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Once the world recognizes the sickness of Waters’ propaganda and once free people stop showing up for his concerts, his influence will dwindle and, one of these days, his world tours will be limited to shows in Russia, China and Gaza.
By: AJ Caschetta
Marcel Proust’s advice that people never meet their heroes lest they be disappointed fits to a T the Pink Floyd co-founder and erstwhile recluse Roger Waters. While I never actually thought of Waters as a hero, I was one of millions of teenagers in the 1970s who loved Pink Floyd. And I have always believed that the man who wrote most of Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975), Animals (1977) and The Wall (1979) is one of the great composers of the 20th century. Unfortunately, Waters has spent the better part of the last 20 years forcing us all to meet him, and oh what a disappointment it has been.
The members of Pink Floyd, like their music, were shrouded in an aura of mystery back then in the pre-social media days, and they seldom gave interviews. But over the last two decades, Waters has shattered that aura, in the process revealing himself as a pseudo-intellectual antisemite, and more recently, an apologist for Vladimir Putin and the Chinese Communist Party. He has inscribed an indelible asterisk to his legacy, like Ezra Pound, the American poet who forever destroyed his reputation by joining the Italian fascists and becoming Mussolini’s favorite Jew-hating poet and regime propagandist.
For using his massive platform and considerable talents to broadcast antisemitism and artfully facilitate authoritarianism, Waters has become the Leni Riefenstahl of rock and roll.
The (d)evolution of Roger Waters
Like most rock musicians of his generation, Waters was always a man of the left. He was only 5 months old when his father, Second Lieutenant Eric Fletcher Waters of the British Royal Fusiliers, was killed at the Battle of Anzio in 1944. But aside from an allusive and nondescript pacifism, politics were largely absent from Pink Floyd’s early psychedelic albums like Ummagumma (1969) and Meddle (1971). As Waters became the dominant force in the band and its music evolved into narrative “concept” albums, the politics were either personal or generically anti-corporate—“Welcome to the Machine” and “Have a Cigar,” for instance. Even Waters’ rock opera masterpiece The Wall is only cryptically political in its opposition to war and portrayal of authoritarian cruelty. Waters’ slide into partisan protest music didn’t begin in earnest until Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in May 1979.
Waters’ first work of the Thatcher era, The Final Cut (1983), would be his last with Pink Floyd. By then, he had reduced his band mates to little more than hired musicians (Richard Wright had quit the band over conflicts with Waters). When the LP was released the back cover read, “The Final Cut by Roger Waters, performed by Pink Floyd.” Disdain for his new bête noir is evident from the very first song’s lament, “Maggie, what have you done to England?” One song, “The Fletcher Memorial Home,” imagines a retirement community where old-world leaders (“overgrown infants…incurable tyrants and kings”) could be kept safely away from the public and ultimately killed as “the final solution begins.” The inmates of this fictional home are mostly figures from the right (“Reagan and Haig, Mr. Begin and friend, Mrs. Thatcher and Paisley…the ghost of McCarthy, and the memories of Nixon”), though he also includes “Mr. Brezhnev and party.”
In 1985, Waters quit Pink Floyd and tried to prevent his former band mates from using the name. He lost, released a couple poorly received solo records, and Pink Floyd went on without him with David Gilmour at the helm.
After the fall of the Soviet Union and reunification of East and West Germany, Waters put on a massive show at the Berlin Wall. Then he all but disappeared for a decade, stopped touring and released only one record, Amused to Death (1992). When he re-emerged in 2005, it was evident that he had taken a hard turn to the left and became an ardent critic of Israel.
Roger Waters, anti-Zionist
In 2005, Waters joined Pink Floyd for the Live 8 Concert, released an opera (Ça Ira), and began touring again as a solo act, playing mostly Pink Floyd music. In 2006 he moved a Tel Aviv concert to Neve Shalom, the site of an “oasis” community founded to showcase Palestinian-Israeli coexistence. He also posed for photographers while spray-painting lyrics from The Wall onto the wall Israel built to prevent suicide bombers from entering the country—a wall that ended the second intifada. Years later, Waters began telling interviewers that when he spoke about peace in between songs at the concert, the Israelis in the audience scowled at him and booed.
This is false according to David Seidenberg, who writes, “Since at least 2017, Waters has been repeating this lie. He told it to an interviewer from the Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of Germany’s largest dailies. He told it to Liberation News, a socialist newspaper. He told it at a Vancouver event in October 2017 to promote Canada’s participation in BDS.” In Seidenberg’s audio of the event, cheers grow louder after Waters says, “I believe that we, the rest of the world, need this generation of Israelis to tear down the walls and to make peace with their neighbors.”
Whatever the cause, Waters’ plunge from budding Israel critic to full-blown Israel hater was well underway when he began touring again. He claimed that when he visited Israel in 2007, he saw, “primal disdain in the eyes of those 18-year-old Israeli border guards.” Soon he was identifying with “the occupied people” and speaking the language of the new BDS movement.
In 2011 Waters made it official, announcing that he had joined the BDS movement, and in 2012 he addressed the United Nations, pronouncing Israel guilty of war crimes. In 2013, the formerly reclusive musician sat for dozens of television and print interviews, enthusiastically and confidently comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany.
For his frequent holocaust inversion rhetoric, the ADL, which defended him early on, concluded in 2013 that, in fact, “Roger Waters is an antisemite.” Former ADL National Director Abe Foxman noted that with Waters, “It started with anti-Israel invective, and has now morphed into conspiratorial antisemitism.”
Roger the bully
On his 2013 concert tour, Waters unveiled a familiar Pink Floyd stage prop—a giant Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade-worthy balloon of a pig. It was an emblem from the Animals album, except that it was now emblazoned with the Star of David. Waters defended his use of Jewish symbols, claiming that he didn’t intend to offend: “I worry about it every day. It’s a huge concern to me that I would be considered to be a bully.”
(JNS.org)
