Pink Floyd’s Waters needs an education
Defensive comments aside, cranky musician acts like an antisemite and Putin apologist
Oh look, Roger Waters has finally found a Jew he likes.
Of course, the Pink Floyd cofounder had to reach all the way back to a girl who died in a concentration camp in 1945. And further of course, Anne Frank wasn’t an Israeli because there wasn’t any Israel when the teenager expired from typhus at Bergen-Belsen two weeks before the camp was liberated by the British 11th Armoured Division.
So maybe that doesn’t count? Waters, a 79-year-old crank and one-time musical genius as bassist, lyricist and vocalist with the iconic British ’70s psychedelic rock band, had the nerve to flash Frank’s name at a pair of concerts last week in Berlin, of all places — the city where 60,000 Jews were sent to their death by Adolf Hitler. Alongside projections of George Floyd, Mahsa Amini, who was killed by Iran’s morality police and Abu Akleh, the Al Jazeera correspondent who was shot and killed a year ago while covering a raid by the Israel Defense Forces on a Palestinian refugee camp.
The musician opened his “This Is Not A Drill” show with a statement. “On a matter of public interest: a court in Frankfurt has ruled that I am not an antisemite. Just to be clear, I condemn antisemitism unreservedly.”
Well, no. There’s nothing clear about it. And that’s not at all what a local court said. Magistrates in Frankfurt had tried to have the concerts cancelled, calling Waters “one of the most widely known antisemites in the world” and his show a painful provocation to the memory of six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. In previous tours, Waters’s concerts had featured as part of the stage show a balloon shaped like a pig depicting the Star of David and various company logos — evoking the antisemitic trope of Jews controlling the world’s banks and money. A passionate supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, Water has incessantly called Israel an “apartheid state” that is guilty of “ethnic cleansing.”
While agreeing that aspects of this show were “tasteless,” the court allowed Waters to proceed, despite making use of “symbolism manifestly based on that of the Nationalist Socialist regime.” Nazis. Waters was nevertheless entitled to artistic expression, the concert “viewed as a work of art,” and there weren’t sufficient grounds to justify banning the performance. “It is not for the court to pass judgment on this,” a spokesperson told German media.
Nothing there about Waters not being an antisemite, which he has steadfastly denied.
The court got it right, which doesn’t make Waters — a propagandist for warmongering Russian President Vladimir Putin when he’s not slagging Israel — any less wrong.
Take it from writer Polly Samson, who wrote to Waters on Twitter in February. “You are anti-Semitic to your rotten core. Also a Putin apologist … Enough of your nonsense.” To be clear, she was describing Waters, who refuted her allegations. Samson happens to be the wife of Pink Floyd’s other co-founder, David Gilmour, who added: “Every word is demonstrably true.”
Waters has compared the Israeli government’s “oppression” of the Palestinian people with Nazi rule under Hitler.
A rule of thumb is that the first person to mention Hitler in any argument is the de facto loser of that argument.
In a speech to the United Nations this year — he’d been invited by Russia to address the UN Security Council — Waters repeated his controversial claim that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “provoked.” Although calling for a ceasefire and correctly labelling the invasion as “illegal,” Waters denounced “provocateurs” in the West, fingering them as responsible for Putin’s ruinous military campaign.
“The invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation was illegal,” Waters, via video-link, told his audience, which doubtless took his Russian sponsors aback. “I condemn it in the strongest possible terms. Also, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was not unprovoked, so I also condemn the provocateurs in the strongest possible terms.”
Putin, amidst all the other lies, has repeatedly blamed NATO’s expansion and Ukraine’s push to join the defensive alliance for the invasion. In truth, Eastern European countries sought to join NATO as a protective measure against Russian aggression, while Sweden and Finland applied to join only after Putin sent his army rumbling into Ukraine if February 2022.
Ukraine’s ambassador to the UN, Sergiy Kyslytsya, responded with a fitting reference to Pink Floyd. “How sad for his former fans to see him accepting the role of just another brick in the wall — the wall of Russian disinformation and propaganda.”
In an interview with the Berliner Zeitung, Waters asserted that Putin “governs carefully, making decisions on the grounds of a consensus in the Russian Federation government.” That was the comment which got up Polly Samson’s nose.
A week before the invasion, Waters told Russia Today that talk of an impending attack was “bulls---” and “propaganda demonizing Russia.”
A near octogenarian, Waters still puts on a smashing stage show, and taking it to an uberextreme with Pink Floyd’s signature biting political and social commentary. He left the band in 1985 in a bad breakup, triggering decades of toxic feuding with Gilmour in particular. In a recent interview with the Telegraph, Waters declared: “I wrote ‘The Dark Side of the Moon.’ Let’s gid rid of all this ‘we’ crap. Of course we were a band — there were four of us, we all contributed — but it’s my project and I wrote it, so, blah.”
In the “This Is Not A Drill” performance, Waters appears on the stage sporting an SSstyle long black leather trench coat with a red arm band, bearing the same crossed hammer insignia from a 1982 musical film dramatizing Pink Floyd’s bestselling double album “The Wall.”
The movie was about a rock star descending into madness (yup, Waters has) and imagining himself as a fascist dictator addressing a political rally.
Images on social media from the Berlin concerts show Waters pointing an imitation machine gun at the audience. Germany has banned all Nazi symbols, including the swastika. Police in that city have confirmed they’ve opened an investigation — apart from the Frankfurt court matter — over suspicions the costume and other concert accoutrements might constitute a glorification, justification or approval of Nazi rule. The Frank inclusion has been condemned as “desecrating” her memory, deeply offensive to many. The performance was endorsed on social media by former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke.
A couple of days after becoming embroiled in the controversy, Waters issued a statement. “The elements of my performance that have been questioned are quite clearly a statement in opposition to fascism, injustice and bigotry in all its forms. Attempts to portray those elements as something else are disingenuous and politically motivated.”
At this most recent show in Manchester, the embattled singer delivered a 10-minute tirade about his “brutal” treatment in Germany and news coverage in Britain. “They’re trying to cancel me like they cancelled Jeremy Corbyn and Julian Assange,” he raged. “I will not be cancelled.”
Corbyn, of course, was the former Labour leader, suspended by the party after it was accused of systemic antisemitism, as borne out by an exhaustive investigation. Corbyn almost brought Labour to its knees.
Before the Manchester show, Waters announced to the audience via a recorded message: “If you’re one of those ‘I love Pink Floyd but I can’t stand Roger’s politics’ people, then you might do well to f--- off to the bar.”
Indeed Roger, do f--- off yourself.
‘‘ They’re trying to cancel me like they cancelled Jeremy Corbyn and Julian Assange. I will not be cancelled.
ROGER WATERS