The words of playwright Harold Pinter’s 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech speak volumes about outlets like Consortium News and the 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 tension 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 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 …”