title: Radio Free Asia

text: After the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, American interest in starting a government broadcasting organization grew. A more concrete concept for such an organization aimed towards Asian countries was first presented by then Senator of Delaware Joe Biden, and later became a part of President Bill Clinton's platform during his 1992 presidential campaign. The International Broadcasting Act was passed by the Congress of the United States and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, officially establishing Radio Free Asia.


title: Radio Free Asia

text: Radio Free Asia was incorporated in March 1996, and began broadcasting in September 1996. Although RFA directors preferred to broadcast under the name "the Asia-Pacific Network", Republican representatives including Chris Smith and Jesse Helms insisted on returning the name to Radio Free Asia before broadcasting began, to which president Richard Richter complied. Radio Free Asia was forced to change the name in part due to financial pressures from the US government, for although they operated with an independent board, their initial $10 million dollar annual budget came from the Treasury.


title: Radio Free Asia

text: In 1997, the then US Deputy Secretary of State, Strobe Talbott, began talks with the government of Australia to purchase abandoned transmission facilities near Darwin, Northern Territory for the purpose of expanding RFA's signal to overcome jamming. Richter personally lobbied in Canberra to support this effort. Although the Australian Government intended to sell the facilities to a foreign broadcaster, preference was given to the BBC over the fledgling RFA due to fears that such a sale would anger China, with Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs Alexander Downer stating, "we are certainly not in the game of provocatively damaging our relations with China."


title: Radio Free Asia

text: In response to radio jamming efforts from China, Newt Gingrich and House Republican leaders helped to increase the budget of RFA and VOA, with further funding of RFA proposed as a way to combat China's political repression without levying trade restrictions that would anger American businesses.


title: Radio Free Asia

text: With the passage of the International Broadcasting Act in 1994, RFA was brought under auspices of the United States Information Agency where it remained until the agency's cessation of broadcasting duties and transitioned to U.S. Department of State operated Broadcasting Board of Governors in 1999. In September 2009, the 111th Congress amended the International Broadcasting Act to allow a one-year extension of the operation of Radio Free Asia.


title: Radio Free Asia

text: RFA broadcasts in nine languages, via shortwave, satellite transmissions, medium-wave (AM and FM radio), and through the Internet. The first transmission was in Mandarin Chinese and it is RFA's most broadcast language at twelve hours per day. RFA also broadcasts in Cantonese, Tibetan (Kham, Amdo, and Uke dialects), Uyghur, Burmese, Vietnamese, Lao, Khmer (to Cambodia) and Korean (to North Korea). The Korean service launched in 1997 with Jaehoon Ahn as its founding director. Broadcasts in Khmer to Cambodia that began under the country's communist regime continue despite the country no longer being communist. In 2017, RFA and other networks, such as Voice of America, were put under the then newly created U.S. Agency for Global Media that also sends representatives to its board of directors.


title: Radio Free Asia

text: Three RFA reporters were denied access to China to cover U.S. President Bill Clinton's visit in June 1998. The Chinese embassy in Washington had initially granted visas to the three but revoked them shortly before President Clinton left Washington en route to Beijing. The White House and United States Department of State filed complaints with Chinese authorities over the matter but the reporters ultimately did not make the trip.


title: Radio Free Asia

text: The Vietnamese-language broadcast signal was also jammed by the Vietnamese government from the beginning. Human rights legislation has been proposed in Congress that would allocate money to counter the jamming. Research by the OpenNet Initiative, a project that monitors Internet filtering by governments worldwide, showed that the Vietnamese-language portion of the Radio Free Asia website was blocked by both of the tested ISPs in Vietnam, while the English-language portion was blocked by one of the two ISPs.


title: Radio Free Asia

text: To address radio jamming and Internet blocking by the governments of the countries that it broadcasts to, the RFA website contains instruction on how to create anti-jamming antennas and information on web proxies.


title: Radio Free Asia

text: On March 30, 2010, China's domestic internet censor, known as the Great Firewall, temporarily blocked all Google searches in China, due to an unintentional association with the long-censored term "rfa". According to Google, the letters, associated with Radio Free Asia, were appearing in the URLs of all Google searches, thereby triggering China's filter to block search results.


title: Radio Free Asia

text: In 2014–2015 China arrested three brothers of RFA Uyghur Service journalist Shohret Hoshur. Their jailing was widely described by Western publishers as Chinese authorities' efforts to target Hoshur for his reports on otherwise unreported violent events of the Xinjiang conflict. Much larger numbers of relatives of RFA's Uyghur-language staff have since been detained, including the family of Gulchehra Hoja.


title: Radio Free Asia

text: RFA is the only station outside China that broadcasts in the Uyghur language. It has been recognized by journalists of "The Atlantic", "The Washington Post", "The New York Times", and "The Economist" for playing a role in exposing Xinjiang internment camps. In particular, "The New York Times" regards RFA as one of the few reliable sources of information about Xinjiang.


title: Radio Free Asia

text: In 2018, after RFA Journalist Gulchehra Hoja published an interview with an individual who had been detained in the Xinjiang internment camps, Chinese authorities detained approximately two dozen of Hoja's relatives. Later that year, Chinese authorities forcibly disappeared two brothers and five cousins of an editor for RFA's Uyghur language service.


title: Radio Free Asia

text: "National Review" has reported that as of 2021, eight of Radio Free Asia's fifteen staff of Uyghur ethnicity have family members who are detained in the Xinjiang internment camps.


title: Radio Free Asia

text: Additionally, the International Broadcasting Act of 1994 (Title III of ), which authorized the creation of the RFA, contains the following paragraph:


title: Radio Free Asia

text: In 1999, Catharin Dalpino of the Brookings Institution, a former assistant secretary deputy for human rights, called Radio Free Asia "a waste of money" and elaborated that she believed its goals had more to do with domestic political symbolism than with supporting democratic movements in Asia, stating that "Wherever we feel there is an ideological enemy, we're going to have a Radio Free Something." Dalpino said she had reviewed scripts of RFA's broadcasts and viewed the station's reporting as unbalanced due to focus on the testimony of dissidents in exile rather than the events occurring in the countries themselves. Lynne Weil, a director of communications and external affairs for the U.S. Agency for Global Media, has disputed descriptions of government-funded outlets as propaganda, referring to outlets such as BBC as examples of non-propagandist journalism funded by a government entity. In 2001, Richter stated that congressional interference in the organization was minimal, saying that he "wanted to make sure we weren't just getting set up to be a kill-the-Commie organization."


title: Radio Free Asia

text: Monroe Price, director of the Center for Global Communication Studies, described RFA as "a modern iteration of Cold War use of the airwaves, emphasizing a turn from the traditional Cold War targets to new ones" and argued that the goals of RFA prove that the "instruments of international broadcasting are a reflection of the priorities and internal politics of the sending nation."


title: Radio Free Asia

text: Vietnamese newspapers such as the state-run "Nhân Dân" have criticized the goals of RFA and broadcasts into the country, with a writer for "Nhân Dân" accusing the network of attempting to "interfere in other countries' internal affairs."


title: Radio Free Asia

text: Chinese citizens calling in to RFA have expressed a wide range of opinions on the network, both positive and negative, many calling from pay phones to hide their identities.


title: Jumanji (franchise)

text: Jumanji is an American media franchise, based on the children's books "Jumanji" (1981) and its sequel "Zathura" (2002), written by Chris Van Allsburg. The first film was produced by TriStar Pictures, and subsequent films by Columbia Pictures, both subsidiaries of Sony Pictures. The franchise follows the adventures of various people who find themselves imperiled when playing an enchanted game that comes with a variety of dangerous jungle elements that the players must survive as they play. Ultimately, the only way to end the disruptions is to finish the game while enduring its dangers.


title: Jumanji (franchise)

text: The franchise includes four films: "Jumanji" (1995), "" (2005), "" (2017), and "" (2019); and an animated television series which aired from 1996 to 1999. The first film received mixed reviews from critics, while the three follow-up films received positive critical response. The films have grossed $2 billion collectively at the global box office.


title: Jumanji (franchise)

text: Two children, Peter and Judy, find and play a game in which each roll of the dice brings the jungle from the game (as well as the creatures that live in it) to life around them. In order to reset the world around them, they must finish the game and make it to the titular city of gold. Afterward, they get rid of the game which is found by their next-door neighbors, two young brothers.


title: Jumanji (franchise)

text: Brothers Danny and Walter, neighbors of Peter and Judy from the previous book, find "Jumanji" but ultimately choose not to play it. Instead, they find a similar game on the same board with a space theme, "Zathura", which they begin to play. As with "Jumanji", playing "Zathura" brings elements of the game into reality, and in order to set everything back to normal, the boys must complete the game.


title: Jumanji (franchise)

text: Two children find and play a magical board game. In doing so, they release a man trapped for decades in its inner dimension and a host of dangers from the jungle that can only be stopped by finishing the game.


title: Jumanji (franchise)

text: Two young brothers are drawn into an intergalactic adventure when their house is hurled through the depths of space by the magical board game they are playing. Furthermore, the brothers surmise the only way to return home is to finish the game.


title: Jumanji (franchise)

text: Though there are no direct references to "Jumanji" in "Zathura: A Space Adventure" and the movie's plot is self-contained, the studio marketed it as being set within the same fictional universe, and is thematically similar to the other franchise installments. The film is based on the children's book "Zathura", also written by Van Allsburg, which was a sequel to the "Jumanji" novel. Despite the film's placement within the same fictional universe, director Jon Favreau discouraged the notion that the film is a sequel, having not particularly liked "Jumanji".


title: Jumanji (franchise)

text: Twenty-two years after the events of the original film, the board game has magically become a video game. Four high school teenagers are transported to the game's jungle setting and become the avatars of the characters they chose, and later discover another victim trapped in the game as well. The only way out is to complete the game and in doing so, they each discover the best of themselves and win with a newfound heroism to see the challenge through. The film served as a direct sequel to the 1995 film.


title: Jumanji (franchise)

text: The team of friends return to Jumanji to rescue one of their own but discover that nothing is as they expect. The players need to brave parts unknown, from arid deserts to snowy mountains, in order to escape the world's most dangerous game.


title: Jumanji (franchise)

text: In December 2019, Dwayne Johnson revealed that the next installment in the franchise would reveal that the villain from "The Next Level", Jurgen the Brutal, was an avatar in the game and that the identity of who was playing as the character would be explored.


title: Jumanji (franchise)

text: In March 2020, Jake Kasdan confirmed early developments for a follow-up film. Kasdan confirmed plans to maintain the core cast of the previous two films. The following month, the filmmaker stated that the story for the next installment is in development. In October 2022, producer Hiram Garcia stated that Kasdan will begin production on the next "Jumanji" movie, following the completing his directorial responsibilities on "Red One".


title: Jumanji (franchise)

text: Jumanji was an animated television series inspired by the 1995 film which ran for three seasons from 1996 to 1999.


title: Jumanji (franchise)

text: "Jumanji: A Jungle Adventure" is a video game released exclusively in North America for Microsoft Windows on October 9, 1996. It was developed by Studio Interactive and published by Philips Interactive Media. It contains five different action-arcade-based minigames that are based on popular scenes from the film.


title: Jumanji (franchise)

text: "Zathura" is an action-adventure video game developed by High Voltage Software and published by 2K Games. It was released on November 3, 2005 for PlayStation 2 and Xbox.


title: Jumanji (franchise)

text: "Jumanji" is a party video game released exclusively in Europe for the PlayStation 2 on 2006, developed by Atomic Planet Entertainment and published by Blast! Entertainment.


title: Jumanji (franchise)

text: Fujishoji released a Pachinko game in 2007, using clips from the film and also 3D rendered CGI anime character designs for the game as part of the screen interaction.


title: Jumanji (franchise)

text: "Jumanji: The Mobile Game" was a mobile game based on the 2017 film "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle" developed by Idiocracy Games and published by NHN Entertainment, and released for Android and iOS on December 14, 2017. The game was removed from Google Play and App Store on May 2, 2018, and its service ended on May 24.


title: Jumanji (franchise)

text: "Jumanji: The VR Adventure" was a virtual reality experience based on the 2017 film "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle". Developed by MWM Immersive and published by Sony Pictures Virtual Reality, it was released on Steam for HTC Vive on January 17, 2018. Although it was announced that the experience would be released on Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR, the releases were canceled, as the game was heavily criticized for its poor graphics and hardware performance. It was delisted from Steam on February 9, 2018.


title: Jumanji (franchise)

text: "Jumanji: The Video Game" is an action-adventure video game developed by Funsolve and published by Outright Games. Based on "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle" and "Jumanji: The Next Level", it was released on November 8, 2019 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and Microsoft Windows.


title: Grendel

text: Grendel is a character in the Anglo-Saxon epic poem "Beowulf" (700–1000). He is one of the poem's three antagonists (along with his mother and the dragon), all aligned in opposition against the protagonist Beowulf. Grendel is feared by all in Heorot but Beowulf. A descendant of Cain, Grendel is described as "a creature of darkness, exiled from happiness and accursed of God, the destroyer and devourer of our human kind". He is usually depicted as a monster or a giant, although his status as a monster, giant, or other form of supernatural being is not clearly described in the poem and thus remains the subject of scholarly debate. The character of Grendel and his role in the story of "Beowulf" have been subject to numerous reinterpretations and re-imaginings.


title: Grendel

text: Grendel is a character in the poem "Beowulf," preserved in the "Nowell Codex". Grendel, being cursed as the descendant of the Biblical Cain, is "harrowed" by the sounds of singing that come every night from the mead-hall of Heorot built by King Hrothgar. He is unable to bear it any more and attacks Heorot. Grendel continues to attack the Hall every night for twelve years, killing its inhabitants and making this magnificent mead-hall unusable. To add to his monstrous description the poet details how Grendel consumes the men he kills; "now that he could hope to eat his fill."


title: Grendel

text: Beowulf hears of these attacks and leaves his native land of the Geats to destroy Grendel. He is warmly welcomed by King Hrothgar, who gives a banquet in celebration. Afterwards Beowulf and his warriors bed down in the mead hall to await the inevitable attack of the creature. Grendel stalks outside the building for a time, spying the warriors inside. He then makes a sudden attack, bursting the door with his fists and continuing through the entry. The first warrior Grendel finds is still asleep, so he seizes the man and devours him. Grendel grabs a second warrior, but is shocked when the warrior grabs back with fearsome strength. As Grendel attempts to disengage, the reader discovers that Beowulf is that second warrior. Beowulf uses neither weapon nor armour in this fight. He also places no reliance on his companions and had no need of them. He trusts that God has given him strength to defeat Grendel, whom he believes is God's adversary. Finally Beowulf tears off Grendel's arm, mortally wounding the creature. Grendel flees but dies in his marsh den. There, Beowulf later engages in a fierce battle with Grendel's mother, over whom he triumphs even if only thanks to a sword found on-site. Following her death, Beowulf finds Grendel's corpse and removes his head, which he keeps as a trophy. Beowulf then returns to the surface and to his men at the "ninth hour" (l. 1600, "nōn", about 3 pm). He returns to Heorot, where a grateful Hrothgar showers him with gifts.


title: Grendel

text: In 1936, J. R. R. Tolkien's "" discussed Grendel and the dragon in "Beowulf". Tolkien argues that "the evil spirits took visible shape" in the characters of Grendel and the dragon; however, the author's concern is focused on Beowulf. Tolkien points out that while Grendel has Christian origins as the descendant of Cain, he "cannot be dissociated from the creatures of northern myth." Tolkien also argues for the importance of Grendel's role in the poem as an "eminently suitable beginning" that sets the stage for Beowulf's fight with the dragon: "Triumph over the lesser and more nearly human is cancelled by defeat before the older and more elemental." Tolkien's essay was the first work of scholarship in which Anglo-Saxon literature was seriously examined on its literary merits – not just for scholarship about the origins of the English language, or what historical information could be gleaned from the text, as was common in the 19th century. Tolkien also wrote his own translation of "Beowulf", entitled , between 1920 and 1926.


title: Grendel

text: During the decades following Tolkien's essay, the exact description of Grendel was debated by scholars. Indeed, because his exact appearance is never directly described in Old English by the original "Beowulf" poet, part of the debate revolves around what is known, namely his descent from the biblical Cain (the first murderer in the Bible). Grendel is called a "sceadugenga" – "shadow walker", in other words "night goer" – given that the monster was repeatedly described to be in the shroud of darkness.


title: Grendel

text: Some scholars have linked Grendel's descent from Cain to the monsters and giants of the "Cain tradition".


title: Grendel

text: Seamus Heaney, in , writes in lines 1351–1355 that Grendel is vaguely human in shape, though much larger:


title: Grendel

text: Heaney's translation of lines 1637–1639 also notes that Grendel's disembodied head is so large that it takes four men to transport it. Furthermore, in lines 983–989, when Grendel's torn arm is inspected, Heaney describes it as being covered in impenetrable scales and horny growths:


title: Grendel

text: Alfred Bammesgerber looks closely at line 1266 where Grendel's ancestry is said to be the "misbegotten spirits" that sprang from Cain after he was cursed. He argues that the words in Old English, "geosceaftgasta," should be translated "the great former creation of spirits".


title: Grendel

text: Peter Dickinson (1979) argued that seeing as the considered distinction between man and beast at the time the poem was written was simply man's bipedalism, the given description of Grendel being man-like does not necessarily imply that Grendel is meant to be humanoid, going as far as stating that Grendel could easily have been a bipedal dragon.


title: Grendel

text: Other scholars such as Sherman Kuhn (1979) have questioned Grendel's description as a monster, stating:


title: Grendel

text: Katherine O'Keefe has suggested that Grendel resembles a berserker, because of numerous associations that seem to point to this possibility.


title: Grendel

text: Sonya R. Jensen argues for an identification between Grendel and Agnar, son of Ingeld, and suggests that the tale of the first two monsters is actually the tale of Ingeld, as mentioned by Alcuin in the 790s. The tale of Agnar tells how he was cut in half by the warrior Bothvar Bjarki ("Warlike little Bear"), and how he died "with his lips separated into a smile". One major parallel between Agnar and Grendel would thus be that the monster of the poem has a name perhaps composed of a combination of the words "gren" and "daelan". The poet may be stressing to his audience that Grendel "died laughing", or that he was "gren-dael[ed]" or "grin-divid[ed]", after having his arm torn off at the shoulder by Beowulf, whose name means "bee-wolf" or "bear".


title: Harold Pinter

text: Harold Pinter (; 10 October 1930 – 24 December 2008) was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include "The Birthday Party" (1957), "The Homecoming" (1964) and "Betrayal" (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include "The Servant" (1963), "The Go-Between" (1971), "The French Lieutenant's Woman" (1981), "The Trial" (1993) and "Sleuth" (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television and film productions of his own and others' works.


title: Harold Pinter

text: Pinter was born and raised in Hackney, east London, and educated at Hackney Downs School. He was a sprinter and a keen cricket player, acting in school plays and writing poetry. He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but did not complete the course. He was fined for refusing national service as a conscientious objector. Subsequently, he continued training at the Central School of Speech and Drama and worked in repertory theatre in Ireland and England. In 1956 he married actress Vivien Merchant and had a son, Daniel, born in 1958. He left Merchant in 1975 and married author Lady Antonia Fraser in 1980.


title: Harold Pinter

text: Pinter's career as a playwright began with a production of "The Room" in 1957. His second play, "The Birthday Party", closed after eight performances but was enthusiastically reviewed by critic Harold Hobson. His early works were described by critics as "comedy of menace". Later plays such as "No Man's Land" (1975) and "Betrayal" (1978) became known as "memory plays". He appeared as an actor in productions of his own work on radio and film, and directed nearly 50 productions for stage, theatre and screen. Pinter received over 50 awards, prizes and other honours, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005 and the French Légion d'honneur in 2007.


title: Harold Pinter

text: Despite frail health after being diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in December 2001, Pinter continued to act on stage and screen, last performing the title role of Samuel Beckett's one-act monologue "Krapp's Last Tape", for the 50th anniversary season of the Royal Court Theatre, in October 2006. He died from liver cancer on 24 December 2008.


title: Harold Pinter

text: Pinter was born on 10 October 1930, in Hackney, east London, the only child of British Jewish parents of Eastern European descent: his father, Hyman "Jack" Pinter (1902–1997) was a ladies' tailor; his mother, Frances (née Moskowitz; 1904–1992), a housewife. Pinter believed an aunt's erroneous view that the family was Sephardic and had fled the Spanish Inquisition; thus, for his early poems, Pinter used the pseudonym "Pinta" and at other times used variations such as "da Pinto". Later research by Lady Antonia Fraser, Pinter's second wife, revealed the legend to be apocryphal; three of Pinter's grandparents came from Poland and the fourth from Odessa, so the family was Ashkenazic.


title: Harold Pinter

text: Pinter's family home in London is described by his official biographer Michael Billington as "a solid, red-brick, three-storey villa just off the noisy, bustling, traffic-ridden thoroughfare of the Lower Clapton Road". In 1940 and 1941, after the Blitz, Pinter was evacuated from their house in London to Cornwall and Reading. Billington states that the "life-and-death intensity of daily experience" before and during the Blitz left Pinter with profound memories "of loneliness, bewilderment, separation and loss: themes that are in all his works."


title: Harold Pinter

text: Pinter discovered his social potential as a student at Hackney Downs School, a London grammar school, between 1944 and 1948. "Partly through the school and partly through the social life of Hackney Boys' Club ... he formed an almost sacerdotal belief in the power of male friendship. The friends he made in those days—most particularly Henry Woolf, Michael (Mick) Goldstein and Morris (Moishe) Wernick—have always been a vital part of the emotional texture of his life." A major influence on Pinter was his inspirational English teacher Joseph Brearley, who directed him in school plays and with whom he took long walks, talking about literature. According to Billington, under Brearley's instruction, "Pinter shone at English, wrote for the school magazine and discovered a gift for acting." In 1947 and 1948, he played Romeo and Macbeth in productions directed by Brearley.


title: Harold Pinter

text: At the age of 12, Pinter began writing poetry, and in spring 1947, his poetry was first published in the "Hackney Downs School Magazine". In 1950 his poetry was first published outside the school magazine, in "Poetry London", some of it under the pseudonym "Harold Pinta".


title: Harold Pinter

text: He was a cricket enthusiast, taking his bat with him when evacuated during the Blitz. In 1971, he told Mel Gussow: "one of my main obsessions in life is the game of cricket—I play and watch and read about it all the time." He was chairman of the Gaieties Cricket Club, a supporter of Yorkshire Cricket Club, and devoted a section of his official website to the sport. One wall of his study was dominated by a portrait of himself as a young man playing cricket, which was described by Sarah Lyall, writing in "The New York Times": "The painted Mr. Pinter, poised to swing his bat, has a wicked glint in his eye; testosterone all but flies off the canvas." Pinter approved of the "urban and exacting idea of cricket as a bold theatre of aggression." After his death, several of his school contemporaries recalled his achievements in sports, especially cricket and running. The BBC Radio 4 memorial tribute included an essay on Pinter and cricket.


title: Harold Pinter

text: Other interests that Pinter mentioned to interviewers are family, love and sex, drinking, writing, and reading. According to Billington, "If the notion of male loyalty, competitive rivalry and fear of betrayal forms a constant thread in Pinter's work from "The Dwarfs" onwards, its origins can be found in his teenage Hackney years. Pinter adores women, enjoys flirting with them, and worships their resilience and strength. But, in his early work especially, they are often seen as disruptive influences on some pure and Platonic ideal of male friendship: one of the most crucial of all Pinter's lost Edens."


title: Harold Pinter

text: Beginning in late 1948, Pinter attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art for two terms, but hating the school, missed most of his classes, feigned a nervous breakdown, and dropped out in 1949. In 1948 he was called up for National Service. He was initially refused registration as a conscientious objector, leading to his twice being prosecuted, and fined, for refusing to accept a medical examination, before his CO registration was ultimately agreed. He had a small part in the Christmas pantomime "Dick Whittington and His Cat" at the Chesterfield Hippodrome in 1949 to 1950. From January to July 1951, he attended the Central School of Speech and Drama.


title: Harold Pinter

text: From 1951 to 1952, he toured Ireland with the Anew McMaster repertory company, playing over a dozen roles. In 1952, he began acting in regional English repertory productions; from 1953 to 1954, he worked for the Donald Wolfit Company, at the King's Theatre, Hammersmith, performing eight roles. From 1954 until 1959, Pinter acted under the stage name David Baron. In all, Pinter played over 20 roles under that name. To supplement his income from acting, Pinter worked as a waiter, a postman, a bouncer, and a snow-clearer, meanwhile, according to Mark Batty, "harbouring ambitions as a poet and writer." In October 1989 Pinter recalled: "I was in English rep as an actor for about 12 years. My favourite roles were undoubtedly the sinister ones. They're something to get your teeth into." During that period, he also performed occasional roles in his own and others' works for radio, TV, and film, as he continued to do throughout his career.


title: Harold Pinter

text: From 1956 until 1980, Pinter was married to Vivien Merchant, an actress whom he met on tour, perhaps best known for her performance in the 1966 film "Alfie". Their son Daniel was born in 1958. Through the early 1970s, Merchant appeared in many of Pinter's works, including "The Homecoming" on stage (1965) and screen (1973), but the marriage was turbulent. For seven years, from 1962 to 1969, Pinter was engaged in a clandestine affair with BBC-TV presenter and journalist Joan Bakewell, which inspired his 1978 play "Betrayal", and also throughout that period and beyond he had an affair with an American socialite, whom he nicknamed "Cleopatra". This relationship was another secret he kept from both his wife and Bakewell. Initially, "Betrayal" was thought to be a response to his later affair with historian Antonia Fraser, the wife of Hugh Fraser, and Pinter's "marital crack-up".


title: Harold Pinter

text: Pinter and Merchant had both met Antonia Fraser in 1969, when all three worked together on a National Gallery programme about Mary, Queen of Scots; several years later, on 8–9 January 1975, Pinter and Fraser became romantically involved. That meeting initiated their five-year extramarital love affair. After hiding the relationship from Merchant for two and a half months, on 21 March 1975, Pinter finally told her "I've met somebody". After that, "Life in Hanover Terrace gradually became impossible", and Pinter moved out of their house on 28 April 1975, five days after the première of "No Man's Land".


title: Harold Pinter

text: In mid-August 1977, after Pinter and Fraser had spent two years living in borrowed and rented quarters, they moved into her former family home in Holland Park, where Pinter began writing "Betrayal". He reworked it later, while on holiday at the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne, in early January 1978. After the Frasers' divorce had become final in 1977 and the Pinters' in 1980, Pinter married Fraser on 27 November 1980. Because of a two-week delay in Merchant's signing the divorce papers, however, the reception had to precede the actual ceremony, originally scheduled to occur on his 50th birthday. Vivien Merchant died of acute alcoholism in the first week of October 1982, at the age of 53. Billington writes that Pinter "did everything possible to support" her and regretted that he ultimately became estranged from their son, Daniel, after their separation, Pinter's remarriage, and Merchant's death.


title: Harold Pinter

text: A reclusive gifted musician and writer, Daniel changed his surname from Pinter to Brand, the maiden name of his maternal grandmother, before Pinter and Fraser became romantically involved; while according to Fraser, his father could not understand it, she says that she could: "Pinter is such a distinctive name that he must have got tired of being asked, 'Any relation? Michael Billington wrote that Pinter saw Daniel's name change as "a largely pragmatic move on Daniel's part designed to keep the press ... at bay." Fraser told Billington that Daniel "was very nice to me at a time when it would have been only too easy for him to have turned on me ... simply because he had been the sole focus of his father's love and now manifestly wasn't." Still unreconciled at the time of his father's death, Daniel Brand did not attend Pinter's funeral.


title: Harold Pinter

text: Billington observes that "The break-up with Vivien and the new life with Antonia was to have a profound effect on Pinter's personality and his work," though he adds that Fraser herself did not claim to have influence over Pinter or his writing. In her own contemporaneous diary entry dated 15 January 1993, Fraser described herself more as Pinter's literary midwife. Indeed, she told Billington that "other people [such as Peggy Ashcroft, among others] had a shaping influence on [Pinter's] politics" and attributed changes in his writing and political views to a change from "an unhappy, complicated personal life ... to a happy, uncomplicated personal life", so that "a side of Harold which had always been there was somehow released. I think you can see that in his work after "No Man's Land" [1975], which was a very bleak play."


title: Harold Pinter

text: Pinter was content in his second marriage and enjoyed family life with his six adult stepchildren and 17 step-grandchildren. Even after battling cancer for several years, he considered himself "a very lucky man in every respect". Sarah Lyall notes in her 2007 interview with Pinter in "The New York Times" that his "latest work, a slim pamphlet called 'Six Poems for A.', comprises poems written over 32 years, with "A" of course being Lady Antonia. The first of the poems was written in Paris, where she and Mr. Pinter traveled soon after they met. More than three decades later the two are rarely apart, and Mr. Pinter turns soft, even cozy, when he talks about his wife." In that interview Pinter "acknowledged that his plays—full of infidelity, cruelty, inhumanity, the lot—seem at odds with his domestic contentment. 'How can you write a happy play?' he said. 'Drama is about conflict and degrees of perturbation, disarray. I've never been able to write a happy play, but I've been able to enjoy a happy life. After his death, Fraser told "The Guardian": "He was a great man, and it was a privilege to live with him for over 33 years. He will never be forgotten."


title: Harold Pinter

text: In 1948–49, when he was 18, Pinter opposed the politics of the Cold War, leading to his decision to become a conscientious objector and to refuse to comply with National Service in the British military. However, he told interviewers that, if he had been old enough at the time, he would have fought against the Nazis in World War II. He seemed to express ambivalence, both indifference and hostility, towards political structures and politicians in his Fall 1966 "Paris Review" interview conducted by Lawrence M. Bensky. Yet, he had been an early member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and also had supported the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (1959–1994), participating in British artists' refusal to permit professional productions of their work in South Africa in 1963 and in subsequent related campaigns. In "A Play and Its Politics", a 1985 interview with Nicholas Hern, Pinter described his earlier plays retrospectively from the perspective of the politics of power and the dynamics of oppression.


title: Harold Pinter

text: In his last 25 years, Pinter increasingly focused his essays, interviews and public appearances directly on political issues. He was an officer in International PEN, travelling with American playwright Arthur Miller to Turkey in 1985 on a mission co-sponsored with a Helsinki Watch committee to investigate and protest against the torture of imprisoned writers. There he met victims of political oppression and their families. Pinter's experiences in Turkey and his knowledge of the Turkish suppression of the Kurdish language inspired his 1988 play "Mountain Language." He was also an active member of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, an organisation that "campaigns in the UK against the US blockade of Cuba". In 2001 Pinter joined the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milošević (ICDSM), which appealed for a fair trial and for the freedom of Slobodan Milošević, signing a related "Artists' Appeal for Milošević" in 2004.


title: Harold Pinter

text: Pinter strongly opposed the 1991 Gulf War, the 1999 NATO bombing campaign in FR Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War, the United States' 2001 War in Afghanistan, and the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. Among his provocative political statements, Pinter called Prime Minister Tony Blair a "deluded idiot" and compared the administration of President George W. Bush to Nazi Germany. He stated that the United States "was charging towards world domination while the American public and Britain's 'mass-murdering' prime minister sat back and watched." He was very active in the antiwar movement in the United Kingdom, speaking at rallies held by the Stop the War Coalition and frequently criticising American aggression, as when he asked rhetorically, in his acceptance speech for the Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry on 18 March 2007: "What would Wilfred Owen make of the invasion of Iraq? A bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the conception of international law."


title: Harold Pinter

text: Pinter earned a reputation for being pugnacious, enigmatic, taciturn, terse, prickly, explosive and forbidding. Pinter's blunt political statements, and the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature, elicited strong criticism and even, at times, provoked ridicule and personal attacks. The historian Geoffrey Alderman, author of the official history of Hackney Downs School, expressed his own "Jewish View" of Harold Pinter: "Whatever his merit as a writer, actor and director, on an ethical plane Harold Pinter seems to me to have been intensely flawed, and his moral compass deeply fractured." David Edgar, writing in "The Guardian", defended Pinter against what he termed Pinter's "being berated by the belligerati" like Johann Hari, who felt that he did not "deserve" to win the Nobel Prize. Later Pinter continued to campaign against the Iraq War and on behalf of other political causes that he supported.


title: Harold Pinter

text: Pinter signed the mission statement of Jews for Justice for Palestinians in 2005 and its full-page advertisement, "What Is Israel Doing? A Call by Jews in Britain", published in "The Times" on 6 July 2006, and he was a patron of the Palestine Festival of Literature. In April 2008 Pinter signed the statement "We're not celebrating Israel's anniversary". The statement noted: "We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land.", "We will celebrate when Arab and Jew live as equals in a peaceful Middle East"


title: Harold Pinter

text: Pinter's acting career spanned over 50 years and, although he often played villains, included a wide range of roles on stage and in radio, film, and television. In addition to roles in radio and television adaptations of his own plays and dramatic sketches, early in his screenwriting career he made several cameo appearances in films based on his own screenplays; for example, as a society man in "The Servant" (1963) and as Mr. Bell in "Accident" (1967), both directed by Joseph Losey; and as a bookshop customer in his later film "Turtle Diary" (1985), starring Michael Gambon, Glenda Jackson, and Ben Kingsley.


title: Harold Pinter

text: Pinter's notable film and television roles included the lawyer Saul Abrahams opposite Peter O'Toole in "Rogue Male", BBC TV's 1976 adaptation of Geoffrey Household's 1939 novel, and a drunk Irish journalist in "Langrishe, Go Down" (starring Judi Dench and Jeremy Irons) distributed on BBC Two in 1978 and released in movie theatres in 2002. Pinter's later film roles included the criminal Sam Ross in "Mojo" (1997), written and directed by Jez Butterworth, based on Butterworth's play of the same name; Sir Thomas Bertram (his most substantial feature-film role) in "Mansfield Park" (1998), a character that Pinter described as "a very civilised man ... a man of great sensibility but in fact, he's upholding and sustaining a totally brutal system [the slave trade] from which he derives his money"; and Uncle Benny, opposite Pierce Brosnan and Geoffrey Rush, in "The Tailor of Panama" (2001). In television films, he played Mr. Bearing, the father of ovarian cancer patient Vivian Bearing, played by Emma Thompson in Mike Nichols's HBO film of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play "Wit" (2001); and the Director opposite John Gielgud (Gielgud's last role) and Rebecca Pidgeon in "Catastrophe", by Samuel Beckett, directed by David Mamet as part of "Beckett on Film" (2001).


title: Harold Pinter

text: Pinter began to direct more frequently during the 1970s, becoming an associate director of the National Theatre (NT) in 1973. He directed almost 50 productions of his own and others' plays for stage, film, and television, including 10 productions of works by Simon Gray: the stage and/or film premières of "Butley" (stage, 1971; film, 1974), "Otherwise Engaged" (1975), "The Rear Column" (stage, 1978; TV, 1980), "Close of Play" (NT, 1979), "Quartermaine's Terms" (1981), "Life Support" (1997), "The Late Middle Classes" (1999), and "The Old Masters" (2004). Several of those productions starred Alan Bates (1934–2003), who originated the stage and screen roles of not only Butley but also Mick in Pinter's first major commercial success, "The Caretaker" (stage, 1960; film, 1964); and in Pinter's double-bill produced at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1984, he played Nicolas in "One for the Road" and the cab driver in "Victoria Station". Among over 35 plays that Pinter directed were "Next of Kin" (1974), by John Hopkins; "Blithe Spirit" (1976), by Noël Coward; "The Innocents" (1976), by William Archibald; "Circe and Bravo" (1986), by Donald Freed; "Taking Sides" (1995), by Ronald Harwood; and "Twelve Angry Men" (1996), by Reginald Rose.


title: Harold Pinter

text: Pinter was the author of 29 plays and 15 dramatic sketches and the co-author of two works for stage and radio. He was considered to have been one of the most influential modern British dramatists, Along with the 1967 Tony Award for Best Play for "The Homecoming" and several other American awards and award nominations, he and his plays received many awards in the UK and elsewhere throughout the world. His style has entered the English language as an adjective, "Pinteresque", although Pinter himself disliked the term and found it meaningless.


title: Harold Pinter

text: Pinter's first play, "The Room", written and first performed in 1957, was a student production at the University of Bristol, directed by his good friend, actor Henry Woolf, who also originated the role of Mr. Kidd (which he reprised in 2001 and 2007). After Pinter mentioned that he had an idea for a play, Woolf asked him to write it so that he could direct it to fulfill a requirement for his postgraduate work. Pinter wrote it in three days. The production was described by Billington as "a staggeringly confident debut which attracted the attention of a young producer, Michael Codron, who decided to present Pinter's next play, "The Birthday Party", at the Lyric Hammersmith, in 1958."


title: Harold Pinter

text: Written in 1957 and produced in 1958, Pinter's second play, "The Birthday Party", one of his best-known works, was initially both a commercial and critical disaster, despite an enthusiastic review in "The Sunday Times" by its influential drama critic Harold Hobson, which appeared only after the production had closed and could not be reprieved. Critical accounts often quote Hobson:


title: Harold Pinter

text: I am well aware that Mr Pinter[']s play received extremely bad notices last Tuesday morning. At the moment I write these [words] it is uncertain even whether the play will still be in the bill by the time they appear, though it is probable it will soon be seen elsewhere. Deliberately, I am willing to risk whatever reputation I have as a judge of plays by saying that "The Birthday Party" is not a Fourth, not even a Second, but a First [as in Class Honours]; and that Pinter, on the evidence of his work, possesses the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London ... Mr Pinter and "The Birthday Party", despite their experiences last week, will be heard of again. Make a note of their names.


title: Harold Pinter

text: Pinter himself and later critics generally credited Hobson as bolstering him and perhaps even rescuing his career.


title: Harold Pinter

text: In a review published in 1958, borrowing from the subtitle of "The Lunatic View: A Comedy of Menace", a play by David Campton, critic Irving Wardle called Pinter's early plays "comedy of menace"—a label that people have applied repeatedly to his work. Such plays begin with an apparently innocent situation that becomes both threatening and "absurd" as Pinter's characters behave in ways often perceived as inexplicable by his audiences and one another. Pinter acknowledges the influence of Samuel Beckett, particularly on his early work; they became friends, sending each other drafts of their works in progress for comments.


title: Harold Pinter

text: Pinter wrote "The Hothouse" in 1958, which he shelved for over 20 years (See "Overtly political plays and sketches" below). Next he wrote "The Dumb Waiter" (1959), which premièred in Germany and was then produced in a double bill with "The Room" at the Hampstead Theatre Club, in London, in 1960. It was then not produced often until the 1980s, and it has been revived more frequently since 2000, including the West End Trafalgar Studios production in 2007. The first production of "The Caretaker", at the Arts Theatre Club, in London, in 1960, established Pinter's theatrical reputation. The play transferred to the Duchess Theatre in May 1960 and ran for 444 performances, receiving an Evening Standard Award for best play of 1960. Large radio and television audiences for his one-act play "A Night Out", along with the popularity of his revue sketches, propelled him to further critical attention. In 1964, "The Birthday Party" was revived both on television (with Pinter himself in the role of Goldberg) and on stage (directed by Pinter at the Aldwych Theatre) and was well received.


title: Harold Pinter

text: By the time Peter Hall's London production of "The Homecoming" (1964) reached Broadway in 1967, Pinter had become a celebrity playwright, and the play garnered four Tony Awards, among other awards. During this period, Pinter also wrote the radio play "A Slight Ache", first broadcast on the BBC Third Programme in 1959 and then adapted to the stage and performed at the Arts Theatre Club in 1961. "A Night Out" (1960) was broadcast to a large audience on ABC Weekend TV's television show "Armchair Theatre", after being transmitted on BBC Radio 3, also in 1960. His play "Night School" was first televised in 1960 on Associated Rediffusion. "The Collection" premièred at the Aldwych Theatre in 1962, and "The Dwarfs", adapted from Pinter's then unpublished novel of the same title, was first broadcast on radio in 1960, then adapted for the stage (also at the Arts Theatre Club) in a double bill with "The Lover", which had previously been televised by Associated Rediffusion in 1963; and "Tea Party", a play that Pinter developed from his 1963 short story, first broadcast on BBC TV in 1965.


title: Harold Pinter

text: Working as both a screenwriter and as a playwright, Pinter composed a script called "" (1966), for a trilogy of films to be contributed by Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Pinter, of which only Beckett's film, titled "Film", was actually produced. Then Pinter turned his unfilmed script into a television play, which was produced as "The Basement", both on BBC 2 and also on stage in 1968.


title: Harold Pinter

text: From the late 1960s through the early 1980s, Pinter wrote a series of plays and sketches that explore complex ambiguities, elegiac mysteries, comic vagaries, and other "quicksand-like" characteristics of memory and which critics sometimes classify as Pinter's "memory plays". These include "Landscape" (1968), "Silence" (1969), "Night" (1969), "Old Times" (1971), "No Man's Land" (1975), "The Proust Screenplay" (1977), "Betrayal" (1978), "Family Voices" (1981), "Victoria Station" (1982), and "A Kind of Alaska" (1982). Some of Pinter's later plays, including "Party Time" (1991), "Moonlight" (1993), "Ashes to Ashes" (1996), and "Celebration" (2000), draw upon some features of his "memory" dramaturgy in their focus on the past in the present, but they have personal and political resonances and other tonal differences from these earlier memory plays.


title: Harold Pinter

text: Following a three-year period of creative drought in the early 1980s after his marriage to Antonia Fraser and the death of Vivien Merchant, Pinter's plays tended to become shorter and more overtly political, serving as critiques of oppression, torture, and other abuses of human rights, linked by the apparent "invulnerability of power." Just before this hiatus, in 1979, Pinter re-discovered his manuscript of "The Hothouse", which he had written in 1958 but had set aside; he revised it and then directed its first production himself at Hampstead Theatre in London, in 1980. Like his plays of the 1980s, "The Hothouse" concerns authoritarianism and the abuses of power politics, but it is also a comedy, like his earlier comedies of menace. Pinter played the major role of Roote in a 1995 revival at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester.


title: Harold Pinter

text: Pinter's brief dramatic sketch "Precisely" (1983) is a duologue between two bureaucrats exploring the absurd power politics of mutual nuclear annihilation and deterrence. His first overtly political one-act play is "One for the Road" (1984). In 1985 Pinter stated that whereas his earlier plays presented metaphors for power and powerlessness, the later ones present literal realities of power and its abuse. Pinter's "political theatre dramatizes the interplay and conflict of the opposing poles of involvement and disengagement." "Mountain Language" (1988) is about the Turkish suppression of the Kurdish language. The dramatic sketch "The New World Order" (1991) provides what Robert Cushman, writing in "The Independent" described as "10 nerve-wracking minutes" of two men threatening to torture a third man who is blindfolded, gagged and bound in a chair; Pinter directed the British première at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, where it opened on 9 July 1991, and the production then transferred to Washington, D.C., where it was revived in 1994. Pinter's longer political satire "Party Time" (1991) premièred at the Almeida Theatre in London, in a double-bill with "Mountain Language". Pinter adapted it as a screenplay for television in 1992, directing that production, first broadcast in the UK on Channel 4 on 17 November 1992.


title: Harold Pinter

text: Intertwining political and personal concerns, his next full-length plays, "Moonlight" (1993) and "Ashes to Ashes" (1996) are set in domestic households and focus on dying and death; in their personal conversations in "Ashes to Ashes", Devlin and Rebecca allude to unspecified atrocities relating to the Holocaust. After experiencing the deaths of first his mother (1992) and then his father (1997), again merging the personal and the political, Pinter wrote the poems "Death" (1997) and "The Disappeared" (1998).


title: Harold Pinter

text: Pinter's last stage play, "Celebration" (2000), is a social satire set in an opulent restaurant, which lampoons The Ivy, a fashionable venue in London's West End theatre district, and its patrons who "have just come from performances of either the ballet or the opera. Not that they can remember a darn thing about what they saw, including the titles. [These] gilded, foul-mouthed souls are just as myopic when it comes to their own table mates (and for that matter, their food), with conversations that usually connect only on the surface, if there." On its surface the play may appear to have fewer overtly political resonances than some of the plays from the 1980s and 1990s; but its central male characters, brothers named Lambert and Matt, are members of the elite (like the men in charge in "Party Time"), who describe themselves as "peaceful strategy consultants [because] we don't carry guns." At the next table, Russell, a banker, describes himself as a "totally disordered personality ... a psychopath", while Lambert "vows to be reincarnated as '[a] more civilised, [a] gentler person, [a] nicer person'." These characters' deceptively smooth exteriors mask their extreme viciousness. "Celebration" evokes familiar Pinteresque political contexts: "The ritzy loudmouths in 'Celebration' ... and the quieter working-class mumblers of 'The Room' ... have everything in common beneath the surface". "Money remains in the service of entrenched power, and the brothers in the play are 'strategy consultants' whose jobs involve force and violence ... It is tempting but inaccurate to equate the comic power inversions of the social behaviour in "Celebration" with lasting change in larger political structures", according to Grimes, for whom the play indicates Pinter's pessimism about the possibility of changing the status quo. Yet, as the Waiter's often comically unbelievable reminiscences about his grandfather demonstrate in "Celebration", Pinter's final stage plays also extend some expressionistic aspects of his earlier "memory plays", while harking back to his "comedies of menace", as illustrated in the characters and in the Waiter's final speech:


title: Harold Pinter

text: During 2000–2001, there were also simultaneous productions of "Remembrance of Things Past", Pinter's stage adaptation of his unpublished "Proust Screenplay", written in collaboration with and directed by Di Trevis, at the Royal National Theatre, and a revival of "The Caretaker" directed by Patrick Marber and starring Michael Gambon, Rupert Graves, and Douglas Hodge, at the Comedy Theatre.


title: Harold Pinter

text: Like "Celebration", Pinter's penultimate sketch, "Press Conference" (2002), "invokes both torture and the fragile, circumscribed existence of dissent". In its première in the National Theatre's two-part production of "Sketches", despite undergoing chemotherapy at the time, Pinter played the ruthless Minister willing to murder little children for the benefit of "The State".


title: Harold Pinter

text: Pinter composed 27 screenplays and film scripts for cinema and television, many of which were filmed, or adapted as stage plays. His fame as a screenwriter began with his three screenplays written for films directed by Joseph Losey, leading to their close friendship: "The Servant" (1963), based on the novel by Robin Maugham; "Accident" (1967), adapted from the novel by Nicholas Mosley; and "The Go-Between" (1971), based on the novel by L. P. Hartley. Films based on Pinter's adaptations of his own stage plays are: "The Caretaker" (1963), directed by Clive Donner; "The Birthday Party" (1968), directed by William Friedkin; "The Homecoming" (1973), directed by Peter Hall; and "Betrayal" (1983), directed by David Jones.


title: Harold Pinter

text: Pinter also adapted other writers' novels to screenplays, including "The Pumpkin Eater" (1964), based on the novel by Penelope Mortimer, directed by Jack Clayton; "The Quiller Memorandum" (1966), from the 1965 spy novel "The Berlin Memorandum", by Elleston Trevor, directed by Michael Anderson; "The Last Tycoon" (1976), from the unfinished novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, directed by Elia Kazan; "The French Lieutenant's Woman" (1981), from the novel by John Fowles, directed by Karel Reisz; "Turtle Diary" (1985), based on the novel by Russell Hoban; "The Heat of the Day" (1988), a television film, from the 1949 novel by Elizabeth Bowen; "The Comfort of Strangers" (1990), from the novel by Ian McEwan, directed by Paul Schrader; and "The Trial" (1993), from the novel by Franz Kafka, directed by David Jones.


title: Harold Pinter

text: His commissioned screenplays of others' works for the films "The Handmaid's Tale" (1990), "The Remains of the Day" (1990), and "Lolita" (1997), remain unpublished and in the case of the latter two films, uncredited, though several scenes from or aspects of his scripts were used in these finished films. His screenplays "The Proust Screenplay" (1972), "Victory" (1982), and "The Dreaming Child" (1997) and his unpublished screenplay "The Tragedy of King Lear" (2000) have not been filmed. A section of Pinter's "Proust Screenplay" was, however, released as the 1984 film "Swann in Love" ("Un amour de Swann"), directed by Volker Schlöndorff, and it was also adapted by Michael Bakewell as a two-hour radio drama broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 1995, before Pinter and director Di Trevis collaborated to adapt it for the 2000 National Theatre production.


title: Harold Pinter

text: Pinter's last filmed screenplay was an adaptation of the 1970 Tony Award-winning play "Sleuth", by Anthony Shaffer, which was commissioned by Jude Law, one of the film's producers. It is the basis for the 2007 film "Sleuth", directed by Kenneth Branagh. Pinter's screenplays for "The French Lieutenant's Woman" and "Betrayal" were nominated for Academy Awards in 1981 and 1983, respectively.


title: Harold Pinter

text: From 16 to 31 July 2001, a Harold Pinter Festival celebrating his work, curated by Michael Colgan, artistic director of the Gate Theatre, Dublin, was held as part of the annual Lincoln Center Festival at Lincoln Center in New York City. Pinter participated both as an actor, as Nicolas in "One for the Road", and as a director of a double bill pairing his last play, "Celebration", with his first play, "The Room". As part of a two-week "Harold Pinter Homage" at the World Leaders Festival of Creative Genius, held from 24 September to 30 October 2001, at the Harbourfront Centre, in Toronto, Canada, Pinter presented a dramatic reading of "Celebration" (2000) and also participated in a public interview as part of the International Festival of Authors.


title: Harold Pinter

text: In December 2001, Pinter was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer, for which, in 2002, he underwent an operation and chemotherapy. During the course of his treatment, he directed a production of his play "No Man's Land", and wrote and performed in a new sketch, "Press Conference", for a production of his dramatic sketches at the National Theatre, and from 2002 on he was increasingly active in political causes, writing and presenting politically charged poetry, essays, speeches, as well as involved in developing his final two screenplay adaptations, "The Tragedy of King Lear" and "Sleuth", whose drafts are in the British Library's Harold Pinter Archive (Add MS 88880/2).


title: Harold Pinter

text: From 9 to 25 January 2003, the Manitoba Theatre Centre, in Manitoba, Canada, held a nearly month-long "PinterFest", in which over 130 performances of twelve of Pinter's plays were performed by a dozen different theatre companies. Productions during the Festival included: "The Hothouse", "Night School", "The Lover", "The Dumb Waiter", "The Homecoming", "The Birthday Party", "Monologue", "One for the Road", "The Caretaker", "Ashes to Ashes", "Celebration", and "No Man's Land".


title: Harold Pinter

text: In 2005, Pinter stated that he had stopped writing plays and that he would be devoting his efforts more to his political activism and writing poetry: "I think I've written 29 plays. I think it's enough for me ... My energies are going in different directions—over the last few years I've made a number of political speeches at various locations and ceremonies ... I'm using a lot of energy more specifically about political states of affairs, which I think are very, very worrying as things stand." Some of this later poetry included "The 'Special Relationship'", "Laughter", and "The Watcher".


title: Harold Pinter

text: From 2005, Pinter suffered ill health, including a rare skin disease called pemphigus and "a form of septicaemia that afflict[ed] his feet and made it difficult for him to walk." Yet, he completed his screenplay for the film of "Sleuth" in 2005. His last dramatic work for radio, "Voices" (2005), a collaboration with composer James Clarke, adapting selected works by Pinter to music, premièred on BBC Radio 3 on his 75th birthday on 10 October 2005. Three days later, it was announced that he had won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature.


title: Harold Pinter

text: In an interview with Pinter in 2006, conducted by critic Michael Billington as part of the cultural programme of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, Pinter confirmed that he would continue to write poetry but not plays. In response, the audience shouted "No" in unison, urging him to keep writing. Along with the international symposium on Pinter: Passion, Poetry, Politics, curated by Billington, the 2006 Europe Theatre Prize theatrical events celebrating Pinter included new productions (in French) of "Precisely" (1983), "One for the Road" (1984), "Mountain Language" (1988), "The New World Order" (1991), "Party Time" (1991), and "Press Conference" (2002) (French versions by Jean Pavans); and "Pinter Plays, Poetry & Prose", an evening of dramatic readings, directed by Alan Stanford, of the Gate Theatre, Dublin. In June 2006, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) hosted a celebration of Pinter's films curated by his friend, the playwright David Hare. Hare introduced the selection of film clips by saying: "To jump back into the world of Pinter's movies ... is to remind yourself of a literate mainstream cinema, focused as much as Bergman's is on the human face, in which tension is maintained by a carefully crafted mix of image and dialogue."


title: Harold Pinter

text: After returning to London from the Edinburgh International Book Festival, in September 2006, Pinter began rehearsing for his performance of the role of Krapp in Samuel Beckett's one-act monologue "Krapp's Last Tape", which he performed from a motorised wheelchair in a limited run the following month at the Royal Court Theatre to sold-out audiences and "ecstatic" critical reviews. The production ran for only nine performances, as part of the 50th-anniversary celebration season of the Royal Court Theatre; it sold out within minutes of the opening of the box office and tickets commanded large sums from ticket resellers. One performance was filmed and broadcast on BBC Four on 21 June 2007, and also screened later, as part of the memorial PEN Tribute to Pinter, in New York, on 2 May 2009.


title: Harold Pinter

text: In October and November 2006, Sheffield Theatres hosted . It featured productions of seven of Pinter's plays: "The Caretaker", "Voices", "No Man's Land", "Family Voices", "Tea Party", "The Room", "One for the Road", and "The Dumb Waiter"; and films (most his screenplays; some in which Pinter appears as an actor).


title: Harold Pinter

text: In February and March 2007, a 50th anniversary of "The Dumb Waiter", was produced at the Trafalgar Studios. Later in February 2007, John Crowley's film version of Pinter's play "Celebration" (2000) was shown on "More4" (Channel 4, UK). On 18 March 2007, BBC Radio 3 broadcast a new radio production of "The Homecoming", directed by Thea Sharrock and produced by Martin J. Smith, with Pinter performing the role of Max (for the first time; he had previously played Lenny on stage in 1964). A revival of "The Hothouse" opened at the National Theatre, in London, in July 2007, concurrently with a revival of "Betrayal" at the Donmar Warehouse, directed by Roger Michell.


title: Harold Pinter

text: Revivals in 2008 included the 40th-anniversary production of the American première of "The Homecoming" on Broadway, directed by Daniel J. Sullivan. From 8 to 24 May 2008, the Lyric Hammersmith celebrated the 50th anniversary of "The Birthday Party" with a revival and related events, including a gala performance and reception hosted by Harold Pinter on 19 May 2008, exactly 50 years after its London première there.


title: Harold Pinter

text: The final revival during Pinter's lifetime was a production of "No Man's Land", directed by Rupert Goold, opening at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, in August 2008, and then transferring to the Duke of York's Theatre, London, where it played until 3 January 2009. On the Monday before Christmas 2008, Pinter was admitted to Hammersmith Hospital, where he died on Christmas Eve from liver cancer, aged 78. On 26 December 2008, when "No Man's Land" reopened at the Duke of York's, the actors paid tribute to Pinter from the stage, with Michael Gambon reading Hirst's monologue about his "photograph album" from Act Two that Pinter had asked him to read at his funeral, ending with a standing ovation from the audience, many of whom were in tears:


title: Harold Pinter

text: Pinter's funeral was a private, half-hour secular ceremony conducted at the graveside at Kensal Green Cemetery, 31 December 2008. The eight readings selected in advance by Pinter included passages from seven of his own writings and from the story "The Dead", by James Joyce, which was read by actress Penelope Wilton. Michael Gambon read the "photo album" speech from "No Man's Land" and three other readings, including Pinter's poem "Death" (1997). Other readings honoured Pinter's widow and his love of cricket. The ceremony was attended by many notable theatre people, including Tom Stoppard, but not by Pinter's son, Daniel Brand. At its end, Pinter's widow, Antonia Fraser, stepped forward to his grave and quoted from Horatio's speech after the death of Hamlet: "Goodnight, sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest."


title: Harold Pinter

text: The night before Pinter's burial, theatre marquees on Broadway dimmed their lights for a minute in tribute, and on the final night of "No Man's Land" at the Duke of York's Theatre on 3 January 2009, all of the Ambassador Theatre Group in the West End dimmed their lights for an hour to honour the playwright.


title: Harold Pinter

text: Diane Abbott, the Member of Parliament for Hackney North & Stoke Newington proposed an early day motion in the House of Commons to support a residents' campaign to restore the Clapton Cinematograph Theatre, established in Lower Clapton Road in 1910, and to turn it into a memorial to Pinter "to honour this Hackney boy turned literary great." On 2 May 2009, a free public memorial tribute was held at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. It was part of the 5th Annual PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, taking place in New York City. Another memorial celebration, held in the Olivier Theatre, at the Royal National Theatre, in London, on the evening of 7 June 2009, consisted of excerpts and readings from Pinter's writings by nearly three dozen actors, many of whom were his friends and associates, including: Eileen Atkins, David Bradley, Colin Firth, Henry Goodman, Sheila Hancock, Alan Rickman, Penelope Wilton, Susan Wooldridge, and Henry Woolf; and a troupe of students from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, directed by Ian Rickson.


title: Harold Pinter

text: On 16 June 2009, Antonia Fraser officially opened a commemorative room at the Hackney Empire. The theatre also established a writer's residency in Pinter's name. Most of issue number 28 of Craig Raine's Arts Tri-Quarterly "Areté" was devoted to pieces remembering Pinter, beginning with Pinter's 1987 unpublished love poem dedicated "To Antonia" and his poem "Paris", written in 1975 (the year in which he and Fraser began living together), followed by brief memoirs by some of Pinter's associates and friends, including Patrick Marber, Nina Raine, Tom Stoppard, Peter Nichols, Susanna Gross, Richard Eyre, and David Hare.


title: Harold Pinter

text: A memorial cricket match at Lord's Cricket Ground between the Gaieties Cricket Club and the Lord's Taverners, followed by performances of Pinter's poems and excerpts from his plays, took place on 27 September 2009.


title: Harold Pinter

text: In 2009, English PEN established the PEN Pinter Prize, which is awarded annually to a British writer or a writer resident in Britain who, in the words of Pinter's Nobel speech, casts an 'unflinching, unswerving' gaze upon the world, and shows a 'fierce intellectual determination ... to define the real truth of our lives and our societies'. The prize is shared with an international writer of courage. The inaugural winners of the prize were Tony Harrison and the Burmese poet and comedian Maung Thura (a.k.a. Zarganar).


title: Harold Pinter

text: In January 2011 "Being Harold Pinter", a theatrical collage of excerpts from Pinter's dramatic works, his Nobel Lecture, and letters of Belarusian prisoners, created and performed by the Belarus Free Theatre, evoked a great deal of attention in the public media. The Free Theatre's members had to be smuggled out of Minsk, owing to a government crackdown on dissident artists, to perform their production in a two-week sold-out engagement at La MaMa in New York as part of the 2011 Under the Radar Festival. In an additional sold-out benefit performance at the Public Theater, co-hosted by playwrights Tony Kushner and Tom Stoppard, the prisoner's letters were read by ten guest performers: Mandy Patinkin, Kevin Kline, Olympia Dukakis, Lily Rabe, Linda Emond, Josh Hamilton, Stephen Spinella, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. In solidarity with the Belarus Free Theatre, collaborations of actors and theatre companies joined in offering additional benefit readings of "Being Harold Pinter" across the United States.


title: Harold Pinter

text: In September 2011, British Theatre owners, Ambassador Theatre Group (ATG) announced it was renaming its "Comedy Theatre", Panton Street, London to become "The Harold Pinter Theatre". Howard Panter, Joint CEO and Creative Director of ATG told the BBC, "The work of Pinter has become an integral part of the history of the Comedy Theatre. The re-naming of one of our most successful West End theatres is a fitting tribute to a man who made such a mark on British theatre who, over his 50 year career, became recognised as one of the most influential modern British dramatists."


title: Harold Pinter

text: An Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and an Honorary Fellow of the Modern Language Association of America (1970), Pinter was appointed CBE in 1966 and became a Companion of Honour in 2002, having declined a knighthood in 1996. In 1995, he accepted the David Cohen Prize, in recognition of a lifetime of literary achievement. In 1996, he received a Laurence Olivier Special Award for lifetime achievement in the theatre. In 1997 he became a BAFTA Fellow. He received the World Leaders Award for "Creative Genius" as the subject of a week-long "Homage" in Toronto, in October 2001. In 2004, he received the Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry for his "lifelong contribution to literature, 'and specifically for his collection of poetry entitled "War", published in 2003'". In March 2006, he was awarded the Europe Theatre Prize in recognition of lifetime achievements pertaining to drama and theatre. In conjunction with that award, the critic Michael Billington coordinated an international conference on Pinter: Passion, Poetry, Politics, including scholars and critics from Europe and the Americas, held in Turin, Italy, from 10 to 14 March 2006.


title: Harold Pinter

text: In October 2008, the Central School of Speech and Drama announced that Pinter had agreed to become its president and awarded him an honorary fellowship at its graduation ceremony. On his appointment, Pinter commented: "I was a student at Central in 1950–51. I enjoyed my time there very much and I am delighted to become president of a remarkable institution." But he had to receive that honorary degree, his 20th, in absentia owing to ill health. His presidency of the school was brief; he died just two weeks after the graduation ceremony, on 24 December 2008.


title: Harold Pinter

text: On 18 January 2007, French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin presented Pinter with France's highest civil honour, the Légion d'honneur, at a ceremony at the French embassy in London. De Villepin praised Pinter's poem "American Football" (1991) stating: "With its violence and its cruelty, it is for me one of the most accurate images of war, one of the most telling metaphors of the temptation of imperialism and violence." In response, Pinter praised France's opposition to the war in Iraq. M. de Villepin concluded: "The poet stands still and observes what doesn't deserve other men's attention. Poetry teaches us how to live and you, Harold Pinter, teach us how to live." He said that Pinter received the award particularly "because in seeking to capture all the facets of the human spirit, [Pinter's] works respond to the aspirations of the French public, and its taste for an understanding of man and of what is truly universal". Lawrence Pollard observed that "the award for the great playwright underlines how much Mr Pinter is admired in countries like France as a model of the uncompromising radical intellectual".


title: Harold Pinter

text: Some scholars and critics challenge the validity of Pinter's critiques of what he terms "the modes of thinking of those in power" or dissent from his retrospective viewpoints on his own work. In 1985, Pinter recalled that his early act of conscientious objection resulted from being "terribly disturbed as a young man by the Cold War. And McCarthyism ... A profound hypocrisy. 'They' the monsters, 'we' the good. In 1948, the Russian suppression of Eastern Europe was an obvious and brutal fact, but I felt very strongly then and feel as strongly now that we have an obligation to subject our own actions and attitudes to an equivalent critical and moral scrutiny." Scholars agree that Pinter's dramatic rendering of power relations results from this scrutiny.


title: Harold Pinter

text: Pinter's aversion to any censorship by "the authorities" is epitomised in Petey's line at the end of "The Birthday Party". As the broken-down and reconstituted Stanley is being carted off by the figures of authority Goldberg and McCann, Petey calls after him, "Stan, don't let them tell you what to do!" Pinter told Gussow in 1988, "I've lived that line all my damn life. Never more than now." The example of Pinter's stalwart opposition to what he termed "the modes of thinking of those in power"—the "brick wall" of the "minds" perpetuating the "status quo"—infused the "vast political pessimism" that some academic critics may perceive in his artistic work, its "drowning landscape" of harsh contemporary realities, with some residual "hope for restoring the dignity of man."


title: Harold Pinter

text: As Pinter's long-time friend David Jones reminded analytically inclined scholars and dramatic critics, Pinter was one of the "great comic writers": His dramatic conflicts present serious implications for his characters and his audiences, leading to sustained inquiry about "the point" of his work and multiple "critical strategies" for developing interpretations and stylistic analyses of it.


title: Harold Pinter

text: Pinter's unpublished manuscripts and letters to and from him are held in the Harold Pinter Archive in the Modern Literary Manuscripts division of the British Library. Smaller collections of Pinter manuscripts are in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin; The Lilly Library, Indiana University at Bloomington; the Mandeville Special Collections Library, Geisel Library, at the University of California, San Diego; the British Film Institute, in London; and the Margaret Herrick Library, Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California.


title: The hand of God

text: "The hand of God" () was a handling goal scored by Argentine footballer Diego Maradona during the Argentina v England quarter finals match of the 1986 FIFA World Cup. The goal was illegal under association football rules because Maradona used his hand, but because the referees did not have a clear view of the play and video assistant referee technology did not exist at the time, it stood to give Argentina a 1–0 lead. Argentina went on to win 2–1, with Maradona scoring a second goal known as the "Goal of the Century," en route to claiming the World Cup.


title: The hand of God

text: The goal's name derives from Maradona's initial response on whether he scored it illegally, stating it was made "a little with the head of Maradona, and a little with the hand of God". Maradona later said he considered the goal to be "symbolic revenge" for the United Kingdom's victory over Argentina in the Falklands War four years earlier.


title: The hand of God

text: Six minutes into the second half of the game, Maradona took the ball out of the box with his left leg and passed it to teammate Jorge Valdano. Valdano tried to take on several English defenders, but the ball was intercepted and thrown back and forth and kicked towards England's goal by English midfielder Steve Hodge.


title: The hand of God

text: Because of the position of the players, Maradona would have been caught offside, but as the ball came off an opponent, there was no offside offence. Alone inside the penalty box and with the ball dropping down, Maradona contested the ball with goalkeeper Peter Shilton, who stood taller than Maradona. Shilton jumped forward with his right hand, while Maradona did so with his left arm outstretched. Maradona's fist, which was raised close to his head, touched the ball first and hit the ball into England's goal. Maradona began to celebrate while glancing sideways at the referee and the linesman for confirmation. He then fully celebrated the goal when it was given.


title: The hand of God

text: Tunisian referee Ali Bennaceur gave the goal, but after the English players' protests he sought the advice of his second linesman who confirmed the goal.


title: The hand of God

text: Mexican photographer Alejandro Ojeda Carbajal immortalized this moment in a photograph in which Maradona can be seen hitting the ball with his hand.


title: The hand of God

text: In 2005, 19 years after scoring the controversial goal, Maradona confessed on a program "La Noche del 10", that the goal was actually scored with his hand.


title: The hand of God

text: Several world media outlets reported the news, creating controversy. Even Peter Shilton rejected the apology, arguing that it was now too late. Maradona, a few days after the article came out, denied everything, saying that the newspaper had misquoted him. Maradona responded:


title: The hand of God

text: In the 2019 documentary film "Diego Maradona" directed by Asif Kapadia, Maradona links the event to the Falklands War four years earlier, saying "[w]e, as Argentinians, didn't know what the military was up to. They told us that we were winning the war. But in reality, England was winning 20–0. It was tough. The hype made it seem like we were going to play out another war. I knew it was my hand. It wasn't my plan but the action happened so fast that the linesman didn't see me putting my hand in. The referee looked at me and he said: 'Goal.' It was a nice feeling like some sort of symbolic revenge against the English."


title: The hand of God

text: Ivan Lopez-Muniz wrote in 2017 that in Argentina the "entire nation", including the Government and the Argentine Football Association, still "praises the most blatant act of cheating ever caught on tape", partly because "Argentines are humans, and humans are hypocrites" but also because of a long history of grievances against the English or British, that includes not only the 1982 Falklands War, but other matters such as England manager Alf Ramsay calling the Argentine players animals after Argentine Captain Antonio Rattín was sent off against England in the 1966 World Cup, as well as Britain's invasions of the future Argentine capital Buenos Aires in 1806 and 1807, and its seizure of the Falkland Islands (known to Argentines as "Las Malvinas") "in 1832". Lopez-Muniz concluded that, because of the combination of high and low standards, "Quite simply, it means that Maradona, on that day, was an Englishman."


title: The hand of God

text: The "Hand of God" became a popular phrase and is still referred to around the world. Some other famous football handballs are:


title: The hand of God

text: The legacy of “Hand of God” has extended beyond the realm of football. Paolo Sorrentino’s semi-autobiographical 2021 drama is named after the incident and references Diego Maradona’s influence on 1980s Naples.


title: The hand of God

text: After the game Maradona swapped his shirt in the tunnel with Steve Hodge. After many years of requests to sell the shirt and a period of 20 years where it was on loan at the National Football Museum, in 2022 Hodge placed it up for auction with auctioneers Sotheby's. On 4 May 2022, the shirt sold at auction for £7,100,000, a world record for a piece of sports memorabilia.


title: Genocide of indigenous peoples

text: The genocide of indigenous peoples, colonial genocide, or settler genocide is elimination of entire communities of indigenous peoples as part of colonialism. Genocide of the native population is especially likely in cases of settler colonialism, with some scholars arguing that settler colonialism is inherently genocidal.


title: Genocide of indigenous peoples

text: While the concept of genocide was formulated by Raphael Lemkin in the mid-20th century, the expansion of various European colonial powers such as the British and Spanish empires and the subsequent establishment of colonies on indigenous territories frequently involved acts of genocidal violence against indigenous groups in the Americas, Australia, Africa, and Asia. According to Lemkin, colonization was in itself "intrinsically genocidal". He saw this genocide as a two-stage process, the first being the destruction of the indigenous population's way of life. In the second stage, the newcomers impose their way of life on the indigenous group. According to David Maybury-Lewis, imperial and colonial forms of genocide are enacted in two main ways, either through the deliberate clearing of territories of their original inhabitants in order to make them exploitable for purposes of resource extraction or colonial settlements, or through enlisting indigenous peoples as forced laborers in colonial or imperialist projects of resource extraction. The designation of specific events as genocidal is often controversial.


title: Genocide of indigenous peoples

text: Some scholars, among them Lemkin, have argued that cultural genocide, sometimes called ethnocide, should also be recognized. A people group may continue to exist, but if it is prevented from perpetuating its group identity by prohibitions of its cultural and religious practices, practices which are the basis of its group identity, this may also be considered a form of genocide. Examples that can be considered this form of genocide include the treatment of Tibetans and Uyghurs by the Government of China, the treatment of Native Americans by citizens of the United States and/or agents of the United States government, and the treatment of First Nations peoples by the Canadian government.


title: Genocide of indigenous peoples

text: After World War II, this concept of genocide was adopted by the United Nations in 1948. For Lemkin, genocide was broadly defined and included all attempts to destroy a specific ethnic group, whether strictly physical through mass killings, or cultural or psychological through oppression and destruction of indigenous ways of life.


title: Genocide of indigenous peoples

text: The UN definition, which is used in international law, is narrower than Lemkin's, and states that genocide is:


title: Genocide of indigenous peoples

text: "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group," as such:


title: Genocide of indigenous peoples

text: The determination of whether a historical event should or should not be considered a genocide can be a matter of scholarly debate. Historians often draw on broader definitions such as Lemkin's, which sees colonialist violence against indigenous peoples as inherently genocidal. For example, in the case of the colonization of the Americas, where the indigenous people of the Americas declined by up to 90% in the first centuries of European colonization, how much of the population decline is attributable to genocide is debatable because disease is considered the main cause of this decline due to the fact that the introduction of disease was partially unintentional. Some genocide scholars separate the population declines which are due to disease from the genocidal aggression of one group towards another. Some scholars argue that an intent to commit a genocide is not needed, because a genocide may be the cumulative result of minor conflicts in which settlers, colonial agents or state agents perpetrate violent acts against minority groups. Others argue that the dire consequences of European diseases among many New World populations were exacerbated by different forms of genocidal violence, and they also argue that intentional deaths and unintentional deaths cannot easily be separated from each other. Some scholars regard the colonization of the Americas as genocide, since they argue it was largely achieved through systematically exploiting, removing and destroying specific ethnic groups, which would create environments and conditions for such disease to proliferate.


title: Genocide of indigenous peoples

text: According to a 2020 study by Tai S Edwards and Paul Kelton, recent scholarship shows "that colonizers bear responsibility for creating conditions that made natives vulnerable to infection, increased mortality, and hindered population recovery. This responsibility intersected with more intentional and direct forms of violence to depopulate the Americas... germs can no longer serve as the basis for denying American genocides."


title: Genocide of indigenous peoples

text: It is estimated that during the initial Spanish conquest of the Americas, up to eight million indigenous people died, primarily through the spread of Afro-Eurasian diseases. Simultaneously, wars and atrocities waged by Europeans against Native Americans also resulted in deaths. Mistreatment and killing of Native Americans continued for centuries, in every area of the Americas, including the areas that would become Canada, the United States, Mexico, Brazil, and the Southern Cone countries such as Paraguay, Chile, and Argentina. In the United States, some scholars (examples listed below) state that the American Indian Wars and the doctrine of manifest destiny contributed to the genocide, with one major event cited being the Trail of Tears.


title: Genocide of indigenous peoples

text: Historians and scholars whose work has examined this history in the context of genocide have included historian Jeffrey Ostler, historian David Stannard, anthropological demographer Russell Thornton, Indigenous Studies scholar Vine Deloria, Jr., as well as scholar-activists such as Russell Means and Ward Churchill. In his book "American Holocaust" Stannard compares the events of colonization in the Americas to the definition of genocide which is written in the 1948 UN convention, and he writes that,In light of the U.N. language—even putting aside some of its looser constructions—it is impossible to know what transpired in the Americas during the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries and not conclude that it was genocide. Thornton describes the direct consequences of warfare, violence and massacres as genocides, many of which had the effect of wiping out entire ethnic groups. Political scientist Guenter Lewy states that "even if up to 90 percent of the reduction in Indian population was the result of disease, that leaves a sizable death toll caused by mistreatment and violence." Native American studies professor Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz states,Proponents of the default position emphasize attrition by disease despite other causes equally deadly, if not more so. In doing so they refuse to accept that the colonization of America was genocidal by plan, not simply the tragic fate of populations lacking immunity to disease.By 1900, the indigenous population in the Americas declined by more than 80%, and by as much as 98% in some areas. The effects of diseases such as smallpox, measles and cholera during the first century of colonialism contributed greatly to the death toll, while violence, displacement and warfare against the Indians by colonizers contributed to the death toll in subsequent centuries. As detailed in "American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present" (2015),It is also apparent that the shared history of the hemisphere is one which is framed by the dual tragedies of genocide and slavery, both of which are part of the legacy of the European invasions of the past 500 years. Indigenous people both north and south were displaced, died of disease, and were killed by Europeans through slavery, rape, and war. In 1491, about 145 million people lived in the western hemisphere. By 1691, the population of indigenous Americans had declined by 90–95 percent, or by around 130 million people.According to geographers from University College London, the colonization of the Americas by Europeans killed so many people it resulted in climate change and global cooling. UCL Geography Professor Mark Maslin, one of the co-authors of the study, states that the large death toll also boosted the economies of Europe: "the depopulation of the Americas may have inadvertently allowed the Europeans to dominate the world. It also allowed for the Industrial Revolution and for Europeans to continue that domination."


title: Genocide of indigenous peoples

text: It is estimated that during the initial Spanish conquest of the Americas up to eight million indigenous people died, primarily through the spread of Afro-Eurasian diseases, in a series of events that have been described as the first large-scale act of genocide of the modern era. Acts of brutality and systematic annihilation against the Taíno People of the Caribbean prompted Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas to write ('A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies') in 1542—an account that had a wide impact throughout the western world as well as contributing to the abolition of indigenous slavery in all Spanish territories the same year it was written. Las Casas wrote that the native population on the Spanish colony of Hispaniola had been reduced from 400,000 to 200 in a few decades. His writings were among those that gave rise to "Spanish Black Legend", which Charles Gibson describes as "the accumulated tradition of propaganda and Hispanophobia according to which the Spanish Empire is regarded as cruel, bigoted, degenerate, exploitative and self-righteous in excess of reality". Historian Andrés Reséndez at the University of California, Davis asserts that even though disease was a factor, the indigenous population of Hispaniola would have rebounded the same way Europeans did following the Black Death if it were not for the constant enslavement they were subject to. He says that "among these human factors, slavery was the major killer" of Hispaniola's population, and that "between 1492 and 1550, a nexus of slavery, overwork and famine killed more natives in the Caribbean than smallpox, influenza or malaria." Noble David Cook, writing about the Black Legend conquest of the Americas wrote, "There were too few Spaniards to have killed the millions who were reported to have died in the first century after Old and New World contact." He instead estimates that the death toll was caused by diseases like smallpox, which according to some estimates had an 80–90% fatality rate in Native American populations. However, historian Jeffrey Ostler has argued that Spanish colonization created conditions for disease to spread, for example, "careful studies have revealed that it is highly unlikely that members" of Hernando de Soto's 1539 expedition in the American South "had smallpox or measles. Instead, the disruptions caused by the expedition increased vulnerability of Native people to diseases including syphilis and dysentery, already present in the Americas, and malaria, a disease recently introduced from the eastern hemisphere."


title: Genocide of indigenous peoples

text: With the initial conquest of the Americas completed, the Spanish implemented the encomienda system in 1503. In theory, the "encomienda" placed groups of indigenous peoples under Spanish oversight to foster cultural assimilation and conversion to Catholicism, but in practice led to the legally sanctioned forced labor and resource extraction under brutal conditions with a high death rate. Though the Spaniards did not set out to exterminate the indigenous peoples, believing their numbers to be inexhaustible, their actions led to the annihilation of entire tribes such as the Arawak. Many Arawaks died from lethal forced labor in the mines, in which a third of workers died every six months. According to historian David Stannard, the "encomienda" was a genocidal system which "had driven many millions of native peoples in Central and South America to early and agonizing deaths.".


title: Genocide of indigenous peoples

text: According to Doctor Clifford Trafzer, Professor at UC Riverside, in the 1760s, an expedition dispatched to fortify California, led by Gaspar de Portolà and Junípero Serra, was marked by slavery, forced conversions, and genocide through the introduction of disease.


title: Genocide of indigenous peoples

text: During the Beaver Wars of the seventeenth century, the Iroquois effectively destroyed several large tribal confederacies, including the Mohicans, Huron (Wyandot), Neutral, Erie, Susquehannock (Conestoga), and northern Algonquins, with the extreme brutality and exterminatory nature of the mode of warfare practised by the Iroquois causing some historians to label these wars as acts of genocide committed by the Iroquois Confederacy.


title: Genocide of indigenous peoples

text: The Kalinago genocide was the massacre of some 2,000 Island Caribs by English and French settlers in 1628 in St. Kitts.


title: Genocide of indigenous peoples

text: The Carib Chief Tegremond became uneasy with the increasing number of English and French settlers occupying St. Kitts. This led to confrontations, which led him to plot the settlers' elimination with the aid of other Island Caribs. However, his scheme was betrayed by an Indian woman called Barbe, to Thomas Warner and Pierre Belain d'Esnambuc. Taking action, the English and French settlers invited the Caribs to a party where they became intoxicated. When the Caribs returned to their village, 120 were killed in their sleep, including Chief Tegremond. The following day, the remaining 2,000–4,000 Caribs were forced into the area of Bloody Point and Bloody River, where over 2,000 were massacred, though 100 settlers were also killed. One Frenchman went mad after being struck by a manchineel-poisoned arrow. The remaining Caribs fled, but by 1640, those not already enslaved were removed to Dominica.


title: Genocide of indigenous peoples

text: The Pequot War was an armed conflict that took place between 1636 and 1638 in New England between the Pequot tribe and an alliance of the colonists of the Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Saybrook colonies and their allies from the Narragansett and Mohegan tribes. The war concluded with the decisive defeat of the Pequots. The Connecticut and Massachusetts colonies offered bounties for the heads of killed hostile Indians, and later for just their scalps, during the Pequot War in the 1630s; Connecticut specifically reimbursed Mohegans for slaying the Pequot in 1637. At the end, about 700 Pequots had been killed or taken into captivity. Hundreds of prisoners were sold into slavery to the West Indies; other survivors were dispersed as captives to the victorious tribes. The result was the elimination of the Pequot tribe as a viable polity in Southern New England, and the colonial authorities classified them as extinct. However, members of the Pequot tribe still live today as a federally recognized tribe.


title: Genocide of indigenous peoples

text: The Great Swamp Massacre was committed during King Philip's War by colonial militia of New England on the Narragansett tribe in December 1675. On 15 December of that year, Narraganset warriors attacked the Jireh Bull Blockhouse and killed at least 15 people. Four days later, the colonial militia from Plymouth Colony, Connecticut Colony, and Massachusetts Bay Colony were led to the main Narragansett town in South Kingstown, Rhode Island. The settlement was burned, its inhabitants (including women and children) killed or evicted, and most of the tribe's winter stores destroyed. It is believed that at least 97 Narragansett warriors and 300 to 1,000 non-combatants were killed, though exact figures are unknown. The massacre was a critical blow to the Narragansett tribe during the period directly following the massacre. However, much like the Pequot, the Narragansett people continue to live today as a federally recognized tribe.