Just seen Teribus's spiel. I agree with much of what he says about the early part of Pinter's address - I put it down to misguided self-indulgence by someone who thinks he is not going to survive his present illness.

But comparing the US with the USSR or any other Communist regime (much less with the Khmer Rouge which was neither capitalist nor communist, just criminal) is a straw-man argument. Sure it may be possible to search out a few monographs critical of US outrages, but only a fool would say that such episodes have attracted media coverage comparable with that meted out to the commie regimes. Unquestionably Stalin was a monster, but again I see little profit in blaming his excesses on any particular economic ideology. His ilk, like Hitler, Pol Pot, Amin, etc, are brutal tyrants and usually megalomanics.

Yet how many countries did the USSR bomb, invade or attack after WW2? For the US I would guess the figure is 40 or thereabouts. Sorry I haven't time to look it up just now - Teribus may tell us. Britain would probably have done its best to ape US atrocities had its power not declined. Still, it did its best in Malaya, the Asian sub-continent etc. (In Kenya the British killed about 11,000 people - many of them supporters of Britain - in retaliation for the Mau Mau insurrection, in which fewer than 40 people were killed.

Yet the western capitalists always had the moral high ground - backed to the hilt by the Vatican, of couse, because popes (especially the last one) have tended to outdo even McCarthy in their hysteria about communism.

America, remember, forced through the disgraceful farce of the Nuremburg trials, and it's America that has called the shots at the ICTY. The same America that insists its own troops will never answer to any form of international court. The crimes of the US are bad enough (though comfortably eclipsed by others, as Pinter acknowledged). What stinks worse is the sheer hypocrisy.