Harold Pinter, the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature for this year, has now released his Nobel lecture, which mainly consists of a scathing attack on the US government and the English government, on the former for mass-murdering innocents and on the latter for merely following in the foot-steps of the US. The lecture can be found in writing, translated to a few different languages, and also in video, on this page. Here's a quote for you from the lecture:
Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don't exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. 'We don't do body counts,' said the American general Tommy Franks.
Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. 'A grateful child,' said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. 'When do I get my arms back?' he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn't holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you're making a sincere speech on television.
The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm's way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.
Harold Pinter is correct.
Svenska Dagbladet, one of the extremely few daily Swedish magazines worthy to be read, has posted this very interesting article on the death sentence in the USA, considering over 1000 people have now officially been executed by state officials, in American prisons.
The interesting part of the article is that we're always told of the "successful" deaths, and not of the extremely horrible ones. Of course, somebody getting killed for having killed somebody makes you wonder, but the article asks why we're not told of the real-life incidents where people who have been put in the electric chair have exploded (!), caught on fire, or of how long it actually takes to die from a lethal injection; at times doctors have dug for a full hour, before finding a useable vein that they can use to kill a human being.
What's the kicker? For starters, capital punishment doesn't scare off people. It's the truth. Apart from statistics showing this, the first time I came across that piece of wisdom, was through Alfie Kohn's "You Know What They Say: The Truth About Popular Beliefs" which I highly recommend. Anyway, back to the myth. Does the introduction of a capital punishment law decrease the number of crimes of that type during a certain period of time, compared with the same period of time before the introduction? No. Kohn proves this in the book, and crime statistics (in the USA) say the same. On the contrary, the number increases.
Studies have shown essential flaws in the American judicial system. As the American government heaves billions of US dollars into a war-machine that only kills Americans and breeds further aggressions across the world, the education goes to waste. The studies I'm pointing to, shows that a lot of members of American juries don't really know the meaning of the term "beyond reasonable doubt". Bear this in mind: should a person be sentenced to death, all a jury needs to say, is that that person is guilty beyond reasonable doubt. This is, of course, an outrage.
Mind you, in the USA, people can be condemned to getting killed by the government, even though there is no evidence for what they've done. No, I'm not referring to Guantanamo Bay or Iraq. For instance, as the SvD-article refers to, there's the case of Robin Lovitt; the evidence against him was apparently thrown away by a notary. Check this CNN article out, especially the paragraph "Executing the innocent?" A little quote from this paragraph reads as follows:
[...] noted that the police DNA lab in Houston has been shut down since 2002 because an investigation found problems with poor training and contaminated evidence.
"What kind of confidence can you have when the jurisdiction that executes more people than any other is fraught with unreliable testing results?" Scheck said.
There you go. Examine the "facts" and you see the death penalty being nothing but a mere archaic tool designed to keep the blood-thirsty part of a population thinking its leaders do everything but lead it into despair. And, of course, a way for the government to kill off people that are against its current leaders. And they don't have to present evidence to do it. Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, soon Iran, I guess. Long live Harold Pinter, and all people who have the guts to say what they think is right.