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Hmm, comments about hyperbole and then a statement such as "there has never been a regime as evil as the Nazis..." At the very least this is an incredibly subjective statement. What about the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Stalin in Russia, the Chinese in Tibet (and Xinjiang?)? Perhaps they fail the test on numbers alone but there's little doubt that one, some or all of these examples (and more) rank pretty high on the evil-ometer. In the words of Michael Franti - hypocrisy is the greatest luxury, raise the double standard.

Well, Adrian, that might be a valid point. The competition for "Most Evil Regime" does not necessarily have a clear winner. If you want to pile the Nazis, Stalin, and the Khmer Rouge together as tied for #1, that's fine with me. But I think you'll agree, no matter how much you detest them, the Bush Administration doesn't come close to matching any of them, so my original point is unchanged. When Pinter says the US is "the most dangerous power that had ever existed," he's engaging in a vast intellectual untruth. And he knows it.

I can tell this is going to get me berated but here goes anyway: From where I sit, the only problem with Pinter's statement is that he didn't preface it with 'Have the potential to be...'. The apparatus is already in place militarily and pretty much there socially. Most of the major information networks appear (to a UK citizen) to be very hesitant to criticise the policy decisions WRT the war against terror and WMD. The powers that be are both willing and able to ride rough-shod over global opinion and use spurious evidence as justification for whatever action they see fit. In the wrong hands this power and attitude has a lot of potential for harm. I realise that this is paranoid but I'm currently fairly incensed over Bush and Blair's behaviour. After all no-one likes to be lied to.

Adrian - you said 'No one likes to be lied to:' That's true. Before the war in Afghanistan, anti-war activists told us that millions would die of starvation and that it would be another Vietnam. Anti-war activist Noam Chomsky claimed that the US was carrying out a ‘secret genocide’ against the Afghans and was deliberately planning to kill millions of them. Then they told us about the ‘massacre’ in Jenin. They told us they were for marching for peace while shouting ‘long live the intifada’ and they compared Bush to Caligula, and..Hitler. Before the Iraq war, the anti-war crowd told us that the street fighting in Baghdad would turn into another Stalingrad, that Saddam was elected and Bush was not, that the war would drag on for years..oh, yes they also carried signs that said Bush=Hitler. After the war, they told us that US negligence was responsible for the theft of thousands of antiquities, that our cultural heritage was being plundered and it was all Rumsfeld’s fault..then they told us.. Well, I could go on and on about their lies but back to the point.. This Bush=Hitler routine has as much credibility as the theories that the moon landings were faked. Fiction is all about things that have the ‘potential to be’ and fiction is Pinter’s specialty. Every human being has the potential to do great things, to do terrible things, to die tomorrow. When he make up stories about things that could potentially happen, it's just more fiction.

Oops – that should be Leningrad (and I saw Enemy at the Gates twice)

Adrian, I don't know exactly what you mean by “berate” (“to scold or condemn vehemently and at length”) as it is one thing to engage in ad hominem against a person (something I strive not to do) and another to condemn an argument on its merits. But I'll give you the “at length” part. Your initial reply showed you were closer to agreeing with Pinter than me, and I tried not to “berate” you then. As for not liking being lied to, it's hard not to agree with that. I think the argument is over whether what happened qualified as lies, and most importantly, whether we yet have enough information to judge that. If you believe Blair lied about WMD, then you must also believe that Blix, French and German intelligence, and a host of others lied as well. All agreed there was evidence Iraq had not given up all of their WMD. That's why there had been years of UN inspections. The debate was over how to finally correct that ... more inspections or war. I, too, am most curious to know exactly what the truth is on Iraq's WMD. Only when we know it can we determine who lied, and who was simply very wrong. But we don't have that truth yet, we just have a lack of evidence. Just as we have a lack of evidence that Saddam's corpus was in Iraq when we invaded. He, or his body (or his doubles, or his sons) have yet to be found. But that doesn't prove he doesn't exist, it just proves that we don't know the full truth yet. I'm sorry you think that Blair purposefully lied to you. But even if he did, did he do it from an office with lampshades made of human skin? Did he sign the order dispatching troops to Iraq alongside an order to execute The Final Solution? Someone who lies to you is a bad person. Someone who lies to you, and sends your neighbors to death camps while taking over a continent is several orders of magnitude beyond simply “bad.” As for “have the potential to be...”, well, we've all got potential, don't we? Instead of typing this out, I have the potential to hop a plane to Britain and try to track you down to beat you senseless. Britain had the potential of solving the Irish troubles with two or three well placed nukes. The US, for 50 years now, has had the potential to kill every person in the world several times over (nevermind seize every oil field in the Middle East and hold the world ransom). There is the “potential” for all kinds of madness. A host of countries have the potential to use their powerful WMD against their own people, just to keep them down. But only one ruler has ever done that. He's now either dead or fled. But I don't totally rule out the possibility that you're right, at least about “manipulation” of WMD evidence (not the potential of Bush/Blair=Hitler). And I can assure you, if that kind of evidence ever comes to light in the US, it will create a political firestorm of massive proportions. As I'm sure it would in Britain. But something like that will only happen when the truth is known, in a documentable manner. We don't know what that truth is, because we don't have it yet.

US billionaires have always behaved like nazis. Take Guatemala for example! 1954. The democratically elected president starts to give land to poor people. But US agro multinationals want slaves/salarymen paid a dime to work the land for them. They do not want to have to deal with independant farmers. They do not want to pay them a fair price for their productions. The price flutuations on the market ruled by huge corporate buyers are the "soft" way to help little peasants go bankrupt in order to buy their lands for a dime. Dozens of millions of farmers on Earth lost everything thanks to the "market". They now live in slums. In 1954 US agro-business billionaires and the CIA chose the hard way: to this day Guatemala has lived in nazi hell. 100000 deaths. US couch potatoes are brainwashed from their birth til their death. Soviet citizens were brainwashed too. CIA TV owns you all. CIA = Heroes. Like on soviet TV: KGB = Heroes. German Reich propaganda: Nazis = Heroes. Indonesia 1965. Between 1000000 and 3000000 deaths. Thanks CIA. Champagne for US multinationals, billionaires. Corea. Vietnam. A few millions more. US gunmen are on the ground helping more than 100 dictatorships on this Earth. Today. How many million deaths? How many hundreds of million enslaved? US billionaires funded Hitler: Ford and Wall Street bankers; they even tried to organize a coup in the USA to have their own Hitler puppet at home. Bush is merely one more puppet for the bloody oligarchy. A lot of money. A lot of power. ALWAYS MORE. Whatever the human cost. They do not care. They are not the ones to die. They are not the enslaved salarymen.

UBEENBRAINWASHEDBYTV posted anonymously from IP 80.8.54.127, which has valid reverse DNS of ca-sqy-1-127.w80-8.abo.wanadoo.fr You're posting from France, and detest the US. What a surprise. My bet would be that anyone who uses the phrase "enslaved salarymen" hasn't spent much time in the US. Such a "code word" phrase, as well, comrade. But thank you for your illuminating opinion.

Pinter is wrong to compare Nazi Germany with Nazi America. One had a 12 year history of genocide and had previously produced the most astronomical geniuses (in literature, philosophy, MUSIC and science the world has ever seen). The other has a 200 year history of genocide (and counting) and never managed to produce ANYONE of any worth--certainly none to place alongside Bach, Beethoven, Goethe, Paul Celan, Brahms, Einstein, Heine, Plank, Heisenberg....a mile-long list of names the LEAST of whom utterly eclipse anything produced in the vile and worthless septic tank we call 'America'.

“Pinter is wrong to compare Nazi Germany with Nazi America. One had a 12 year history of genocide and had previously produced the most astronomical geniuses (in literature, philosophy, MUSIC and science the world has ever seen).” Da Vinci was German? Aristotle? Copernicus? Faulkner? The Beatles? Stephen Hawking? What about the acknowledged genius of comedy (at least in France) Jerry Lewis? Not very many famous funny Germans, are there? However, in a mere 12 years, they managed to be responsible for about 30 million deaths ... 6 million Jews, 22 million Russians, hundreds of thousands of Poles, Brits, French, Americans, etc., etc., etc. Those are certainly numbers to brag about. “The other has a 200 year history of genocide (and counting)...” Ah, yes, let's go back to the times when mankind didn't even have the sense to bathe once a week (it's possible they made some other mistakes, too). And let's look at just who brought slavery to North America, and who committed knowing (and unknowing) genocide against millions of Native Americans. The answer: Europeans, long before there was a country known as America. Next, let's look at who has freed people from oppression/invasion within their own countries, in places like Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and now Iraq: America. Now, name me one other country who has put their troops at risk to free another country (or people) in the past 50 years, and done it without America by their side (usually in dominant numbers). “....and never managed to produce ANYONE of any worth--certainly none to place alongside Bach, Beethoven, Goethe, Paul Celan, Brahms, Einstein, Heine, Plank, Heisenberg....a mile-long list of names the LEAST of whom utterly eclipse anything produced in the vile and worthless septic tank we call 'America'.” No, let's truly go to “the LEAST”: Hitler, Goebbels, and Goering. Every American eclipses them, just by taking a breath without killing someone. But if you're right, and America has never produced anyone of any worth, that would have to include you, wouldn't it? Your IP is in the Southern US. And if you weren't born here, why did you come here? Better yet, if you think you live in a septic tank, why do you stay? Or is it all just hot rhetoric paired with frigid inaction (other than the effort it took to search for “Pinter and Iraq” and find this place to dump your turgid troll)?

Our serpent-handling loon of an attorney general would doubtless be impressed with your IP-snooping surveillance of potential subversives. Keep up the fine work! Having created the Taliban from scratch and patiently nursed their psychoses, America turns on their former colleagues with lethal rage, failing to capture or kill their intended target but successfully carbonizing thousands of innocent afghans, a good many of them, children. America's path of destruction then veered toward yet another former client, Mr. Hussein, having already devastated his country and killed over a million of his citizens through a combination of ruthless bombing and pitiless sanctions dubbed "genocidal" by both the human rights community and two former heads of the UN humanitarian assistance program for Iraq (both of whom resigned in disgust). ...these and other abominations you hold up as examples of America's "helping hand" in the world, (or had you intended your remarks as an illustrative example of "the genius of comedy")?

I'm not sure why I should bother responding to your questions when you ignore all of mine. But one final point... “Our serpent-handling loon of an attorney general would doubtless be impressed with your IP-snooping surveillance of potential subversives. Keep up the fine work!” You haven't been on the Net very long, have you? Tracing an IP number is the simplest of tasks for anyone connected to the Net, and the software by which you commented on this site saves your IP number by default (on hundreds of thousands of weblogs, not just mine). It's only slightly more difficult than attaching an e-mail address to your name when you comment here, as most who stand by their words (or have something constructive to say) are willing to do. In addition, you clearly have no clue of my opinion about John Ashcroft, but it's all over this site. Rather than engage, you simply want to spew your hatred for the US. Mission accomplished. Thread closed. We're all proud. Go have an imported beer.