Pinter’s take on history has some merit

Re “The play’s his thing, not history,” Opinion, Dec. 12

Niall Ferguson’s perplexing response to Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech creates a new and bizarre take on American and British political morality. He tells us that he won’t defend torturing folks (and we really should stop doing that), and he admits that U.S. support of fascist tyrants since the end of World War II makes us complicit in the political murder of hundreds of thousands.

But he chides Pinter for asserting that such behavior makes us as bad as our Cold War enemies. Shucks, they killed way more right-wingers than we killed left-wingers (how’s that for moral relativism?). And shucks, nothing’s been covered up. Yet those who depend on The Times for news could hardly know what Ferguson is fulminating against, because Pinter’s Nobel laureate speech excoriating American and British foreign policy was wholly ignored by your newspaper.

MARVIN KLOTZ

Venice

*

Ferguson correctly exposed Pinter’s exaggeration of the abuses committed by our government overseas. However, Pinter’s hype does not cost a single life. We need more courageous journalists, like the young (not the current) Bob Woodward, to dig meticulously into the truth that will not only set us free but can save lives as well.

BILL WAUNG

Rancho Palos Verdes

*

I am sure that it will be a great consolation for the South and Central American victims of CIA-sponsored death squads to know that the communist regimes achieved greater kills in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia and Korea.

MAURICIO D’TEJADA

Claremont