People in the know expressed surprise that the Swedish Academy chose British playwright and sometime �poet� Harold Pinter to receive this year�s Nobel Prize for Literature. But they shouldn�t have. After all, Pinter was hands-down the most qualified choice if one considers the Academy�s record of choosing the most virulent freedom hating, America hating author from the crop it regards as contenders. In brief, Pinter has �what it takes� in spades to be a hero to the Swedish elite as well as to much of the European and American intelligentsia.

Despite Pinter�s unquestionable qualifications, one particular scratching may have sealed the deal for this devoted supporter of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, an organization that regards Cuba as �the most democratic state in the world.� Which scribble? We cannot know for certain, but we can make some guesses.

Perhaps it was his signature on an �anti-war� letter published in London�s Daily Telegraph on September 20, 2001. In the true perversion exhibited by most of the modern �anti-war� crowd, the letter reacts to the events of 9/11 with the injunction �Stop the war!� Stop the war against whom? Why against nations that �are said to� harbor terrorists, of course. (How the Leftists of the Academy must have gushed over the implication that the �imperialist� United States heaps ugly calumnies upon innocent nations falsely �said to� support terrorism!)

But it may have been Pinter�s love of Cuban �democracy� that so affected the creative sensibilities of the Academy�s artistes. Then, again, it may have been the political insight which Pinter reveals in his recent �poetry� in which he rails against the �bully� United States, that �bovine monster� whose criminality is �systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless.� (Regarding this �poetry,� I will spare readers examples of hateful, obscene trash a sick mind might scratch on a bathroom wall. Skeptics may read it for themselves.)

Whatever motivated the Academy, we can be sure of this: In their deliberations, its members rejected the observations made by William Faulkner when he accepted the Prize in 1950. Indeed, how they must snicker at the crude thoughts of an American �cowboy� who criticized an age in which writers have forgotten �problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing.�

He [the writer] must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

It is no surprise that those who nostalgically long for a return to the Marxist literature written during the time of the �great idealists� Stalin and Mao reject Faulkner�s exhortation, for they hate literary classicism as much as they hate the United States, the exemplar of a democratic, libertarian nation. Neither should we be surprised that like the thieving, dictatorial communist hypocrites who enslaved the masses in order to �free� them, Leftist literary hypocrites live the high life in free, prosperous societies while they denounce the very culture that makes their wealth and their expressions of pretentious stupidity possible.

�Why should we care even a whit about such liars and frauds?� some may ask. Why should we care that in 2004 the Academy awarded the literature prize to Elfriede Jelinek, the Austrian writer who was a member of Austria�s Stalinist communist party from 1974 to 1991, a woman whom Roger Kimball of The New Criterion calls a �pornographer and anti-American fantasist,� a woman whose selection caused Knut Ahnlund to resign from the Academy, calling Jelinek�s work �whining, unenjoyable public pornography� and �a mass of text shoveled together without artistic structure�? 

Why should we care that Mr. Pinter said of 9/11, �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.�

Why should we care that German composer Karl Stockhausen reacted to 9/11 with the comment that the murderous attacks represent �the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos�?

We should care because true art nurtures culture while false art poisons it. We should care because Orwell�s idea that corrupt language is first a symptom and then itself a cause of cultural decline applies as well to literature and the arts in general. We should care because the same hate and hypocrisy that flourishes in the Old Europe is evident in the words of Americans (think of Michael Moore) who call murderous Fascists �Minutemen� and American politicians (think of Senators Kerry and Clinton) who try to gull the nation into believing that with a magic potion of �multilateralism� they can transform the America hating French & Friends into true and steadfast allies.

Those who doubt the virulent hatred beloved by those who sit on the Swedish Academy and their ilk need only listen carefully to what they say. Those who doubt their hypocrisy ought to listen to the words of Bosnians, who, living in Leftist Old Europe�s backyard, know quite a lot about their pretentious neighbor�s lack of commitment to justice, peace, and opposition to tyranny. Then, will the doubters join the rest of us who know trash when we see it.

Copyright by A.J. DiCintio