PREFACE

[From a recent speech by a British writer and citizen of the world]

I am deeply honoured to receive this degree from Aristotle University. I have always felt a strong attachment to Greece and a great respect for the Greek people. You have asked me to say a few words and I intend to take the term "a few words" literally.

The other day I came across a letter I wrote to a theatrical magazine in 1958. It included the following sentences:

'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false."

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false? There are certain facts which more or less everyone knows to be true but which few people actually talk about, although there is, I believe, a growing surge in the world, an oceanic nausea, if you like, to which more and more people subscribe. What is the relationship of military might to "market forces"?

The United States has made quite clear - many times - that it will protect its own economic and strategic interests with the use of military might at the drop of a hat, without compunction, whenever it feels like it. And the government of Great Britain follows suit - with an eagerness which can only merit our disgust.

I contend that the bombing of Serbia had nothing whatsoever to do with "humanitarian intervention". It was a blatant assertion of US power. [Applause] That and the continuing bombing of Iraq are illegal, immoral, illegitimate acts, against all understood criteria of international law, holding both international law and the United Nations in contempt. As for the sanctions upon Iraq and their toll of death, there are re- ally no words which can properly describe the cynicism, the indifference and - as someone else has said - the casual sadism which inspires them.

The United States constantly refers to its belief in "civilised values" and its concem for "human rights". Its own penal system - two million people in prison, mental deficients executed, children under eighteen incarcerated in adult prisons where they are systematically raped and assaulted, the use of "restraint chairs" where the prisoner is padlocked and his legs secured in metal shackles and where he is left for extended periods in his own excrement, the use of the "stun gun" which emits an electrical shock of roughly 50,000 volts and causes severe pain and instant incapacitation - torture by remote control - and of course the employment of the death penalty in thirty-eight states - lethal injection, electrocution, the gas chamber, hanging - take your pick - are facts which speak for themselves and render the term "civilised values" laughable. President Clinton said at the end of last year, "We Americans have given freedom to the world". There will undoubtedly be more of the same language used this year, more "moral outrage", more "humanitarian intervention", more lies, more bombs, more destruction, more grinding of millions of people into the dust - that kind of freedom.

There is also, in my view and in the view of many others, serious danger of a nuclear catastrophe - stemming not from "rogue states," - as defined by the United States - but from the United States itself.

We are confronted by a vast, brutal, malignant machine. This machine must be recognised for what it is and resisted.

--Harold Pinter, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki degree speech April 18th 2000.

[Herald Pinter - a writer and an intellectual, as well as Cardinal Basle's]

"The USA is a monster. It is actually USA that needs to be stopped. Every one knows that war is appalling but what we lose sight of is that it is being abstracted now and sanitized to such a degree that Mr. Clinton has killed children and he has not even noticed it because they are actually abstractions - they are children dying of his sanctions...Despite continued references to the solidarity of the international community, the United States in fact held international law in contempt for so long it has succeeded in rendering the concept meaningless...The USA is now a bovine monster out of control.

--Herald Pinter, The Independent, Feb. 13, 1998

Below are excerpts--from a novel of mine, http://www.zeus- publications.com/page5.html--which I enclosed and referred to in a letter to a unique group of American acquaintances during the last bombing raids of our next-door- neighbor Yugoslavia...but decided not to send so as not to hurt these people's feelings. Then again, it seems that some people--and societies--cannot do otherwise but live by the sword, in this case live by death-dealing. This same category of people can substitute quite easily self-inventing excuses--can institute, as a matter of fact, instant self-acclaim that extends to practices and norms similar to those that govern mob hysteria, mob rule even--for feelings of kindness, justice and common sense. As you might have guessed, and correctly so, this is the type of self-seeking that ensnared the aforementioned acquaintances.

I dare say my acquaintances must have fallen head over heels prey to such risque Sirens as censorship and suppression of free speech as well. For, one of them disappointed me rather greatly, but not unexpectedly so. This naive poor soul wanted me to 'edit specific sections' of the short story "Ratt-tat-tatt" as he saw fit. Pending on this 'edit' he would or would not publish the short story in the magazine he was a staffer of. After I refused, his Americana coup de maitre, cul-de-sac, and piece de resistance, was a quote from an American politician/mayor named or nicknamed Kingfish. When asked if America would ever have fascism, Kingfish replied, "Why sure, but we'll call it anti-fascism".

As this reply settled-in well and crystalized, certified itself in my awareness, my up to then ambiguous impression of this-is-an-anything-goes country and a-free-for-all- grabs-of-the-global-pie society, I sat down and wrote a similar article which was unprotestingly accepted and published--my sensitivities now no longer wearied or tormented--in the March 2000 issue of ELT News (English Language Teachers News), distributed throughout the English learning institutions and communities in Greece. I gathered by that time that my acquaintances' defenses, or attitude, could wear more than adequately the slings and arrows of my keen distress at and acute disapproval for their nation's policies, and subsequently those of her follower nations or allies, as expressed in the said letter below.

Today, in view of the plethora of hoodwinking going on, I for one am amazed at the international community's inability to see and counteract such expansionist injustice and Vietnam-war-like blunt and overt regression-aggression going on in real-time progress. I am left dazed at this form of sophisticated--but at times quite blunt-- propaganda of such accurate degree and tact, such precise extent and strategy, that it is sucking in even the most enlightened, the cunningest and most illuminated, of nations which would otherwise have deplored and abandoned any endeavor of alliance with such Orwellian-apartheid attitudes and goals as the ones practiced by this most recently risen, but underdone, Wild West Nationalistic Empire.

At present I am thoroughly saddened by the international community's reticent, this self-inhibiting and self-incriminating, silence.

What is that noble Nobel Foundation doing? Sleeping?

Why does it guard its own dumbfound silence so deftly when it should be crying out, shouting in distress--perhaps even be pulling at its hair--at this most recent and most merciless violation upon us all, upon all of the tenets of civilization and beliefs in a free and fair humanity?

The goal of the US this time is not nazi Germany, the USSR, Korea or Vietnam, Iraq or the Balkans; that much must be clear to everyone.

But global Americanization.

Not globalization.

Pax Americana has nothing to do with worldization, peace or any kind of global union or harmony, but with attaining and maintaining American interests throughout the globe. Most Americans--thank God--are severely against, staunchly criticize, this inclination of American world dominance. But, the same gene governs American oligarchy today as did during the American genocide spree of days not long ago. The gene that predisposed them to go on a never-before binge, predicated such a rampage of genocide the likes of which the world has never seen before or has yet to recover from: to purge The New World of Red Men, Black Men and Hispanics. It is a tough gene to expiate or discipline, to expunge or to expulse this WASP gene. It, like its ancestor the Arian gene, and before that the Hun and Tartar-Mongol gene, wants all for iself. War and hostility are its vital signs. This gene cannot survive in peace. Peace smothers this genome. The catch-phrase here--at all and at any cost--is: "America First!" and, "The hell with ecumenicity, lawful due process and UN interference, intervention and egalitarianism. We have the strongest organism," American syllogism goes on, "since the Roman legions. Stronger even than the Third Reich and the Axis. We have the NATO machine. It's our one and only chance to be masters of it all, masters of an entire planet, a whole world. Use it! damn it. Use this force! The opportunity, the circumstances, the facade is just too perfect to miss out on. To blazes with all else. To Hades with you and your legal writ of habeas corpus, buster! Our Manifest Destiny, our American Dream comes first. And it's just around the corner!! So what if a few million go under? So what if a few countries are decimated?"

This malison and miasma, this sarcoma of a sorts, is harming the subject nation, or federation/confederation whichever the USA wishes to call herself, as much as the rest of the world. Dominance of one single country, no matter how strong or well- intentioned, cannot, does not, constitute Democracy. It strips and flogs Democracy. It's not me that says it, it's the institutions of Democracy that voice it.

Today, there is continuing basis for the inferences I make. Again, I guess this is more of the same not-to-be-tolerated-any-further, self-righteous indignation of the Yugoslavians (and those that support the upright and unprotected populace, the majority of Yugoslavians), for one's own immorally and exemplarily slaughtered kinfolk. Perhaps there is indeed ecumenical truth, more than meets the eye here, to the monologue's account below. It seems, the 'humanitarian' war in Yugoslavia is not yet over, as the 'anti-communist' Vietnam war is not, as the 'anti-nationalist' Korean war is not over.

But continues.

Covertly and in low tones, even as we speak.

But continues, nevertheless, clandestinely, confidentially, in the Cold War fashion--as that of the economic wars against Cuba, against Iraq, against a Libya not so long ago; the never-ending propaganda against a united Ireland, a united Cyprus so agreeable to, in step and in-nature with, the temperament so admirable by the temerity and foolhardiness of both the rodeo cowboyism and KKK tactics germane to certain Americans, to those that murdered millions of the indigenous Indians and African blacks and hispanics, and in line with the WASP dogma of certain Englanders that murdered and continue today still to 'leagally' exterminate untold thousands of the indigenous Briton Kelts.

The speaker in the story is a dying Vietnam veteran, Sam Latevic, living stateside, of Yugoslavian descent who had been blinded by napalm (perhaps even by clofen, so copiously used) in the 'good ol' gung-ho days'.

The letter/story begins like this:

[And in the middle of them, with filthy body, matted hair, and unwiped nose, Ralph wept for end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.

24 March 1999: the invasion of the Balkans by NATO. 2,000 killed. 8,000 wounded. In memory to the human beings slaughtered in the seventy-eight-day holocaust. I, one Hellene among the majority of 97% of the Hellenic populace, contest and indict this illegal assault. I lodge unreservedly a formal protest and complaint opposing this unprovoked rash act of indiscretion, reprisal and thoughtlessness against humanity and against our friend and neighbor Yugoslavia. This petition is directed to The Tribunal of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, The War Crime Court at The Hague, The Swedish Commission Inquest on The Kosovo War and The Nobel Foundation. This uncalled for, shameful and savage attack of carnage and butchery, one with an all-encompassing and especially barbarous and grotesque turn after the first few days will be the cause, in the author's opinion, for the spawning of such asymmetrical alliances as the Western world cannot even begin to imagine or appraise. Praises and compliments for ushering in the new millennium with this first exemplary Mai-Lai-Massacre step for our children to follow, one surely deserving the Nobel Prize. Congratulations for setting up the stage of the onset of what may probably well be the most xenophobic and hydrophobic century in human history: The Twenty First Century AD. May God and mortal forgive you, nineteen.

...These neoteric 'Tartar-Mongols' did not descend from North-Central Asia and Central East Asia this time, but swarmed from across the Ocean from the Far West after killing and raping seventy million of their own indigenous Red Men, God knows how many hundreds of thousands of African Americans, and more recently three million Vietnamese. Blood and War sustains these Turanians. And these newly-sprung Huns, these most modern Ottoman hordes needed to humiliate Europe, once more. Break Europe's spirit and confidence, and drag her into another/their image-making war. Europe, their Continental gofer.

Europe, now, their overseas pack-runner; another England, another Japan, another Korea...another water boy.

Unite with Europe to conquer the Balkans first, then Europe all over, with only a starting skirmish-of-a-war, Latevic thought.

Progressively start more bombings--but go low on the tone. Bomb all!--low tones, now. Bomb and rule--but always, low on tone. Don't want , the spat-upon veteran myth to resurface again, become an alibi for why the most powerful nation on earth lost a war with an underdeveloped Asian nation called Vietnam. Vietnam yesterday. Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia today. Skopjia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Caucasus...Russia and China tomorrow. The world the day after.

'Geeve eet to them, Weelee!'

The Bold Nova Axis.

The Neo-Janissaries.

The Valorous New Roman Legions...or is it the Brown/Black Shirts...or the tie- and-white-shirt Yuppies nowadays?

"Snuff out dem Yugo-dudes--on de double, troops. Quick-like, I say! And beat feet back heah! Got trouble back home, troops. Gotta whole rabble of gun-blazing rebel-rousers and whimperin'-snipers right at our own public-schools, troops! Dem Yugos ain't killed a single one God-fearin' 'merican man. But back home, our own piddly toddlers are mowin ' us down Mai-Lai-fashion! Our own kind--would you believe?-- gunnin' us down right in our own fuckin' back-yaads!"

...The name is Latevic, Sam Latevic, are you with me? It's Latevic and my drift carries from what once used to be Yugoslavia, my birth country and my parent's and my grandparent's native home. What now is poisoned, no- man's-land, from our State Department's 'human-rights presents' and our U-238-jacketed bombs from our Department of Offense.

There's this guy, Alexis. Dunne's his name, that says:

'Thrust ivrybody--but cut th' ca-ards.'

So, who 'thrusts' a crowd that needs to go to war every twenty years or so in order to balance their books? I want to ask all the bronze-laden Generals. Hell, Alexis, who can honor a system of government promoted by a handful of dog-eat-dog troops, 'civil servants', government men and CIA spooks whose sole motto in life is, 'Your death is my living'; and, whose work of endeavor or Gross National Product is essentially based and appropriated from the sales, proliferation and use of arms and armament, spontaneous and never-ending global skirmishes and war? Sounds to me too close to a second, but runaway, USSR.

What manner free-thinking citizen of the world will vouch for or go in with an establishment that promotes and supports military dictatorships--enlightened or not--so as to perpetuate on to others a soldiering and warring way of life, and a cruel enough martial fascism to have gotten even George Smith Paton disgusted with the military? The West should try onto itself what it dispenses so easily to others. --Forgot. New World Order leaders nowadays have two standards and two set of rules they abide by--

Who wants to be an enlistee from cradle to grave? The law of war governs the establishment here, Alexis. There's a spontaneous war waging here 365 days, Alexis. It's a perpetual battle-field. It don't matter any--no difference if it's Nam or New York, the Persian Gulf or the Gulf of Mexico, 'We Survive through War' or 'Warring Is Our Business' the logo goes. Or should it be, 'In Arms We Trust' or 'In Strife and Bullying We Trust'? Whether you're civilian or troop, straight or crooked, makes no difference. You have got to learn to dodge bullets in school and kindergarten in this NovaAmerica of the wily and wild West; in our own streets-of-battlefields, sooner or later. What is the point of all this grim, pondering dirge, I ask, when there are no longer principles around other than glorying in victory? No code in sight other than the law of domination. When there is no precept, other than the doctrine of Hannibal, Attila, Gengis Khan, Caesar: Veni, Vidi, Vici--I Come, I See, I Conquer.

War.

Soldiering.

War.

Dominate.

War.

Militarize...civilians too.

Make the country--all countries, into a great boot camp: "Mine is not to question 'why?', mine is but to do or die!"

In memorial to great Roman Legions, create anew great World Battalions: bastions of the perfect flesh and blood machina, the Universal Soldier-Citizen. The West will not be content conquering half of the world. The West wants the whole world. The entire pie. All of the economy.

"It's only a bunch of backwoods Balkan Slavs and backward 'Wag The Dog' Albanians. Thousands and thousands of miles--at world's end. A place called the Balkans. What would any red-blooded, good and white, Anglo-Saxon-Protestant and clean-cut Yank boy know about a place called Balkans, for Christ sake? It's not the same as Philly or the Liberty Bell, or Yosemite National Park, the DOW-JONES AVERAGE or apple pie. What a fuss about a pack of goddamn Balkan hicks and hillbillies, rednecks out o' the sticks, being leveled to dust. Big frigging Jack-shit deal."

That's the people over us, Alexis: 'In Gold We Trust' is what the greenback should read as someone said.

The people whose boot-sole we're under.

The same oppression and colonialism the Irish, the Scots, the Welsh--the Kelts-- have been trying to throw off for 700 years, bless them, so as not to be assimilated into a permanent kind of tyrannical affair. The West's breed of oppressors is a lineage of people, present throughout history and throughout the globe, in every race, creed and epoch, that is arrogant, overbearing, absolute, bloated. One that feeds on anguish, suffering and the shaming of others.

Patriots, Alexis, at least the ones I hold in esteem, are not those people. They are not the Generals or Attilas, the NATOs or Hannibals, not the CIAs or Stalins. They are the Martin Luther Kings, the Lincolns and Bravehearts, the Nathan Hales and Leonidases, Patrick Henrys, Gandhis and Joan d'Arcs. People like the Russians--and overall Soviets--who with bravery and sensible internal strength realized a mistake, accepted it and corrected it without bloodshed and with the wholehearted help and camaraderie aid of old order America and old order Europe.

These had been peace-loving people, Alexis; who as well cared and had a special love of life, of their country and of liberty in their hearts. But, when their freedom was tampered with, trampled upon, they fought the oppressor. Not embrace him. Kicked him out. Not roll out the red carpet for him. Had not bowed their heads and bleat like sheep...]

The letter ends:

[...Yes, Jeff and Cary, Jim and Don it's my shame that my little country has no choice other than to be in NATO; and it's your shame that your great country--awarely and with its leaders' blessings--did so zealously with such fervent dedication and devotion the greatest damage to the greatest number of defenseless/innocent civilians: Think of it, 2,000 dead, 8,000 wounded, uninvolved and simple folk as those of Mai Lai. Cart this, too, on your conscience...and we all do have one. The Russians in Chechnya have ample 'good and proper' example to follow and go by. Thanks to the US, NATO, the UN and to the 'Vietnam-days-displayed wisdom' of its leaders.

Sincerely,

Vasilis Afxentiou]

Vasilis Afxentiou is an ESL/EFL teacher in Athens, Greece. He has been teaching English on-and-off since 1968, and full-time since 1985. Prior to that he worked as a Technical Specifications Writer for seven years and as an Engineer for five years. He has also studied music formally at the Hellenic Conservatory having majored in the classical guitar.

He was born in Thessaloniki, Greece. He went to college and university in the United States where he received his degrees.

Vasilis's writing credits include published fiction and non-fiction appearing both in Greece, Europe, Australia, Canada and in the USA. A few stateside and other, paper and e-publications he has written for are Writer's Choice, Greek Accent, Salon DAarte, Akkadian, National Herald (Proini), and Crosscurrents. His writing includes short stories (literary, fantasy and science fiction), articles and essays (mostly travelogues and health diets), a theatrical play, five novels, a novella, and a book of short stories; all in English and/or in Greek. Some of his longer works of fiction can be found at:

1. http://www.ebooksonthe.net/horrorscifi.html
2. http://www.m-pro.demon.co.uk/bookstore.html
3. http://www.zeus-publications.com/page5.html
4. http://www.booksonscreen.com
5. http://www.amazon.com
6. http://shop.barnesandnoble.com
7. http://www.xlibris.com
8. http://www.borders.com

Vasilis has received several Distinctive Certificates from WD Writing Competitions held over the years, and also Honorary Mention in his Greek literary work in Athens.

In Greece he's been published in 30-Days, Key Travel News, Greece's Weekly, Athena Magazine, The Athens Star newspaper, fragments of his work appeared in ELT NEWS, and has been invited to be published in the poetry anthology of Contemporary Greek Poets, Vol. III.