Award 2004
Henry Peacock Gallery, London 2004
Harold Pinter read from his poems ‘War’ outside Henry Peacock at the opening Saturday afternoon.
photo by Jenny Matthews
sorry for delay in uploading film of Harold reading his poems from ‘War’ – coming soon
pamphlet handout made for the exhibition Award
the folio of prints included an essay by John Berger and a facsimile of the fax to us from Thom Yorke both written in response to the work
to see all prints in the series Award in greater detail see the print section
Essay by John Berger
“If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure.”
George W. Bush
There are certain moments of looking at a familiar mountain which
are unrepeatable. A question of a particular light, an exact
temperature, the wind, the season. You could live seven lives and never
see the mountain quite like that again; it’s face is as specific as a
momentary glance across a table at breakfast. A mountain stays in the
same place, and can almost be considered immortal, but to those who are
familiar with the mountain, it never repeats itself. It has another
time scale.
*
Each day and night of the ongoing situation in Iraq is different
with different griefs, different acts of defiance, different
stupidities. It remains, however, the same war, the war which almost
everyone in the world perceived, before it began, as an aggression of
unprecedented cynicism (the ravine between declared principles and real
aims), undertaken to seize control of one of the world’s richest oil
reserves, to test out new weapons, like the microwave bomb, weapons of
pitiless destruction, many of which were offered free to the Pentagon
by
the manufacturers in the hope of winning substantial contracts for wars
to come, but principally and above all undertaken to demonstrate to the
present fragmented, globalised world what Shock and Awe is!
The primary aim of the war, launched in defiance of the UN, was to
demonstrate what is likely to happen to any leader, nation, community,
or people, who persist in refusing to comply with U.S. interests. Many
propositions and memos about the vital need for such a demonstration
were being discussed in corporate and operational planning circles
before Bush’s fraudulent election.
The term U.S. interests can lead to confusion. It does not refer
to the direct interest of U.S. citizens, whether poor or well-off, but
to the interests of extensive multinational corporations, often
dominated by U.S. capital, and now, when necessary, defended by U.S.
armed forces.
What Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, Wolfowitz, Perle and Co. have
succeeded in doing since September 11th is to close any debate about
the
legitimacy or ultimate efficacy of such a threatening deployment of
power. They have used the fear, set off by the Twin Towers attack, to
try to enlist the media and public opinion in support of unilaterally
decided pre-emptive strikes against any target they name terrorist. As
a result, the world market with its spin is being woven into the Stars
and Stripes, and the making of profit (for the few who can) is becoming
the only inalienable right.
“Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the
rich,” Peter Ustinov the playwright recently observed with succinct
clarity.
*
Although the assertion that Iraq had weapons of massive destruction
was the so-called justification for the country’s invasion, there has
perhaps never been a war in which the inequality of firepower between
the combatants has been so great. On one hand satellite surveillance
night and day, B52s, Tomahawk missiles, cluster bombs, shells with
depleted uranium and computerised weapons which are so sophisticated
that they give rise to the theory (and virtual dream) of a no-contact
war; on the other hand, sandbags, elderly men brandishing the pistols
of their youth and handfuls of fedayeen, wearing torn shirts and
sneakers, armed with a few Kalashnikovs. The comparative casualty
rates between the Iraqi people on the one hand and the forces of the
Coalition on the other will probably turn out to be, as in the
operation, whose logo was Desert Storm, something approaching 1000 : 1.
*
Let us return to the mountain, which proposes another time-scale.
From there the victors, with their historically unprecedented
superiority of weapons, the victors who were bound to be victors,
appear
frightened. The leaders of the New World Order are married to Fear and
their subordinate Commanders and Sergeants are indoctrinated from above
with the same fear.
The practices of their marriage? Day and night the partners of
Fear are obsessively preoccupied with telling themselves and their
subordinates, the right half-truths, half-truths which hope to change
the world from what it is into something which it is not! It takes
about three half-truths to make a lie. As a result, they become
unfamiliar with reality. Above all they cannot come to terms with, or
find a place for, death. Fear keeps death out. And so the Dead desert
them. They are alone on this planet – as the rest of the people in the
world are not. This is why, considering all the power they wield,
military and otherwise, the victors are dangerous. Terrifyingly
dangerous. It is also why they cannot survive. The Dead have
abandoned
them.