Pillar number two

Harold Pinter's death was announced today. Dark plays that focused attention on one of the most destructive human forces: power. Reality or the boards were all one, of course. What else is the stage but a microcosm of the world at large. Where are the clear boundaries? Let us recall the beginning of his most articulate attack on the whole fraud of our political systems that he launched with his grand speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005:

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.

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 Quaeda 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.

...And so on.

For the rest of the speech.