http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,975048,00.html

Pinter blasts 'Nazi America' and 'deluded idiot' Blair 

Angelique Chrisafis and Imogen Tilden
Wednesday June 11, 2003
The Guardian 

The playwright Harold Pinter last night likened George W Bush's 
administration to Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, saying the US was 
charging towards world domination while the American public and 
Britain's "mass-murdering" prime minister sat back and watched. 
Pinter, 72, was at the National Theatre in London to read from War, a 
new collection of his anti-war poetry that had been published in the 
press in response to events in Iraq. 

In conversation on stage with Michael Billington, the Guardian's 
theatre critic, Pinter said the US government was the most dangerous 
power that had ever existed. 

The American detention centre in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where al-Qaida 
and Taliban suspects were being held, was a concentration camp. 

The US population had to accept responsibility for allowing an 
unelected president to take power and the British were exhausted from 
protesting and being ignored by Tony Blair, a "deluded idiot" Pinter 
hoped would resign. 

After a big operation for cancer, Pinter returned to public life last 
year to speak out against American belligerence. He called it a return 
from a "personal nightmare" to an "infinitely more pervasive public 
nightmare". 

The playwright said: "The US is really beyond reason now. It is beyond 
our imagining to know what they are going to do next and what they are 
prepared to do. There is only one comparison: Nazi Germany. 

"Nazi Germany wanted total domination of Europe and they nearly did it. 
The US wants total domination of the world and is about to consolidate 
that. 

"In a policy document, the US has used the term 'full-spectrum 
domination', that means control of land, sea, air and space, and that 
is exactly what's intended and what the US wants to fulfil. They are 
quite blatant about it." 

Pinter blamed "millions of totally deluded American people" for not 
staging a mass revolt. 

He said that because of propaganda and control of the media, millions 
of Americans believed that every word Mr Bush said was "accurate and 
moral". 

The US population could not be let off scot-free for putting the 
country under the control of an "illegally elected president - in other 
words, a fake". 

He asked: "What objections have there been in the US to Guantanamo Bay? 
At this very moment there are 700 people chained, padlocked, 
handcuffed, hooded and treated like animals. It is actually a 
concentration camp. 

"I haven't heard anything about the US population saying: 'We can't do 
this, we are Americans.' Nobody gives a damn. And nor does Tony Blair." 
Pinter added: "Blair sees himself as a representative of moral 
rectitude. He is actually a mass murderer. But we forget that - we are 
as much victims of delusions as Americans are." 

In a British society where people were increasingly encouraged not to 
use their brains, the only way to protest was by "thought, intelligence 
and solidarity". 

· Michael Billington was last night voted theatre critic of the year in 
a survey of theatregoers for the website whatsonstage.com.