The Telegraph has published a version of Harold Pinter's notorious honorary degree acceptance speech at the University of Turin in November. Steven Den Beste really goes to town on it here and here. He sees Pinter's "paranoid anti-American rant" (and that it is) as an example of an extremism that is beyond the pale, that ventures well outside the limits of garden variety anti-Americanism. I don't know about that. Pinter is pretty well-stocked with loopy political views (he was the leading light of the Free Slobodan movement-- enough said?) But, in a crackpot face-off, Gore Vidal would win hands down. Strip away some of the hyperbole-- e.g. "the US administration is a blood-thirsty wild animal," a characterization hardly borne out by the facts at this stage of the game-- and it's fairly run-of-the-mill anti-American blather, European-style. It's the sort of thing that seems to play well to the educated elite in Britain, and the domestic edition will be familiar to anyone who has ever overheard conversations at a Berkeley Starbucks or visited znet.
The usual version boils down to these points: (a) America and Americans have been responsible for so much evil in the world that the US has no legitimate standing to take any action in the international arena; (b) since we created many of the world's problems (despite the simplisme, true enough) anything we could do about them can only make matters worse at the price of tremendous suffering and compounded culpability; (c) George W. Bush is a uniquely dangerous moron who relishes the prospect of killing innocent people just for the fun of it (though he also likes to do it for oil and to distract attention from domestic problems and for personal reasons having to do with "his daddy"); (d) the American public, outside of a few courageous movie stars, support a military challenge to Iraq either because they are as stupid as their foolish leader, or because they have been duped by an unaccountably effective propaganda campaign that only teenagers, people with tenured academic positions, and those in the entertainment industry can see through. These dissenting voices are "silenced" by severe criticism, which renders the administration's complaints about the predations of foreign dictators laughably invalid; (e) given the evil that America has wrought, the attacks on 9/11 were predictable, inevitable, perhaps justified if not exactly praiseworthy, and Americans have only themselves to blame for them (in effect, they say "I'm not a terrorist, and I wouldn't have done these things, but if I were a terrorist and I had done them, I would have done them for these reasons.") Therefore, it follows that if the Americans would adopt my positions on x, y, z, and Fred and Ethel, they would find that terrorism would cease to be a problem for them because no one would have any grievances anymore. The fact that they continually refuse to do so is yet more proof of their perfidy; (f) the validity of this analysis is proven beyond question by a list of anecdotes, quotations and statistics illustrating American hypocrisy when it comes to freedom, democracy, weapons, law, human rights, and power, and anyone who disagrees cannot possibly be motivated by anything other than a secret jubilation in the prospect of the death and destruction of people of other races and cultures.
Not all of these points are covered in the Pinter address, but I think that's the paradigm. I admit, I've constructed a bit of a straw man here; but then, so has he, and with evident earnestness. I hasten to add, in addition, that not all arguments against the war follow the paradigm-- but the anti-American ones generally do. And I believe that for those who produce such rhetorical presentations, it's often the anti-Americanism that generates the enthusiasm and passion, rather than the opposition to the war as such.
Even when valid points are made in such a discourse, they are unlikely to carry much weight with those who don't already share those assumptions. There is certainly much to criticize about US policies, past and present, but it's difficult to imagine a useful discussion of them arising from such a wasteland. That's because it's not an argument, though it can masquerade as one; it's more a series of non sequiturs held together by the conviction that ones own feelings of resentment and alienation must have universal significance, that they must be a "root cause" of all the grief and trouble in the world. This conviction is a kind of faith, and like the more creditable kind of faith, it can arise from a true desire to understand that which defies understanding, a sincere and honorable distress at the horror and suffering in this sad world of ours. But that's the best thing that can be said about it. Sermons like this are unlikely to persuade anyone who is not himself in the throes of the solipsistic delusion. As for the choir, they've heard it before, and each member has his own version of it at the ready for the next time he finds himself sitting across the table from someone who, he knows in advance, already agrees with him on every point. So why bother? Well, you have to say something when they give you an honorary degree from the University of Turin.
I also agree with Den Beste that the vacuousness of the anti-war "arguments" generally heard today is by no means a good thing, even for those who believe that a military challenge to Iraq is warranted. Especially for us, in fact. Den Beste:
Pinter's article was virtually a catalog of all the wounds the anti-war Left has inflicted on itself and all the ways in which its own rhetoric has served to make people like me seem far more reasonable and persuasive to the undecided middle. Pinter is the paradigm of all the ways in which the anti-war Left has been its own worst enemy.