Roger Waters
Legendary Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters took time out from his This Is Not a Drill solo tour to interview CNN and share his controversial views on the origins of the war in Ukraine and tensions between China and Taiwan
The outspoken 78-year-old rocker, who severely attacked former President Donald Trump and was accused of anti-Semitism due to his support for a boycott against Israel, is in the midst of his “This Is Not a Drill” solo tour. The performances on the tour include references to the murder of blacks by police, a segment where the singer pretends to spray the audience with a semi-automatic rifle and also a reference to abortion.
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Waters also defended his reference in the opening video to US President Joe Biden as “a budding war criminal”.
According to Waters, Biden “is fanning the fire in Ukraine, for starters… It’s a huge crime. Why won’t the United States of America encourage President Zelensky to negotiate, and eliminate the need for this terrible and terrible war?”.
The singer continued: “This war is really about the action and reaction of NATO being pushed up to the Russian border, which they promised they wouldn’t do when Gorbachev was negotiating the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from all of Eastern Europe.”
Waters, who frequently described the devastation of the war that killed his father in the music of Pink Floyd and in his solo music, also denied that the Allies were a liberating and positive force in World War II: “America entered World War II because of Pearl Harbor,” he said in reference to the attack The surprising Japanese on the US naval base in Honolulu that drew America into the war, “America was completely isolated [לפני כן]. Thank God the Russians had already won the bloody war by then. 23 million Russians died, we protected us all from the Nazi threat.”
When Waters was asked to comment on Chinese aggression, which is encircling Taiwan with threatening military maneuvers following the recent controversial visit of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the island, he replied: “They are not encircling Taiwan! Taiwan is part of China! It has been completely accepted by the entire international community since 1948,” Waters said firmly. “And if you don’t know you’re not reading enough… you’re believing your own side’s propaganda. You can’t have a conversation about human rights and you can’t have a conversation about Taiwan without reading and knowing.”
The interviewer told Waters that the Chinese are at the top of every list of human rights violators, and suggested that Waters almost always criticizes the West. The musician disagreed and responded: “The Chinese did not invade Iraq and kill a million people in 2013… Who did the Chinese invade and massacre?”
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The interviewer, Michael Samarkonish, answered him that they are torturing their own people, referring for example to the mass arrest and forced sterilization of the Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities (mostly Muslims) that the Chinese government is carrying out as part of what an international tribunal has determined to be genocide. “Nonsense!” Waters responded. “Absolute nonsense!”
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