Posted on 12/22/2001 8:19:45 AM PST by aculeus
Arthur Miller, America's greatest living playwright, will speak out against the Bush administration for abusing civil rights, in a BBC interview to be broadcast on Christmas Day.
Miller was called before Senator McCarthy's Un-American Activities Committee in the crusade against supposed left-wingers in 1956 and wrote one of his greatest plays, The Crucible, in response to it. He says he now fears the United States is using the war on terrorism to "increase its power over civil rights". Miller's words make him the highest-profile figure in the American arts world to take issue with President Bush's stance.
In the interview with the BBC World Service, he refers to Mr Bush's emergency order that allows non-Americans accused of helping terrorist enemies to be tried outside normal courts by military tribunals. Twenty million immigrants and visitors fall within its scope.
Miller says of the new law: "The government now is taking advantage of it ... and using it as a way of increasing its power over civil rights and so on, by this business of creating military courts for terrorists."
Asked by Ritula Shah, presenter of The World Today, whether he thinks the world has changed since 11 September, he says: "The confrontation of a mass dying is a traumatic experience even for the dullest mind and I think people were drawn together, but I question whether this is a long-term effect." Asked how events have forced American attitudes to change, he says: "I think that more people are prepared now ... to inquire as to why we are so hated in so many places.
"It comes as a big surprise to a lot of people who have always accepted that American foreign policy was beneficent."
Unlike Joe McCarthy, Miller's hero Stalin actually killed those he falsely accused.
Note to Independent Editors: Hire someone who knows that Senator McCarthy could not possibly have headed the House's Un-American Activities Committee.
If there are 20 million illegal immigrants helping terrorist, then hell yeah, try them all!
Most inquiring minds would really ask if such a statement is true -- most likely it's propaganda.
Guess what, I don't give a rat's ass to why we are hated in so many places. F'em. I don't care about being liked.
What's the competition? "Death of a Salesman" is his only good play, and he wrote that a long time ago. Meantime all the other half-way decent American playwrights (Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill) happened to die before he did.
In the long perspective, even "Death of a Salesman" is pretty minor work.
If true, no very great distinction.
I am starting a project to clone Eugene O'Neill. Please give generously.
Dang, I forgot Tennesse Williams! Him too.
Okay, but please delete the alcoholism genes.
And it is the worst sort of melodramatic soap opera there is.
Sounds like a line from any one of his plays, trite and overdone.
In March 1949, New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel played host to one of the strangest gatherings in American history. Less than four years after Allied troops had liberated Hitler's concentration camps, 800 prominent literary and artistic figures congregated in the Waldorf to call for peace at any price with Stalin, whose own gulag had just been restocked with victims of his latest purge. Americans, including Lillian Hellman, Aaron Copland, Arthur Miller, and a young Norman Mailer, joined with European and Soviet delegates to repudiate "US warmongering." Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich told the delegates that "a small clique of hatemongers" was preparing a global conflagration; he urged progressive artists to struggle against the new "Fascists'' who were seeking world domination. American panelists echoed the Russian composer's fear of a new conflict. Playwright Clifford Odets denounced the ``enemies of Man'' and claimed the United States had been agitated into ``a state of holy terror'' by fraudulent reports of Soviet aggression; composer Copland declared "the present policies of the American Government will lead inevitably into a third world war."
Extremely delicate surgery, as those genes are often intertwined with the writing genes.
Shaw 'nuff.
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