s worrisome that Professor Ferguson ignored that topic. Harold Pinter is not the only Nobel Laureate to receive the prize with a powerful and relevant speech, many of the Nobel Acceptance speeches are well worth reading and are available at http://nobelprize.org/index.html. Harold Pinter’s speech is available in English, Swedish, French, and German at http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture.html. There is also a video version accessible from that same web page.
I urgently encourage Professor Ferguson to reread Harold Pinter’s speech. I urgently encourage Professor Ferguson’s students to read Harold Pinter’s speech and Ferguson’s response to it, and then to question their instructor as to his interpretation. I urgently encourage everybody else, to read both Pinter’s and Ferguson’s words, and then to consider the slippery nature of Truth.
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