29 LITERATURE
Lilijana Burcar 
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
The New World Order and the  
Unmasking of the Neo-Colonial Present 
Summary
In his dramatic sketch #e New World Order Pinter exposes practices of psychological and 
physical abuse targeted at local people who resist neo-colonial advancements in territories directly 
occupied or indirectly controlled by Western hegemonic powers.  rough the deployment of 
Pinteresque double-layered meanings conveyed through seemingly ordinary, everyday language, 
the drama unveils the ideological premises and operating principles of neo-colonial discourse.  e 
paper discusses the way Pinter blasts apart a seemingly neutral Western rhetoric of humanitarian 
militarism, focusing on the discursive strategies by means of which neo-imperial violence, torture 
and massive dispossession of local populations are justi ed and naturalized.  
Key words:  neo-colonialism, cultural racism, economic dominance, torture, Chile
Novi svetovni red (The New World Order):  
razpiranje pogleda na neokolonialno sedanjost
Povzetek
V svojem dramskem skeču Novi svetovni red Pinter razgali psihološke in  zične prakse ustrahov anja 
lokalnega prebivalstva, ki se zoperstavlja neokolonialnim posegom, in sicer na področjih 
neposredno pod okupacijo zahodnoevropskih hegemonov, ali pa pod njihovo posredno kontrolo. 
Večslojnost pomenov, ki jih Pinter vgrajuje v navidezno nevtralno, vsakdanjo govorico slehernika 
služi kot odskočna deska za razkrivanje ideoloških podstati in operativnih tehnik, na katerih 
temelji neokolonialni diskurz. Prispevek obravnava načine, na katere Pinterjeva drama razpre 
navidezno nevtralno retoriko zahodnoevropskih imperialističnih velesil, in pokaže, kako poteka 
zagovor in naturalizacija neoimperialnega nasilja, mučenja in masovne razlastitve lokalnega 
prebivalstva pod krinko domnevno humanitarnega militarizma. 
Ključne besede:  neokolonializem, kulturni rasizem, ekonomska dominantnost, mučenje, Čile
UDK 821.111–224.09Pinter H.
DOI: 10.4312/elope.9.1.29-40
30 Lilijana Burcar The New World Order and the Unmasking of the Neo-Colonial Present 
The New World Order and the Unmasking  
of the Neo-Colonial Present 
 “Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as 
a market, the $ag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed 
must be battered down … Concessions obtained by %nanciers must be safeguarded by ministers 
of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must 
be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left 
unused.” Woodrow Wilson, 1907
1
1. Introduction
Pinter’s dramatic oeuvre has been marked by his commitment to the analysis and understanding 
of power relationships, with a heavy focus placed on the function of language in creating and 
securing positions of usurped authority, dominance and control. Critics unanimously agree that, 
while Pinter’s dramatic output has always referenced political issues, it has also undergone a 
major change with regard to its de nition of the po litical, thus contributing primarily to the 
“deepening and enlarging of the  eld of political” (Aragay 2009, 185). His earlier works of the 
1950s, 1960s and the 1970s are con ned to the explo ration of micropolitics within seemingly 
self-su<cient inter-personal relationships, which are therefore still treated in isolation from the 
broader socio-political context and symbolic order that in fact informs their structuration. His 
later works that emerged with the onset of the 1980s, such as One for the Road (1984), Mountain 
Language (1988), Party Time (1991) and Ashes to Ashes (1996), break out of this con nement. 
 ese works thus traverse the path from being mere “ metaphorical explorations of power” to 
becoming works that “broaden their focus to include an understanding of politics as the world of 
state power, torture, repression and violence”, thus also pointing to the “absolute interdependence 
of the private and the public”, while reinstating the need for a constant production of a “social, 
shared sense of subjectivity” (Aragay 2009, 289). It is to this second stage of Pinter’s oeuvre that 
#e New World Order belongs. 
Pinter’s dramatic sketch #e New World Order premiered in 1991 as a prelude to Death and 
the Maiden written by Ariel Dorfman, a well-known political activist
2
 who was exiled by the 
Pinochet regime as a result of his sustained critique of US imperial policies in Latin America. 
While Death and the Maiden deals with the reappearance of a woman seeking revenge against 
her former torturer in post-Pinochet Chile, Pinter’s #e New World Order takes us to the very 
1
 Quoted in Noam Chomsky: “Modern-Day American Imperialism: The Middle East and Beyond.” Noam Chomsky’s Zspace Page, 
December 23, 2009.
2
 Dorfman’s most influential work, How to Read Donald Duck: A Manual of Decolonization, was co-authored with Armand Matterat 
and published in 1971 during the Allende presidency. The book was later burned in Pinochet Chile and taken out of circulation in the 
US by the Ford administration (McClennen 2010, 176). How to Read Donald Duck draws attention to the imperial propaganda found 
in the Disney comics. As one critic has pointed out, it “dismantles the seemingly innocuous characters of Donald Duck and his pals 
and demonstrates how they serve to colonize Latin America through a repeated litany of tales favouring capitalism, U.S. imperialism, 
[and] the infantilization of the reader” (McClennen 2010, 175).
31 LITERATURE
heart of the Pinochet regime, backed and sponsored by the US (Livingstone 2009; Harvey 2005; 
Chomsky 2003). Its single act unravels in a torture chamber presided over by two interrogators 
who have English names, Lionel and Des.  e two inte rrogators continually =ex their muscle in 
the presence of the blindfolded prisoner, openly and repeatedly boasting that the victim “hasn’t 
got any idea at all about any one of the number of things that we [“are about to do”] to him” 
(Pinter 2005, 271, 272).  e blindfolded man turns o ut to be the target of their intimidation 
and impending torture for being a disturbance in the socio-political landscape. It is in this 
respect that Lionel  rst wonders ironically about t he identity and true preoccupation of the 
speechless victim, oscillating between two options: “Who is this cunt anyway! What is he, some 
kind of peasant – or a lecturer in theology?” (Pinter 2005, 273).  is crucial remark, which at 
 rst sight seems to merely belittle the victim, is immediately followed by Des’s precision-driven 
observation that foregrounds and undercuts the signi cance of the victim’s political cause. It 
merges the two labels into a single description,  n ally announcing an alarming truth, which in 
turn seals the victim’s fate: “He is a lecturer in fucking peasant theology” (Pinter 2005, 273). 
 e signi cance of this compound phrase is twofold:  rst, the peasant in the “peasant theology” 
invokes and makes visible the otherwise spectral existence of all those Latin American peasants 
and by extension the rest of the masses of ordinary citizens who have been dispossessed and 
impoverished through ongoing privatisation schemes in Latin America.  ese have always been 
the staple of imperial pursuits on the part of the US and other Western corporations, who have 
worked in cahoots with local elites, demanding free access to and control of land, natural resources, 
markets and unprotected, low-wage labour. Secondly, the reference to “theology” and thereby to 
“peasant theology” in particular, acknowledges and foregrounds the existence of swelling social 
and guerrilla resistance movements organised primarily by the dispossessed, that is, peasants as 
well as by trade unionists, journalists and intellectuals (Burbach 2001). All of these, of course, are 
spreading the theology, or in other words the gospel of social justice, demanding a redistribution 
of wealth and an end to the exploitation and violence that accompany the Western-led expansion 
of capitalist modes of international production and accumulation of private corporate wealth. It 
is to this kind of potential resistance movement that the two torturers refer derisively as “peasant 
theology”.  e two torturers – who, as suggested by their English names, obviously work in the 
employ of a Western imperial force and serve as its extended hand – boast that the in=iction of 
pain on those who will not succumb makes the two of them “feel so pure” (Pinter 2005, 277). 
For they believe it is their sacred duty to suppress the dangerous theology of social justice and 
annihilate its local spokespeople in order, as they proudly proclaim, to “keep the world clean for 
[the spread of Western] democracy” (Pinter 2005, 277). It is for this reason that the blindfolded 
victim is tortured and mutilated in order to be subdued and  nally rendered speechless, keeping 
the socio-political landscape “clean” for the advancement of Western economic interests.
Pinter’s political play is a critique of Western neo-colonial practices and imperial structural 
violence masquerading as democracy and human-rights discourse.  e torture room alerts us 
to the neo-colonial present that can no longer be concealed, nor can its uncomfortable truths 
of socio-economic subjugation and devastation be evaded. Far from being just an enclosed 
box, the torture room is thus a “symbolic place” that stands for the whole of Chile and by 
extension Latin America and beyond. As a symbolic place, the torture room thus also functions 
32 Lilijana Burcar The New World Order and the Unmasking of the Neo-Colonial Present 
as a veritable Pandora’s box for Western audiences, whose world is in fact by no means separate 
from the world and the fates of those directly exposed to the US-led neo-imperial policies. 
Once its lid is pried open and its visceral contents are  nally allowed to spill over, the sketch 
and its torture room come to feature as a “speck of [stirring] consciousness” on the part of an 
audience that needs to be awakened from its mainstream-media induced slumber (Worth qtd. 
in Inan 2005, 38).
With the torture chamber functioning as a symbolic place, the anonymous blindfolded prisoner 
who is to be vanquished for spreading the gospel of social justice can therefore be taken both 
literally and  guratively. He can be understood bot h as somebody plucked from a critical crowd 
of local inhabitants demanding social justice and as an allegorical stand-in for those Latin 
American leaders who have dared defy the US’s designation of Latin America as its backyard. In 
this sense, Pinter’s political sketch draws a direct analogy between the “peasant theology” of a 
seemingly anonymous prisoner and the anti-colonial and socialist agenda pursued by the ousted 
Chilean President Allende.  is agenda was made most explicit in part of the speech Allende 
delivered upon his election victory, which deserves to be quoted in full: 
“We shall abolish monopolies which grant control of the economy to a few dozen families. 
We shall abolish a tax system which favours pro tee ring and which has always put a greater 
burden on the poor than the rich. … We shall abolish the large estates which condemn 
thousands of peasants to serfdom. We shall put an end to foreign ownership of our industry 
and our sources of unemployment.  e road to sociali sm lies through democracy, pluralism 
and freedom.” (qtd. in Livingstone 2009, 58).
Pinter’s sketch inadvertently draws attention to a broader socio-political context in which the 
torturers, as allegorical  gures of Western powers, operate and their victims are embedded. 
Salvador Allende and his government introduced progressive policies, the aim of which was 
a redistribution of wealth.  is rested on agrarian reform and nationalisation of industries, 
the most important among which was copper extraction, in which private American  rms 
prior to the nationalisation had a 79 percent ownership stake (Livingstone 2009, 59). 
Semi-declassi ed US government documents reveal tha t the CIA, operating under close 
scrutiny by top Washington administrators and working in close alliance with private 
American corporations like Pepsi, ITT and Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank, tried to 
prevent Allende’s ascendancy to power well before his election in 1970.  e CIA poured in 
millions of dollars to fund the campaigns of Allende’s right-wing and Christian Democrat 
opponents, thus in=uencing the election results in 1964.  e same tactics, however, fell 
through in the 1970 election (Livingstone 2009, 51-5).  e Nixon administration, among 
other actions, immediately resorted to measures to cripple the Chilean economy and spread 
dissatisfaction among Allende’s own supporters.  e US cut  nancial aid and reached an 
agreement with other  nancial agencies, including W estern private banks, to withdraw or 
no longer grant loans, as a result of which whole sectors of Chile’s vital economy, such as 
copper, steel, petrol, electricity and transport, eventually ground to a halt, due to a severe 
shortage of spare parts the Allende government could no longer a@ord to buy (Livingstone 
2009, 56).  e gravity of the situation was further compounded by Nixon’s direct order 
33 LITERATURE
instructing “his o<cials to sell copper from the US stockpile in order to reduce the world 
copper price and slash Chile’s export earnings” (Livingstone 2009, 56). While the Nixon 
administration deliberately made the Chilean “economy scream” (Livingstone 2009, 55), 
virtually incapacitating Allende’s government in implementation of its reforms, it also 
continued to pour money into the co@ers of Chile’s opposition parties, making it possible 
for them to establish or buy private radio and television stations that were to spread anti-
Allende, that is anti-socialist propaganda. All along, the Nixon government supported 
and funded the preparations for the coup, which the CIA engineered in collaboration 
with anti-constitutionalist military o<cers, opting in the end for Pinochet. After the coup 
and under the close supervision of the US government, the Pinochet regime was one of 
the  rst to launch a series of neoliberal economic policies which included privatisation 
of state industries that were to be sold o@ at rock-bottom prices, the privatisation of the 
education, social security and health systems, the abolition of labour laws and outlawing 
of trade unions, and the opening of the economy, including natural resources such as 
energy resources, timber and  sheries, to foreign p rivate investment,  nancial speculation 
and “unregulated exploitation”, with minimum concession payments and only symbolic 
corporate taxes placed on foreign companies (Livingstone 2009, 64; Harvey 2005, 7-9). 
 is pattern of contemporary neo-colonialism, which is premised on  nancial instruments 
under Western control and marked by a new cycle of appropriation of natural resources and 
control of labour, is not unique to South America. It can be traced all over the world.  e most 
recent example is the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, which the Western hegemonic 
powers sold to the public under the false claims of Iraq being an imminent security threat for 
possessing weapons of mass destruction. Here, under the slogan of bestowing American freedom 
and democracy on the Iraqi people, the US – with the help of the new Iraqi government 
which it had itself installed – has passed a number of laws that have prohibited strikes and 
annulled the right of the Iraqi people to trade unions, while also putting into e@ect: “the full 
privatisation of public enterprises, full ownership rights by foreign  rms of Iraqi businesses, 
full repatriation of foreign pro ts ... the opening of the Iraqi banks to foreign control, national 
treatment for foreign companies and ... the elimination of nearly all trade barriers” (Harvey 
2005, 6). In all instances, be it Latin America, the Middle East or some other place of geo-
strategic importance, we can observe a familiar process at work that underlines the expansionist 
activities of Western hegemonic powers geared towards accumulation of private capital: this is 
the draining of resources from newly constituted peripheries, including the former European 
socialist countries, to the reconstructed imperial centres, most e@ectively achieved through 
shock therapy as evident in instances of direct military occupation or carefully staged coups 
(Klein  2007).  ese kinds of interventions fall und er the rubric of neo-colonialism – a new 
world order – whereby a “sovereign state (i. e. Iraq) is held under political, economic, and 
military control by a hegemonic power (i. e. the USA)” whose troops may not necessarily be 
present on the territory under occupation (Welch 2010, 124). 
Being a symbolic space, Pinter’s torture room epitomises this broader geo-political context.  e 
escalating torrent of threats unleashed against the blindfolded victim in the torture chamber 
cannot therefore but be understood in a double and yet complementary sense. As the nature of 
34 Lilijana Burcar The New World Order and the Unmasking of the Neo-Colonial Present 
the threats moves from the merely descriptive level, “He hasn’t got any idea at all of what we’re 
going to do to him”, to a more detailed explanation stating explicitly that the victim “hasn’t 
got any idea at all about any one of the number of things that we might do to him” (271, italics 
added), a more nuanced vista of multi-layered meanings unfolds. For these threats no longer bear 
only direct reference to bodily pain, which is to be in=icted on the victim through application 
of various torture techniques for his refusal to conform.  ey also carry an equally sinister 
Pinteresque undertone which is to be understood in broader socio-economic terms, hinting 
at a seemingly abstract but in reality very concrete form of torture linked to the new economic 
world order.  e introduction of neoliberal economic agendas promoted by hegemonic powers 
always leads to the complete rupture and devastation of local communities, and hence to the 
reduction of human lives to mere labouring bodies that are not only held captive under an 
imposed socio-economic order but also inevitably riddled with the pain of systemic deprivation. 
Since economic threats sooner or later always acquire a very concrete physical manifestation, 
they eventually become one with physical threats. Direct physical and implicit economic threats 
are thus not at all separate from one another but in fact mutually reinforcing to the point that 
they merge into one another.
In Pinter’s #e New World Order, the torturers are mouthpieces announcing a clear agenda on 
behalf of the imperial master they serve.  e messag e they impart to the victim is that those 
who preach social justice have no clue about what we can do to them. And we can do this 
by tearing apart your communities and your countries, reconstituting them in our image as 
operative economies tied to our private gain of pro t, making your lives in the process disposable, 
reducing you to mere =esh or “bare life” (Singh 2006, 76) that festers with unacknowledged 
but systematically in=icted wounds. Yet our conscience is clear and our hearts pure, for our 
excuse, although unfounded, is that we are doing all this for the sake of spreading freedom and 
democracy.  e political signi cance of Pinter’s ske tch thus also lies in laying bare the discursive 
mechanisms by means of which a hegemonic power comes to portray itself as a seat of benevolent 
colonialism and claims for itself the fake status of indisputable moral authority. 
2. The New World Order and the Neo-Racism of Western Democracies
 e torturers’ evocation of the word democracy, unde r whose banner the executioners of 
Western hegemonic projects march to other countries, draws attention to ideological discourses 
Western hegemonic powers use to obscure their exploitative economic practices and to naturalise 
their imperial violence. T o justify the exploitation and mistreatment of neo-colonial subjects, 
contemporary hegemonic powers produce o<cial narratives about themselves that put them, 
as Pinter’s play foregrounds, in a position of fabricated moral superiority.  ese narratives of 
Western supremacy are based on the re-activation and intensi cation of old Eurocentric, racialised 
binaries, which once again construct societies along the axis of modernity and traditionalism, 
which are euphemistic expressions for progress and regressiveness. 
In liberal democracies, as noted by an array of social scientists, contemporary processes of 
racialisation no longer rely upon discredited and imploded biological racism.  e focus has 
instead shifted to the endless production of cultural racism. As explained by Balibar, this is 
35 LITERATURE
“racism whose dominant theme is not biological heredity but the insurmountability of cultural 
di@erences” (Balibar 1991, 21). In this context culture is used as a selective and racialised marker, 
since it is used to reference and hence de ne only non-western peoples as well as immigrant/
minority groups residing at the heart of imperial centres (Gunew 2004, 6; Bannerji 2000, 78). 
Within cultural racism, the destiny of non-western others is interpreted as no longer sealed 
by their genes but imposed by the supposedly restrictive traditions and habits of their culture, 
which is conceptualised as static and ahistoric (Balibar 1991).  is discursive manoeuvre makes 
it possible for the members of racialised groups to be re-positioned as prisoners of their culture, 
which in turn is posited as a totalising and deterministic force.  is rhetorical operation leads 
to a re-con guration of non-western others as subje cts lacking agency and individuality: their 
thinking and behaviour are presented as entirely governed by the dictates and traditions of their 
supposedly one-dimensional cultures. In this way formerly biological constructs of hierarchically 
arranged di@erence and otherness morph into those of cultural stereotypes.  e essentialised 
notion of culture becomes an explanatory tool for interpreting the behaviour and actions of non-
western others. While racialised others are thus rendered culture-speci c and culture-bound, 
liberal subjects of western democracies are presented as free of the determinants of their culture, 
in terms of its “constructive and repressive powers” (Brown 2006, 22). How is this ideological 
trick made possible?
In this game of binary constructs, the Western subject is featured as a rational and autonomous 
individual, who in his/her rationality appears to be abstracted and therefore supposedly 
disembodied from the material determinants and constraints of his/her culture. In other words, 
the so called liberal individual is arti%cially divested of any associations with culture through a 
discursive strategy that abstracts the individual from her/his concrete social context, so that the 
“powers that produce and reproduce subjects’ relations and practices, beliefs and rationalities, and 
[which] do so without the [subject’s] express choice or consent” are disavowed and removed from 
view (Brown 2006, 22).
3
  e conceit at work here, as demonstrated by Wendy Brown, is that 
the Western subject is re-conceptualised as though s/he existed “prior to culture”, so that culture 
through this rhetorical strategy is “rendered extrinsic to rather than constitutive of the subject” 
(Brown 2006, 153). Culture is thus re-formulated and positioned as a mere “background” which 
a liberal subject, unlike its subaltern other, can freely “enter or exit” (Brown 2006, 153). In 
this way, the understanding of “culture as power and especially as rule is replaced by culture 
as a mere way of life”, so that we no longer deal with interpellative ideological processes and 
subject positions but rather with a mere assortment of consumer choices revolving around food, 
music, and other sources of comfort (Brown 2006, 153). In this way the Western subject is re-
constituted as somebody whom culture neither de nes nor regulates.  e Western liberal subject 
is understood to choose culture and “have culture”, but unlike its racialised other, it is not seen as 
3
 The construction of the Western subject as an autonomous and self-made individual existing outside the constitutive constraints 
of their culture leads, for example, to the misconception that patriarchy, its norms and gender subordination are inherent only to 
other cultures. The outcome of this dualism is the construction of a homogenised image of all non-western women as victims and 
prisoners of their oppressive and religiously driven patriarchal cultures, and the construction of the myth of Western women as 
“secular, liberated and having control over their own lives” (Mohanty, 2002, 42). The construct of a free western woman rests upon 
the ascription of cultural constraints exclusively onto the “Other” racialised woman, which in turn serves to mask the existence of 
patriarchy and processes of gender subordination in Western capitalist states, where women continue to be construed as a deviation 
from the masculine norm.
36 Lilijana Burcar The New World Order and the Unmasking of the Neo-Colonial Present 
the embodiment of culture. Rather, as pointed out by Wendy Brown, culture is something that 
Westerners have, unlike the racialised others who “are a culture” (Brown 2006, 151). Hence the 
slogan “'we' have culture while culture has 'them'” (Brown 2006,151).
 e construction of racialised others as prisoners o f their atavistically reconstrued culture and of 
Western subjects as enlightened, free individuals who supposedly simply choose what to think 
and how to behave is indicative of the re-activation of the old colonial discourse: open and 
modern societies in the West and traditional and regressive societies in the rest of the world. Or, 
as exempli ed by Balibar in his seminal essay “Is t here a neo-racism?”, these constructs once again 
point to “barely reworked variants of the idea [in the Western orientalist imaginary] that historical 
cultures and humanity can be divided into two main groups: the one assumed to be universalistic 
and progressive, the other supposed irremediably particularistic and primitive” (Balibar 1991, 25). 
All of this plays directly into the hands of Western supremacy. Pinter’s play discloses the duplicity 
of this game precisely at the peak of the action when the torturers are  nally ready to use force. As 
one of the torturers begins to cry in ecstasy, feeling the urge to confess to the fellow torturer that 
“he loves it”, that he loves what he is doing because it makes him “feel so pure”, the other torturer 
legitimises the feelings of his workmate by stating, “You are right to feel pure. You know why? ... 
Because you are keeping the world clean for democracy” (Pinter 2005, 277).  is justi cation is 
premised on a particular kind of cultivated blindness motivated by updated cultural racism. 
Here representatives of hegemonic power are cast as military missionaries on a civilising mission in 
a country where locals, according to the torturers, supposedly need to be instructed on principles 
of democracy, even though the lesson, strangely, is steeped in torture and blood.  e evocation of 
democracy and the need to keep the host country ready for its unconditional uptake implies the 
lack of any kind of democratic organisation or other trace of self-governing capacity among the 
locals, thus signalling a traditional society driven by lack of rationality, which therefore needs to be 
enlightened by a modern and progressive one. Violence is justi ed in the form of a neo-colonial 
speak that  gures Western subjects as carriers of u niversal laws and seemingly disembodied 
principles of humanity to be imparted to the colonised others. Pinter’s political sketch completely 
unveils the ideological machinations that inform the construction of the hegemon’s fake moral 
superiority, bringing to the surface logical contradictions that make this position untenable and 
unsustainable. For the military missionaries who appear to stand on a higher moral ground can 
parade as such only when the constitutive forces of their own authoritarian, racist and patriarchal 
culture are disavowed and removed from view.  eirs is indeed a culture marked by discriminatory 
and exclusionary practices, including, for example, repressive immigration policies, blatant racism, 
ghettoes, and a huge sprawl of pro t-run prison-ind ustrial complexes where people’s subjectivities 
are indeed constituted in pain.  e ascription of a lack of democratic principles of governance to 
non-European countries – a lack that only Western hegemonic powers can redress – signi es the 
construction of the colonised subjects as mired in an anterior time and place, and marked by a 
particular kind of imaginary cultural incommensurability with the West. 
Pinter’s play thus makes visible the way in which the very mobilisation of the discourse of 
modernity and tradition now premised on cultural racism is strategically applied by Western 
powers to other seemingly far-=ung corners of the world, where it becomes directly tied to 
37 LITERATURE
the justi cation of the Western forces’ invasive fo reign policy agendas and the enforcement of 
their geo-political interests under the pretext of humanitarian intervention and rescue missions. 
 is can be witnessed in the re-conceptualisation of non-western countries as inadequate 
and de cit cultures incapable of governing themselv es and in need of  nancial and military 
“stabilisation”, thus inevitably inviting upon themselves the services of western powers.  ese 
are benevolently extended in the form of structural adjustment programs and humanitarian 
military interventions, which in the neo-colonial speak, as pointed out by a number of critics, 
are euphemistic expressions for economic and military occupation (Chomsky 1993). All this 
goes to show that the way cultural racism is re-mobilised at the heart of the so called Western 
democracies has direct consequences for the way the constructs of race and socio-economic 
power hierarchies are circulated and applied globally to keep in check “the material and symbolic 
boundaries” between the West and its Others. 
3. Exporting Freedom, Exporting Torture
“#ey tell us they are teaching democracy. We say ‘How do you teach democracy through the 
barrel of a gun?’” (Father Roy Bourgeois in Taylor 2007, 1)
US-led imperialism rests on benign claims of installing democracy and bestowing freedom on 
the colonised peoples it takes into its custody, supposedly for the sake of their own security and 
protection.  e image of the US imperial force as a beacon of democracy, the seat of reason and 
source of benevolence is, however, betrayed by the systematic and indiscriminate deployment 
of widespread, carefully coordinated torture, which Pinter’s sketch uncompromisingly brings 
to the surface.  e US has taken every measure to ex empt itself from the Geneva conventions, 
to which it no longer subscribes. At the same time it has loosened up de nitions of torture, 
allowing for reinterpretation of a number of torture techniques as no longer falling under the 
category of pain-inducing or life-threatening procedures, even though the end result might be 
organ failure or even death. It has also adopted measures that protect US interrogators against 
war crimes prosecution or charges of homicide, while creating new categories of non-persons 
and war-prisoners out of colonised people with no recourse to legal protection.  ese are people 
stripped of their humanity and reduced to mere “bodies that can be tortured or killed with 
impunity” (Singh 2006, 74).  
 e real aim of widespread, indiscriminately used to rture is not to extract signi cant confession 
or intelligence information, on the basis of which the tortured could be incriminated. Research 
shows that (Iraqi) detainees are required to sign “prepared confessions” before their torture even 
commences or just to “give false information”, which the subcontracting torture agencies simply 
 le away. As pointed out by a number of human right s activists and lawyers, “information 
gathering is not the goal” (Philipose 2007, 70).  e point of the torture that is part of systematic 
imperial violence is not to incite people to talk but to make them go silent, a point succinctly 
driven home in Pinter’s play by one of the torturers: 
“Before he came in here he was a big shot, he never stopped shooting his mouth o@, he 
never stopped questioning received ideas. Now – because he’s apprehensive about what’s 
about to happen to him – he’s stopped all that, he’s got nothing more to say, he’s more or 
38 Lilijana Burcar The New World Order and the Unmasking of the Neo-Colonial Present 
less called it a day. I mean once – not too long ago – this man was a man of conviction, 
wasn’t he, a man of principle. Now he’s just a prick.” (Pinter 276, bold italics added)
As Pinter demonstrates, under the New World Order the aim of using torture is not to loosen 
the victim’s tongue by whatever means possible but to debase and shatter the victim into 
smithereens, thus immobilising his/her tongue and turning the victim into a submissive observer 
of occupation who no longer “questions received ideas” (Pinter 2005, 276). Or, as stated by 
Spencer, the objective of torture under a hegemonic power is “the reduction of a thinking, 
vigorous and insubordinate human being to ‘no more than a pile of blood, bone and meat that 
is unhappy’, a gibbering and helpless body focused now not on resistance or triumph but on the 
endurance or alleviation of su@ering” (2008, 183).  e point of deliberate, systematic in=iction 
of pain is to break people in, which in turn prevents the articulation of a fully-=edged critique 
of their subjugation and consolidation of critical consciousness that might lead to meaningful 
political opposition. T o torture, then, is to “send [colonised subjects] beyond language, outside 
of the political”, thus e@ectively “shutting down dissent” (Koopman 2008, 829) and eradicating 
or at least containing resistance. 
Evidence shows that the US has apprehended and detained tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians 
(26,000) that it has swept literally o@ the streets in random raids.  ese civilians are held inside 
a network of large prison-like camps without charges and for extended periods of time. Even 
though they are o<cially not considered criminals or terrorists, they are labelled and treated 
as an “imperative security risk” (Welch 2010,128). In these prisons Iraqi civilians are subjected 
not only to harsh and degrading, abusive treatment but also to “re-training” programmes.  e 
purpose of these is to inculcate the prisoners into accepting or at least adapting to the new socio-
economic order, turning them into compliant and even active supporters of the occupation and 
“the new regime of authority”. Some of these re-formed detainees are then “hire[d] back” by 
the US military “to confront [that is, in ltrate an d incapacitate] the insurgency” (Welch 2010, 
129, 135).  is is the issue that Pinter’s play rais es at its very end, resulting in its culmination. 
When one of the torturers admits feeling so pure in what he is doing to supposedly “keep the 
world clean for democracy”, the other torturer shakes him by the hand, motioning at the victim, 
saying, “And so will he … [that is, shake you by the hand] … in about thirty- ve minutes” 
(Pinter 2005, 278).  e point of the torture, then, is not only to break the prisoner who is 
believed to be “a lecturer in peasant theology” and therefore a “man of conviction”, a “man of 
principle”, so that his vociferous critique can thereafter be forever silenced.  e purpose is also 
to force the weakened victim to bury his convictions and replace them with their opposite. 
 e victim must not only give up his principles but also endorse his own enslavement.  e 
underlying goal is therefore to reset his mind frame so that he will become an ardent supporter of 
his own subjugation, somebody whose self-de nition from now on will always be derived from 
and conditioned by the terms set by the not so invisible hand of the imperial master. 
At this point, the signi cance of the torturers’ En glish  rst names  nally comes full circle. On the 
one hand, their English names point to the immediate, direct ground engagement of Western 
troops in a country placed under direct Western occupation. On the other, the torturers’ English 
names signify the hegemonic power’s indirect presence, yet unrestricted involvement in the 
39 LITERATURE
interior a@airs of seemingly sovereign countries whose proxy governments in the new world 
order have been in fact installed by the US or its Western allies. In short, their English names 
suggest that the torturers might themselves be the direct representatives of a Western occupying 
force or they might be local militias trained and put in service by a Western hegemonic power as 
its extended hand. Figuratively, the torture chamber stands for any country of strategic interest to 
and directly targeted by US-led Western neo-colonial forces, while literally speaking it returns us 
to Chile and Latin America.  e English names of the torturers in this latter case thus invoke the 
US Army School of the Americas, which the US established in Panama in 1946 and relocated 
to Fort Benning, Georgia in 1984, giving it a new name but, of course, not a new purpose 
(WHINSEC – the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation).
4
 Ever since its 
inception, this school has been concerned with the training of Latin American military personnel 
in counterinsurgency warfare and the use of various torture techniques that the CIA developed 
in the 1950s as part of a new psychological torture paradigm based on sensory deprivation, 
sexual humiliation and exposure to extreme stress positions (Koopman 2008, 829).  e training 
manuals extensively used in the school instruct speci cally that, for domestic insurgency to 
be quelled, the targets should be “union organizers, and those who say the government is not 
meeting the basic needs of the people” (Koopman 2008, 828).  
4. Conclusion
 e English names of the torturers throughout the pl ay thus serve as a sinister reminder of the 
doublespeak of neo-colonial powers whose self-promoted benevolence and concern for the well- 
being of the colonised is proven a sheer travesty of truth and a propaganda piece at its worst.
5
 At 
the same time, the dark side of the Western-sponsored or directly exported brutality in seemingly 
far away places ceases to be the “fantasy world of abroad”, but becomes instead our immanent, 
“massive and historically important objective reality” (Inan 2005, 42), which can no longer be 
swept aside and ignored. Pinter’s torture chamber thus defamiliarises us to the reality of our own 
world reconstructed along the axis of neo-imperial centres and newly created or refurbished 
peripheries. It is the new world order that is steeped in blood and mired in violence for the 
sake of holding in place the old, but refurbished socio-economic hierarchies and accompanying 
modes of exploitation that a@ect those on the periphery as well as those in the centre. #e New 
World Order makes a political statement by holding a mirror to these practices that a@ect us all 
directly.  ey make us all captives of a globally re structured torture chamber, which upon closer 
inspection turns out to be nothing but the latest stage in a massive schema of private wealth 
accumulation designed to enrich a few and further impoverish the rest. 
4
 The most notorious graduates have included Manuel Noriega and an array of former dictators and death squad leaders operating in 
Latin American states (Livingstone 2009, Koopman 2008).
5
 I recently discovered that the two English names, Des and Lionel, are today considered obsolete and that in the minds of the English 
they would be instantly recognised as names associated with stand-up comedians and public-hall entertainers back in the 1960s 
and the 1970s. The names thus carry another ominous Painteresque note, as they draw attention to the way violence, torture and 
death inflicted on neo-colonial subjects are rendered palatable and acceptable to the Western audience once they are strategically 
translated into a form of mere entertainment, as witnessed, for example, in video-game-like presentations of Western-led bombing 
raids in the mainstream media. At the same time, the horrific effect of neo-colonial discourses and practices propped up by torture 
and violence becomes lost on the executioners themselves. Their humanity is irredeemably lost once their internalised discourses of 
otherness and the infliction of pain on others come to serve as a source of entertainment.
40 Łukasz Borowiec More or Less on the Mark? Translating Harold Pinter’s The Dwarfs: A Novel
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