Three Monkeys Online

A Curious, Alternative Magazine

Gulag, Schmulag

I caught Harold Pinter’s Nobel lecture on television today. All in all, a perplexing performance. It began promisingly with Pinter describing the origins, in a phrase and an image, of two of his great plays, The Homecoming and Old Times. Then, with a few perfunctory comments about the nature of lies in modern politics, he launched into a sustained kicking of the USA and all its works. The efficacy of this lecture is questionable–how many people who tuned in to listen to Pinter’s words of wisdom are likely to consider the invasion of Iraq to have been an act of brillant altruism?What piqued my attention was when Pinter described “the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.” Now, the US prison system is a grim symbol of the social and racial inequality that bubbles beneath the country’s facade of prosperity and opportunity-for-all. But is it accurate to use the acronym that described the network of slave camps that existed in the Soviet Union? No one, to my knowledge, freezes to death being transported to US prisons, or starves in custody, or is locked up for cracking jokes about the President (not yet anyway).One wonders what a fellow laureate, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, (who was prevented by the Soviet authorities from traveling to Stockholm) will make of the comparison?It’s a bit like calling Malcolm McDowell Michael McDowell, Ireland’s controversial minister for justice and b�te noire of the Left, a Nazi–by reaching for the most visceral language you are merely alienating that section of the audience that is ready to be won over. However, Pinter, who was too unwell to travel to Stockholm to collect to prize in person, seemed more interested in defining his political credentials for posterity than providing the kind of enlightenment some might expect from a Nobel lecture (actually after a perusal of the Nobel site, most of them seem pretty gaseous). In any case, the laureled writer didn’t waste too many words on what now seems like his secondary interest, literature.