Оригинални научни рад 821.111-2.09 Pinter H. 821.134.2(82)-2.09 Dorfman A.

Ivana S. Tašić1 University of Niš Faculty of Philosophy

ART AND ACTIVISM IN THE WORKS OF HAROLD PINTER AND ARIEL DORFMAN

The intention of this paper is to analyse the works of Harold Pinter, Ariel Dorfman and the artists they collaborated with, in order to see what kind of light they shed on the political and cultural events in Europe and Latin America from the 1970s onwards. The aim is to answer the question what made them decide to use their talent and their art not to entertain their audience but to engage it in their fight for truth, justice, and the right of all people to live and speak freely. The paper examines how they become artists and humanists American playwright Naomi Wallace celebrates as ’’dangerous citizens’’ by providing a more in-depth study of the ways they responded to the political events of their time, interacted with each other and conducted their explorations of reality through art. The focus is on the specific aspects of the political events that inspired them to become not only truth-loving artists, but also political activists. Keywords: Harold Pinter, Ariel Dorfman, Truth, Politics, exploration of reality through art

1. UNMASKING THE LIE: HOW THE PERSONAL BECAME POLITICAL IN THE LIVES OF HAROLD PINTER AND ARIEL DORFMAN In his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, Art, Truth and Politics, given in 2005, Harold Pinter sent a very powerful message to the world when he insisted on our right to know the real truth of our lives and our societies. On that occasion he discussed the disastrous impact of the American and British foreign policy on the state of affairs in Latin America, Iraq and Afghanistan. He voiced his outrage that under the veil of noble deeds and just causes the Government of the United States continued to commit brutal crimes in South America and other parts of the world, with complete disregard of the sanctity of human life, or respect for international law. “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” (Pinter 2005).   1 [email protected] Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture / Year XVII / Volume 59

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Pinter devoted himself to the analyses and criticism of the power relations that made this kind of behaviour possible. He came to believe that to restore human dignity, something almost completely lost from the world today, incessant quest for the truth was necessary, as well as the persistence and dedication to that task. In order to emphasise the role the artists can play in that struggle, he invited them to use their art to break the mirrors where only superficial, familiar and seemingly acceptable images of the world can be seen, because, he insisted, “it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us” (Ibid.). In the last period of his life, with political directness not easily recognizable in his early works, Pinter wrote plays that uncover the social and psychological mechanisms which maintain and justify the rapacious traditions and practices of the West. To fight against the numerous strategies of denial of (neo-colonial) crimes that are still being committed, and to reveal the truth hidden behind the thick tapestry of political lies he talked about in his Nobel lecture, Pinter supplemented the efforts he made to expose the truth through art, with activism. He joined other playwrights, such as Arthur Miller, and activists such as Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, in numerous protest actions, and participated in organizations such as the Bertrand Russel Tribunal, PEN International, and others, where he spoke on behalf of Cuba, Nicaragua, Chile, the Kurds, and of course, in 1999, in defence of Yugoslavia. Testimony of his activism is recorded in the texts, speeches and poems, published in Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics (2005). Ariel Dorfman, who is twelve years younger than Pinter, wrote his plays, poems and novels inspired by the tragedies he personally witnessed and experienced during his life in Argentina, Chile and the US, in the period when turbulent regime changes, supported by the American government, were carried out in order to suppress the popular and democratic movements for justice and social change emerging throughout Latin America. “My words were harsh, blunt,” explained Dorfman, “calling things by their names, lamenting the blood and the pain and accusing the military of murder. This was the way I had written, outside Chile, for the last 10 years—it was, after all, to be free in expressing myself with unequivocal clarity that I had left my country. I told myself that now, when the dictator had allowed me to rejoin my homeland, I should not let any changes creep into my style or my vocabulary. I had to prove, more to myself than to others, that I could not be silenced” (Dorfman 2003). That a relationship worth exploring between Harold Pinter and Ariel Dorfman exists, is signalled by the fact that Dorfman’s best known play, Death and the Maiden, is dedicated to Pinter. Dorfman acknowledged the important role Pinter’s art played in his life both before and after Pinter’s death. In 1968 he wrote his doctoral dissertation on Pinter, The Absurd Within Four walls: the Тheater of Harold Pinter, and three years later he published his own reasons for criticising the US in the book of cultural criticism How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic 160

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(1971). In 2013 he wrote an important text, Martin Luther King’s Words in a Surveillance World, in which he compared the assassination of Martin Luther king with the assassination of Salvador Allende, emphasising that both were killed because their dream (of a world based on racial and social justice for all) was completely unacceptable to the allegedly freest and most democratic country in the world, America. The similarities in Pinter’s and Dorfman’s views are many, although differences, especially in Dorfman’s views after Pinter’s death, also appear. Acting as the conscience of the New World Order, Pinter and Dorfman wrote and talked about the crimes modern history tries to cover up and forget. They used every opportunity to challenge the official lies with which distorted impressions of imperialism are created. Both remind us through their art that power and submission are still the most important imperial concerns of Empire. They criticise the US for its assumption that it has the divine right to do what it likes, using as an excuse the claims that it is bringing “freedom and democracy” to the rest of the world. The real truth behind these claims is superbly exposed by Pinter’s colleague, Australian journalist John Pilger, in such documentaries as War on Democracy (2007) and his earlier, award winning documentary, Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror (2003). The title of the second film is a deliberate reminder of Martin Luther King’s 1967 speech against the War in Vietnam, because of which King was assassinated in 1968. In the New Statesman2 survey of the 50 heroes of our time, Pilger came fourth. Harold Pinter wrote: “John Pilger unearths, with steely attention to facts, the filthy truth. I salute him.” In line with Pinter’s dedication to truth, on 14 August 2008, Pilger wrote an article for the New Statement titled “Don’t forget what happened to Yugoslavia”3. He repeated Pinter’s criticism of the US/NATO aggression against a sovereign European nation, documented by Pinter in the 1999 television program Counterblast4, and added: “The secrets of the crushing

2 The New Statesman is a British political and cultural magazine published weekly in London. It was created in 1913 with the aim of permeating the educated and influential classes with socialist ideas. Today it is also characterised by a leftist political orientation. 3 John Pilger: Don’t Forget What Happened in Yugoslavia, New Statesman, 14 August 2008. 4 Counterblast was aired at BBC2 on 4th May 1999, while the NATO bombs were still destroying Yugoslavia. Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture / Year XVII / Volume 59

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of Yugoslavia are emerging, telling us more about how the modern world is policed”5 6. In the book Dreams and Deconstructions: Alternative Theatre in Britain (1980), edited by Sandy Craig, several essays are relevant for the better understanding of Harold Pinter and Ariel Dorfman’s works. The first one is the chapter Unmasking the Lie, on political theatre, written by the editor Sandy Craig. It begins with the quotation from Kafka: “The lie is transformed into a world order”, the claim that Harold Pinter understood very well and dramatised in many of his plays. The first paragraph reads: “All theatre is political, in the sense that theatre is not autonomous and is forced continually to decide in whose service it acts. While most theatre workers in the commercial and bourgeois subsidized theatres do not recognise this choice, workers in political theatre consciously place themselves on the side of the working class. Political theatre is by necessity a theatre of socialist political change” (Craig: 1980).

The second chapter relevant for the better understanding of Pinter and Dorfman is chapter three, Personal is Political, by Michelene Wandor. Although Wandor writes about feminism in the theatre, in the case of Pinter and Dorfman personal became political as well: for Pinter, the personal experiences of growing up during the Second World War, for Dorfman, the personal experiences of the coup against the socialist government of Salvador Allende, which he wholeheartedly believed in and supported. Just as Dorfman wrote an essay comparing Martin Luther King and Salvador Allende as dreamers of the same dream, this paper explores the ways 5 Whereas it was not possible to find any comments on bombing of Yugoslavia by Pinter’s great admirer Ariel Dorfman, his fellow Latin American artist from Uruguay, Eduardo Galeano, wrote the text Confession of the Bombs, published in La Jornada, on 10 April 1999. He drew a parallel between the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, when NATO celebrated its 50th anniversary, the most expensive birthday party in history where each night of bombing cost $330 million, and the ethnic cleansing in Guatemala in the 1980s, when the indigenous people of Guatemala were the victims of the massacre conducted by America. In this text Eduardo Galeano commented on the words of President Clinton, who stated that the ’ethnic cleansing’ of Kosovo Albanians, the alleged reason for the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, was “the unacceptable humanitarian catastrophe”. Galeano reminded the readers that “the most unacceptable humanitarian catastrophe” actually happened in Guatemala in the 1980s, emphasising the hypocrisy of the US and President Clinton who, having apologised for the crimes in Guatemala in the 1980’s on behalf of his country, actually continued to pursue the devastating politics of the US and commit the most brutal acts of terrorism in the sovereign country of Yugoslavia in 1999. 6 John Pilger and Noam Chomsky appeared in a debate moderated by Harold Pinter in May 1994 at the Almeida Theatre in London. The discussion was entitled The New Cold War. Reflecting upon the Old-New Cold War, John Pilger said: “The original Cold War never ended. The Old Cold War was a war of attrition between the great nuclear powers, but it was a rhetorical stand-off, too. So often we were invited and manipulated to see it simply as a conflict between East and West, yet the Cold War always was, and still is, a war against the majority of humanity. It was a war fought with the blood of ’expendablе’ people over strategic position, resources and it was a war of control - it was an imperialist war. The Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States fought in the Third World was relatively insignificant compared with the war fought by the US against people trying to improve their position in the world. The Soviets never matched the Americans as imperialists; they were lousy imperialists outside their own borders.”

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in which Pinter and Dorfman put themselves in the service of the same dream of a just and peaceful world. On September 11, 1973 a military-led junta, supported by the US Government, and conducted by General Augusto Pinochet, took control of power in Chile. Allende’s government elected in 1970 was the fruit of the revolution led by Allende himself, “[the revolution] that was peaceful and democratic and did not believe that you must kill your adversaries in order to create the world of justice and freedom for all.” (Dorfman 2011: 112) From 1970 to 1973, Ariel Dorfman was the cultural advisor and devoted supporter of president Allende, witnessing both how people of Chile felt free, confident and optimistic about their future after the election, and how the dream of socialist, democratic and prosperous country was ultimately devastated. Describing this period, Ariel Dorfman said: “I had a moment in time. I lived for revolution, absolute hope, and maximum joy. Everybody was changing the world and changing themselves. There was nothing like it, to watch illiterate peasants feel that they can be the owners of the land, to watch workers feel that they can be the owners of the factories, to watch intellectuals like myself feel that they can be the owners of imagination and of mass media. And then, the dream was crashed”7.

In the aftermath of the coup tens of thousands of Chileans were arrested or ’disappeared’8 and in many cases murdered. For Ariel Dorfman it did not only mean losing the country or losing the revolution. He lost his friends, bonded close with him by the common experience of life in Allende’s Chile. What he also lost on that 9/11 1973 was the privilege of being active in the revolution when “everything was called into question: the way the state operates and the cities are built and children are educated, and bodies make love and art is expressed” (Dorfman 2011: 152). There was nothing quite like this feeling, and, all of a sudden, it was gone. This bitter experience changed Dorfman forever, making him aware of his duty to reveal the truth about the coup that took place in Chile and its consequences9.

7 An interview with Ariel Dorfman on his memoirs Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant exile. See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5b9a2vqYy1s 8 The first of the ’disappeared’ in Chile during the rule of General Pinochet was, as Ariel Dorfman wrote in his memoirs, Allende himself, whose body was secretly dumped in a grave by the sea. The denial of his tombstone, as well as of the tombstones of the many, was, in Dorfman’s words, the denial of memory. See: Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile, 2011, p. 228. 9 It is of crucial importance to say that Ariel Dorfman had to leave his country for the first time when he and his family moved from Argentina to New York in 1943, after the Argentinian coup led by the pro-Axes forces resulted in a government change in 1943. In 1954 Dorfman left the USA and moved to Chile due to the McCarthyte persecution of his communist father of Jewish origin Adolfo Dorfman, whose family, in order to avoid the persecution in Ukraine, had moved to Argentina at the beginning of the 20th century. Eventually, Ariel Dorfman’s third experience of losing the country happened in December 1973 when Chile was crushed due to the 1973 coup. Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture / Year XVII / Volume 59

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In one of his articles, Martin Luther: a Latin American Perspective10, Dorfman compares the assassination of Martin Luther King, who dreamed a dream of racial justice and equality for all, with the assassination of Allende, who dreamed of class justice and equality for all. His comparison reads: “Allende’s vision of social change, elaborated over decades of struggle and thought, was similar to King’s, even though they came from very different political and cultural origins. Allende, for instance, who was not at all religious, would have not agreed with King that physical force must be met with soul force, but rather with the force of social organizing. At a time when many in Latin America were dazzled by the armed struggle proposed by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, it was Allende’s singular accomplishment to imagine as inextricably connected the two quests of our era, the quest for more democracy and more civil freedoms, and the parallel quest for social justice and the economic empowerment of the dispossessed of this earth. And it was to be Allende’s fate to echo the fate of Martin Luther King; it was his choice to die three years later. Yes, on September 11, 1973, almost ten years to the day after King’s I have a dream speech in Washington, Allende chose to die defending his own dream, promising us, in his last speech11, that sooner rather than later – más temprano que tarde – a day would come when the free men and women of Chile would walk through las amplias alamedas, the great avenues full of trees, towards a better society” (Dorfman 2003).

Dorfman claimed that he became aware of Martin Luther Kings’ dream in 1968, after King had been killed, and it was then that he realised what was lost with King’s departure from this world. After seeing the furious and violent uprisings in the slums of Black America where King’s followers were avenging the death of their leader, Ariel Dorfman was forced to ask himself: “What was the best method to achieve a radical change? Could we picture a rebellion in the way that Martin Luther King had envisioned it, without drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred, without treating our adversaries as they had treated us? Or did the road into the palace of justice and the bright day of brotherhood inevitably lead through fields of violence? Was violence truly the unavoidable midwife of revolution?” (Dorfman 2004: 102).

10 This article was first published in the Irish Times (Dublin), August 20, 2003. Afterwards it was published in Dorfman’s collection of essays Other Septembers, Many Americas: Selected Provocations, 1980-2004. 11 Allende’s last speech was broadcast at 9:10 am on September 11, 1973 and these are the words Ariel Dorfman referred to: “Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Go forward knowing that, sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again where free men will walk to build a better society. Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers! These are my last words, and I am certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain, I am certain that, at the very least, it will be a moral lesson that will punish felony, cowardice, and treason.” See: https://www.marxists.org/archive/allende/1973/september/11.htm

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Art and Activism in the Works of Harold Pinter and Ariel Dorfman

As Stephen Gregory reminds us, in the essay Ariel Dorfman and Harold Pinter: Politics of the Periphery and Theatre of the Metropolis (1996), after the coup in Chile, Pinter became more openly engaged in political matters, especially of Latin America. He quotes Pinter’s reaction to the coup: “I just froze with horror, it absolutely knocked me sideways and my disgust was so profound at what I immediately understood to have happened, which was of course a military coup supported by the United State. […] I began following the course of other upheavals in the world, and the more I did, the more I felt the responsibility to do something about them” (Gregory 1996: 325-345).

In order to demonstrate farther the similarities in beliefs and attitudes that Harold Pinter and Ariel Dorfnman share, it is necessary to state several more facts about the link that exists between them. Dorfman’s acknowledgement of his debt to Harold Pinter appeared in the obituaries he wrote for The Washington Post (The World That Harold Pinter Unlocked, December 27, 2008) and the New Statesman (You want to free the world from oppression? January 8, 2009). In the article The World that Harold Pinter Unlocked Ariel Dorfman tells the story of how Harold Pinter had been his inspiration and a guide since his college years and how Pinter’s plays helped him realize that lies were the essence of the US doctrine, used eventually, in 1973, to crush his own country, Chile: “As I plunged into every one of his works in the years that followed, Pinter became irreplaceably, uniquely inspiring. He showed me how dramatic art can be lyrical without versifying, can be poetic merely by delving into the buried rhythms of everyday speech. But all of these lessons in dramatic craftsmanship pale next to what he taught me about human existence and about – dare I say the word? – politics” (Dorfman 2008).

Dorfman was fascinated, even haunted, he said, by Pinter’s knowledge, and by his capacity to create and understand his characters and tell his stories. Pinter’s aesthetics and Pinter’s political sense, universal in their power, helped Dorfman develop his own critical insights into the ways repressive systems operate and uphold the world order, and understand how the power of literature can actually contributed to the understanding of such systems: “From his very first play, I felt that Harold Pinter was unfolding a world that was deeply political. Not in the overt sense (as would happen later, beginning in the early ’80s, in several of his dramas) that his creatures were affected by who governed them, whether this or that man controlled the army or gave orders to the police… And yet, by trapping us inside the lives of those men and women, Pinter was revealing the many gradations and degradations of power with a starkness I had not noticed before in other authors who were supposedly dedicated to examining or denouncing contingent politics” (Ibid.). Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture / Year XVII / Volume 59

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In this text Dorfman reveals the details about his first encounter with Harold Pinter’s name and art through Pinter’s play The Dumb Waiter (1957). He saw it in Chile in the early 1960s, and it was then and there that something in his work changed forever. The play he saw was about two paid killers who wait for the order to kill a designated human being, without thinking and without any objections. Innocent people get killed or disappeared because the killers submissively obey the orders of their superiors. Faced with the countless number of tortured and killed people in Argentina, his native country from which as a child he experienced his first exile, Dorfman saw the significance of Pinter’s attempt to understand how obedient servants and servile supporters of inhumane systems are created, and how human beings morally capitulate and become ready to do evil. Although The Dumb Waiter was written by a British writer, the situation the play explored was becoming global. In his article The World That Harold Pinter Unlocked, Ariel Dorfman wrote: “What was extraordinary about that hour or so I sat through The Dumb Waiter in Spanish was how immediately recognizable that play by Pinter was, almost Latin American in its familiarity”. Inspired and encouraged by Harold Pinter’s art, Ariel Dorfman wrote Death and the Maiden. The initial literary connection between these two artists eventually turned into an unbreakable personal bond and long lasting friendship. It is important to mention that Ariel Dofman stared to write Death and the Maiden as late as the 1980s, when he was an exile from Chile and General Augusto Pinochet was still the dictator. It was not until Pinochet’s dictatorship was over, and Chile returned to “democracy” in 1990, that Dorfman “finally understood how the story had to be told”, and returned to his play. The finished version was published in 1992. Besides art, political activism is the common field of interest where Ariel Dorfman and Harold Pinter actually met. It was in London, in late November of 1990, at the campaign against censorship organised by The Institute of Contemporary Arts. 22 years earlier Dorfman had completed his doctoral dissertation on Pinter’s work, The Absurd within Four walls: The Theatre of Harold Pinter, published in Spanish as El absurdo entre cuatro paredes: el teatro de Harold Pinter in Santiago in 1968. Their meeting in London was the occasion when he could present this work to Pinter. He had found a copy of it in his library in Chile, when he returned after 17 years of political exile. In the dedication for Harold Pinter and his wife, Dorfman wrote: “This has waited 22 years and thousands of miles and lots of love and admiration from so near and so far, so I could bring this to you Harold and of course for you Antonia, from Chile that is now democratic and still threatened.”

Dorfman recalled this event in the article How Harold Pinter’s Kindness Saved My Play (2011), published in The Telegraph, where he explained how this exceptional person and artist affected not only his art, but also his career. Many things in his life changed when his own play Scars on the 166

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Moon, which eventually became Death and the Maiden, was chosen to be the main event of the 1990 campaign Censored Theatre, programme of readings of suppressed plays launched by Vaclav Havel. It is important to emphasise that at that time Harold Pinter and Vaclav Havel shared the same set of beliefs and seemed to fight for the same causes. In his 2011 text Dorfman does not mention the fact that in 1999 Havel and Pinter found themselves on the opposite sides, concerning the NATO aggression against Yugoslavia12. Quite naturally, Dorfman discovered Pinter’s characters on the streets of his Chile, “a country where those who suffered and those who inflicted the suffering had to live side by side” (Dorfman 2011:152). He could feel both the torturers and the tortured around him and that is what inspired him to write Death and the Maiden. In an article How Harold Pinter’s Kindness Saved My Play, published in the Telegraph on 12 October 2011, Dorfman explained not only how Harold Pinter influenced him as a writer, but also how his support, concerning the premier of Death and the Maiden, was of crucial importance for his subsequent artistic career: “It is not only a matter of Pinter’s influence on me as a writer, how the resonance of his own work echoes in the silences that surround and undermine the woman who has been raped and seeks revenge, the doctor whom she captures and accuses of being her torturer, the husband who must defend that doctor in order to save the wife he loves and his own ambitious career. Not only that Pinter’s plays inspired me as a young and fledgling author in Chile back in the Sixties, taught me so much about stagecraft and character, cruelty and subtlety and tenderness, to the point that my first book, in 1968, was an analysis of Harold’s work. Similar things could be said of many writers around the world. In the case of Death and the Maiden, however, Pinter provided the play with much more than literary inspiration and remote guidance” (Dorfman 2011).

What Dorfman is referring to is the fact that it was not until Pinter offered the world premier of The New World Order that Death and the Maiden got the consent to be staged in London for the first time. The play Death and the Maiden remained the unbreakable bond between Pinter and Dorfman and as an acknowledgment of that fact it was chosen to be the first play to be staged in the London Comedy Theatre, when it was renamed Harold Pinter Theatre, on September 7, 2011. This is the reason why Dorfman considers the story of this play, and the story of its coming into being, “a testimony to loyalty and friendship and generosity and love” (Ibid.). 12 Harold Pinter criticised the NATO politics and spoke against the bombing of Yugoslavia, while Havel supported it and allowed American military bases to be set on the soil of The Czech Republic, despite the fact that the Czech people protested and demanded a referendum. Havel claimed that such serious issue could not be decided by the people, but only by ’experts’. In her essay The 21st Century: Age of Consent or Concern? The Rise of Democratic Imperialism and ‘Fall’ of William Shakespeare) Ljiljana Bogoeva Sedlar gives a comment on Vaclav Havel’s transformation ‒ his support for all new American wars and interventions which Harold Pinter courageously opposed and criticised. Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture / Year XVII / Volume 59

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The circumstances in Chile, on and after September 11 1973, were depicted by John Pilger in the documentary “War on Democracy”13, and by Ken Loach in the short film about 9/11 1973, made to remind the world that 9/11 2001, was not the only September worth remembering. In Ken Loach’s film, one Chilean victim of the Pinochet coup of 9/11 1973 addresses the families of those who died in New York on 9/11 2001. He explains to them that they have in common not only the suffering of their loved ones, but the date of the disaster as well. In his letter he reminds his American co-sufferers that after Chile’s democratic elections in September 1970, besides having “milk for the children, land for the peasants and industry owned by the people”, the Chileans for the first time also had dignity. However, their democratic decisions were not perceived as relevant by the United States Government. As in many previous cases the US decided to resort to violence in order to protect their markets and their profits, which were their only interest. Ken Loach’s Chilean who in the film gives his testimony about the horrible tortures Chilean people had to endure during and after the coup, has the same story to tell as Dorfman. Dorfman saw the coup in Chile as an act of terrorism and the crime against humanity. Right after the coup Dorfman he had to leave Chile to save himself from being executed because he was the close collaborator and advisor of the president Salvador Allende, who was killed. Pablo Neruda, Chile’s Nobel Prize winner and Allende’s Minister of Culture who, unlike Dorfman, did not leave Chile, died several weeks after the coup (or, as some continue to claim, was killed). Pinter honoured Neruda in his Nobel lecture when he quoted his poem I’m Explaining a few Things as the best illustration of what the world is like because of the crimes committed by America in Neruda’s Chile, but also in many other parts of the world. Ariel Dorfman, Harold Pinter, John Pilger, Ken Loach and many others consider the events of 9/11 2011 as the payback for the American foreign policy. At the University of Turin, on the occasion of being awarded an honorary doctoral degree, Harold Pinter stated: “The atrocity in New York was predictable and inevitable. It was an act of retaliation against constant and systematic manifestations of state terrorism on the part of the United States over many years, in all parts of the world”. In the text The Last September 11, published in Los Angeles Times ten days after the attack on the World Trade Centre and The Pentagon, Ariel Dorfman wrote about two possible paths this incident could lead to: “A crisis of this magnitude can lead to renewal or destruction, it can be used for good or for evil, for peace or for war, for aggression or for reconciliation, for vengeance or for justice, for militarization of the society or for its humanization” (Dorfman 2004: 39-42). However, the United States chose to pursue the course which ultimately led to the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the escalation of violence throughout the 13 John Pilger, dir. The War on Democracy, Youngheart Entertainment, Granada Productions. 15 June 2007 (UK)

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world. About ’the bloodthirsty wild animal’, as Harold Pinter called the US administration in his Nobel lecture he had to say the following: “As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Qaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true. The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it” (Pinter 2005).

In his Nobel lecture Harold Pinter mentions only a small fraction of the political lies used in the second part of the 20 century and the first decade of the new millennium, which have caused devastation and suffering all over the world. Both he and Dorfman could have directed the attention of their art to many other topics, but they felt compelled to make the truth their priority. They understood not only the importance of the aesthetic and formal aspects of art, but also understood and emphasised the crucial role art can play in raising moral questions and diagnosing the moral state of the world. Their plays, although stylistically very different, serve the same purpose – that of uncovering and naming correctly the ethical failures which are bringing mankind to the brink of annihilation. Pinter was very direct in his Nobel speech when he sarcastically pointed out that the moral authority of the US resides in its fist14 and its bombs, and not in the American sense of justice or respect for international law. He asked: “What is moral authority? Where does it come from? How do you achieve it? Who bestows it upon you? How do you persuade others that you posses it? You don’t. You don’t have to bother. What you have is power, bombs and power. And that’s your moral authority… What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days ‒ conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead?” (Pinter 2005).

While the oppressors who claim to possess moral authority to intervene continue to create the new world order appropriate for themselves, the role of the artist as Pinter and Galeano understood is to ’unmask the lies’ on which the New World Order rests, which explains why the title of 14 In his Nobel lecture, Harold Pinter suggested a speech for President George Bush, where he also explained the essence of ’moral authority’ claimed by the allegedly omnipotent US: “I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don’t you forget it” (Pinter 2005). Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture / Year XVII / Volume 59

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this chapter is appropriate and relevant. By unmasking the lies hidden by appearances created by means of propaganda, hypocritical acts and the mendacious15 language of the politicians, the artists struggle to prove that another world the world of justice and love is possible. The Brazilian theatre maker, Augusto Boal, talked about this other world which is possible in his 2009 World Theatre Day message, where he said: “When we look beyond appearances, we see oppressors and oppressed people, in all societies, ethnic groups, genders, social classes and casts; we see an unfair and cruel world. We have to create another world because we know it is possible. But it is up to us to build this other world with our hands and by acting on the stage and in our own life” (Boal 2009).16

Pinter, Dorfman and other Latin American artists such as Boal and Galeano help the readers see the vision of the better world more clearly, by helping them perceive and understand more clearly the injustices hidden behind the world of surfaces. A good diagnostic example was given by Galeano in the text the Confession of the Bombs written to protest, like Pinter, the 1999 destruction of Yugoslavia. To unmask the hypocritical claims to moral superiority of the US, EU and NATO, Galeano informed his readers of the fact that very few people know: “A scandal recently surfaced in Great Britain. The most famous universities, the most pious relief organizations and the most important hospitals invest the pension funds of their employees in the weapons industry. Those responsible for education, charity and health care declared that they invest their money in the firms that make the highest profits, the businesses of the arms industry. A spokesperson of the University of Glasgow said very clearly:’We don’t make any moral decisions. Whether the investments are profitable interests us, not whether they are ethical’” (Galeano: 1999).

The nature of the moral environment which Galeano’s disclosure makes clear is the reason why Pinter and Dorfman used their art to uncover the truth, to question the alleged holders of moral authority, and to try to answer why conscience is the word that has almost disappeared from the world today.

15 Before Dorfman and Pinter, Tennessee Williams also dedicated himself to uncovering and rejecting lies, especially in Big Daddy’s famous speech in Cat on the Hot Tin Roof: “I could write a book on [mendacity] and still not cover the subject? Think of all the lies I got to put up with!–Pretenses! Ain’t that mendacity?” 16 http://artthreat.net/2009/05/augusto-boal-1931-2009/

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2. THE HOLOCAUST THEY WILL NOT SEE: HAROLD PINTER AND ARIEL DORFMAN’S CRITICISM OF THE IMPERIALIST IDEOLOGY In his 2010 article The Holocaust We Will Not See, George Monbiot reminded the readers of the greatest acts of genocide committed throughout the world from 1492 onwards. Having realised that the fate of the Native Americans is the story no one wants to hear, he emphasised that Europe was massively enriched by the genocides in the Americas, and that the American nations were actually founded on them. In this text Monbiot mentioned David Stannard’s 1992 book American Holocaust, which documents the massacres on the soil of the Americas that began with Columbus, and never actually ended. Like Harold Pinter, Monbiot understood that the Second World War German Holocaust was not the only genocide that had to be remembered, and that the greatest other genocides in history, such as the ones continually being committed by the US, the UK and the NATO, “scarcely ruffle our collective conscience” (Monbiot 2010): “Perhaps this is what would have happened had the Nazis won the Second World War: the Holocaust would have been denied, excused or minimised in the same way, even as it continued. The people of the nations responsible – Spain, Britain, the US and others – will tolerate no comparisons, but the final solutions pursued in the Americas were far more successful. Those who commissioned or endorsed them remain national or religious heroes. Those who seek to prompt our memories are ignored or condemned.” (Ibid.)

Pinter had strong interests and involvement in the political destinies of the countries of Latin America. The stages of his transformation from a writer-humanist into a writer-humanist-political activist are marked by his membership in numerous organizations, most importantly the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, but also Amnesty International, PEN-International in Britain, June 20 Group17, and many other associations which promote literature and defend freedom of expression all over the world. He supported the Nuclear Disarmament Campaign and the movements for liberation of Latin America; he supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and led the campaign against the blockade of Cuba. In addition, he was the member of the Bertrand Russell Tribunal whose second session, after Vietnam, was set up to investigate the situation in Latin America and the violations of the Human Rights in Brazil, Chile and Argentina. 17 In 1986 Harold Pinter organised the June 20 Group with his wife. It was a group of writers and leading intellectuals who participated in regular meetings in order to “question the appalling situation [they] found themselves in England, under Mrs. Thatcher’s regime.” Pinter’s conviction that this regime was destroying the institutions in England, that the manipulation of power was the essence of England and its politics, encouraged him to speak even more against the unjust and cynical acts that were committed. They were drawing attention to the “extraordinary blatant and corrupt use of power” in the electricity companies in England, for example. However, having worked in a rather hostile surrounding, the activity of the group was restricted as a result of the harsh censorship (Pinter 2005: 230). Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture / Year XVII / Volume 59

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What fascinated Pinter most about Latin America were the revolutionary movements and social reforms on its soil. In Michael Billington’s words, his politics was shaped by “a mixture of his questioning conscience, his network of friends and the immediate pressure of public events” (Billington 1997:496). Pinter believed that the revolutions and the democratic choices of Latin American people sharpened their political and cultural intelligence, and that the political socialist changes, as in Nicaragua in 1979 and Chile in 1971, brought spread of literacy and cultural development. He closely collaborated with Latin American artists before and after the Pinochet coup in Chile, the event that he understood and felt as the personal trauma: “I was appalled on the personal level by the fate of an Argentinean director who had done one or two of my plays. He came to see me in London around 1970 and said that he was going to Chile. I never heard from him again and I knew he ended up in the stadium for the ’disappeared’ in Santiago. So I suppose, my political conscience, which had always been around, was refined and distilled by experience” (Ibid.).

After the overthrow of Allende government, Pinter unambiguously informed the public about the CIA involvement in forcible political changes that brought down the legally elected democracies of Guatemala in 1951 and of Chile in 1973. In his 1987 article, The US Elephant Must Be Stopped, published in The Guardian, he wrote: “The tortured of Latin America have been tortured for ’freedom’, ’Christian principles’, ’the fight against Communism’. The initial CIA may have become an exhausted cliché, good for a laugh, but the dead are not laughing” (Pinter 2005: 185-89).

Dorfman’s criticism of the imperialism and neo-colonialism was first expressed in his influential book How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. The work was co-authored with Armand Matterat, and published in 1971 in the middle of the Chilean revolutionary process, during the presidency of Salvador Allende. As Dorfman explained in the 1975 preface to the first English edition of this work, How to Read Donald Duck was censored and burned at the time of Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, together with many other works that criticised the imposition of US imperialism: “They broke records, murdered singers18, destroyed radios and printing presses, imprisoned and executed journalists, so that nothing would be left to remind anybody of anything about the struggle for national liberation” (Dorfman 1991:21). 18 Victor Jara is a Chilean poet, singer and a threatre director who was arrested, tortured and ultimately killed after the 1973 Chilean coup due to his communist political beliefs and open support for Allende’s revolution in 1971. Adrian Mitchel, a British poet, playwright and novelist wrote a poem about him which was turned into a song by Arlo Guthrie. http://trevsongs.typepad.com/blog/2007/05/victor-jara-written-by-adrian-mitchell-arlo-guthrie.html

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In the book Dorfman focused on the positive political and economic revolutionary changes in Chile and the intentions of the US after the 1971 revolution. He wrote: “[…] the whole Chilean people were recovering the industries that during the twentieth century had been the means of enrichment for Mr. Rockefeller, Grace, Guggenheim and Morgan. Because this process was intolerable to the United States government and its multinational corporations, it had to be stopped. They organized a plan which at the time was suspected, and since has been confirmed by Mr. Kissinger, Ford and Colby to have been directed and financed by the United States intelligence services. Their objective, to overthrow the constitutional government of Chile” (Ibid.).

As usual, economic blockade and embargo were imposed and other measures taken to “conquer the minds” of the Chileans. Finally in 1973 the military coup took place, enforced by propaganda and the media: “Each day with expert US advice, in each newspaper, each weekly, each monthly magazine, each news dispatch, each movie and each comic book, their arsenal of psychological warfare was fortified. In the words of General Pinochet, the point was to “conquer the minds” while in the words of Donald Duck…the point was to “restore the king” (Ibid.).

In the preface to the 1975 English edition, in order to document the difference between the socialist conception of Alende’s Chile and that of the Pinochet regime, Dorfman writes about the revolutionary project carried out by of the State Publishing House Quimantu, (the name means The Sunshine of Knowledge in the native language of Chilean Indians). It managed to publish five million books in two and a half years, and it was a sign of, “a people on the march to cultural liberation- the process which also meant criticizing the mass cultural merchandise exported so profitably by the US to the Third World”19. That is how and why How to Read Donald Duck was created. As Dorfman’s biographer and critic Sophia A. McClennen points out, this work “dismantles the seemingly innocuous characters of Donald Duck and his pals, and demonstrates how they serve to colonize Latin America through a repeated litany of tales favoring capitalism, U.S. imperialism, and the infantilization of the reader” (McClennen 2010:175). Wishing to remind us of the influence of this work in Latin America, in the paper entitled Beyond Death and the Maiden - Ariel Dorfman’s Media Criticism and Journalism, McClennen wrote: “Dorfman and Mattelart’s groundbreaking analysis of the ways that Donald Duck comics circulated in Chile influenced a wide range of intellectuals globally and in Latin America…What sets the work of Dorfman apart from that of most of the critics originally associated with the cultural turn, and those 19 Sophia A. McClennen: Beyond Death and the Maiden - Ariel Dorfman’s Media Criticism and Journalism, Pennsylvania State University, University Park Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture / Year XVII / Volume 59

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that have continued in their wake, is his commitment to combining critique with creative work, his persistent faith in the emancipatory possibilities of engaged art, and his efforts to redefine the discursive boundaries that shape social communication.”

In 1971, when Dorfman published How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, another important Latin American book appeared, Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of the Continent20. Galeano’s book provides the readers with the detailed overview of the crimes, manipulations and exploitation the people of South America suffered throughout the centuries of white man’s rule. In the same way as Dorfman, Eduardo Galeano understood that the fate of Latin American writers is “linked to the need for profound social transformations. To awaken consciousness, to reveal identity – can literature claim a better function in these times… in these lands?” (Galeano 1007:13). The issues that both Dorfman and Galeano explored were also the subject of Aime Cesaire’s 1955 Discourse on Colonialism. Cesaire’s analyses of the dominant imperial ideologies spread throughout Africa were relevant for the region of Latin America as well, and continue to be relevant today, as they shed light on the reasons why the world is controlled by force and fear. Cesaire courageously spoke the truth about the colonial practices in Africa, claiming that colonization is “neither evangelization, nor a philanthropic enterprise, nor a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease, and tyranny, nor a project undertaken for the greater glory of God, nor an attempt to extend the rule of law” (Cesaire 1995:11). The critique of popular cultural forms, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (1971), written by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, is Dorfman’s contribution to the same effort: to call things by their right name and encourage in his compatriots the critical awareness of the US imperial lies, carefully masked as progress and democracy. The methods by which the colonisation of the imagination of the subjected peoples was achieved was masterfully deconstructed by another great Latin American, the Brazilian Paulo Freire, in his book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in 1968. Latin America was on the move, resisting occupation and recovering its stolen identity.

20 At the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago on April 17 2009, where he vowed to repair relations with Latin America, President Obama briefly met with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who gave him a copy of this book of Eduardo Galeano as a reminder of all the atrocities that the US committed in Latin America. After this event, Obama had to respond to harsh criticism he was exposed to for shaking hands with President Chavez.

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3. HAROLD PINTER’S COUNTERBLAST AND ARIEL DORFMAN’S COMPROMISE Harold Pinter’s exploration of political reality, especially the construction and maintenance of various types of repression, preoccupied him throughout his life. In his openly political plays, Party Time (1991) and Celebration (2000), which appeared in the last decade of the twentieth century, he found an efficient way to provide his audience with the answer to the question he continually and courageously asked in his art, the question of how power actually operates. These two plays explore the theme of celebrations, and make the audience aware of the power games played behind the closed doors of salons, restaurants or luxury mansions. Pinter’s characters in these plays are members of various elite clubs, claiming to be inspired by the “unshakeable, rigorous, fundamental and constant” sets of moral values. In fact, they are responsible for the horrors and the crimes that occur outside their sheltered retreats and, in Michael Billington’s words, the audience is faced with their “cocooned indifference to global cruelty”21. As Pinter explained in his 1996 interview with Mireia Aragay, “There was a world which didn’t actually bother to discuss the acts of military and police repression for which they were responsible” (Pinter 2005:220). The ones who dare to oppose them and expose them are forced out of the games they could not, or would not, consent to play. Pinter’s earlier work that had explored the theme of celebration, and that may be compared to Party Time and Celebration, is The Birthday Party, the play that also brings into light the power game of the oppressor and the oppressed that underpins our “reality”. Stanley Webber is terrorized by the two mysterious visitors, Goldberg and McCann, who subject him to the interrogation process and force him into the birthday celebration that ends with the complete destruction of his character and spirit. In the text Symbolism of Celebration in Pinter’s Birthday Party, Party Time, Counterblast and Celebration, published in Nasledje, Journal of Language, Literature, Art and Culture, Radmila Nastic, Professor at the Faculty of Philology and Arts at the University of Kragujevac, wrote about the political activism of Harold Pinter and of the significance of celebrations in his works. She compared Pinter’s play The Birthday Party with his television program Counterblast, aired at BBC2 on 4th May 1999, while the NATO bombs were still destroying Yugoslavia. It is important to remember that in 1999, NATO celebrated its 50th anniversary by staging the attack on Yugoslavia, the longest and the most expensive birthday party in history. The bombing of Yugoslavia lasted 78 days, from 24 March to June 1, 1999. Nastic explains: “Situations from Pinter’s The Birthday Party seem to have come true. The play’s protagonist Stanley has the double meaning of a scapegoat…Harold Pinter’s Counterblast showed rudiments of a similar ritual to be performed 21 Michael Billington: On Directing Harold Pinter’s Works Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture / Year XVII / Volume 59

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on the country Yugoslavia, subsequently – Serbia, one of many such cases in recent wars. Dumb executioners and eloquent spokesmen conduct stickand-carrot procedure analogous to Goldberg’s and McCann’s, in which the hero-victim is both wooed and threatened. In the language of The Birthday Party, and in the name of principles and values, the people is offered ’a new pair of glasses’ in order to ’see straight’, after being ’cockeyed for years’. It is promised/threatened with ’a long convalescence’ ’somewhere over the rainbow’, ’where angels fear to thread’, to be ’reoriented’, ’adjusted, ’integrated’ and to become executioner’s ’pride and joy’, ’a success’ in the world. Having no more real tongue of its own, it mumbles and mutters its consents or dissents like Stanley in the last act” (Nastic 2009).

On June 5, 1999 Harold Pinter organised an anti-war demonstrations in front of the Imperial War Museum in London, where he openly criticised the politics of the British Labour Government which wholeheartedly supported the US aggression on Yugoslavia, still in progress while the demonstrations were being held. In his address to the protesters Pinter said: “Little did we think two years ago that we had elected a government which would take a leading role in what is essentially a criminal act, showing total contempt for the United Nations and international law… Let us face the truth. The truth is that neither Clinton nor Blair gives a damn about the Kosovar Albanians. This action has been yet another blatant and brutal assertion of US power using NATO as its missile. It set out to consolidate one thing - American domination of Europe. This must be fully recognised and it must be resisted”22

Along with the statement that because of the brutal attack on Yugoslavia he is ashamed to be British, Pinter’s criticism of the attack on Yugoslavia and the “civilisation against barbarism” policy of Blair, NATO and the United States, appeared in Socialist Review in June of 1999. In the text he insisted that the true danger to the world peace was not former Yugoslavia, but the US, the UK, and NATO: “When the bomb went off in Old Compton Street, Mr Blair described it as a barbaric act. When cluster bombs go off in Serbian marketplaces, cutting children into pieces, we are told that such an act is being taken on behalf of ’civilisation against barbarism’… NATO is destroying the infrastructure of a sovereign state, murdering hundreds of civilians, creating widespread misery and desolation, and doing immeasurable damage to the environment.”23

Two years later, on the occasion of being awarded an honorary doctorate at the University of Florence, Harold Pinter spoke about the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and the civilian victims of the attack on the city of Niš. He wanted to emphasise that this act of terrorism was not a mis22 http://www.haroldpinter.org/politics/politics_serbia.shtml 23 http://www.haroldpinter.org/politics/politics_serbia.shtml

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take, as NATO had claimed. He quoted to the public what General Wesley Clark said, as the NATO bombing began: “We are going to systematically and progressively attack, disrupt, degrade, devastate and ultimately ‒ unless President Milosevic complies with the demands of the international community – destroy these forces and their facilities and support” (Pinter 2005:238-40). Such interventions, masked by the term ’humanitarian’, as well as the misuse of language on such occasions, were criticised and condemned by Pinter. “The bombing of Niš, far from being a ’mistake’, was in fact an act of murder… But the actions taken, we are told, were taken in pursuance of a policy of ’humanitarian intervention’ and the civilian deaths were described as ’collateral damage’” (Ibid.). Once again, as he had done in his Nobel Lecutre, Pinter dared to unmask the true nature of the US interventions, because he understood how important the condemnation of political lies was. He was not afraid to speak out, to speak up, to speak for the ones who were unjustly demonised and destroyed, because of their unwillingness to submit to the civilizing interventions of the alleged world democracies. Through his art and through his career as an activist, Ariel Dorfman also insisted on the importance of using every opportunity to speak out for justice and truth, convinced that, as a writer, he was not allowed to remain neutral. However, whereas in his struggle for justice and truth Harold Pinter remained fateful to his ideals, Dorfman’s voice of protest seems to be gradually growing silent and attuned to the interests of the “compassioned” America that “embraced” him after the 1973 Chilean coup. It is important to state that in 2004 Dorfman became a US citizen, and that since 1985 he has been employed as a professor of  literature  and  Latin American Studies by Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina. In 2000, Dorfman was asked by Kerry Kennedy Cuomo to read her book of interviews with over fifty human rights defenders, and to turn their voices into a play. He did so, and in the same year their collaboration resulted in the release of the play Speak Truth to Power: Voices from Beyond the Dark. As Dorfman explained, this play was about the people who either suffered violence personally, or witnessed another human being, a group or a nation being violated. Having experienced similar things himself, he felt that he was, personally, part of the common struggle of all those people who managed to find the courage, and the way, to speak out and reveal the truth about disappearances, abductions, confinements, sexual harassment, censorship24 that took place all over the world. He wrote: 24 Ariel Dorfman’s play that deals with the issue of censorship is Reader, a play about a censor who realizes that the novel he wishes to ban is actually the story of his own life. Commenting on this play, Dorfman explained: “I discovered that Reader had depths and dilemmas … where an agent of the State has to confront the terrible truth that, if you destroy another human being, you will end up destroying yourself as well… How is reality itself constructed for us and by us and without us, how can we tell what is true and what is false if we do not simultaneously question power, if we have lost our capacity to separate good from evil?” See: Ariel Dorfman: The Resistance Trilogy, Death and the Maiden Nick Hern Books, London, 2012. pp 212-214 Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture / Year XVII / Volume 59

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“They were becoming more courageous the more they spoke out, the more they destroyed the silence, the more they fought back against the darkness” (Dorfman 2003). Because he had been spared from death during the coup in 1973, Dorfman felt that his special task was to speak for the ones who were silenced by death. He believed that: “It meant that the wisdom [he] had accumulated, talent that [he] might have, was in the service of those voices, that [he] was one of those voices” (Ibid.). The words that open Speak Truth to Power: Voices from Beyond the Dark are the following: “Courage begins with one voice. It’s that simple. I did what I had to do. That is what we know. You walk into the corridor of death and you know. You know this moment might be your last” (Ibid.).

Through these words, Ariel Dorfman enables his audience to perceive what the defenders of human rights and the defenders of truth have in common. What they all share are powerful moral convictions which enable them to overcome the natural human fear of death, and give them courage to make the truth their driving force and their main source of strength. The first person who was given the voice to speak out in Speak Truth to Power: Voices from Beyond the Dark is Guillaume Ndefa Atondoko, from the Congo, who was sentenced to death because he dared to oppose the racist practices in his country: “I am told that as a child I reached out to others. I befriended pygmies, even though in my community, in the Congo, they were considered to be animals. I cut bread with them, I brought them to our house, I gave them my clothes. It was sick to society that I associated with pygmies, but I saw them as my friends, just like anyone else” (Ibid.)25.

Dorfman was amazed by the confessions of people like Guillaume, or by the fate of people like Digna Ochoa, a nun and lawyer ’disappeared’ and tortured in Mexico because she wanted to make known the truth about her disappeared father. He understood that people such as Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and the human rights defender who opposed the Apartheid, Hose Zalaquett, a lawyer who organised the defence of prisoners in Chile after the coup, and many other activists from all over the world, shared his life experience. “If people could not prepare themselves for death, they should not decide to defy the regime” (Ibid.). It is exactly what Martin Luther King understood, when he explained to his Civil Rights friends and activists that freeing oneself from the fear of death was the first step towards the successful struggle for justice in the United States as well as in other parts of the world:

25 Dorfman’s play Speak Truth to Power: Voices from Beyond the Dark gives voices to fifty human rights activists from all over the world.

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“You know when I say don’t be afraid you know what I really mean. Don’t even be afraid to die. I submit to you tonight, no man is free if he fears death. But the minute you conquer the fear of death, at that moment, you are free. You must say somehow I don’t have much money. I don’t have much education. I may not be able to read and write, but I have the capacity to die”26.

The paradox that Ariel Dorfman’s play Speak Truth to Power: Voices from Beyond the Dark was premiered in Washington, D.C. in 2000, as part of Speak Truth to Power Project of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, casts a shadow on his more recent intentions and motives. Why would he allow the American political establishment, the perpetrators of crimes against humanity his play denounces, to appear as patrons of the arts and supporters of the efforts to reveal the truth about the crimes they themselves committed? The project was hosted by the American President Bill Clinton, who less than one year earlier had ordered the criminal NATO attack on Yugoslavia. It is important to note that Ariel Dorfman considered Natasa Kandic to be one of the voices made audible in this play. In 2000, Natasa Kandic, who approved of the intervention against Yugoslavia, was awarded a medal by the American National Endowment for Democracy. Ljiljana Bogoeva Sedlar wrote that the award actually “put her where she belongs, together with the likes of Richard Holbrooke, Wesley Clark and other military and diplomatic ’heroes’ who had done so much to ’bring democracy’ to Serbia in 1999”27. This case reveals the enormous contrast that came to exist between Dorfman and Pinter. While Harold Pinter criticized presidents Clinton and Blare for their joint actions not only against Yugoslavia but also in other parts of the world, Ariel Dorfman remained silent. His silence implied that he supported the politics responsible for countless deaths of people throughout the world. How could Dorfman consent to being hosted by Clinton, the political hypocrite of the type always to be seen in the political tragedies of South America in the second half of the XX century? Clinton (like Obama today) praised Martin Luther King’s legacy, while in practice committing all the political crimes King condemned and died exposing. This is a part of Bill Clinton’s speech at the Kennedy Center: “If you believe that every person matters, that every person has a story and a voice that deserves to be heard, then you must believe that what all human rights defenders do everywhere is worth doing. Let us never develop a sense of futility, for the people we honor tonight have proved the wisdom of Martin Luther King’s timeless adage that ’the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice”28. 26 http://www.earthstation1.com/Martin_Luther_King.html 27 See: Ljiljana Bogoeva Sedlar, “The 21st Century: Age of Consent or Concern? The Rise of Democratic Imperialism and ‘Fall’ of William Shakespeare”, Nasledje, Journal of Language, Literature, Art and Culture, Year 6, Volume 12, 2009. 28 Bill Clinton’s speech at the opening ceremony of Speak Truth to Power Project in 2000 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlmkKhWZazo&list=PLB656F0F6602B3D24 Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture / Year XVII / Volume 59

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To Pinter, the irony and the cynicism of this speech would have been apparent and intolerable. It is rather confusing that his great admirer, Ariel Dorfman, found nothing objectionable in it, and appeared as one of the most important figures in the project supported by the US Government, whose politics based on deception and terrorism in the name of democracy and protection of human rights he seemed to deplore. Did he forget how and why his country was destroyed in 1973, and why he was forced into exile by that very democracy? Did he eventually incline towards the side of the oppressor and discover that he actually loved Big Brother? Ultimately, Ariel Dorfman became one of the artists who turn out to be like Orwell’s Winston Smith. Once revolutionaries and rebels of their times, they eventually resort to doublethink and begin to produce paradoxes which they once tried to expose. For various reasons (career opportunities) they allow the dominant ideology to engulf them. They try to preach “reconciliation”29 which is a politically correct word for moral capitulation. The image of a rebel and a revolutionary they uphold comes to hide the actual accomplice. Is this kind of transformation really inevitable? An acclaimed American poet, Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), showed that there is an alternative to the consent of this kind. In an open letter entitled Why I Refused the National Medal for the Arts (1997) she explained why she refused to accept the award from President Clinton, the same president Dorfman was happy to associate with in 2000. Unlike Dorfman, who did not mind Clinton’s presence and his hypocritical preaching about human rights at the Kennedy Center, this is how Rich explained to Jane Alexander, the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, the reasons for her refusal of the medal they wished to give her: “I just spoke with a young man from your office, who informed me that I had been chosen to be one of twelve recipients of the National Medal for the Arts at a ceremony at the White House in the fall. I told him at once that I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration. I want to clarify to you what I meant by my refusal” (Rich 1997, italics added)30.

Rich believed in art’s social presence “as breaker of official silences, as voice for those whose voices are disregarded, and as a human birthright”(Ibid.). As the artist who had witnessed the increasingly brutal impact of racial and economic injustice in her country, she tried in her letter to clarify and celebrate the importance of art, and to criticise her own 29 The case of the historian Caroline Elkins is instructive. She read in the textbooks she was assigned at Harvard University about the wonderful reconciliation Britain achieved in Kenya. During her PhD research she discovered that the situation was actually diametrically opposite, and that the “reconciliation” was an attempt to hide the colonial crimes committed by the British in that country. Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka used the example of Kenya in his 1986 Nobel lecture. 30 Adrienne Rich: Why I Refused the National Medal for the Arts, Los Angeles Times Book Section , August 3, 1997.

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country for investing in war and destruction far more than in peace and support for art and human creativity. Like Adrienne Rich, Harold Pinter ended his Nobel Lecture with a similar appeal to the world to stand up and save human dignity from the many forces which are trying to erode and destroy it. The hypocrisy Rich and Pinter saw, and attacked whenever they saw it, seems to have stopped bothering Pinter’s alleged admirer, Dorfman. 4. CONCLUSION It is obvious that, with time, Pinter’s critical reactions to the global political situation became more open and more explicit. For him, the violations of international law and other crimes committed by the US, UK and NATO were intolerable. He could not stand the lies Clinton, Bush and Blare were fabricating to mask their aggressive, murderous policies throughout the world. His 2005 Nobel Lecture, his last plays, speeches, interviews and other texts, as well as his 1999 television program Counterblast, make this clear. As a writer and anti-war activist he fought against the thick tapestry of lies covering the world by inventing different strategies with which to fight for the people’s right to know the truth. In spite of his declared admiration for Pinter, Ariel Dorfman has been going through a process which seems quite the opposite. The uncompromising attitudes that he wholeheartedly stood for after the 1973 Chilean coup seem to have begun to weaken, casting a shadow on his recent, rare attempts to criticise the crimes perpetrated by the Western powers in the twenty first century. We have already seen that, in 2000, the first performance of Dorfman’s play Speak Truth to Power: Voices from beyond the Dark was organised and hosted at the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights by the US President Bill Clinton. Dorfman has not explained how he could find this situation acceptable, in light of the fact that his friend Harold Pinter, in the same year, at the Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, called Clinton’s attack on Yugoslavia a blatant criminal violation of international law and the UN and EU charters. Dorfman’s recent artistic achievements were backed and promoted by the US government institutions and by the American political leaders, in spite the fact that other options were possible, as the celebration of Harold Pinter’s art in the US, only one year after Dorfman’s premiere, shows. The celebration was supported not by the American political establishment but by by the prominent American artists such as Edward Albee, John Guare and Arthur Miller, to mention a few, who shared Pinter’s artistic and political views. In 2001, at the Lincoln Center Festival, nine Pinter plays were staged, as well as a discussion of Pinter’s life and work. The different road Dorfman seems to be taking is visible in his most recent text, How to Forgive Your Torturer?, written in June 2014. In it, Dorfman referrers to the results of an Amnesty International survey, released Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture / Year XVII / Volume 59

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in May of this year, according to which “45% of Americans believe that torture is ’sometimes necessary and acceptable’ in order to ’gain information that may protect the public’, whereas (when asked the same question) twenty-nine percent of Britons ’strongly or somewhat agreed’ that torture was justified”(Dorfman 2014). Dorfman did not use the opportunity this text provided him with, to shed some light on how these depressing statistics are related to what the American leaders and the US government are doing to make their citizens accept “enhanced interrogations” as necessary to keep Americans safe. In the same text Dorfman also stated that he was chosen by the BBC to tell the story of the WW II British officer, Eric Lomax, who met his Japanese torturer, Takashi Nagase, forty years after the war. When Nagase asked Lomax for forgiveness, Lomax “offered Nagase the absolution that he needed in order to live and die in peace” (Dorfman 2014). It is important to mention that this was not the first time that Dorfman praised and promoted reconciliations of this kind. In 2010 he delivered the Eighth Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture “Whose Memory? Whose Justice? A Meditation on How and When and If to Reconcile” at the Linder Auditorium in Johannesburg31, where he also insisted on “understanding our enemies’ stories” in order for true reconciliation to be achieved. While this sounds commendable, he failed to address the fact that most of the problems that the world is facing today may be related to the fact that the US, UK and the member states of NATO, never offer apologies or ask forgiveness for the crimes they commit all over the world. On September 10, 2001, commenting on the UN World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa, from 31 August to 8 September, the New Statesman journalist, Darcus Howe, reported that the conference “collapsed in recriminations against Israel, against calls for an apology from Europeans for the Atlantic slave trade, against calls for reparations for one of the most horrible, barbaric, evil, vicious, corrupt moment in the history of humanity”32. Unlike Dorfman, Howe was appalled that the world leading powers refused to apologise for slavery and pay reparations for the exploitation of others that made them rich. Covering the same issue, a passage from the text Slavery was theft: we should pay, published in the same issue of The New Statesman, reads: “Justice demands debt relief for Africa and opportunities for African countries to sell their goods to the developed world. The word reparation is merely a recognition that these are obligations, not acts of charity. People who talk about reparations may seem to be off with the fairies, but they are more realistic than those who babble about reconciliation. There will be no rec-

31 The First Nelson Mandela annual Lecture was delivered by Bill Clinton on 19 July 2003. 32 Darcus Howe: In Durban, the black woman peer did the white man’s dirty work, The New Statesman, 10 September, 2001. See: http://www.newstatesman.com/node/141102

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onciliation until white governments and white public opinion unreservedly accept the need for justice.”33

Instead of urging Western governments to “accept the need for justice” and admit the scope and the tragic consequences of their crimes, Ariel Dorfman seems to have chosen to play it safe. Without holding to account those who conceived of, and for centuries carried out crimes against whole continents, who, as the Durban conference showed, refuse to apologise or ask for forgiveness, he continues to urge individual victims of colonial and neo-colonial interventions to offer forgiveness, accept what had been done to them, and move on. Unlike him, Pinter clearly understood that as an artist he had to unmask the true perpetrators of the crimes committed throughout Western history, and refuse to consent to them, or celebrate fake reconciliations. As the recent decades have shown, all such seemingly progressive compromises have only made the repetition of the same crimes possible. Dorfman seems to have gradually adjusted himself to the power game he once so eagerly opposed and criticised. Is the fate of Doctor Miranda slowly becoming his own? Using the contrast between Pinter and Dorman, one of the goals of this paper was to highlight the ongoing process in which the keepers of the New World Order attempt and often manage to create artists whose task is to divert the attention of the audience away from the most important issues of the day- the countless wars, and the horrors of ceaseless destruction of human life. To use Jim Morrison’s words, the Lords who control the masses pay well for “art” through which they can “confuse us and blind us to our enslavement. Art adorns our prison walls, keeps us silent and diverted and indifferent.”34 Time will tell if Ariel Dorfman has embarked on a transition to this “other side”, where truth and justice are not priorities. What the future will reveal, however, does not at the moment diminish the significance of his works.

References Bogoeva-Sedlar 2009: Lj. Bogoeva-Sedlar, The 21st Century: Age of Consent or Concern? The Rise of Democratic Imperialism and ‘Fall’ of William Shakespeare, Nasledje, Journal of Language, Literature, Art and Culture, Year 6, Volume 12, 2009. Césaire 1995: A. Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, New York: Monthly Review Press. Craig 1980: S. Craig, Dreams and Deconstructions: Alternative Theatre in Britain, Charlbury: Amber Lane Press. Dorfman 1991: А. Dorfman, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, New York, International General, 1991

33 http://www.newstatesman.com/node/154073 34 https://beatpatrol.wordpress.com/2009/07/17/jim-morrison-the-lords/ Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture / Year XVII / Volume 59

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Dorfman 2003: A. Dorfman, Fear and the Word, Autodafe, 219, New York: Seven Stories Press. Dorfman 2003: А. Dorfman, Speak Truth to Power: Voices from Beyond the Dark, New York: Umbrage Editions. Dorfman, Ariel, Martin Luther: a Latin American Perspective, The Irish Times (Dublin), 20 August, 2003. Dorfman 2004: А. Dorfman, Other Septembers, Many Americas: Selected Provocations, 1980-2004, New York: A Seven Stories Press. Dorfman, Ariel, How Harold Pinter’s Kindness Saved My Play, The Telegraph, 12 October, 2011. available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-features/8821715/ Ariel-Dorfman-How-Harold-Pinters-kindness-saved-my-play.html, retrieved on 9 June, 2014 Dorfman 2011: Ariel, Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile, Boston/ New York, Mariner Books, Houghtton Miffin Harcourt. Dorfman 2012: A. Dorfman The Resistance Trilogy, London: Nick Hern Books. Dorfman, Ariel, Martin Luther King’s Words in a Surveillance World, Huffington Post, 27 August, 2013, available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ariel-dorfman/ martin-luther-king-jr-9-11_b_3822942.html, retrieved on 5 May, 2014. McClennen, A Sophia, Beyond Death and the Maiden - Ariel Dorfman’s Media Criticism and Journalism, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, available at: http:// lasa-2.univ.pitt.edu/LARR/prot/fulltext/Vol45no1/McClennen_173-188_45-1.pdf, retrieved on 12 June, 2014. McClennen 2010: S. McClennen, Ariel Dorfman: An Aesthetics of Hope, Durham: Duke University Press Books. Dorfman, Ariel, The World That Harold Pinter Unlocked, The Washington Post, 27 December, 2008, available at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ article/2008/12/26/AR2008122601359.html, retrieved on 9 September, 2014. Monbiot , George, The Holocaust We Will Not See, The Guardian, 10 January, 2010, available at: http://www.monbiot.com/2010/01/11/the-holocaust-we-will-not-see/, retrieved on 22 June, 2014. Nastić 2009: R. Nastić, Symbolism of Celebration in Pinter’s Birthday Party, Party Time, Counterblast and Celebration, Nasledje, Journal of Language, Literature, Art and Culture, Year 6, Volume 12, 2009. Pilger, John, Don’t Forget What Happened in Yugoslavia, New Statesman, 14 August, 2008, available at: http://www.newstatesman.com/europe/2008/08/pilger-kosovowar-nato-serbs, retrieved on 7 April, 2014. Pinter, Harold, Art, Truth, and Politics, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 2005, available at: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2005/ pinter-lecture-e.html, retrieved on 9 June, 2014, retrieved on 20 January, 2014. Pinter 1996: H. Pinter, Plays Four, London: Faber and Faber. Pinter 1996: H. Pinter, Plays One, London: Faber and Faber. Pinter 2005: H. Pinter, Various Voices- Prose, Poetry, Politics, London: Faber and Faber. Raymont, Peter, dir., A Promise to the Dead: the Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman, White Pine Pictures, Canada, 2007.

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Ивана С. Ташић / УMEТНОСТ И АКТИВИЗАМ У ДЕЛИМА ХАРОЛДА ПИНТЕРА И АРИЈЕЛА ДОРФМАНА Резиме / Сврха рада је да се анализом дела Харолда Пинтера, Аријела Дорфмана и уметника са којима су они сарађивали утврди њихов став према политичким и културним дешавањима у Европи и Латинској Америци након седамдесетих година двадесетог века. Рад настоји да покаже шта их је подстакло да користе свој таленат и уметност не као забављачи већ као борци за истину, правду и право на живот и слободу изражавања. Циљ рада је да се прикаже шта је ова два уметника навело да постану „опасни грађани”, како америчка списатељица Наоми Волас, у предавању Писање као прекршај, назива ангажоване драмске писце, као и да се утврди шта је то што их је формирало као уметнике и каква су их животна искуства инспирисала да постану не само истинољубиви уметници већ и политички активисти. Кључне речи: Харолд Пинтер, Аријел Дорфман, истина, политика, истраживање стварности кроз уметност Примљен јануара 2016. Прихваћен за штампу фебруара 2016.

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