The words of playwright Harold Pinter’s 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech speak volumes about outlets like Consortium News and the so-called anti-disinformation industry.
“It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them.
You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
These words of British dramatist Harold Pinter upon his acceptance of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature inspire the continuing mission of Consortium News as we celebrate our 30th year in 2025.
CN’s mission is to show its readers and viewers that it is happening. The U.S. is arming, funding and aiding an active genocide. It is provoking and prosecuting the worst war in Europe since World War II. It is building unnecessary tension with China and stirring up trouble in the Western Hemisphere.
But if you pay attention to mainstream media, none of this is happening — while it is happening. U.S. coups and bombings around the world that have killed multiple millions of innocent people over eight decades never happened, even while they happened.
The job of the supposed anti-disinformation industry, often with ties to U.S. intelligence, is to marginalize or silence outlets like Consortium News so the public isn’t told it’s happening.
The public’s eyes must stay shielded from the crimes their tax dollars are financing. Americans are not to see what is happening. While it is happening.
They don’t want you, the reader, to fund a site like this. They want you to read a mega-corporation production of news in close collaboration with the state and the intelligence agencies that is financed by other mega-corporations and that hides what’s happening — today and in the past.
We ask you to defy them. Donate in these last days of our Winter Fund Drive so you’ll always know what is happening, while it is happening. (Below is more from Pinter’s indispensable speech.)
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“The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.
Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It’s a winner.
Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, ‘the American people’, as in the sentence, ‘I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.’
It’s a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it’s very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.
The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn’t give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant …”
I really don’t know if the president to be actually believes all the vomit spewed from him, but he is beyond an entertaining nightmare. The actions are sureal. He must have been heavily traumitized as a wee one. TECHNOLOGY WILL NOT SAVE US. Listen to some wisdom, it can’t hurt maybe it will save us.
I remember when Mr. Pinter won the award….I was thrilled. I also remember the response of the elites in the USA. They all trashed him.
Everybody should read “The Concise Untold History of the United States of America”, by Oliver Stone and Peter Kusnick.
Summarises the duplicity and avarice of the US during the 20th century, up to modern day. Misses one or two relevant points, such as the sell off to a private consortium, of the US Federal Reserve Bank in 1913. On examination of this event and the consequences, rests most of the ills resident in the U. S., and consequently, the rest of civilisation.
Carlson’s interview of both Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, friends of Consortium News, was released on Friday.
Thank you for that. I will look for it with anticipation.
Harold Pinter like Howard Zinn tells the real truth of American foreign policy. Bravo Harold. Will the American people listen and act???
Bravissimo to Mr. Pinter, he sees the U.S. for what it really is, and he said so, loudly.
Coolidge didn’t say exactly “the business of America is business,” but that’s the truth. Look up the infamous ’71 Powell memo and its anti-New Deal corporate agenda. It’s a bunch of assertions with little or no empirical evidence. What’s sobering is how much of it has become accepted as givens.
Then add how the U.S. military has devolved from being about defense of the nation, a common good, to being used as the enforcement arm of a unipolar econopathy–the collective of corporate “persons.”
If those “persons” were psychologically analyzed, they would be diagnosed as severely APD–antisocial personality disorder. Typical traits are: aggressive behavior, pervasive anger, relations as revolving around the exploitation and abuse of others, arrogance, seeing others as irrelevant lessers, little remorse for their harmful actions, and an inability for empathy.
The MICIMATT is selecting for sociopathy, then aiding and abetting its inhumane behavior. Pinter was right; it’s clinical manipulation.
I can always count on Consortiumnews to find some wonderfully humane and talented human being like Harold Pinter or Diana Johnstone ,give them a platform , and “tell it like it is”!.
Such insights can’t be stated too loudly or too often: whatever it takes to awaken people’s minds.
When did it start, when did the USA wake and realise it could and would rule the world ?
Was it when the united states became united states ?
Was it after WW1 or WW2 ?
Maybe, it was Manifest Destiny, or perhaps that was merely a named instance of something that was always there, arisen out of the parochial self-interest of a ruling class, combined with the religious fanatics who came as “settlers” in someone else’s home.
Maybe, it just took until we had more discerning people, who actually cared about all of humanity, rather than just a select few, for the mask to begin slipping, until the façade is no longer there at all, fooling no one except the most misguided, deluded, or complicit.
There was no one specific moment when it started — it was a process that developed over time. There were hints of what was to come along the way — for instance, the Monroe Doctrine was such a hint. (Who was the young USA in 1823 to brazenly declare “Hands Off the Americas!” to the established European powers?) The Spanish-American War was another such early hint, as the USA ruthlessly & brutally seized the Philippines, waging the entire war under its soon-to-become-standard M.O., claiming loudly to be fighting for virtuous values like “freedom and democracy” while actually fighting for self-interest. But the process greatly accelerated by the end of WW2, as the OSS became the CIA, and the atomic bomb was used to intimidate the USSR (and the rest of the world) into abject submission to the newly-crowned top global power. Even the previous heavyweight champ, the UK, was unceremoniously shoved out of the way, as the new American Empire, its talons flashing, took the reins.
I respectfully suggest another turning point, or at least a visible marker: 1949, when war criminal Truman (who earlier murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians using atomic bombs) — changed the name of the former US Department of War (1789-1947) to the US Department of ‘Defense’.
It was one of history’s most brilliant PR moves, equal to those of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels. As it happened, the ‘Defense’ naming took place two months before the publication of George Orwell’s dystopian 1984. The parallels may be obvious to readers of Consortium News.
One more thing: the act of congress naming the ‘defense’ department also created the CIA.
You are correct, but there’s more! This all came about after the U.S. “rehabilitated” “former” Nazis and brought them into the government because of their rabid anti-Communism. They slowly wormed their way into the very heart of the newly emerging National Security State, and now have complete control of it. They were the ones providing McCarthy with names, accusing anyone who might be able to expose or counter their slow revolution. This is the TRUE deep state. Cons are notorious for accusing their opponents of the very crimes they are or will commit in order to deflect suspicion away from themselves.
“This all came about after the U.S. “rehabilitated” “former” Nazis and brought them into the government because of their rabid anti-Communism.”
During World War II the Nazis were our enemy and represented the supreme evil (and actually were evil), and the Russians, the Communists, were our allies in fighting this enemy. However after the war ended the Communists came to be regarded as the supreme evil, and the “former” Nazis were now OK since they were rabidly against the Communists. They (the former Nazis) were the enemies of our new enemies (the Communists), and thus became our friends.
It does seem like the USA has always needed to have some enemy.
The Brothers, a book by Stephen Kinzer, sheds a lot of light.
Kinzer’s book would not have been necessary if the corporate media wasn’t burying this history, as if it wasn’t happening.
…as if it wasn’t happening. Yes. And I may not have known of Kinzer’s work had I not discovered Consortium News where it was recommended by another reader in the comments section. Much appreciation for carrying on the legacy and mission of Robert Parry. Thank you.