The Chris Hedges Report: Pink Floyd's Roger Waters on Ukraine, Palestine, music & more

now you talk about Terror [Music] what about for me I've been terrorized all my days [Music] having all my days [Music] Roger Waters the British rock legend and co-founder of Pink Floyd is in the midst of his this is not a drill tour in his concerts he Weds his musical genius to the most pressing social issues of our day including permanent War police violence the crimes of Israeli occupation against the Palestinians including the killing of the Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu akla and the imprisonment of Julian Assange when Waters performed the song the powers that be above him on the enormous video screens are animated scenes of police brutality the names of George Floyd Eric Garner Brianna Taylor and others flash overhead their crime is listed as being black their punishment is listed as death images from the collateral murder video the Israeli bombing of Gaza and numerous other police murders including those of the Syrian Ali alhamda killed by Turkish police rashan Charles killed by British police Matthias Melo Castro shot by police in Brazil provide the background to his music slogans of resistance pepper the performance F drones F the Supreme Court F occupation you can't have occupation in human rights he dedicates a song to the water protectors at Standing Rock and as a montage of U.S presidents from Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden all correctly labeled as or criminals Waters returns us to the era when artists were not denuded of moral Authority by commercial interests he stands unequivocally with the oppressed he stands unequivocally against the forces of Oppression like Victor Hara Mercedes Sosa or Woody Guthrie of another era he reminds us of who we must fight for and who we must fight against joining me to discuss his music and his tour this is not a drill tour is Roger Waters uh it was remarkable it's a remarkable tour and uh but we're gonna before we close you can give us the upcoming dates um you have such a longevity I mean you started uh Pink Floyd and there's it's kind of very poignant you in the concert go back and and talk about the co-founder of Pink Floyd Sid and and the first concert I think you went to in London and where you saw the Rolling Stones but for me and uh it you returned in that concert Rock to its subversive Origins it was that your intent no it was not my intent what what was my intent I don't know you know we were supposed to start this show in 2020 so we had prepared a show of sorts well they're actually similar with the similar intentions to expose uh the machinations of the powers that be and how murderous they are and so on and so forth all the stuff that you see in the show um and and then covered here and we had to cancel in 2020 and we tried it again in 21 and we had to cancel again and Bravo and we eventually got on the road in 22. in the meantime I had written a couple of new songs maybe three new songs during covid and one of them is fundamentally important it's called the bar yeah I know you've seen a stick of the shows so you so you were aware of what it is but the bar is a very long song that I wrote sometime last year in 2021 and it is based upon a concept that I developed that we all carry within us the potential to go to the bar have a drink talk to people talk to our friends meet and talk to her but also talk to strangers also and talk to people who don't agree with us about things and and being so the bar for me is a safe place where we can express our opinions and but also demonstrate our love for one another and Allah for all our brothers and sisters all over the world irrespected for their own ethnicity or religion or nationality I know that sounds like a speech what I'm saying because it is a speech it's something that I say often and I'm I'm sure I say it at least once during the show so I sit at the piano and some of the Bands gather round and in a very intimate atmosphere I explained to the 16 000 people who are in the room that we are all sitting in the bar together I'm getting quite emotional uh Chris even saying this to you now my job I was quite emotional just listening to you or introduction because it's very moving to be noticed in November and to have somebody as eloquent and and as revered as you are to say those things about about the show that I'm doing so why am I talking about the bar because it's new that's new in 2022 to what was already a show that was Earnest and direct and very political and so but it's what what what's happened now and why I'm so excited about doing this work now is that by including bits and we just do small bits of that song by including bits of that song now um it is an invitation to every single one of those 16 000 people to be in the bar not just move with me but with each other and with everybody else who who feels a kinship to the human race a closer kinship to the human race than they do to profit for instance or anyone of any number of dogmas in different camps or around the world where people are extreme and have been subverted if you like from their potential to be human and to love one another and look after one another but your fear I mean the concert is fierce against the forces of oppression I mean it had a kind of orwellian quality to it and and when you take those kinds of stances you you make enemies yeah yes I do and often wonder you know how thick the dossier is in the FBI and the CIA because I bet I bet it's quite thick and I know from experience that uh occasionally I'm talking about the USA now particularly because I live in the USA and so I have to have I I'm permanent I'm sort of constantly reapplying for an o1 Visa which is my permit to work my permit to stay to be resident in the United States and uh the last time I went to get it renewed was in the American Embassy in London a few years ago and I had somebody else that was with me I probably shouldn't be telling you this but frankly I couldn't give a damn you know and he's a guy who works for me and he's worked for me for many years so I have an o1 Visa which is a visas they give to people who are unique in some way nobody can do what I do because I'm me and only I have my body of work and it applies to actors and musicians and all kinds of people and then people who work for people like me get O2 visas which are attached if you like to that well we went in together who's worked for me for 20 years and we were I was five nine one and he was 592 on the list right so sudden he got called in 592 and they gave him his O2 Visa and he was done and I sat there for another two and a half hours even though I was the number for a month so I thought oh my goodness they're in a room having a meeting trying to decide whether to let me back into the United States or not and they did and I'm happy that they did um but who knows next time it's very difficult to know which way they're going to jump and they must do the sums about it is this to our advantage or not and you have to believe that the neocons the powers that be who run the United States and completely control all the politicians and the government and we know that's just a charade you know there's really no difference between any of the politicians because because as we know government can be purchased in the United States that's what citizens united is which is only about 10 years old as far as I remember but you can buy you can purchase the election uh which is weird that they would call themselves a democracy and yet government is for sale to the highest bidder so um what am I trying to say I don't know I've I've I've sort of run off the rails well but it's important so I spoke in uh Florence I was at the time a communist government they invited me to speak to all graduating high school students there were 10 000 of them in an auditorium when I came back to Newark the same experience I had a I'm a U.S citizen with a valid U.S passport they put me in room for two hours told me nothing and then a supervisor came in to somebody behind the computer screen and said he's on a watch tell him he can go and I think that what they did to me is exactly what they did to you it was intentional just to let you know uh that they are watching you yeah yeah they are I know that I've been warned by people I've been warned by people with connections oh well it's just that wouldn't you rather be Martin Luther King than Malcolm X you know if you go to an if you get too extreme and I had this comment I thought this was in my own home and I'm not going to mention the name of the guy who came and made this speech to me but he's an ex-cia desk you know he ran the Middle Eastern desk at the CIA for a number of years or there he was explaining to me that it's probably much better to be moderate that you have more uh impact and effect if you don't get to malcolmaxy you know well I and I thought to myself well they killed melt wax and Martin Luther King so but so and then at the end of it the guy said to me that was quite chilling he said well you know I just wouldn't want to see anything happen to you and I thought [ __ ] me I'm being threatened in my own home by an ex-cia Desk Manager amazing and I tried not to bat an eye and I I sort of didn't but I think well thank you for your time man well I do bury it in mine sometimes however I don't walk well I don't wander around looking over my shoulder well you didn't pull any punches I gotta hand it to you you did warn everyone at the beginning that if they don't like uh if you're one of those who likes Roger Waters music but you don't like his politics you can f off to the bar I guess the bar being a place where maybe we can convert them and I I thought at the end of the concert well they were everybody was forewarned completely forewarned uh I'm gonna wade into an area that is totally out of my expertise uh but when you go back and and I want you to talk a little bit about I found it very poignant when you were talking about uh just your your first kind of dreams of creating this iconic group Pink Floyd um and the very tragic life that finally took uh you're a co-founder Sid um uh but wouldn't that kind of uh political radicalism uh wasn't that more infused within rock and roll when you began in the 60s or am I wrong about that I don't know if you're right or wrong because it's not an area of Interest really because the radicalism comes from my mother and my father so so it's very in fact I've I've we you and I may have even conversed about this bridge yeah because I know that a lot of your um in not instincts but a lot of your beliefs and things are attached to the memory of your father and the fact that he stood up so bravely for what he believed in when he was a minister and ran up against the church and blood and all of that so I I I was chairman of the young socialists and The Young and the youth campaign for nuclear disarmament in Cambridge when I was 15 year old you know so and that came absolutely from the fact that my mother was card carrying Communists and up until 1956 which was the year when almost everyone in England stopped being a code caring communist because the British Communist Party refused to condemn the invasion of Hungary specifically by the Russians and so that was a huge chain it changed that happened with the Communist party but my my childhood is kind of littered with daily worker bazaars and and you know political meetings in the front room my my attachment to rock and roll was far less Worthy I really I couldn't see how I could get enough money to buy a sports car and start pulling chicks to use that Pilots unless I won the football pools or something like that you know because I didn't I couldn't see how I could really make my way in the world in a way that I want and rock and roll was sort of the only thing and it was like winning the lottery or the football pools because it's so unlikely that you would ever make a shilling out of a garage band they won't call garage bands there but by putting a pop group together but by some weird Quirk of faith it happened to me partly because of Sid's great talent earlier on because he wasn't right he was a writer of some note I I can you know still remember some of his lyrical work from those days um and and not just his lyrics as well he was something of a Visionary in terms of of uh his musical applications as well though he learned a lot from Love and one or two of the other West Coast American groups there was precious little going on in England at the time the music industry by and large was run by a lovely man who was called um Pawns Larry ponds and he was a manager and he was also a publisher I think and in the trade he was known as Larry Palms Shillings and Pence which is kind of you know a sort of a nice kind of tip of the hat to his attachment to the bottom line and so so rock and roll's full of people called Vince eager and and um Marty Wilde all these names were invented for them by Larry panchal and some pants as as a you know as a way of selling their Wares that were written by other people they never wrote anything they were the figureheads so Tin Pan Alley was sort of owned and run by the Lawrence pounds showing some pencils of this world and they would pluck people with greasy hair and nice quiffs and a reasonable voice from from somewhere around God knows where they found them and they were the pop stars of the time and that all in that's why the Beatles are important I think because that that only changed when the Beatles and others having latched on to Woody Guthrie who you mentioned before and and others and Pete Seeger and a bit of American folk started to understand that they maybe could be singing about things that were relevant in their life in the Beatles case it was like Eleanor Rigby or she's leaving home or kitchen sink drama about the reality of their lives um others mainly more in America attached to um you know sleeping on in Railway cars and the Woody Guthrie end of rock and roll which was in itself attached very much to Huey Ledbetter and Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday and and and that and the American tradition but somehow somehow some of that filtered through to us young people in England probably via a crystal set American forces Network overseas and radio Luxembourg and all that that was the subversive bit of it was the beginnings of radio for me anyway although it wasn't just the music I mean the reason I mentioned Victor horror Mercedes Sosa and Woody Guthrie is because they may they use their artistic talent as I think you do as a frontal assault I mean Victor horror was murdered Mercedes Sosa was exiled uh Woody Guthrie was all but internally exiled uh the and this is what so impressed me about you just didn't pull any any punches at all I mean that's what made it I think so powerful and I just want to say that it it also was it was it had Artistic integrity it wasn't a polemic it could have been a polemic in which case it would have fallen flat yeah where it's a disguise polemic well that's what all great art is okay yeah yeah I believe you'd be right you're exactly right you can't I could name English artists who are very very Earnest and you know and convinced and free and really laudable because of what they do I can't not mention Billy Bragg who's a name for mice or from the English past of the thing but it's like so Earnest and so direct that it's no longer poetic or really very interesting in a way so it's just circumvent that but to circumvent it is not a subterfuge it's not an intellectual process Sid could do it not that he was political he wasn't but he could do it and introduce ideas into his song because his work was rooted in the work of Hillary bellark another kind of English Romantics you know in a way that was really interesting and laudable but this my circumvention of it only has to do with the fact that even talking to now I'm capable of welling up and becoming overcome emotionally by not not my situation really but the situation that I see my brothers and sisters in and I cannot not respond to it but sorry I want to talk about war you your father was killed in World War II you wrote one of the greatest I think modern anti-war anthems ever written Us and Them um and uh with Rick Wright that's Rick Wright's music is it okay but it's unbelievable song yeah and um but I want to talk about War because it had a personal effect on you and I I love your uh understanding and and hatred of of war and violence which again I think came through in your concert well I've I spent this morning um over this computer writing the second bit of a letter to um Elena zelenska I read your first one it was great all right so I wrote the first one she replied with a very short Twitter just telling me you're wrong the Russians have to um give up the Russians have to give up and then the war will be over so I've written another one to her which I wrote some of this morning sort of trying to explain to her that um they both have to give up it clearly there's there's no end to there's no good end to this war there has to be a ceasefire and then they have to be diplomatic negotiates and in the letter I've written all the stuff about how weird is it that all the propaganda is going on the waving of the blue and yellow flags and the pouring of arms and weapons into the Ukraine um at the cost obviously mainly of young Ukrainian men and women who are being slaughtered because they can afforder and certainly the United States the government couldn't care less about them and is totally disinterested in the Ukraine all it wants is to further its geopolitical ends and we know there's but those of us who care about people think oh my God this is horrific how can we stop this war well obviously you have to talk to Vladimir Putin who is the new Hitler you can't even talk to him but what's different and we're heading towards Ukraine being the new Cuba we're going to have it now that we're having another Cuban Missile Crisis right now in Eastern Europe like we had in 1962 but two things were different in 90 well we don't know one thing was certainly different and what was that John Fitzgerald Kennedy was speaking to Nikita Khrushchev on the telephone we know this because William Polk was in the room and so was Rhema governor and they've told us what was going on during those moments when the Hawks were saying press the button press the button let's kill them before they kill us and and to his eternal credit JFK went wall hold on and he listened to wiser voices and he spoke to Khrushchev and they figured it out and Khrushchev figured it out as well and he went all right I understand is Biden talking to Putin of course he's not he's Biden is sitting there saying you are Hitler and we're going to remove you from Power hang on a minute it's not your Country Joe you doddering old fool it's Russia it's their country it's nothing to do with you what this is insane you can't you can't try and manufacture regime change in one of the most powerful nuclear armed countries in the Russia did you not watch the second world war Joe when you were a little kid did you not see 23 million of them died fighting the Nazis saving you and me from the tyranny of the Third Reich the Russians did that you think they're going to take any notice of you telling them that they've got to get a new leader you are uniting the Russian people behind Vladimir Putin whether what you think of him is irrelevant and it's crazy you can't have the president of a great great country like the United States poking another world leader in the eye with a bloody sharp stick it's insane that they've allowed foreign policy Iraq read um John pilger's piece last week where he talks about um Christ Harold Pinter talking about American foreign policy yeah this is is a Nobel Prize speech exactly it's yes what does he say yeah it's uh he says American foreign policy is like um uh uh it's like a bully in the school you know you said you you do as we say or we're gonna kick your teeth in that's American foreign policy what how crude and debilitating and disgusting and old-fashioned what do you are you living in the 9th century what is wrong with you what's wrong with them of course is that they picked up from Irving Crystal and you know and and those early neocons and the something of The New American Century that they could be the unipolar power and that they can rule the world well you know you know we're all in we're all in trouble when Henry Kissinger is the voice of reason uh which he is and and you know you got in a lot of trouble on CNN I don't know if I watched the whole thing um but you you were not saying anything different than Kissinger had said which is that they should give land for peace the war has to end and because whatever you think about Kissinger and of course I think he's a work room and all along with all those presidents who listed your concert um he certainly understands geopolitics and he understands the danger and as I think you just laid out of the Ukraine policy yeah so we so that's what we do all day you do it as well this is what this is what we do we the people we the people who represent the we the people who somewhere understand that we have to figure out a method of collaborating with one another that might at the end of the day so save this beautiful planet that we will call home because they the powers that be the neocons the prophet mongers the war machine are working as hard as they can to destroy it as fast as they can including possibly with nuclear war and I mean one one I sort of um am I lost to go into this Arena probably do you have the Evangelical Christian right is a I'm not sure it's worry to you as well the idea of the Rapture and how attractive that is some people is deeply deeply distressing obviously to anybody who's even thinking about the questions that we're talking about now because they push us all in the you know well it's a kind of Yearning For apocalyptic violence I mean you look at the end time series and I wrote a book on it American fascist the Christian right in the war in America I was trying to reach out to them um uh I want to go back so uh uh you I have to ask you this I've always wanted to ask a great musician and a great writer of this so those of us who write look at language as a form of music and having a rhythm if you're a good writer and you're a great writer but you wed your lyrics to music and which I of course I'm incapable of doing and I'm wondering how that's different from just writing is a poem that I wrote when I first read Cormac mcculloth it's great and Over All the Pretty Horses I've read all these novels many times but that that particular there is a magic in some books that sucks a man into connections with the spirits hard to touch that join him to his kind a man will eek the reading out guarded like a canteen in the desert heat but sometimes needs must drink and then the final Drop Falls sweet the last page turns the end it's a very short poem about everybody who loves prose or poetry but prose I'm really talking about there's that last 10 pages of a book where you keep putting it down on the bedside table because you do not want it to end yes so musical it's a bit like and A River Runs Through It those last pages the last paragraph of a river runs through it and the last paragraph of the Dead by James Joyce exactly but you but you go to another level so you're a writer obviously a very gifted writer but that writing doesn't stand alone it becomes fused with music and that's a mystery to me that process well I'm happy to say that it does stand alone now because I've written a memoir and it's great I love it and I had Noah and it's another covid thing because before covet I had no idea that I could write prose oh really yeah that's funny I know I could write songs yeah but pros and I sat down one day and wrote like 10 000 words or something and thought wow I can do this this is cool and it is it's one of the great joys of my life now say I love I love to write well Patty Smith just did that with just kids beautiful yes you did yeah beautiful book yeah it was beautiful but but I I want to go back to that I mean you're you when you write it's the words are not standing alone when you're writing lyrics how what's the what's the mental process of wetting those words to music do they play off of each other do you write to the music how does it work uh it's different so I either work with a guitar or with the piano at the piano I hardly play the piano in fact the these shows the first time I've ever played because the bar I think you're playing the piano right yeah yeah I'm playing yeah so with the ball for instance it was I think I was just fiddling around in B flat yeah B flat and E flat and uh an f and um probably just just the faintest glimmer of an idea probably the first line does everybody in the bar feel pain Lord knows I do no that's the second voice or the third verse yeah sure they do I guess we'll feel pretty much the same kind of wore out by this crazy [ __ ] serve you know um we so what is it we solve the uh the Family Farm for snake or brought into the carpet Beggar's lies and now I'm right into the beginning of the 20th century in North America with the rubber Barons and the [ __ ] that they sold all the settler colonialists in the country they sold them the idea that this was perfect and it sort of was they had slaves so they could make fortunes without doing any work and then they decided to murder all the indigenous people and that was you know it was lovely and and and just and steal everything and spend it on themselves and walk better it's great it's brilliant if you don't have to internalize the terrible damage that you do yourself when you commit genocide on another poop Israelis are suffering it now although they don't most of them don't seem to know it but there they are committing genocide on the Palestinian people or trying to as first to think and they must be paying a price that we can't possibly no I lived in Israel you're very right yeah it's it's very corrosive and I think much the militarization of Israeli Society mirrors the militarization of American society and it's exactly the same poison I find many parallels we're just going to stop for a minute hey before we stop though tell us your next tour dates so people can go what's coming up uh if I could tell you that I would so tell us your webs where they can get it oh I just want to so before we close I found that very moving this is not a drill was a response to to loss to uh I think it's Sid's death right yeah yeah when we lose someone that we really that we really love it serves to remind us that this is not a trip somebody else a friend of mine who died and uh Donald Hall who was oh great poem great poem yeah yeah and I became a friend of his very late in his life we we only knew each other for like the last two years of his life but I I was very close to Donald and we used to talk and talk and what was I was trying to say about loss I think I know yeah I wrote his after he died I wrote his um assistant who's called candle a letter and um and I think in it I said we only get one chance that's what I mean though this is not we get one chance so it behooves us if we have the opportunity to walk the path that we choose with Grace and love and what I can't remember exactly the words that I which Donald Hall did yeah and so and so if we're lucky enough to have to figure out that that is what brings joy to our life is to walk the path with Grace we're we're very we are lucky men and women who discovered that early enough and discover that you know having and getting another phone of car or being a billionaire is not talking about gonna buy you can't buy Joy No but I said to kennel you know Donald Hall walked the hit the part of his life with such Grace and courage and because because um you know his Jane his wife Jane Kenyon also a great Poet by the way also a great poet yeah died tragically okay and Don Paul and I shared a journey together which is part of what brought us together because he wrote a book called essays after 80 and one of the books was called there is only one road and it was about him and his first wife whose name I will remember in a minute it begins with k as well but it doesn't matter they went um in a in a Morris Minor to Athens in it was just before I went 1959 I think something like that so they left Vienna and drove down through Yugoslavia and whatever and when it and uh when they were going through Yugoslavia they stopped and there was a bloke by the road who miraculously spoke English and they said is this the road to Zagreb and he looked at them slightly pitchingly and said there is only one road the news [Laughter] which is great and that was something and then he talks about the rest of their journey and they're going back she called Kirby it doesn't matter anyway 20 years later she gets when they've split up and the marriage is over and being over she gets cancer and Don goes and lives with her for the six months it takes her to die all right um which is which is very moving in a kind of different way but at the end of his story he comes back to the beginning and she's died Kirby her name's Kirby and he says there is only one road all right we're gonna stop there this is not a drill I want to thank the real News Network it's production team Cameron granadito Adam Coley Dwayne Gladden and Kayla Rivera you can find me at Chris edges.substack.com [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: The Real News Network

Views: 494,054

Keywords: Roger Waters, This Is Not A Drill, Palestine, Ukraine, Pink Floyd, Chris Hedges Report, The Real News Network, TRNN

Id: _8n51xlrMy8

Length: 36min 43sec (2203 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 30 2022