This is Not a Drill: Talking With Roger Waters

Fame and fortune are often corrupting forces, ones that beget power and comfort. To stand with the afflicted requires sacrificing this privilege and few embody that sacrifice more profoundly than the legendary musician of Pink Floyd Roger Waters.

For years, through his music and political action, Waters has amplified the voices of the oppressed. He has championed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, defended attorney Steven Donziger, demanded the closure of Guantánamo Bay, has long stood against the apartheid state of Israel and now unwaveringly against the genocide of Palestinians.

Waters joins Chris Hedges to discuss his political activism, including his support for Palestine Action, a group criminalized by the British government for their protest against Israel.

The pair discuss how Waters’ art has documented his moral devotion against oppression over the years while also examining the political decay — fueled by greed and corruption — of the United States, the United Kingdom and other world powers.

Chris Hedges

There are very few artists or musicians who have stood as doggedly on the side of the oppressed as Roger Waters, the co-founder, bassist, singer, and songwriter for Pink Floyd. He has been an outspoken defender of Palestinian rights and critic of the apartheid state of Israel long before the genocide. He was one of the principal signers of an open letter called, “Artists Against Apartheid” and supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement denouncing musicians who perform in Israel.

He called out the fabrications disseminated by Israel that Hamas carried out systematic sexual assaults on October 7th. He attacked Labour leader Keir Starmer for his backing of the genocide and headlined a concert for Palestine with Cat Stevens and the rapper Lowkey.

He came to the defense of the British punk rap band, Bob Vylan, who, at this year’s Glastonbury Festival, led the chant of “Death, death to the IDF,” referring to the Israeli Defense Force. After the British government banned Palestine Action, labeling it a terrorist group in the UK under the Terrorism Act of 2000, and then arresting 100 people for expressing their support for the group, he posted a video to X in which he praised Palestine Action as “a great organization,” noting they were non-violent and “absolutely not terrorists in any way.”

Membership in or public support for the group is now classified as a criminal offense and is punishable by up to 14 years in prison and/or a fine. In the video Roger can be seen making a sign from a piece of cardboard, “This says Roger Waters supports Palestine Action. Parliament has been corrupted by agents of a genocidal foreign power. Stand up and be counted. It’s now,” the musician read. “This is the moment I am Spartacus.”

Israel and its Zionist allies have mounted vicious and sustained assaults against him, producing slanderous documentaries, engaging in a stream of defamatory attacks and character assassination, blocking publicity for his “This Is Not a Drill” concerts, pressuring music companies to cancel publishing agreements, forcing concert venues to blacklist him, even denying him hotel rooms while on tour. But Roger has never wavered.

He helped launch the campaign called “Countdown to Close Guantánamo”. He stood fast with Julian Assange during his long persecution, once performing outside the UK Home Office just miles from Belmarsh Prison where Julian was incarcerated singing Pink Floyd’s iconic song, “Wish You Were Here.” The behavior of the British government towards Julian Assange is a disgrace, he said, a profanity on the very notion of human rights. It’s no exaggeration to say that the treatment and persecution of Julian Assange is the way that dictatorships treat a political prisoner.

He backed the attorney, Steven Donziger, who won a $10 billion settlement against the oil giant Chevron on behalf of the indigenous peoples in Ecuador, whose land was poisoned and who suffered serious illnesses from toxins dumped by Chevron. Donziger endured a prolonged and savage campaign by Chevron that led to him being disbarred and placed under house arrest.

Roger, who a year ago released the songs, “Resist This Genocide” and “Stand Up for Palestine,” has launched a giant inflatable pig with Donald Trump’s face on it at concerts in Mexico City, where Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” is not an abstraction. He showed images of Trump dressed as a Nazi. And before the 300,000 fans in Mexico City flash the words, “Trump eres un pendejo,” “Trump is scum.”

He calls out Trump along with Joe Biden as war criminals. He endorsed Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, calling him, “A beacon of hope.” In short, his is an example of the moral life, which is always a life of confrontation. His courage is a reminder that standing against the forces of oppression comes with a cost. The global theatrical release of his new concert film, “This Is Not A Drill – Live From Prague,” the movie has just been released by Trafalgar Releasing and Sony Music Vision. Joining me to discuss our rapid descent into authoritarianism and the imperative of resistance is Roger Waters.

And let me just second your admiration for Palestine [Action]. These are courageous men and women who are actually trying to do something to stop the genocide. And just in case MI5 is watching, that’s H-E-D-G-E-S. So Roger, let’s begin where we are in this world. It’s a world that you and I have feared and fought for a long time.

So, let’s talk about where we’ve ended up. This fear of a creeping fascism, authoritarianism, which you have called out for decades, has now come to fruition.

Roger Waters

Yeah, well, this morning I woke up and the first thing I read, I think it was in the FT [Financial Times], is that some NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] general this morning or yesterday stood up and said, we must prepare for a world war in 2027, because Russia is going to try and steamroll its way with armored divisions across Europe and it won’t stop until it reaches the English Channel.

Why they would stop at the English Channel, God only knows. But this is what this bloke’s saying. And so he’s really, he’s drumming up support for taxing all the people of Europe, which they’re now talking about trying to raise 4% or 5% of GDP to spend on weapons. And they’re talking about importing many more nuclear weapons, so on and so forth.

And saying his great concern is that at the same moment that the Russians invade Paris or march into Paris, the Chinese will be invading Taiwan. So it’s absolute baby talk, warmongering, but we shouldn’t be surprised because they’ve been doing it ever since I was alive, practically. We had one or two years after the Second World War, which I don’t remember too well because I wasn’t old enough to really be taking notice, but we did.

We got a national health service and we sort of pretended that we were gonna look after one another and that we weren’t gonna have any more wars. And look at us now. They’re like, they’re absolutely going gangbusters to make certain that war is permanent. Because that’s how they make their living and they’re entirely happy about it. And if they have to starve babies in Gaza, so be it. They couldn’t care less. They have no interest in human rights.

This is what I always say when they say, what’s the difference between like the bloke who owns the Four Seasons Hotel who won’t let you stay in any of his hotels ever anywhere in the world again, and you, the difference is that I believe in human rights. It’s very, very simple.

My platform is tiny. It’s the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from the 10th of December, 1948. I believe in it. I support it. They don’t. They never have. I live in America. In America since 1776, they’ve been absolutely clear that they have no interest in human rights, freedom of speech, democracy, any of the things that they pretend to support. They don’t. And we know it, but what can we do about it?

All we can do is go on encouraging ordinary people all over the world and there are billions of us to stand shoulder to shoulder and resist them and say no, you may want to devote your entire life to making Raytheon and [Northrop] Grumman and Palantir richer and keeping Jeff Bezos in $50 million weddings, but I don’t.

I want to live in a world where my children can go to school and we can talk to one another and maybe go for a swim in the river. That’s the world that I want, where we look after one another and we look after the weakest amongst us and so on and so forth. I am a socialist. Oh my God, no, wow, what could be, that’s awful. You mean look after people?

Instead of stealing from them and spending all the money on weapons so that we can kill people. Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean. I know it’s a bit long winded and I’ve spoken to… Chris and I have had conversations before and we’re very similar. Both of us could go on forever but…

Chris Hedges

Well, as I come out of the church, how can I not be a socialist?

Roger Waters

Well, exactly.

Chris Hedges

And I want to just, on the point that you made, this is the brilliance of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. He showed that all of the gains that were made for working men and women, for people of color, for women, were done because of movements that fought against the dominant centers of power to open up space in our democracy, which is why, of course, they hate Zinn, why they’re canceling him. Trump denounced him by name, not that he’s read him, of course.

But this is the point that you’re making, that it’s only by essentially forming groups of solidarity like Palestine Resistance that we have any hope of pushing back against these forces. And then I also want to raise the great Francesca Albanese’s report, her most recent report, which again buttresses the point that you just made, and that is that there are many, many corporations, Palantir and others, who of course are making huge profits, not only off of war, but off the genocide.

Roger Waters

Yep, this is true, everything that you say is true. So the trick is to wake up in the morning and not throw your hands up in despair and shoot yourself or whatever, but to go, I know it’s crazy that the world is like this, clearly the lunatics have taken over the asylum. Obviously the Keir Starmers and Donald Trumps and [inaudible], or in fact, almost all the world leaders in the West are criminally insane.

And we should be looking after them on the National Health Service. They should be locked up in a loony bin with people going, there, there, Keir, calm down. Here’s your pills for today. Just sit in the sun and be quiet. But they’re not, they’re running the world and they’re running it extremely badly.

So all we can do is what you do and what I do and keep organizing and keep encouraging all those brave, wonderful people who go out every Saturday into the streets of London. Oh, that 83-year-old lady who was arrested outside the High Court in London for saying that, they’re actually called Palestine Action, not Palestine Resistance, but Palestine Action. And hats off to her and how courageous and whatever.

And that’s all we can do. Do you know what? The only thing I do, Chris, is I wake up in the morning and I go, I have to do one thing today. And I have to do it every single day. I have to do one thing, whether it’s making a little video or doing this show with you or whatever. Any opportunity that I get, I will speak out. And I’m beginning to speak out a bit more about my industry and about how I’ve been, how they’ve tried to shut me up and still do.

There’s all kinds of stuff that comes out all the time. At the moment, I’ll tell you this now because at the moment, I’ve been working on a new version of “The Wall,” a new theatrical version of “The Wall.” And have been in conversations with The Sphere in [Las] Vegas to put it on there.

Chris Hedges

Right, but save me tickets.

Roger Waters

Okay, I will. I will, I promise to save you tickets.

Chris Hedges

A promise, that’s recorded, Roger.

Roger Waters

Yeah, except, I don’t think it’s gonna happen. Irving Azoff, who is a well-known Zionist and a big figure in the music industry. He’s the manager of the pop group, The Eagles. And he’s also I think an investor in The Sphere and a big and very close to Jim, our friend Jim Dolan, who built the bloody thing.

I’m pretty sure that they’re going to go, oops, we’ve changed our mind. Don’t want you. Their voice will be in their ear the whole time.

“You can’t have Roger Waters. You can’t encourage people to think that he has a voice or that he’s got anything important to say. It doesn’t matter that he wrote ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ and ‘The Wall’ and you know, ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ and all that and ‘Comfortably Numb’ and blah, blah, blah. ‘Wish You Were Here.’”

And all those songs that our friend there with you has got on vinyl handed down to her by her father. None of that matters because he opposes the genocide and he’s very vocal about it. He is not allowed a platform. So there we are. I’m not whining. I mean I do understand that that’s the case there. And they will stop at nothing. Luckily, most of them have got IQs of about 30.

Like Greenblatt for instance, [CEO of the Anti-Defamation League] Jonathan Greenblatt. He’s such a fool, but there you go. But he’s got a loud voice and quite a big following and lots of funding behind it.

Chris Hedges

I want to go back to the lyrics you wrote for Pink Floyd, which is how many years, decades ago, but they’re so prescient, I mean, as to where we’ve ended up.

Roger Waters

Go on then. Yeah, that is true. I mean, I mentioned “Comfortably Numb,” you know, and I’m not gonna repeat, I’m not gonna spew the lyrics out now, I could, but yeah, because that’s a conversation between a disaffected rock star who is affected by the fame and fortune that he has stumbled upon through his chosen profession and turns into a Nazi thug.

And I play the Nazi thug in the piece, you know. Luckily, he wakes up. He goes, stop. In fact, the film that I’ve just released, in it, at the end of the song “Run Like Hell,” which I do two songs from the wall in the Nazi getup, and at the end of “Run Like Hell,” where it goes, stop, I wanna go, I’d stop, I’d take off the, and I make a speech.

And the speech I make in the movie is about the fact that there’s been a huge uproar because I juxtaposed the names of Anne Frank, who was a victim of the Nazis in Holland. Was it Holland or?

Chris Hedges

Yeah, I think it was Holland.

Roger Waters

Holland, right. In 1943 or 44, I juxtaposed her name with Shireen Abu Akleh, who was murdered by the Israelis a couple of years ago in Jenin, I believe, or on the outskirts of Jenin. And the Zionists went ape shit. How dare you desecrate Anne Frank?

Yeah, I also mentioned Sophie Scholl, do you remember her? The Germans killed her.

Chris Hedges

Yeah, The White Rose…

Roger Waters

With the White Rose Movement in Munich. Yeah. In 1943, she was, along with her brother Hans and Christoph Probst, they were all killed, they were all guillotined.

Chris Hedges

Let me just interrupt, for handing out leaflets.

Roger Waters

For handing out leaflets, exactly. Exactly. Well, Chris, you and I, today, we’re handing out leaflets. This is what we’re doing. And thank goodness we are.

Chris Hedges

I know. But the walls are closing in. I mean, we know where it’s going. I covered [Augusto] Pinochet’s Chile. We know what ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] is going to become, our version of the Brownshirts. If anybody thinks they’re going to stop with undocumented migrants, and of course, they’re seizing people who have legal residence within the United States, students, they just are utterly blind to the mechanisms of authoritarianism and history.

And I think that’s one of the things that, I have written about the Death of Liberal Class, Empire of Illusion, in many ways, in written form, what you’ve done musically, and signal this kind of warning. We can’t allow this erosion of the open society because this is where we end up.

And I know that you’ve been attacked for using that fascist uniform, but of course that is the denouement of the assault that has been carried out in the name of neoliberalism and national security on our open society.

Roger Waters

Yes it is, yes it is. And you know what struck me when I was listening to you talking then was thinking about Trump. Let’s just say Trump because he’s the biggest of the leaders out there at the moment, leading this charge on everything. Trump is beyond ignorant in every way and he always was. He’s always been monumentally stupid.

He’s a terrible businessman, everybody knows. Nobody in New York will speak to Trump, particularly lawyers, because he never pays his bills.

Chris Hedges

And contractors, he doesn’t pay his contractors either.

Roger Waters

Well, there you go. So he never pays anybody. He’s an ignorant thug. And that is why he appeals to the MAGA crowd, I guess. They actually believe the slogan, Make America Great Again. America is becoming tiny and also a massive carbuncle on the potential beautiful face of the human race, of homo sapiens.

We have the potential to actually move into a future where we believe in love and truth and we look after one another and we refuse to murder one another. That’s absolutely completely verboten in our brave new world.

Okay, but they’re not, they believe in, no, no, no, let’s murder everybody. Let’s starve children to death because we can make money. And that’s all they care about is making a profit. And it’s enshrined sadly in American law. The only responsibility that the corporations have is to maximize the bottom line of the profits for their shareholders. It’s capitalism at work. And capitalism could not be less interested in ordinary people, in you.

Chris Hedges

Well, the other thing it does is inculcate within the society a culture of fear. So you have the internal and the external enemy. Look, I mean, you’ve raised this point many times, but it’s about creating fear even if that enemy is a phantom, the way we’ve demonized hardworking immigrants who make $14,000 a year and work 10, 12 hours a day.

That has become a mechanism by which they will create this police state, which will affect all of us, the same way they have weaponized anti-Semitism as a way to shut down free speech. These are all tropes. These are all mechanisms. The idea that Trump cares about anti-Semitism is patently absurd. But it’s about profit, but it’s also about fear.

Roger Waters

Yeah, well, it’s the exercise of control. You need to create an atmosphere of fear in the people. And I confess, Chris, that they’ve almost achieved it with me, saying if you come back to England, we’re gonna lock you up for 14 years, or we have the legal right to, it’s now the law of the land.

And so I can sit here as long as I want and go, but the law is an ass, just like it was an ass when it locked Julian Assange up. Thank goodness he eventually managed to do a deal and escaped back to Australia and is back in society with us now. But for them to corrupt the legal process like that, that’s why I did my piece of cardboard on that Saturday morning, July the 5th, 2025.

That was my Independence Day. I am independent from the government of the United Kingdom because the government of the United Kingdom is a fascist cesspit. And so we have to stand up against it. Whether I’ll go back and go to prison like a good resistor, I have no idea. It remains to be seen, maybe. Though all those brilliantly brave, wonderful people who take to the streets, every Saturday they do it, and they certainly have done since October the 7th, 2023.

And so, there is hope, there is hope in my heart because I see all these wonderful people continuing to resist. And all I can do is cheer them on and go for it and try and increase the volume of the voices in the crowd so that our voice gets louder and louder. And is it vain hope? No.

No, it’s not a vain hope. But has it ever succeeded before in the long term? No. They always seem to be able to get the Pinkerton men together in large enough numbers with enough six shooters to shoot us down. So when we organize, their only recourse is to shoot us down, to hire mercenaries to kill us.

And that’s what they’re doing. This is what Trump stands for and that’s what they’re trying to do now. And you know, Sumud, the perseverance and resistance to the occupation in Palestine that the Arab speakers engaged in, in their resistance against that occupation is a guiding beacon for all of us. But my God, what they’re having to suffer now is unconscionable and extraordinary that 300 million Americans are not in the streets going stop! Not in my name!

Well they’re not. Maybe 3 million are. But what about the other 297 million? Why aren’t they in the streets going no, this is not who I am. So, I don’t know. Let’s see what happens today and tomorrow and the day after that because none of this shit is going away in the near future.

Chris Hedges

I want to ask about the fact that the genocide is in many ways a message by the Global North to the Global South, the genocide in Gaza. Whether you think, I think many people in the Global South see it as such with the breakdown of the climate and the flight of climate refugees. But this, of course it rips off the veneer, it exposes what industrial nations like the United States or the UK are about but to what extent is it a harbinger of a new world?

Roger Waters

Well, I don’t know, I have said recently or in the last few months, written articles where I talk about the genocide in Gaza being like Narcissus’ pool and that when we stare into it, we see our own reflection. And it’s only really dawned on me that actually, when you look at what’s gone on and the facts of it, this is just the advance of European white man, hegemony and imperialism. And it never changed. And I’m surprised by it.

When I saw the whole of the European ruling class standing behind the United States in supporting this murdering of an entire indigenous people in what we call the Holy Land, I went, oh my God, nothing has changed since the 15th century.

This all carries on from the Spanish and the English in 1492 and there it was, Zion. They even called North America the brave new world, that was their Zion. So the idea that it’s okay to murder indigenous people in order to steal everything that they’ve got and to take over territory is something that the imperialist mind of the white European can’t seem to let go of.

I thought we had. We were all told after the Second World War, no, that’s all in the past. We’re not doing that anymore. We never really said we’re sorry that we killed 160 million Indian indigenous people or that we ran a drug company, the East India Company, that was selling drugs to the Chinese and making huge profits out of it or that.

We’re not actually apologizing for that. What we are doing in supporting the genocide is saying, no, that is the model. That was the British Empire and we believe in that model and we’ll kill everybody on earth except us if we have to. And the Global South are going, hmm, I think they mean us. And they’re right. They do mean…

Chris Hedges

Well, that’s what they’ve been doing in the Global South, whether it’s the 1943 Bengal famine, whether it is the Mau Mau, the British Mau Mau rebellion, which has been completely covered up in British history. There’s a very good book on it called Imperial Reckoning, whether that’s the Spanish in the Americas, whether that’s the Euro-Americans carrying out the genocide against Native Americans. Genocide is baked into our DNA.

Roger Waters

Yeah, sadly, you’re right. I mean, one of the things that I’m doing at the moment, and it’s sidelined completely, I am speaking up for Pedro Castillo, okay, who was the duly elected president of Peru, and who’s in prison, because the ruling class didn’t like it because he’s indigenous. Okay.

And the other is now there’s massacres going on at the moment in Bolivia, because the miners, indigenous people who in small cooperatives and family businesses have been doing all the mining have been told, no, we’re going to give all of that to an American corporation. You are done. Well, there’s 300,000 of them and they’ve gone, no, we’re not.

And they brought Bolivia to a stand, well Peru as well, miners in Peru have sort of brought Peru to a standstill. No lorries are going in and out of Lima. Nobody knows about this because nobody reports it. But I talk to my friends in these South American countries and I watch it very carefully because as we know, like a huge country like Brazil, we saw in the last election, hangs on a knife edge between a [Jair] Bolsonaro or a Lula da Silva.

And they are diametrically opposed in terms of their political philosophies. Lula is one of us and Bolsonaro is one of them. So there is that. And weirdly enough, the propaganda machine is so powerful that a complete utter asshole like Bolsonaro can garnish votes from poor people just by doing what Trump does, pretending that he will represent their needs and their aspirations and their futures.

And we all know that Trump couldn’t give a fig for working people. He never has and he never ever will. Well, it’s exactly the same with Bolsonaro. But people get persuaded from the propaganda. It’s why Rupert Murdoch is so important and all of them in all of this. So we’re watching that battle at the same time.

Will they believe the lies that they’re being told by MAGA and Bolsonaro or will they look at things and go, hold on a minute? They’re not… At least Lula was involved in labor unions before he became a political figure and appears to have a heart and a soul. So let’s keep voting in the Lulas.

Chris Hedges

Well, these demagogues like Trump and so you have, I mean, in some ways, I don’t know if you feel the same way. I hate the liberals like Starmer, Tony Blair, even more because with an [Viktor] Orbán or a Trump, you get, they kind of advertise their thuggishness. But these liberals, my friend Glen Ford used to call them the more effective evil, the Democratic Party, because they mask it.

I mean, you’ve called out Starmer, you’ve called out Blair. You know, they purport to defend these values that they betray.

Roger Waters

Yeah, Blair, you know, after Margaret Thatcher came in to destroy England, I don’t know if you know what her popularity ratings were until the Malvinas, until the Falklands war.

Chris Hedges

She was very low.

Roger Waters

She was on 2%. Suddenly, she has a small war, and boom, she’s a great heroine. She was a disgusting person. And she was not stupid like Trump. She actually got a perfectly decent two one or something from a college in Oxford University where you have to actually study something.

Chris Hedges

You have to read books, unlike Trump.

Roger Waters

Yeah, you have to read books. And Blair was just the follower. Blair said, yeah, let’s sell. Let’s sell the Great Britain that was created by Aneurin Bevan and Clement Attlee and Wedgwood Benn and Michael Foot and some left wing Labour politicians and Jeremy Corbyn attempted to get back into that kind of training.

We’ll fuck off, excuse my French. We’ll put that to one side and we’ll just sell out to the American model. We’ll sell out to the corporations. And John Pilger, our late great friend.

Chris Hedges

Yeah, great journalist.

Roger Waters

John, he made a wonderful movie about the National Health Service. And there’s a scene in it where a lady who’s been a nurse all her life had carried on trying to work in a hospital that was taken over by an American corporation. And she actually breaks, I’m nearly breaking down now, she breaks down in front of the camera saying, we realized that we weren’t there to look after people.

She said, I’d been looking after people in the National Health Service for 25 years and suddenly it wasn’t that, it was how much profit can we make out of each body? And if we can’t make a profit out of them, kick them out the door. That’s the model. And we know that.

You don’t have to live in North America very long to understand that is how it works. The only people who are profiting or making are the insurance companies and big pharma. And the care of the patient is completely lost except for the very, very wealthy.

Chris Hedges

Well, and it’s worse here in the United States, where you have private insurance, private…

Roger Waters

That’s what I’m talking about, the United States.

Chris Hedges

Yeah, it’s legally permissible to hold sick children hostage while their parents bankrupt themselves trying to save their sons or daughters. That’s the system we advocate. And of course, what they do is they starve the national health system. They’re doing the same thing in Canada to break it, to destroy it.

Roger Waters

Yep. So this comes back, Chris, to ordinary people standing shoulder to shoulder from the river to the sea, sumud, perseverance. Steadfast perseverance is what the word sumud means. And that is what we have to show, but we have to make as much noise while showing it as possible to encourage the young, particularly.

I always said that the question of the Holy Land, the battle was gonna be fought on the campuses of the American university. I was saying this 15, 20 years ago, okay? And it turns out that that’s correct. And look how Columbia University in New York City has capitulated completely.

They’ve moved now to accept the IHRA [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance] definition of antisemitism, which is insane and has been adopted by 35 states, state jurisdictions. That is now the official definition of anti-Semitism.

Chris Hedges

Well, and I just want to interrupt you, Roger, because they’ve codified it to add examples, which in essence say that any criticism of the Israeli state is anti-Semitic. I was just at the Trenton State Capitol testifying against the adoption of the measure.

The committee unanimously passed it for approval. It goes to the Senate. But immediately when I began, they muted my mic and the Zionists jeered and shouted me down, along with Raz Segal, an Israeli genocide scholar.

So there we were arguing that this measure would curb or shut down free speech and we weren’t allowed free speech, which gets into, you know, kind of Alice in Wonderland world. All of these creeping steps are very, very frightening. And I think what’s shocked me is the rapidity, how fast it’s coming in the United States.

Roger Waters

Yeah. No, it is. It’s very rapid and it’s very, very scary. People spit on me, literally, and I go, wow. Why? And they spit on me because I believe in human rights. That’s the only, that’s the only, that’s why you oppose the IHRA definition because it doesn’t believe in human rights. It believes in genocide. It says, yeah, Israel could commit genocide. And if you oppose it, that is antisemitic.

That is a hate crime, Roger. Opposing the Israeli policy of genocide. That thing where they’ve got them now and they’re funneling into them and pretending that they’re gonna give them food and then they shoot them. They’re shooting them with…

Chris Hedges

Yeah, well, it’s just bait. They bait. It’s to lure starving Palestinians to the south. They only give food at four hubs for an hour a day. It is highly inadequate. It’s exactly what they did in the Warsaw Ghetto, where the Nazis starved the residents of the Warsaw Ghetto and then offered loaves of bread if you would get on the trains. That is exactly the same tactic.

Roger Waters

Yes, it is exactly the same tactic. So the big battle is in the hearts and minds of men. We come back always to the propaganda battle. Is Rupert Murdoch gonna win the battle or are you and I going to win the battle? Because what do we have on our side, Chris? We have love and truth on our side.

Rupert Murdoch and Trump and and Stammer and them, all they have on their side is greed and hatred and lies. So you would think that you understand then why billions of people all over the Global South but all over the west as well are going, nada mas, nada mas.

Ordinary people, they can tell the difference between love and hate. I know they can. I get emotional even talking about it.

Chris Hedges

I knew [former President of the Czech Republic] Václav Havel, I covered the Velvet Revolution, I was in the Magic Lantern Theater with him every night, and he talked about this, which is really what you’re saying, he called it living in truth. But living in truth, if you hold fast to that truth, is terrifying to these despotic centers of power because it exposes who they really are.

And if they can’t intimidate or cow you to be silent, then they’ll physically silence you. I want to talk just when we close here, you mentioned it and I agree with you, the empire always wins. As a former divinity student who watched Jesus Christ get abandoned by all his friends, turned on by the mob and killed as an insurrectionist by the state, that was the message.

And yet we must fight anyway. If not just to slow the process, but also to keep alive another way of living, another orientation to the world. [Soviet writer and journalist] Vasily Grossman writes about this quite eloquently as kindness in these despotic times being acts of subversion and he writes at the end of this beautiful passage that if they can’t crush even a small kernel of kindness, which is what these systems attempt to do, then evil will never be conquered.

I mean, this gets into maybe a more theological or existential discussion, but it’s one I believe in, it’s one I think you believe as well, that it’s important for us to keep these powers alive, regardless of what happens to us as distinct individuals.

Roger Waters

Yeah, well, that’s another interesting conversation, obviously, because I’m an atheist, you’re not. And yet we love each other, and we love our brothers and sisters. And for whatever the reasons may be, maybe it has something to do with our parents, because your father was a preacher, right? Yeah.

And my mother was an atheist, but she was a communist and a socialist and all of those… and my father, who died fighting the Nazis, they inculcated into me a sense of responsibility and love for my fellow human beings. Your father did the same with you, and it’s a different route and it’s a different journey. But the result is the same thing.

You and I, Chris, both work tirelessly for love and truth. And there ain’t nothing that’s gonna change that. And if we go down fighting, we go down fighting. But we have love in our hearts and so do millions and millions of us. And if I get emotional, it’s because I feel for those millions of me. I can see, you know, and people sometimes when I meet them, they get hold of my hand and they…

You know, there was one guy at a gig 20 years ago, or I don’t know when it was, some gig, when I had veterans coming to the show every night. Every night I would have 10 veterans and I would always invite them to come with a helper, either a loved one or whatever, because often they’ve got so much PTSD they can’t go out on their own, it’s too scary. And they would come to the show and I would go and see them halfway through the show.

And just say hello and chat a bit and then go, oops, I’ve got to go and do “Hey You” now. It was during “The Wall” shows. Okay. And so I was leaving one time and an older bloke, must have been in a Vietnam vet. Because most of them are Afghanistan and you know, and Iraq [veterans]. Awful, awful injuries. Anyway, this older bloke, as I was going, he put his hand out, so I shook his hand, he wouldn’t let go.

I went, I’ve got to go on stage now. We’re just about to do “Hey You,” it’s the second. And he wouldn’t let go, and so I relaxed a bit, and I let him hold my hand. And then he looked me in the eyes, like that, piercing, and he said, your father would be proud of you.

I mean, I’m crying now because I just thought, fucking hell. Wow, what an amazing moment. And it was an amazing moment, and I’ll never forget him, and I’ll never forget that. But yeah, we can hand this from generation to generation. You can hand love and truth down to the next generation. And your primary responsibility in life is to do exactly that and to not give in to the monsters, Trumps and Starmers, of this world.

Chris Hedges

And Roger, that’s the resurrection. I mean, I always say that it’s my voice, but it’s my father’s words. It’s your music, your lyrics, but they’re your father’s words, who was, I want to say, as I understand it, a Christian and a member of the Communist Party. Bless him.

Roger Waters

Yeah, he was. He was at the beginning of the war, he was contrary because of his Christianity, his devotion to, is it the sixth commandment, thou shalt not kill? Exactly. So he said no. And then he started to get organized and he drove an ambulance through the Blitz and all of that. And at a certain point, he joined the Communist Party. And then he realized that the need to fight the Nazis trumped his love for Jesus. And so he went back and volunteered. Jolly good, this chap’s got a degree, he’s officer material. So he was basic training, officer training, commissioned second lieutenant, dead three weeks later. He lasted about three weeks in [inaudible].

It’s not a burden, but if you’re that man’s son, you can’t, I’ll never get over the bravery of those, both the bravery of being a conscientious objector and then the bravery to give up your life. It’s pretty, you know, strong stuff. No wonder I’ve written some songs.

Chris Hedges

I think you were five months old when he died. But look at the gift that he gave you. And that’s the gift my father gave me. And I can never betray him. And you can never betray your father, which means they can’t do anything to us.

Roger Waters

Yeah, this is true.

Chris Hedges

All right, bless you, Roger.

Roger Waters

Things could be worse.

Chris Hedges

They can always be worse. They’re probably going to get worse.

Roger Waters

Yeah, they will get worse, but we will hold on to that, to that truth and that love that we inherited.

Chris Hedges

We will. Great, that was the great Roger Waters.

The post This is Not a Drill: Talking With Roger Waters appeared first on CounterPunch.org.