This year's Nobel Prize winner in literature, Harold Pinter, has some tough words to say about both the United States and the United Kingdom:
On Wednesday his lecture, entitled Art, Truth and Politics, studied the importance of truth in art before decrying its perceived absence in politics.
He said politicians feel it is "essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives".
Pinter said the US justification for invading Iraq - that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction - "was not true".
"The truth is something entirely different," Pinter added. "The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it."
I agree with Pinter about the politicians' desire to have us live in ignorance, and most people indeed live in almost total ignorance of the world events and their hidden underpinnings. Maybe there is no other way of enduring it all, but we probably would have a better society if more people had the time and energy to be informed and active. Maybe.